ABSTRACT
A critique of the modern, the quest for ways of knowing and being devoid of the violence of modernity as such, for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, ought to have remained necessarily outside of an inexorable completeness. One of the most crucial departures of Gandhi from what may be regarded the fundamental traditions of Western modernity remains articulated in his engagement with the idea of freedom. True freedom or swaraj presumes most pertinently an inevitable oneness, a unity of the self and other, of the individual and the social. Gandhi's freedom sustains as such, what must remain a perpetual paradox to the modernist epistemology, a transcendental communion in authentic ahimsa, the fact of permanent restraint the authenticity of universal moral obligation. Swaraj, Gandhi claimed, was a category radically distinct from the modernistic independence'. Swaraj in Gandhi's schema remains linked inextricably to the praxis of swadeshi.
