ABSTRACT
Gandhi conceptualized his idea of Swaraj in 1909 in his seminal work, Hind Swaraj. The text is a promising venue for extending the meaning of Swaraj from self-rule to autonomy attained through self-knowledge. Given a recovery of interest in Gandhi, there is no dearth of secondary sources both in India and the West. However, works reflecting on self-knowledge and autonomy are minimal, which accounts for my interest on this theme. This chapter is in the nature of groundwork to ask Gandhi to have a view of self-knowledge and autonomy, derived from the project of Swaraj. A Swarajist construction of self-knowledge and autonomy acquires urgency today because specters of the modern civilizations, as Gandhi conceived, continue to make people victims of its fetishism, rather more gravely than ever. People are tempted to acquire insatiably more and more in lesser span of time. This tendency leads to the path of self-indulgence, making human-autonomy its first casualty.
