Rewriting Gandhi: Historiography, Complexity, and the Politics of Memory in Indian National History

Term paper examining Gandhi as a site of historiographical contestation rather than a settled biographical subject. The paper engages feminist and subaltern scholars including Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments), Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Recasting Women), Uma Chakravarti (Brahmanical patriarchy framework), and Manimala Shrivastava (ashram feminist critique) to argue that the proliferation of mutually incompatible 'Gandhis' in the historiographical record is not a failure of scholarship but an index of genuine historical complexity. Three original analytical propositions are advanced: (1) The Hagiographic Trap — how Nehruvian nationalist historiography converted Gandhi's biographical complexity into a foundation myth; (2) The Double Bind of Subaltern Inclusion — how Gandhi's mobilisation strategy simultaneously included and domesticated subaltern participation, reproducing the hierarchies it claimed to oppose; (3) Memory as Political Infrastructure — how post-independence Gandhian memory functions as a regulatory discourse across Congress, Hindutva, and Dalit counter-traditions. A Three-Field analytical model (Structural, Mobilisation, Memory) with original formal expressions is proposed for post-hagiographic Gandhi studies. Submitted as part of MA European Studies coursework, MISHA, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Manipal. June 2026.