ABSTRACT
Hind Swaraj is written as a dialogue between a nationalist Reader who is willing to use violence to drive the British out of India, and an Editor who, voicing Mahatma Gandhi’s explicit positions, argues that such violence would not bring about swaraj. For Gandhi, the sovereignty involved in ‘modern civilisation’ cannot be swaraj since it is not attentive to the swa. Indeed, Gandhi had only one thought about ‘modern civilisation’ — that it erased and forgot the swa or ‘proper’. Focusing on the word veshya and its alteration, this chapter explores not only Gandhi’s thought about the swa and ‘modern civilisation’, but its ‘unthought’. It considers the conservative ordering of the swa in order to set it aside and apart. This ordering is signalled by the word thekaana. It is incapable of that radical giving which — to anticipate the argument presented later — loses the thekaana itself, which keeps itself only in this radical giving.
