Swaraj pdf

Debashri Banerjee Gandhi understood the importance of swaraj and in his hand its meaning expanded from colonial self-government to purna swaraj at the time of Indian political movement started from Hind Swaraj is not merely a protest against violence; it is also a protest against the ongoing administrative system. To Gandhi swaraj is a delicate thing and the means to achieve it is also a much more delicate process. Actually over his thought of Hind Swaraj, the influence of Tolstoy and Ruskin is prominent.

In his opinion, swaraj stands for self-rule for individual and also for a nation. This self-rule is taken in the sense of individual self-rule or self-government by Gandhi which is the basis of even his theory concerning political self-rule.

It is true that Gandhi also believed in the idea of political self-rule i. In his view, a self-government which fails to satisfy the demand of individual self-rule cannot be considered as a good instance of political self-government. A government which ensures the self-rule of all individuals is the true instance of political self-government. That political self-government, ensuring individual self-government of all, can even be within the foreign rule.

This is the reason why his theory of swaraj was thought by me to be the modified form of colonial self-government. It will be unjust, according to me, if we consider Gandhian theory of swaraj as complete independence like that of Sri Aurobindo. He was okay with the idea of freedom of will of Indians if the British government mercifully bestows that on us.

He was in the state of practical day-dreaming that British government will allow enough political freedom in the hands of the Indians. He thought that if dominion status in Great Britain had declared that British dominions are autonomous communities within the British empire, equal in status in any domestic or external affairs with it, though have to be loyal to Britain could ensure our freedom of will then it is worthy to be welcomed.

His main aim was to attain individual self-rule but whether it comes in the disguise of dominion status in India under the British administration or in the form of colonial self-government where India has to exist as subordinate colony of England, he simply was not very interested to think for.

The proof is to be found in the book Hind Swaraj where Gandhi clearly wrote to pray before the British government to bestow individual self-rule of Indian citizens. He was in the favor of making a stable nation with political freedom of its people; whether within the foreign rule or without, did not matter to him. However Gandhi gradually transformed his idea of colonial self-government to complete independence unlike Sri Aurobindo following the necessity of politics in India.

It will be not be wrong to mention that Gandhian theory regarding swaraj even though remains in the sense of self-rule in its theoretical level but it transformed into the sense of complete political independence while using it in practice in the arena of Indian independence movement. By the help of truth satya and non- violence ahimsa how to reach this kingdom of God Gandhi failed to show. References 1. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive.

We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. Menon We have a tendency to make contemporaries of thinkers with whom we feel an afinity.

Gandhi is one of those igures whose thought has been mined for aphorisms on issues ranging from the environment and alternative eco- nomics to an ethical politics and the placebos of peaceful coexistence. This is not merely about conducting a historicist or contextualist exercise that imprisons thought in a temporal moment.

We have to deal creatively with notions of anticipation, prescience, and prolepsis. At the same time, as Quentin Skinner has reminded us, arguments are always situated—in a ield of interlocutors and historical conjunctures. Gandhi cannot be studied merely as a brain in a vat, yet a number of re- cent studies have tended to do just that. Moreover, words that can ap- pear relevant to us in the present may have originally been uttered as a response located within a now-discredited ield of ideas.

To emphasize too much, whether for sentimental or progressive reasons, that Gandhi is our contemporary is to occlude the particularities—even the eccentricities—of the positions within and against which his stances were forged. With sympathy and erudition, she engages with issues including the state, sovereignty, and ethical politics that were raised by these groups which are now subject to the condescension of history.

As we know from recent scholarship, his understanding of India and its civilization was medi- ated through Theosophy, vegetarianism, and the Bhagavad Gita, and we are alerted to the bricolage that was an essential feature of Gandhian thinking and writing.

Being trained in a discipline of Philosophy of a quite different temperament, I will try to not get distracted by the irrita- tion I sometimes feel about this. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all 2. That a life of labour, i. All of this is ironic, but certainly not quixotic. This rugged, non-ideological bricolage has to be seen as the leitmotif of Gandhian reading.

All was grist to his mill; and all was bent to his will. Isabel Hofmeyr attempts to recuperate a Gandhian mode of reading by attending carefully to his instructions to readers of the Indian Opinion: Gandhi wished to train them not only to read, but to reread; to memorize important passages; to maintain scrapbooks of favorite quotes; to read to others and to instruct them on what was germane in a text.

The Hind Swaraj is a ragged text, with asides on marriage, sexuality, and local Gujarati history. The irst approach tends to treat Gandhi as an Indian thinker—while not excluding other inluences—and stresses the Jain and Vaishnava landscape of Kathi- awar and the roots of Gandhian political practice in his Gujarati lineage.

But reading back- wards from the Gandhi who was to be is a less than justiiable historical method. 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.

More careful historical readings have emphasized the location of Hind Swaraj within the larger politics of imperial citizenship, the historical context of Johannesburg, and a particular kind of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism that drew South Africa, London, and the British Empire into its embrace and forged a conjunctural politics that was particular to the moment, both culturally and geographically.

In the brief, random, yet at the same time suggestive bibliography that Gandhi provides at the end of HS, amongst the familiar names is one misnamed text: Paradoxes of Civilization by Max Nordau.

Gandhi wrote HS in at the age of He was still active in South Af- rican politics at the time, and was heavily inluenced intellectually both by his stay in England from — and by his local circle of Jewish friends. In many senses, it can be argued that 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.

This text, then, is not the much-vaunted critique of Western modernity and its institutions but rather a relection on both late nineteenth-century distemper regarding the masses and politics as well as the fallout of imperial policies of racial discrimina- tion. By the irst decade of the twentieth century, a new generation of activists attempted to break away from this politics of mendicancy in favor of a more radical, revolutionary rejection of the presumptions of liberal empire.

A second kind of reading locates HS too narrowly in the conjuncture of the revolutionary Swadeshi movement of —08 that had argued for an indigenous politics, economics, and way of life and argues that Gandhi was asserting, in this text, a nonviolent agenda against revolutionary terrorism.

What if we think of Gandhi as a late-Victorian thinker writing at the juncture of the emergence of the masses into politics and the transition to a new kind of imperialism from an earlier liberal empire? It was the product of the Industrial Revolution, consequent urbanization, and the throwing together of different classes of people in cities, all of which had to be regulated.

Here degeneration was discussed not as a re- ligious, philosophical, or ethical problem but as an empirically demonstrable medical, biological, and anthropological fact. A scientiic understanding of the phenomenon was supposed to lead to the possibility of puriication and perfectibility that characterized the emerging eugenics movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. In France, questions 39 This content downloaded from In India, too, liberals drew upon ideas of evolution and degenera- tion when thinking about the future of Indian politics.

The central problem facing European scientists was the vexed question: whether or not the progress of civilization had increased the number of diseases.

Some of us, indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of dis- ease which the various races of man have to pass through—as children pass through measles or whooping cough; but if it is a disease, there is this serious consideration to be made, that while History tells us of many nations that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more normal and healthy condition.

The world of 40 This content downloaded from Individual health, he argues, is related to a sense of unity and wholeness with nature; the igure of the noble savage is recovered as a resource with which to deal with the ravages of civilization. It begins with the abandonment of the primitive life and the growth of the sense of shame as in the myth of Adam and Eve. From this follows the disownment of the sacredness of sex. Sexual acts cease to be a part of religious worship; love and desire—the inner and the outer love—hitherto undif- ferentiated, now become two separate things.

This is no doubt a necessary stage in order for the development of the consciousness of love, but in itself only painful and abnormal. It culminates and comes to an end, as today, in a complete divorce between the spiritual realiy and the bodily fulillment—in a vast system of commercial love, bought and sold, in the brothel and in the palace.

His words offer an eccentric mix of elements: a return to nature, a remaking of spiritual wholeness, and a reveling in the sexual self, of which Gandhi retained only the irst two. HS, What indeed were the symptoms of civilization as disease?

This nostalgic description is in contrast to the reality of the moment: the increasing mechanization of life which takes away human agency, sense of self, and volition from humans. There is little that is original here; much of what follows from the central metaphor of disease, borrowed from Carpenter, consists of a random elaboration of his arguments.

In the text itself, Gandhi expresses concerns that arise in response to two factors: the sudden growth of Johannesburg as a city with the discovery of 42 This content downloaded from When the South African writer W. Gandhi was experiencing in Johannesburg what he never would have expe- rienced in India: the maelstrom of industrial production, overcrowding of labor, men and women who were physically separated from their families, and general perceptions of the decline of morality.

The Cape Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Act in , followed by a proclamation of scheduled areas that sequestered sex work, and required the registration and compulsory medical examination of prostitutes. With the extension of the railways in , the move of prostitutes northwards from the coast to Johannesburg was acceler- ated.

Even though syphilis was a disease associated with the white man and with towns, Africans as much as Indians were drawn into the discourse as vectors of the disease, and questions of sanitation, health, and racial dis- positions to dirt and disease circulated through legislations circumscribing residence, trade, and movement. During the s, segregation was introduced in hotels, bars, and trains in the Cape and the process of removing Africans from the towns, as well as more general residential separation began.

Law Three of sought to put limits on Asian immigration, impose a registration fee for immigrants, and threatened to restrict trade to segregated bazaars. These laws led Gandhi to protest against one of the requirements—that Indians were to provide three photographs to secure passes—on the grounds that this implied that all Indians were criminally inclined and that the use of photographs was both invasive and abusive.

In addition, Lord Milner announced the formation of an Asiatic depart- ment with a plan to impose a program of identity registration for all Indians. The irst set qualiications for entry of immigrants: proiciency on a written English test and assets of at least 25 pounds. The second gave the Natal government powers to deny trading licenses on grounds of poor hygiene. In , there was a test case at the Transvaal High Court to determine whether the law requiring Indians to live in restricted locations also meant that their businesses could only be in those locations.

The Indians lost. In when Durban was threatened with the plague, Gandhi organized vol- unteers to get the Indian community to comply with health regulations. The impulse towards this compliance arose as much from a sense of imperial citizenship and duty to follow government regulations as it did from the desire to remove the stain of disease and lack of hygiene which was at- tributed to the Indian laboring population and the lower mercantile class.

In , representatives of the Indian population agreed to the issuing of registration certiicates that would incorporate a thumbprint as a marker of identiication. Parallel to this was his attempt to demonstrate that India was on par with the civilization of the English, stressing their common Aryan inheritance against that of the savage African.

Hunter, he pointed out that the Indians and the British were descended from common Indo-Aryan stock and were not inferior to their Anglo-Saxon brethren. He cited pell-mell a litany of scholars, philosophers, and Anglo-Indian oficials like Hunter, Max Muel- ler, Schopenhauer, Bishop Heber and Thomas Munro to portray the distinct achievements of Indian civilization in ields as diverse as jurisprudence, algebra, philosophy, linguistics, and village organization.

Is it fair that European subjects of that Empire in this Colony, who themselves derive a considerable beneit from Indian labour, should object to the free Indians earning an honest livelihood in it? It was irst created in a climate of differentiating Indians from Africans and claiming afinity with the European—we are as good as you are, the argument went.

It is dificult to understand how HS has been considered a manifesto against Western mo- dernity. It is, rather, a celebration of Indian civilization, born in the crucible of defeat, and therefore intent on glorifying India in much the same manner that the Hindu right wing would in later years.

Anthony Parel argues in his Introduction to the deinitive edition of HS that a whole group of Indian radicals and revolutionaries, including the Hindu ideologue V. Savarkar, are the invisible interlocutors of HS.

This is an India without inequality, without caste, and even without the grinding poverty that early nationalists like R. Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji made the constant focus of their critique of British rule. Arguably, it is less Savarkar and the revolu- tionary radicals than the Maharashtrian lower caste reformer Jotiba Phule who could be a possible villain in HS. Phule wrote his polemical pamphlet Gulamgiri [Slavery] against the inequities of caste and Hindu brah- minical civilization, an argument that would have made him, in the eyes of HS, both enemy and sinner.

We must understand HS as coming at the end of a deining moment: the recuperation of an Indian identity for the Indian living in South Africa, all within a racialized atmosphere where color was the deining benchmark. Gandhi resisted a cosmopolitanism of color and a politics of racial afinity for strategic reasons, clinging instead to the more general idea of civilization. With this strategy, he hoped to hoist the English on their own petard, which helps to explain the peculiar indigenist, nativist politics of HS premised on the wonder that was India.