Fasting as Dissent: Examining the Body Discourses and Publicity of Mahatma Gandhi and Irom Sharmila

ABSTRACT FASTING AS DISSENT: EXAMINING THE BODY DISCOURSES AND PUBLICITY OF MAHATMA GANDHI AND IROM SHARMILA by Arjun Buxi Master of Arts in Communication Studies California State University, Chico Summer 2011 In this thesis, I explore the efficacy of hunger striking as a method of exposing the unjustness of a powerful, repressive State. I confront the exclusion of oppressed minorities from the arena of public debate based on the attributes that make them ‘different.’ As recourse, I argue that the minority dissident’s last resort for resisting the State is the creation of bodily discourses and a spectacle of his/her suffering. However, what are the effects of the minority hunger striker’s attributes of ‘difference’ on his/her fast? Conversely, what are the effects of fasting on behalf of a minority group? I attempt to advance some answers to those questions through a comparative analysis between Mahatma Gandhi and Irom Sharmila, who respectively fasted on behalf of, and as a member of, an oppressed minority. Through analysis of news media discourses, documentary footage, and biographies, this thesis examines the implications of a hunger striker’s battle for autonomy while imprisoned and subverted by the State, and his/her efforts to gain publicity and sympathy from an audience. I demonstrate the limitations Sharmila faced as a female, ethnic minority hunger striker, and the implications of the State’s counter-discourses upon a fast-untodeath. It is shown that by a problematic application of the law, force-feeding, and hospitalization, the State weakened Sharmila’s spectacle of suffering, and framed her humanitarian crisis as a problem of ‘national security’. As contrast, I present how Gandhi successfully framed his fast as confronting first and foremost a social problem, using a dual argument of political and social reform to successfully implicate both State and society for moral transgression. Though Gandhi enjoyed a more well known persona and achieved more tangible reform, Sharmila has gained some public support and spoke up against injustice. The sheer longevity of Sharmila’s fast-unto-death (10 years and still going) demonstrates the efficacy of hunger striking in enabling a desperate, forgotten, minority citizen to continually and determinedly resist a State with his/her last resort, the body.