Gandhi... valores para una propuesta de futuro

20 gandhi... valores para una propuesta de futuro As the ship arrived at the quay and I watched the people coming on board to meet their friends, I observed that the Indians were not held in much respect. I could not fail to notice a sort of snobbishness about the manner in which those who knew Abdulla Sheth behaved towards him and it stung me. Those who looked at me did so with a kind of curiosity. My dress marked me out from other Indians. I had on a frock-coat and turban, an imitation of the Bengalee pugree (Gandhi Autobiography, 1927: 88) . He has entered a socioeconomic mode of production, the multiracial plantation (prevalent in the Caribbean and the Americas). Gandhi, formerly a provincial subject in a British imperial colony India, had not encountered this system until he docked in Durban in 1893. Aspects of plantation life present traumatic racial terror that Gandhi shared with the “coolies” who had preceded him there by almost 70 years. The incident on the train would be that first existential moment of solidarity. That is, he is developing a sense of anticolonial which begins as an anti- plantation identity, born in the experience of racial terror and racial exclusion. Thus the “nationalizing moment” happens at the very instance that he finds himself in the unfamiliar and unsettling creole space of a transoceanic migrant. He was also exiled: outcasted by his community the Modh Banias when he crossed the ocean. This is also Gandhi’s first encounter with Creolite, (although the word is never used in India) the melange of ethnicities out of which he constructs the “Indian.” The Indian nation is as yet “a thing without a past” (Kaviraj quoted in Nataran, Atlanta Gandhoi, 2013, ch 1) its contours are uncertain. In the circum Atlantic, the Indian from India has not yet left an ethnic footprint, having become invisibilized by Columbus’s mistake of calling indigenous people Indians. The sea voyage in ships tossed around by storms, links Gandhi with the newly globalizing world he was stepping into, where millions of bodies and commodities traversed the ocean on newly sea navigated ships. But instead of being a passive victim of the system, his individuality is awakened. He is also both attuned to the difficulties of sea voyages and yet aware that, as a lawyer, he was spared the terrible terror of the transplanted coolie.