Addressing imagined immunities: the Dawn of life at phoenix settlement in South Africa

The paper locates the virological pan against the backdrop of the pandemic of masculine, majoritarian ethnonationalism in India and examines their implications for the forms of belonging and futures of human communities. In doing so, it attempts to explore alternative ways of imagining communities, immune to the otherizing pathologies of caste, gender, language, religion etc. that spawned this viral infection. At the dawn of twentieth century, Gandhi had imagined a community of satyagrahis at Phoenix Settlement and laid out the grammar of its imagined immunities in his writings. The paper draws on them and on The Dawn of Life, a memoir of Gandhi’s grandnephew Prabhudas Gandhi who witnessed firsthand the immunization of an ashramite community through experiments in satyagraha, cosmopolitanism, self-development and so on. It emphasizes the importance of a collective awakening to the dawn Gandhi had imagined for a toddler nation, an alternative dawn of a nation’s life, and pleads for its reclamation.