Table Of ContentPOLITICS, ETHICS AND THE SELF
Hind Swaraj by Mahatma Gandhi is arguably the greatest text to have emerged from
the anti-colonial movement in India and the first to seriously challenge the cultural
and civilizational premises of the colonizers’ mentality. It is also the first text in
India that falls within the broad tradition of modern political philosophy, advancing
a complex cluster of theses with conceptual sensitivity, analytical precision, and
sustained argument.
This book critically engages with Hind Swaraj and explores the fascinating and
subtle dialogue set up by Gandhi between the characters of the reader and the
editor. With essays from leading contemporary thinkers on Gandhi, the volume
looks at themes such as Gandhi on epistemic servitude, decolonization, and
intercultural translation; his complex critique of modern civilization; his views
on the empire, democracy, citizenship, and violence; the normative structure of
Gandhian thought; Gandhi and the political praxis of educational reconstruction;
and how to read this text.
An important intervention in Gandhian studies, this book will be useful for
scholars and researchers of peace studies, political philosophy, Indian philosophy,
Indian political thought, political sociology, and South Asian studies.
Rajeev Bhargava is former Director, Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, New Delhi, India.
POLITICS, ETHICS AND
THE SELF
Re-reading Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj
Edited by Rajeev Bhargava
Cover image: Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-45807-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-48859-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-04318-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003043188
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CONTENTS
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction 1
Rajeev Bhargava
PART 1
The truncated ethic of modern civilization 23
1 The originality of Hind Swaraj 25
Anthony J. Parel
2 Gandhi and the debate about civilization 42
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
3 English rule without the Englishman: citizenship,
subalternity, and Gandhi’s ‘reader’ 61
Ajay Skaria
4 Reflections on Gandhi’s anti-modernism 79
Akeel Bilgrami
5 Hind Swaraj: a historical necessity 103
Nandkishore Acharya
vi Contents
6 On the normative structure of Gandhian thought: with
special reference to Hind Swaraj 110
Satish K. Jain
PART 2
Empire, politics, and violence 119
7 Empire and violence, or the foes in Hind Swaraj 121
Rajmohan Gandhi
8 Political self-rule: Gandhi and the future of democracy 136
Fred Reinhard Dallmayr
9 Politics and violence: Gandhi’s ambivalence to democracy 148
Uday Singh Mehta
10 A nationalism open towards the world 162
Jeremy Webber
PART 3
Colonization of minds 191
11 Learning from the South: Gandhi and intercultural
translation 193
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
12 Beyond decolonizing knowledge: revisiting the Svaraj in
ideas debate 224
Shail Mayaram
13 Gandhi and political praxis of Educational reconstruction,
1909–1938 241
Joseph Bara
PART 4
Cultivating self 271
14 Could Hind Swaraj presuppose a theory of judgment? 273
Sasheej Hegde
Contents vii
15 Gandhi: calling to non-violence joined by
a strong pragmatism 287
Gangeya Mukherji
16 Afterlife of a text: Hind Swaraj and the Chhattisgarh
Mukti Morcha 304
Hilal Ahmed
17 Sheherezade and Hind Swaraj 320
Lucy Nusseibeh and Sari Nusseibeh
18 Gandhi’s Twin fasts and the possibility of non-violence 325
Sudhir Chandra
PART 5
How to read Hind Swaraj 335
19 Reading Hind Swarajya/Swaraj in two languages 337
Tridip Suhrud
Index 351
CONTRIBUTORS
Nandkishore Acharya is an Indian playwright, poet, and critic. He is Profes-
sor Emeritus at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad,
where he taught Political Economy and Human Rights. He was awarded the Sahi-
tya Akademi Award in 2019, a literary honour conferred by India’s National Acad-
emy of Letters.
Hilal Ahmed is Associate Professor, CSDS, and faculty member, CSDS-Lokniti.
He works on political Islam, politics of representation, and politics of symbols in
South Asia. His first book Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments,
Memory, Contestation (2014) explores these thematic concerns to evolve an interdis-
ciplinary approach to study Muslim politics. His later works Siyasi Muslims: A story
of Political Islam in India (2019) and Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in contem-
porary India (with Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, 2019) further elaborate these
themes and make a modest attempt to explain the discursively constituted nature of
contemporary Muslim political discourse in India. His recent works include Com-
panion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (with Peter R deSouza,
and Sanjeer Alam, 2021).
Joseph Bara presently an independent scholar, coordinated, as Editor, a research
programme on history of education in modern India at the School of Social
Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for three decades since 1885.
In 2013-14, Dr. Bara was appointed a member of the Prime Minister of India’s
High Level Committee on Socio-Economic, Health and Educational Status of
Tribal Communities. Since 2006, he was on the international editorial board of the
Taylor and Francis journal, History of Education (UK), for over a decade. Dr. Bara
has recently published Social Inclusion and Education in India: Scheduled Tribes, Denoti-
fied Tribes and Nomadic Tribes (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
