ABSTRACT
Gandhi's Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth remains understudied by scholars. This chapter examines Gandhi's Autobiography as an adaptation of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in Gandhi's obsession with clothes as signs of change and multiple identities. It argues that Sartor Resartus offered Gandhi ideals, themes and metaphors of clothes and wanderings with which to help him fashion an Indian national self as a transnational identity, beyond parochial regional and caste hierarchies inherent in traditional Indian identities. Gandhi's sartorial transformations coincide with his arrivals after long voyages between Britain, India and South Africa which mark transitions between sections of his text. Victorian science and religion underpinned Gandhi's spiritual quest, and he partook of British ideals of self-help, reformism, hygiene and public health. Gandhi points out in the foreword of his autobiography that the genre is thoroughly western and dangerously dogmatic.
