An Autoethnographic Reading of Gandhi as a Cultural Text

• In Event: Why Gandhi Now? Reclaiming Education for the Social Majorities

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation provides an autoethnographic account of an Indian woman’s reading of Gandhi as a cultural text embedded within the epistemological frame of patriarchy and orthodox religion that naturalizes women as the subordinate ‘other.’ In his autobiography, Gandhi (1957) speaks about himself and his relation to the world; when Kasturba, his wife speaks, she too speaks about Gandhi and his world. My aim is not to illustrate that Gandhi was no Gandhian, rather, it is to ask questions on the constructed nature of historical truths, how histories are written, what gets inscribed, what passes into silence, prompting alternative readings of the master narrative of Gandhi. I was raised in India by parents who were strict followers of ‘Gandhiji,’ hence; rereading Gandhi opens a disruptive space to examine the complicated legacy of freedom – from the official history of Gandhi to my own gendered lived experiences and coming to voice.

Theoretical Framework
Four interrelated concepts in composing autoethnography provide the theoretical framework for this presentation: the autobiographical I, critique of representation, embodied agency, and self-reflexive knowledge production. According to Spry (2011) and Ellis (2004) autoethnography evokes the performative/personal/self in relation to the scripted historical/cultural/social master narrative to reveal a different kind of truth, one that is always in the process of becoming. I use these four concepts to frame my autoethnographic recovery of history.

Methods
The qualitative method for this study integrates autoethnography as a “self-narrative that critiques the situatedness of self with others in social contexts” (Spry 2001, p. 710) and the embodied “doing” of autoethnography as “a vehicle of emancipation from cultural and familial identity scripts” (708). According to Spry, autoethnography is a reflective counter narrative that presents the researcher’s personal and political relation to culture and history. Informed by autobiography, the autoethnographic text emerges from the researcher’s “experience, discourse, and self-understanding” that “collide against larger cultural assumptions concerning race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, and age” (Trinh Minh-ha 1991, p. 157).

Results
A reading of Gandhi as a cultural text testifies that culturally laden words such as history, freedom, truth, experience, woman, and voice occur within, and are not outside power relations. It is also testimony to my gendered ‘otherness’ in India, my resistance to being the subaltern other in the US, and most of all, it is testimony to my complicity in the legacy of Gandhi – the class and caste privilege afforded by my education in a free India that gives me the political space to reclaim my history and voice.

Significance
Though my stance is primarily critical, autoethnographic readings create space for the possibility and educational importance of treating historical truths, cultural knowledge, and political practice as a subject of critical and theoretical reflection. Asking questions about historical and cultural knowledge, how these questions are answered, and how the answers are interpreted has far reaching consequences for our understanding of the construction of knowledge, and the inclusions and exclusions from what counts as official knowledge.

Author

• Suniti Sharma, Saint Joseph's University