The Mahatma and Downing Street

The Mahatma and Downing Street

For Mahatma ('Great Soul') Gandhi, bodies and politics were inseparable. He insisted that Indians boycott foreign cloth and spin their own, providing a self-made uniform for his followers and a self-made time (at the spinning wheel) of bodily discipline and contemplation. This discipline was expected to spill over into the everyday habit of his followers. They were to forsake alcohol, meat, drugs and sexual intercourse, unless for the purpose of reproduction. While ideologically poles apart from other Indian mass voluntary organisations of the time, such as the Indian Boy Scouts or the burgeoning Hindu and Muslim organisations, all of these movements facilitated the filtering of politics into people’s everyday lives through encouraging certain types of bodily practice. When travelling, Gandhi inserted his body of difference into the formal spaces of internationalism. His assistant Mirabehn would prepare his special food for him wherever he travelled. Blanket media coverage reported him as an ascetic in a loincloth (he was neither). His refusal to bow to the weather or to social convention earned him the grudging respect of his hosts, whether at the Ritz hotel, Downing Street or Buckingham Palace, where tea party clothing protocol was set aside for Gandhi alone. In the event it was (reports suggested) George V who attempted to provoke Gandhi into an argument, which the latter refused.