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Masculinity and Nation: A study of Gandhi and Savarkar

2014; Volume: 19; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.9790/0837-19753644

2279-0845

Rashmi Gopi,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

This research paper focuses on how ideas of masculinity and nation are interlinked in the political thoughts of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.To understand these aspects, the author has taken five significant areas to concentrate.They are the colonial context, education, religion, significant others and morality.The work emphasises the fact that masculinity is constructed, plural and fluid.Through the lives and thoughts of Gandhi and Savarkar we realize that experience and experiments with masculinity can change within a lifespan of a person.The same applies to the idea of nation.Both Gandhi and Savarkar envisioned the nation in terms of their understanding of masculinity.These ideas are relevant even today as the contemporary Indian politics plays with the very same ideas of Gandhi and Savarkar.This research paper is a product of in depth study of original works of Gandhi and Savarkar.It also draws its strength from various theories on masculinity and nation.The author has taken constructivist approach, that is, to take both ideas of masculinity and nation as products of socio-cultural discourses of a particular context.The work explores how a particular hegemonic masculinity based on upper caste-upper class Hindu men in the colonial context influenced both Gandhi and Savarkar but their experiments with it were different.