This year, 2009, Mahatma Gandhi’s dialogue between an Editor—Gandhi himself—and a Reader (V.D. Savarkar and his fellow travelers who believed in a bloody revolution and a modern Hindu nation to follow in its wake) will complete one hundred years of its solitude as a radical critique of modern Western civilization in the context of Indian civilization which Gandhi felt had survived and would continue to survive the vagaries of history.

A century after Gandhi wrote this rather slim book, I realize that it has not lost an iota of its stature as a searching, conscientious, and perennially relevant quest for non-violence based on truth as we humans understand it of our own condition on earth and what we have made of it through our own avoidable actions.

For Gandhi, whose ideas incorporate the anarchist thoughts of Western critics of human civilization in its alternative forms such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, violent development is the thrust of modernization in the West as opposed to the slow or even seemingly static evolution of mankind for the good of everyman which he later called sarvodaya.

Gandhi’s concept of human society was within the limits of an inviolable and given nature; and his concept of swaraj was that it implied self-control as well as autonomy. Gandhi’s ideal society was self-governed and decentralized or founded in the trust of every individual human being in other human beings.

We are in the grips of a laissez faire globalization now and already reeling under its recessive economic consequences. We are an emerging global power. We have nuclear arms and energy alternatives offered by innovative technology. We have information technology and its global connectivity at the velocity of light. However, we are an increasingly unhappy species hyper-activated by our unnatural desire to overreach.

Isn’t Gandhi still relevant when terror has become globalized, when anxiety and insecurity affects us all, and when every human being suffers from the bi-polar disorder that modern civilization has bred and unleashed upon us.

Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj still challenges us to look into ourselves, to find solutions for our philosophical, ideological, and civilizational traumas and the human trauma that sums them all up.

If you don’t possess a copy of "Hind Swaraj” you can easily locate and access it through an internet search, thanks to a non-Gandhian technology.

What follows is an insightful essay by Sadanand More on the birth of Hind Swaraj.

Dilip Chitre
Honorary Editor

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