This essay examines how Gandhi's understanding of his gendered and religious identity was shaped by colonial discourse. Mahatma Gandhi, like many of his Indian counterparts, came to believe in the powerful narrative articulated by the West that attributed British colonization of India to Indian effeminacy, apathy, and "deviant" sexual behavior. Gandhi's capitulation to British ideals of masculinity in his youth made him focus his critical gaze on his body and it is these "experiments" with him self as a subject that facilitated the formulation of a novel anti-colonial discourse that restructured the body's economy of pleasure sprioritizing self-discipline in the service of the nation. Gandhi's example illustrates that traditions and histories are disrupted not just by the consciousness of dissident subjects, but also by representational practices. Western "regimes of truth" both facilitated Gandhi's initial self-reproach and his later transformation of the figure of the Hindu ascetic and ascetic practices to contest and alter colonialist views of Hindu religion and masculinity. For Gandhi, nationalist asceticism functions as a "technology of the self" (Foucault), as essential to the process of ethical for mation, as certain types of bodies, behaviors, and desires are constituted in and through the selfdisciplinary practices of the colonized Indian male subject. At the same time, however, nationalist ascetics also became a domain through which to dominate marginalized castes, classes, religions, and genders.