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the colonised (Indians). He rejected the myth of political and civilisational superiority of the British and their institutions of parliament and the press. He exposed the true English character as greedy: the British were timid traders and shopkeepers with no real interest in the welfare of India but only their own as they drained Indian resources for their own prosperity. He did not accept the validity of the 18th century Enlightenment or 'civilising mission' of the colonisers, at least not in the case of India which
had nothing to learn from the colonisers. In this sense, the text is like a mirror to see and recognise ourselves. And for everything he rejected, he proposed his own model with his own terms and tools. For instance, decolonisation and Independence are possible only through swaraj that, for him, stands for 'Rule Thyself (to Rule Others)'. Moreover, it can be sustained only through
swadeshi and satyagraha. Gandhi analysed logically like the Buddha, who acknowledged that there is suffering in the world, the suffering has a cause which is desire. In the elemination of the cause is the end of the suffering. Likewise, Gandhi accepted the fact that there was colonisation/ exploitation in the world/India. The cause, according to him, lay in the colonised's inability to resist the coloniser, for which satyagraha emerged as the
means of freedom from colonisation. The sustained
protection of freedom from colonisation would then depend on swaraj and swadeshi. This is discernible in the four-stage solution of the problem of attaining
swaraj of Hind towards the end of the book: (1) Real Home Rule is self-rule or self-control. (2) The ways to it is passive resistance: that is soul
force or love force.
Incidentally, neither the word Hind nor "Indian' appears in the aforementioned extract. It suggests that by the time Gandhi was signing off the discourse, his concerns had transcended hind of the mind and hind became a trope for us, i.e., the entire humanity. More importantly, Gandhi was against a civilisation built on greed, crass materialism, exploitation, brute force and injustice. This civilisation invites clash sooner or later, and as a consequence, however hard we try to ignore or reject the thesis or idea of the clash of civilisations and propose the thesis of the confluence of civilisations, the idea of the clash is still a reality. If we wish to see that the clash does not lead to catastrophe. Gandhi's path is at least one of the best and the least violent among the 'tested' alternatives available to us.
Hind Swaraj is a prophetic text, as it anticipated many a problem that plagued us then. It does so even today as we did not pay heed to the caution implicit in Gandhi's caveat. It is difficult to accept his outright rejection of railways, lawyers or doctors which he regarded as a consummation devoutly to be wished' (Young India 26 January 1921, in Gandhi 1986:27). But it is also difficult to ignore the fact that while the fast modes of transport have shrunk distances, they have also added to the spread of epidemics such as bird flu and swine flu. Global warming and fast depleting natural resources have created a crisis of survival for humanity. The crities
or rejectionists of Hind Swaraj get trappped in Gandhi's sweeping generalisations; these appear to have been used as a device of maximisation to
attract attention to the manifestation of the new
culture of machinery, but have been taken too
literally. Though Gandhi did not want to incorporate any change in the text except for one wrod, there was some changes in his stand: 'I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I Would certainly welcome their natural destruction' (ibid. :26)
It is no surprise, however, that the world is
સત્ય-અહિંસા-અપરિગ્રહ
(3) In order to exert this force, swadeshi in every
sense is necessary.
(4) What we want to do should be done, not because we object to the English or because we
want to retaliate but because it is our duty to do so I bear no enmity towards the English but I do towards their civilisation (Gandhi
1931:16)
ઑક્ટોબર- ૨૦૧૮ પ્રબુદ્ધ જીવન : ગાંધી સાર્ધશતાબ્દી વિશેષાંક
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