to be pure or not to be: Gandhi,women, and the Partition of India

This article examines Gandhi's writings, speeches, and correspondence, produced mainly from 1946 to the end of his life, on the subject of violence against women during the riots surrounding the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Gandhi, the article demonstrates, persistently fails to address the gender pathology revealed at the heart of South Asian society by these violations, a pathology to which men were subject, but of which women were the victims. The article compiles a comprehensive overview of Gandhi's shifting positions during this brief, though cataclysmic, period, in the belief that in so doing a certain core aspect of mainstream Indian nationalism's patriarchal underpinnings can be laid bare to critique.