ABSTRACT
I am not ashamed to repeat before you that this is a religious battle … to revolutionize the political outlook-… to spiritualize our politics.
—M.K. Gandhi
A curious category in Indian nationalist thought is the ashram. Amongst nationalist ashrams were the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan, and the gurukuls (school-ashrams) set up by the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist organization. Most famously, there were the Gandhian ashrams. In South Africa, Gandhi had already set up the Phoenix settlement and the Tolstoy farm. On his return to India in 1914, he set up the Satyagraha ashram in Ahmedabad, and made that his base. Later, he was involved in and often based at the ashrams at Wardha and Sevagram (Thomson 1993).
