ABSTRACT
My effort in this chapter is to work towards a possible answer to the question posed by my title. In doing so, I use a thought from Wittgenstein to frame some further considerations on the moral space of Gandhi and his Hind Swaraj, particularly. It is the work’s perlocutionary effects (as distinct from the truth of the content borne thereby) that I am interested to foreground, even as my remarks here have something to do with the kinds of things that Indian thinkers have said by engaging texts whose own status may essentially differ from that of the truth they would have us understand. I am maintaining, somewhat summarily though, that the Hind Swaraj is privy to an epistemic theory of judgment – one in which the means by which a subject comes to know what to think and what to do is not rule-driven (the operation of judgment being conceived as something distinct to rule-following) even as it is the case that the subject’s coming to such a view is normatively compelled.
