ABSTRACT
I do not think that any serious student of Gāndhi’s teachings would deny that Hind Swarāj is the fundamental document. It is a strangely lucid and impressive little book which, one feels, was the outcome of some profound experience of illumination such as seems to have been the common destiny of all great religious teachers. And, in particular, it has a marked affinity in the vehemence of its repudiation of Western “civilization,” with the Discourse which was the outcome of Rousseau’s illumination on the road to Vincennes. The place of Rousseau’s natural man, uncorrupted by “civilization,” is taken in Gāndhi’s mind by the Indian peasant, who has the advantage over Rousseau’s conception of being a reality. Not, of course, that, as shallow critics pretend, Rousseau’s natural man was a mere romantic fiction: he was a normative ideal, which is a very different thing. But, for Gāndhi, the normative ideal of the man uncorrupted by “civilization” actually existed. There were hundreds of millions of them in the villages of India living lives of communal fraternity, of frugality, of simple duty deeply rooted in an enduring religious faith, for whom the Westernization of a thin stratum of Indian intellectuals was a remote happening which did not really concern them. And Gāndhi’s conception of Hind Swarāj (Indian home-rule) was, in essence, a spiritual reconquest of the corrupted Westernizers by the great body of this truly self-governing people—a reconquest to be achieved by a spiritual regeneration of the Westernizers themselves, through a recognition of their own corruption, and a humble re-identification of themselves with the true civilization of the Indian villager. “Civilization,” said Gāndhi, “is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty.” That path was being followed, and had been followed for centuries, by the Indian peasant.
