INTRODUCTION

-Hind swaraj is the seed of which the tree of gandhian thought has grown to its full statue. It is
on this text that Gandhi presents his basic ideas in proper relationship to one another.

-HS is gandhi’s seminal work. It is also a work which he himself translated from gujrati into
English; no other work of his , not even the autobiography enjoy this distinction.

-it was this text that Tolstoy , Roman Rolland, Nehru and Rajaji read and commented up. It was
through the English translation and not the gujrat text, as he put it , to use the british race for
transmitting ‘his mighty message of ahimsa’ to the rest of the world. And it was this text that he
returned throughout his carrier as source of his inspiration.

-it was written in 10 days between 13 and 22 november 1909, on board the ship kildonan castle
on the author’s return trip from England to south Africa. The original gujrati text was banned by
the government of Bombay and in 1910 the English translation published in Johannesburg.

-gandhi wrote HS at the age of 40. He was still active in south African politics at the time, and
was heavily influenced intellectually both by his stay in England from 1888-1891 and by his local
circle of jewish friends.
HIND SWARAJ : ANTHONY PARELL

-why Gandhi wrote HS ?

1. inner illumination and inner illumination and the consequent urge to communicate. 'The thing
was brewing in my mind', he wrote to his friend Henry Polak a month
before the actual writing.

2.he wanted to clarify the meaning of swaraj, the concept that

provides the theoretical framework of the book. This is done by introducing
a distinction between swaraj as self-government or the quest for
home rule or the good state, and swaraj as self-rule or the quest for self improvement.

3. Thirdly, he felt it necessary to respond specifically to the ideology of

political terrorism adopted by the expatriates. The book was written in
order to show that they were following 'a suicidal policy'.

4.Fourthly, Gandhi was anxious to teach the Indians that 'modern

civilisation' posed a greater threat to them than did colonialism.

5. Fifthly, he wanted to contribute towards the reconciliation of Indians

and Britons.

6. Finally, Gandhi believed that through Hind Swaraj he would be able to

give Indians a practical philosophy, an updated conception of dharma,
that would fit them for life in the modern world
Gandhi felt that the time had come to redefine
the scope of dharma to include notions of citizenship, equality, liberty,
fraternity and mutual assistance. And in Hind Swaraj he presents in
simple language his notion of such a redefined dharma, the vision of a
new Indian or Gandhian civic humanism, one that the Gita and the
Ramayana had always contained in potentia, but something which Indian
civilisation had not actualised fully in practice.

1.HISTORICAL CONTEXT: MODERN CIVILISATION

-gandhi critiqued modern civilization in HS.but his attitude towards modern civilisation, though
critical, is not wholly negative. Being critical implies the desire to improve the object criticised.
So it is with Gandhi and modern civilisation. Thus he welcomes a number of its contributions
- civil liberty, equality, rights, prospects for improving the economic conditions of life, liberation
of women from tradition, and religious toleration.

-Gandhi has his own definition of civilisation: civilisation is 'that mode

of conduct which points out to man the path of duty' (sudharo, ch. xin).Barbarism (kudharo) is
the absence of civilisation.
-The 'mode of conduct' which emerged from the Enlightenment, and more exactly, from the
Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution for gandhi was
much more than a mere change in the mode of production. Industrial revolution brought new
modes of life and a complete different outlook in every field.

-According to this outlook, nature was taken to be an autonomous entity operating according
to its own laws, something to be mastered and possessed at will for the
satisfaction of human needs, desires and political ambitions.

-Two types of political theory emerged, one for the industrialised societies and the other for the
rest of the world. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the world for all practical
purposes was divided into the industrialised and the non-industrialised, or the 'civilised' and the
'non-civilised',

-It is in the context of arguments such as James Stephen's that Gandhi develops his critique of
modern civilization. Stephen wrote his famous essay ‘foundations of the government of india’ in
1883.

2. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE POLITICS OF SOUTH AFRICA

- The actual development of Gandhi's critique of modern civilisation takes not in

India but in South Africa. In the first place, it was in South Africa, not in India, that he first
acquired his vision of Indian nationalism, a fact which differentiates his nationalism from that of
the other Indian nationalists. His idea of nationalism does not start with the locality and then
gradually extend itself to the province and finally to the nation but Quite the reverse.

- it is in the politics of the Transvaal, not Champaran or Bardoli, that he first developed his
unique political philosophy and political techniques.

-Three issues associated with South Africa need highlighting.

1. The first is that it was in South Africa that Gandhi for the first time became aware that modern
civilisation was at the root of the colonial problem. If Lenin connected colonialism to
capitalism, Gandhi went one step further and connected colonialism to modernity itself.

2. The second issue associated with South Africa that needs highlighting is the relative social
freedom that it offered to Gandhi to conduct his social and political experiments for India. As
Judith Brown has pointed out, South Africa enabled him to play the role of a 'critical outsider' in
India.

3.The third point that needs highlighting is the importance of his lobbying missions of 1906 and
1909 to London. And it was on these missions that Gandhi first acquired the diplomatic skills
necessary for dealing with the British political establishment in London. It was on these vistis
that he was able to be in contact with newly emerging indian middle class and expatriate.
3. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE POLITICS OF EXPATRIATE INDIANS

- Expatriate Indians at the turn of the twentieth century were a motley crowd of university
students, recent graduates and budding intellectuals who had gone abroad to England or US or
japan to study.

- To Gandhi they appeared to be misguided Indians fully committed to 'modern civilisation' who
wished to fashion India on the model of Great Britain, Italy or Japan. Gandhi had this group very
much in mind when he wrote Hind Swaraj.

-A key figure among these expatriates was Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857-1930) , V. D. Savarkar
(1883-1966 , Taraknath Das (1884-1958 , Madame Bhikaji Rustom Cama (1861-1936)

4. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE INDIAN NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

-Hind Swaraj opens with an analysis of the Indian National Congress and ends with an
exhortation to its two internal factions - the Moderates and the Extremists.The split between the
Moderates and the Extremists, which occurred in 1907.

-The Moderates stood for swaraj defined as self-government within the empire, achieved through
the constitutional means of gradual reform 'granted' by the imperial parliament. This was the
attitude taken by the early leaders of the Congress -Allan Octavian Hume, Sir William
Wedderburn, Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Baddrudin Tyabji - all
mentioned in the book and treated critically but respectfully.

-Gandhi knew from his South African experience, did not get anywhere nor did it raise the
fundamental moral issue of the reform of the soul, which for Gandhi was a precondition for
sound politics. Swaraj of the type he had envisaged could not be attained without the reform of
the soul and this separated him from the Moderates as a group.

-The Extremists stood for swaraj defined as complete sovereignty achieved through
constitutional means if possible, but through other means if necessary. In contrast to the
Moderates, no Extremist is mentioned by name in Hind Swaraj - an indication of Gandhi's
distance from them.

5. THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT: WESTERN SOURCES

-Gandhi's introduction to Western thought began in 1888 with his legal studies in London. He
read a lot of legal cases and even learn latin and was able to go in deep knowledge.

-Vegetarianism with him was more than a fad. He was a careful reader of books on the
philosophy of vegetarianism which by the end of the nineteenth century had claimed its
allegiance to 'true civilisation'. He read The Perfect Way in Diet (1881) by Anna Kingsford. The
Ethics of Diet (1881) by Howard William.
-Gandhi'sinterest in theosophy was temporary but it played an important role in his intellectual
development. For it made him aware of the richness of Indian religious literature; it was also
instrumental in bringing him into contact with his life-long friends, Henry Polak and
Hermann Kallenbach.

-His interest in Christianity, after his disappointment with the preachers in rural Gujarat, became
deep and intense in South Africa.There it led him to undertake a serious study, not only of
Christianity, but also of Hinduism and other religions.

-Plato's Apology, listed in the Appendix. The influence of Tolstoy on Gandhi is widely
recognised. Gandhi himself directs the readers of Hind Swaraj to read six of Tolstoy's works,
listed in the Appendix. Between them, they cover four broad topics: Christianity as an ethical
religion, aesthetics and political action, critique of the new industrial civilisation, and the
colonial question in India. The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which Gandhi read for the first
time in 1894.other works are - what is art , how shall we escape , the slavery of our time , the
first step , letter to hindoo- tolstoy’s explanation of colonialism in india.

-In addition, Gandhi read a large number of nineteenth-century British critics of the new
industrial civilisation, among them Carlyle, Ruskin and others mentioned in the Appendix. It is
from Ruskin that Gandhi derives the basic principles of his economic philosophy. The first of
two books by Ruskin which affected Gandhi - A Joy for Ever and Its Price in the Market.
This work marks the beginning of Ruskin's critique of the industrial civilisation.

-But it was the second book of Ruskin's, Unto This Last (1860), that had the more profound
impact on Gandhi. It produced an almost instantaneous change in him. It lead to two immediate
results – 1.The first was Gandhi's decision to establish the Phoenix Settlement. 2. to serialise a
nine-part paraphrase of Ruskin's book in Indian Opinion, and later to publish it as a pamphlet
under the title Sarvodaya.

-Gandhi's concern for modern civilisation and swaraj expressed itself in his deep interest in the
revitalisation of India's villages. This explains the inclusion of Henry Sumner Maine's classic,
Village Communities in the East and West (1871), in the Appendix. Gandhi used Maine's thesis for
two purposes. First, he used it to support his argument that Indians in South Africa should be
allowed to vote And back in India he used Maine's thesis in his life-long campaign on behalf of
the Indian village.
-There were other authors in South Africa and London that are listed in appendix - Edward
Carpenter, Max Nordau, Godfrey Blount, Thomas Taylor and Robert Harborough Sherard.
Carpenter's Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure mentioned in the CH VI. Blount’s pamphlet, A
new crusade summarized in the indian opinion in 1905. 1903). Taylor's Fallacy of Speed was also
summarised in Indian Opinion. Divided into three short chapters - 'Speed and population', 'Speed
and profit' and 'Speed and pleasure' - the book challenges the prevailing assumption that 'faster is
better'. He had in mind the railways (see Hind Swaraj, ch. ix). Max Nordau is included in the
Appendix as being the author of 'Paradoxes of civilisation'. This obviously is an error, since there
is no such work in any Nordau bibliography. But Nordau did write Conventional Lies of
Civilisation (1895) and Paradoxes (1906). Gandhi may have read both; there is sufficient
internal evidence in Hind Swaraj to suggest that Conventional Lies of Civilisation is the book
that is relevant here.
-Hind Swaraj has its American, or rather New England, sources as well. Henry David Thoreau is
mentioned in the Appendix, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Preface. Also worthy of mention is
William Maclntyre Salter whose Ethical Religion Gandhi had paraphrased and published in an
eight-part series in 1907 in Indian Opinion.

-Hind swaraj has a chapter on Italy. By listing Mazzini's Duties of Man in the Appendix, Gandhi was
sending a signal to the Indian nationalists that he was to be interpreted in strictly ethical and non-violent
terms, and not in militaristic terms, as the Indian revolutionaries had done.

6. THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT: INDIAN SOURCES

-The process of the discovery of his Indian philosophical identity begins in a conscious,
technical, way in London in 1888 and reaches its critical stage in South Africa. Gandhi began
reading texts of Indian philosophy in London with The Song Celestial - Sir Edwin Arnold's
translation of the Gita. This was followed with books relevant to religions associated with India.
But the thinker who was most influential in guiding him in the development of his thought in
Indian philosophy was Rajchandra Rayjibhai Mehta (1868-1901).

-gandhi also have taken various ideas from traditional classics like Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Tulsidas is quoted in CH-XIV and XVII his Ramayana and other jain classics have been used in
HS.

7. THE LITERARY GENRE, THE STRUCTURE AND THE ARGUMENT OF HIND SWARAJ

-Hind Swaraj is written in the literary genre of dialogue: a dialogue between a newspaper Editor
and a Reader. It is significant that Gandhi chose for himself the role of a newspaper editor - a
very modern figure - not that of a traditional figure, the guru. The Reader is a composite of
'modern' Indians including the expatriates he had met in London in 1906 and 1909. According to
the Foreword, this particular genre was chosen to make the reading 'easy'; and according to the
Preface, it was chosen because 'the Gujarati language readily lends itself to such treatment' and
because it was considered 'the best method of treating difficult subjects'.

-The book is divided into twenty short chapters. Eleven of these deal with historical reflections,
while the rest deal with philosophical ones. The historical reflections begin with an assessment of
the contributions of the Indian National Congress towards the rise of Indian nationalism
(ch. 1). The Congress has made a good start, but its conceptions of swaraj need rethinking. The
partition of Bengal has caused much excitement which requires to be directed in non-violent
channels (chs. 11 and in).There follows an analysis of the causes and the consequences of British
rule in India (chs. vn-xn). The causes, briefly, are on the one hand the commercial and power
interests of the British, and on the other, the political and moral decay of Indian society: 'it is
truer to say that we gave India to the English than that India was lost'. The consequences are
an uncritical attitude towards modern civilisation and the rise of an uncaring middle class - the
'doctors' and the 'lawyers'. India must get out of the quagmire in which she finds herself, but she
can best do so with the help of the moral and intellectual resources available to her in her own
traditions. The examples of Britain, Japan and Italy are considered but rejected as being
unsuitable for India's condition (chs. v and xv).
-Philosophical reflections begin with a preliminary statement on the nature of swaraj (ch. iv),
followed by a revised statement (ch. xiv). A similar two-step examination of the nature of
civilisation follows (chs. Vi and xi 11). With chapters xvi and xvn we reach the high point of the
book - the futility of violent revolutions and the need to use ethically sound means (satyagraha)
to attain independence. Additional means of attaining independence - educational reforms (ch.
xvin) and a technology appropriate to India's needs (ch. xix) - are discussed. Chapter xx
makes a series of practical proposals to the Moderates, the Extremists, the new middle class and
the English.

-The argument of Hind Swaraj may be outlined briefly as follows. Political life has the potential
of becoming the highest form of the active life. However, it can become such only when it is
practised within the framework of an updated dharma - i.e., a dharma suited for life in
the modern world of liberty, equality and prosperity. If, and only if, Indians can develop and
implement such a dharma will they be able to integrate within their own culture whatever is good
in colonialism and modern civilisation.

-Civilisation can be a help or a hindrance in this process of personal and national reintegration,
depending on its ethical orientation. Indian civilisation in its present unrenovated condition is as
much a hindrance as is the modern civilisation that has emerged from the industrial
revolution. Only an innovated Indian civilisation can help India attain swaraj. Such a civilisation,
Gandhi believes, would contribute towards the reduction of political violence, the moderation of
greed, the increase of compassion, the advent of economic prosperity, and the spiritual
integration of the individual.

-The attainment of swaraj is the immediate task facing colonial India. But here Gandhi draws a
subtle distinction between swaraj as self-rule and swaraj as self-government or home rule.
Swaraj as self-rule is the rule of the self by the self. More precisely, it is the rule of the mind over
itself and the passions - the passions of greed and aggression, in particular. Self-rule enables one
to pursue ariha and kama within the bounds of dharma.

-Swaraj as self-government or home rule is the rule of the nation {praja) by the nation. It is the
founding and maintaining of the good state (surajya). The good state or good self-government is
possible only if Indians acquire the capacity for self-rule; but self-rule itself can flourish only
within an appropriate political community. That community in modern times is the nation-state.
In Hind Swaraj Gandhi defends the view that India is a nation deserving self-government. That
India is a nation was a contested issue at the time Gandhi was writing Hind Swaraj.

-Satyagraha will appear to be a legitimate means available to those who enjoy self-rule. The
Reader in Hind Swaraj mistakenly believes that the end of the Raj will automatically bring
swaraj. The Editor replies that this is not so: it may bring mere home rule (the rule of the modern
coercive state) but not true home rule (the rule of the just, limited state); in any case it will not
bring about self-rule. The dispute between the Editor and the Reader (and all future readers of
Hind Swaraj) centres on the crucial question of whether there can be true home rule or self
government without self-rule.
-According to Hind Swaraj, a major obstacle to Indian self-government is the sectarian
nationalism fostered by certain sections of both Muslims and Hindus. The solution to this evil
lies in the development of a moderate, liberal nationalism, based on the concept of praja,
reintroduced into the political vocabulary by Hind Swaraj. Hind Swaraj
teaches that there are good religious reasons for practising toleration.

-The Reader believes that the adoption of the modern state is sufficient for achieving self-
government. Gandhi disputes this. He believes that the modern state without swaraj as self-rule
would only replace the British Raj with an Indian Raj. In Hind Swaraj's striking phrase, such a
rule would produce Englistan not Hindustan, 'English rule without the Englishman',
'the tiger's nature, but not the tiger' (ch. iv).

-Gandhi's teaching on non-violence is another of the book's lasting lessons. Though it has its
roots in Indian metaphysics, it is used in Hind Swaraj as a political, not metaphysical doctrine.
Its exercise has to be guided by prudence, not metaphysics.Three strands of thought on non-
violence are present in Hind Swaraj. The first is that involuntary violence is consistent with
Gandhian nonviolence.The second strand concerns intention: for an act to be violent in
the Gandhian sense, an intention to harm another living being has to be present.The third
strand has to do with legitimate self-defence: self-defence within the limits of natural justice is
consistent with non-violence.Non-violence, according to Gandhi, has its source
in soul-force (atmabal), and violence in body-force (sharirbal).

8. THE RECEPTION OF HIND SWARAJ

-The initial reception of Hind Swaraj, except in the case of Tolstoy, was hostile. The sage of
Yasnaya Polyana wrote to say that the question of passive resistance raised in the book was 'of
the greatest importance not only for India but for the whole of humanity' (CW10: 505). In March
1910 the Government of India reacted by banning the book for fear of sedition.
Only in 1919 did Hind Swaraj become widely known in India. It was then treated as the
manifesto of the Gandhian revolution by most Indians.

-But there were critics from the right and from the left. The pioneers of Indian Marxism,
such as S. Dange, in his Gandhi vs Lenin (1921) and M. N. Roy, in his India in Transition
(1922), saw the significance of the book, only to dismiss it as representing 'Christian piety'
and mere humanitarianism, and as being ignorant of the 'laws' of class struggle. Sir
Sankaran Nair, one of India's outstanding legal minds and a former president of the
Congress, castigated Gandhi in his Gandhi and Anarchy (1922) for the alleged anarchical
tendencies inherent in satyagraha. From the 1930s onward B. R. Ambedkar became one of
Gandhi's severe critics.

9. HIND SWARAJ IN RELATION TO GANDHI'S CONTEMPORARY INFLUENCE.

-Hind Swaraj has also something to contribute to our understanding of the nature of freedom in
general and liberal freedom in particular. Swaraj as self-rule means inner freedom or positive
freedom. Gandhi's argument that without swaraj as self-rule swaraj as self-government could
degenerate into state oppression even in the so-called liberal societies, is worth pondering.
-Finally, there is one aspect of Hind Swaraj which past critics have underlined and which
deserves underlining again today. That aspect refers to Gandhi's conception of the connection
between self-realisation (atmadarshan) and politics (rajyaprakaran). According to Gandhi, the
two may not be radically separated. Inner change within the individual ought to be the starting
point of outer changes in society.

Patience, Inwardness, and Self-Knowledge in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj

Uday S. Mehta

- Uday Mehta believes Gandhi referred to the book itself as something that required patience,
because only then would the views expressed in it be appropriately characterized. As gandhi said
at the conclusion of the chapter titled“Hind Swaraj”: “There is need for patience. My views will
develop themselves in the course of this discourse. It is difficult for me to understand the true
nature of Swaraj as it seems to you [the Reader] to be easy”.

- In Hind Swaraj, as elsewhere, Gandhi was hesitant in announcing his views in a declarative
manner; instead, he emphasized the difficulties in the way of swaraj. Patience is the general term
that refers to those difficulties. The very structure of the work as a dialogue — a source of
considerable irritation to his impatient interlocutor — accentuated that hesitance by postponing
declarative conclusions
- Patience for Gandhi refers to an essential condition for crafting a way of being, or a state of
inwardness as the ground for moral and political action. Such action requires self-knowledge,
which is itself profoundly linked with patience. According to Gandhi there is no shortcut to it.
Self-knowledge has as its antonym moral and political abstraction, and vicarious forms of
existence, which have no temporal constraints on them. For Gandhi, patience sediments
opinions, beliefs, and values. It gives them a mold; only then can they appropriately guide the
self in the course of everyday life.

-Mehta compares between Edmund Burke and Gandhi . he says patience for Gandhi, like
tradtion for burke, was the redress to a similar worry.

- Mehta says that Gandhi expresses none of the urgency of a typical nationalist, precisely
because he is not that. He interjects time and duration at every possible juncture. He condems
trains because they reduce the time and relax the effort involved in going from one place to
another.
Gandhi – The ‘Angel of History’: Reading Hind Swaraj Today
Aditya Nigam

- According to Aditya Nigam ,Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is more than a political text. It is an
ontological drama staged by Gandhi, reflected in his treatises against “modern
civilisation”, and his critique of “modernity”.

- At one level, Gandhi himself tells us that politics, indeed, was not his primary preoccupation.
On a number of occasions he claimed that his “work of social reform was in no way subordinate
to political work” and that when he saw that “to a certain extent my social work would be
impossible without the help of political work, I took to the latter and only to the extent that it
helped the former” (cited in Dalton 1998: 49, emphasis added). He also tells us that the “work of
social reform or self-purification of this nature is a hundred times dearer to me than what is
called purely political work” (ibid: 49). So, this is one level at which Gandhi himself tells us that
politics was for him, a secondary concern.

- “Self-purification” at a mass level would be impossible if it were to be based on small, local

efforts; the discourse of self-purification and social reform had to become a public, mass debate,
which is to say, it had to be articulated within the political realm. In this sense, then, social
reform, self-purification and politics must be seen, in Gandhi’s view, to be inseparable. To that
extent, this was possibly just another mode of doing politics, or carrying out politics at the level
of everyday practices of the community. Thus it makes little sense to say that politics was
secondary to Gandhi because social reform was primary.

-Indeed, Gandhi and the HS in particular, have often been read as retrograde and backward-
looking. “His face is turned towards the past” but the “storm of progress is blowing him
irresistibly into the future” – and Gandhi always had his back turned to it. He would like to
awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed but the storm will not allow him. HS can
actually be read as an attempt to “awaken the dead” and to put together what has been smashed –
not merely by British colonialism, as Gandhi repeatedly reminds us, but by modern civilisation.
It is therefore dramatic, excessive and often deliberately provocative. HS, it seems to me, is a
performative text.

-Reading the HS, its savage attack on modern civilisation, speed, railways, one begins to have a
strange feeling that Gandhi was not simply responding, in this tract, to prototypes of Savarkar
and other political adversaries; he was indeed laying out the basis for a way of looking at the
world that rejected modernity’s and political-aesthetic modernism’s self-image. As against the
beauty of speed therefore, he posits the beauty of slowness.

- according to aditya Gandhi in HS seems to be suggesting that HS should be read as a poem and
Gandhi as a poet, in the great tradition of classical dramas.
An Eminent Victorian: Gandhi, Dilip M. Menon
- there have been four different approaches to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909).
1. The first approach tends to treat Gandhi as an Indian thinker—while not excluding other
influences—and stresses the Jain and Vaishnava landscape of Kathi-awar and the roots of
Gandhian political practice in his Gujarati lineage.

2.The second approach sees him as an Indian thinker, but one who puts an intellectual
inheritance in dialogue with a landscape of postindustrial thinking that at times is inflected with
an agrarian romanti-cism, both traditions reflecting a deep skepticism with respect to the need
for the modern state and its ministrations. Gandhi’s engagement with Thoreau, Ruskin, and
Tolstoy, among others, becomes crucial to the formulation of a distinctly modern transnational
politics, reflecting a cosmopolitan crisis around issues of violence and modernity.

3.The third approach treats Gandhi as the architect of Indian independence and the mediator of
a passive revolution. Here a text like Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj becomes a manifesto for future
political strategy in India, despite the fact that the text itself reflected South African concerns
voiced from within the framework of a distinct notion of imperial citizenship. But reading back-
wards from the Gandhi who was to be is a less than justifiable historical method. So, for
instance, Partha Chatterjee speaks about the fundamental critique of “bourgeois society” in
Hind Swaraj; he reads it as a text concerned with the organization of a political movement
(unlike Tolstoy), which was aimed “at the political appropriation of the subaltern classes.”

4. A fourth approach studies Gandhi as a disaffected liberal who rejected Enlightenment

categories of reason, state, progress, and history, and ap-propriates him as a postcolonial
contemporary whose thought sits easily with our distemper regarding modernity, liberalism,
and its mode of gov-ernmentality.

-Dilip menon takes a different approach by attempting a reading of Hind Swaraj within three
conjunctures: the politics of empire and its relation to race in South Africa; questions of mass
democracy and the crisis of liberal politics at the end of the nineteenth century; and the
paradoxical relationship of an anti-imperial politics to notions of trustee-ship engendered by
the trajectory of liberalism under colonial ideology.

- Dilip menon in this paper focused on Max Nordau. The bibliography that Gandhi provides at
the end of HS, amongst the familiar names is one misnamed text: Paradoxes of Civilization by
Max Nordau. We now know this was actually the text titled Conventional Lies of Our Civilization,
written in 1883 by Max Simon Nordau as a critique of the “inherently false and dismal tone and
tendencies of our age.”

-according to Menon, HS must be read as a late Victorian text informed by the unease felt by
liberals about the opening up of mass democracy following the extension of the vote through
the Reform Acts in England which brought the masses into politics. The figure of the disciplined
HS and resonated with Nordau’s trenchant prose. Gandhi’s recovery of the idea of Indian
civilization as an entity distinct from both a degenerating Europe and a barbaric Africa, which is
the balancing element in HS, is an added element that was an attempt to distinguish In-dia from
the presumptions of colonial thinkers.

Interpreting Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj

Rudolf C Heredia

-GANDHI’s Hind Swaraj (HS) is surely a foundational text for any understanding of the man
and his mission.

-The three recurrent themes in Hind Swaraj which are: colonial imperialism, industrial
capitalism,and rationalist materialism.
Colonial imperialism: Gandhi categorically insisted that “the English have not taken India; we
have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength: but because we keep them”
(HS, Ch 7). He was one of the earliest to realise that colonialism was something to be overcome
in our own consciousness First. British India colonialism was first justified by a supposedly
Christianising mission, but very soon this was articulated in terms of a civilising one. In rejecting
this modern civilisation, Gandhi is subverting the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise at its core.
For there could be no colonialism without a civilising mission.
Industrial capitalism: Gandhi sees capitalism as the dynamic behind colonial imperialism. Lenin
too had said as much, and like Marx, Gandhi’s rejection of capitalism is based on a profound
repugnance to a system where profit is allowed to degrade labour, where the machines are valued
more than humans, where automation is preferred to humanism. It was this that moved Gandhi to
his somewhat hyperbolic claim: “Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation; it
represents a great sin” (HS, Ch 19).
Rationalist materialism: Technology is but the expression of science, which in modern
civilisation becomes an uncompromising rationalism. For Gandhi this is but a dangerously
truncated humanism.

-Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization does overlook many of its strengths: its scientific and
critical spirit of inquiry: its human control over the natural world; its organisational capacity.
Such achievement would imply a certain ‘spiritual dimension’ that Gandhi seems to have missed.
However, the focus of his criticism is modern civilisation of a specific period; his condemnation
of colonialism. However, once the real limitations of Gandhi’s critique are acknowledged, then
we can better contextualise and interpret his relevance for us today, whether this be with regard
to politics in our neocolonial world, or technologies in our postindustrial times, or culture in our
postmodern age.

-We must now situate ourselves with regard to the critical issues of our world today to enter into
dialogue with gandhi. three such issues as being the most fruitful for this encounter: the
collapse of socialism and the crisis of capitalism, gobalisation in an interdependent world, and
the unresolved violence of our atomic age.

-Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is not a rejection of the liberative contribution of modernity: civil
liberties, religious tolerance, equality, poverty alleviation. Rather his effort can be interpreted as
an attempt to integrate these positive elements with a liberating reinterpretation of tradition, even
as some see him as radical and others as reactionary.With his critique from within the tradition,
Gandhi becomes the great synthesiser of contraries if not of contradictions, within and across
traditions.

NATIONALIST THOUGHT AND THE COLONIAL WORLD – Partha Chatterjee

-chatterjee prefer to read HS as a text in which gandhi’s relation to nationalism can be shown to
rest on a fundamental critique of the idea of civil society.

-chatterjee by quoting Gandhi’s comment on modern civilization concluded that it was a moral
failure on the part of indian that led to the conquest of india. And in exploring the reasons behind
this moral failure, gandhi’s answer becomes opposed to that of Bankim. It is not because indian
society lacked the necessary cultural attributes that it was unable to face up to the power of the
English but it is because Indians were seduced by the glitter of modern civilization that they
became subject people.

-partha points that the colonial state in india , by projecting an image of neutrality with regard to
social divisions within indian society, not only upholds the rigours of those divisions, such as the
ones imposed by the caste system , but actually strengthens them.

-gandhi calls parliament, ‘a sterile women and a prostitute’, the first because despite being a
sovereign institution, it cannot enact law according to its own judgment but is constantly swayed
by outside pressure, and the second because it continually shifts its allegiance from one set of
ministers to another depending on which is more powerfull. But basically,Gandhi objects to an
entire structure of politics and government in which each individual is assumed to have his own
individual interest.

-gandhi’s moral charge against the west is not that its religion is inferior, but that by whole-
heartedly embracing the virtues of modern civilization, it has forgotten the true teaching of the
Christian faith. At this level of thought, therefore, Gandhi is not operating at all with the
problematic of nationalism. His solution too is meant to be universal, applicable as much to the
countries of the west as to the nation such as india. gandhi did not regard the Gita,or even the
Mahabharata od which it appears as a part, as a historical narrative. The historical underpinnings
were merely a literary device; the message had nothing to do with history.

-the critique of civil society which forms such a central element of gandh’s moral and political
thinking is one which arises from an epistemic standpoint situated outside the thematic of post-
enlightenment thought. As such, it is a standpoint which could have been adopted by any
member of the traditional intelligentsia in india, sharing the modes and categories of thought of a
large pre-capitalist agrarian society, and reacting to the alien economic, political and cultural
institutions imposed on it by colonial rule. the correct perspective for understanding the gandhian
ideology as a whole would be to study it in relation to the historical development of elite-
nationalist thought in india.
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