5 ideas
Colonialism is a shared psychological state, not only a political-economic arrangement, and it deforms rulers as much as ruled. To rule, the British had to suppress the softer, plural, androgynous strands of their own culture and harden into a narrow, hyper-masculine, instrumental self. The coloniser therefore becomes a victim of his own system, losing parts of himself he can no longer acknowledge.
Colonial ideology mapped the ruler-ruled relation onto the masculine-feminine hierarchy. The British coded themselves as manly, aggressive and hard, and coded Indians as effeminate. Colonised elites often answered by trying to become hyper-masculine themselves (martial Hinduism, the cult of physical strength), which accepted the coloniser's scale while reversing positions on it, so domination continued in the colonised's own head.
Colonisers cast the colonised as children, or as childlike and 'savage', who needed adult guardianship to grow up into history and progress. This borrowed a Western model of childhood as an inferior, incomplete stage and applied it to whole cultures, making rule look like benevolent education. The same logic treats a culture's past as its immaturity, to be outgrown instead of drawn on.
Gandhi refused the coloniser's terms instead of inverting them. He treated femininity and non-violence as a form of courage, held that the feminine in a man could exceed the masculine, and spun cloth and fasted. He dismissed history-centred time in favour of myth and ethics. By declining to compete for 'manliness', he denied the British the ground on which their superiority rested and offered them a way out of their own hardened self.
The most durable colonialism survives the end of formal rule because the colonised adopt the coloniser's categories of progress, history, masculinity and adulthood as their own standards of worth. Resistance that uses those same categories, such as out-modernising or out-arming the former master, remains colonised. Decolonisation therefore means recovering the alternative selves the colonial frame labelled weak, childish or primitive, including those still latent in the coloniser.