As the father of his nation Gandhi is naturally associated with India’s territory. From his ideas about home rule and village republics to mobilizing peasants in the country’s heartland, the Mahatma’s mission was linked with the vast landmass of India. Yet Gandhi was born in a port-city that served as a gateway for Gujarat’s commerce across the Indian Ocean, a trail which he followed first as a student to London and then as a lawyer in South Africa. Moving between land and sea, Gandhi was able to unsettle the territorial foundations of India’s colonial society by new ideas and practices from everywhere and nowhere. Even his manifesto of 1909, Hind Swaraj, was written on board a ship. Rather than vanishing into the great territorial expanses of the subcontinent, this shifting and even liquid world of ideas, images and practices allowed Indians to free and transform themselves even while their land was still in the possession of others.