Hind Swaraj

Hind Swaraj (“Indian Home Rule”) is a short book written by Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarati in November 1909, during a ten-day voyage from London back to South Africa, and published in English in 1910. Cast as a dialogue between an impatient young nationalist, the “Reader” — who wants independence by any means, including violence — and the “Editor” (Gandhi), it is the most concentrated statement of Gandhi’s philosophy: a critique of modern civilisation, a theory of swarāj as self-rule, an argument for non-violent resistance over violence, and a vision of an India rebuilt on village self-sufficiency. Written partly in response to Indian revolutionaries in London who advocated assassination, it remained, Gandhi said thirty years later, the basis of all his thought.

The argument

What is swarāj?

The Reader wants the English driven out of India. The Editor asks: do you want “English rule without the Englishman” — the tiger’s nature but not the tiger? “That is not the swarāj that I want.” Real swarāj is self-rule: “It is swarāj when we learn to rule ourselves… Such swarāj has to be experienced by each one for himself.”

How India was lost

“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.” Indians welcomed the East India Company for profit, served in its armies, used its courts and studied in its schools. The cause of subjection is internal.

The disease of civilisation

The heart of the book is a sweeping critique of modern civilisation, which Gandhi defines as a civilisation that makes bodily welfare the object of life. It multiplies wants, makes people slaves of machines and of money, and destroys morality and religion. “This civilisation is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.” Railways spread plague and famine, increase fraud and desecrate holy places; lawyers profit from quarrels and helped the British rule; doctors encourage indulgence by curing its consequences. India’s ancient civilisation, by contrast, aimed at self-restraint: “Civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty… to observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions.”

Brute force and soul-force

The Reader argues that the English took India by force and must be expelled by force. The Editor answers that the means determine the end: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree… We reap exactly as we sow.” Violence would produce a violent India. Against brute force he sets soul-force or passive resistance (later satyāgraha): “a method of securing rights by personal suffering”. History records only interruptions of peace — wars — but the ordinary life of families and villages is sustained by love; that is the true history of humanity.

The way forward

The book ends with practical advice: Indians should give up English cloth, take up the spinning wheel, use the vernaculars, resist injustice non-violently, accept imprisonment, and above all reform themselves. “Real home rule is self-rule or self-control.”

Reception

Hind Swaraj was banned by the British in India. Gandhi’s colleagues often found it embarrassing — Gokhale predicted Gandhi would destroy it after a year in India; Nehru thought it unrealistic. But it remains the key to Gandhi’s mind, and has been reread in recent decades as an early critique of industrial modernity, consumerism and the environmental crisis.

In conversation

“The English have not taken India; we have given it to them” — Gandhi’s insight that domination depends on the cooperation of the dominated. And: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree.”