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WorkMahatma Gandhi

Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule

A dialogue between an impatient young nationalist and an editor, arguing that India's real master is modern civilization rather than the English.

by Mahatma Gandhi97 passages held

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Original title
Hind Swaraj
First published
(aged 40)
Original language
Gujarati

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Overview

In July 1909 Madan Lal Dhingra, an Indian student in London, shot dead Sir William Curzon Wyllie, an official of the India Office, as guests left an evening gathering. Gandhi was in London that summer and met the young Indian revolutionaries there, whom he found brave and badly mistaken. On the voyage back to South Africa in November, aboard the Kildonan Castle, he wrote his answer in Gujarati in about ten days, switching to his left hand when his right tired. The answer is a dialogue in twenty short chapters between an impatient nationalist, the Reader, and an Editor who will not give him what he wants. Driving the English out by force, the Editor argues, would leave English rule standing with Indians at its head: the same railways, courts, lawyers and doctors, the same hunger for machinery. India was handed over rather than conquered, by Indians eager to trade with the English and to buy what they sold. Self-rule, swaraj, begins as rule over oneself, and its weapon is passive resistance, the readiness to suffer rather than to kill. The text ran in Gandhi's weekly Indian Opinion in December and appeared as a booklet the next month. In March 1910 the Bombay government proscribed the Gujarati book, and Gandhi answered by publishing an English translation he had made himself, Indian Home Rule. Tolstoy wrote from Russia that he had read it with great interest. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi's political mentor, found it crude on a visit to South Africa in 1912 and predicted that Gandhi would destroy it after a year in India. He never did. In 1921, leading a mass campaign, Gandhi wrote that India was not ready for the self-rule the book describes, and in October 1945 he told Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to be India's first prime minister, that he still stood by it.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by modern civilization?

A way of life that measures progress by bodily comfort and nothing else. Its signs, the Editor says, are more clothing, faster travel, machines in place of hands, letters for a penny, and people who need food every two hours and have leisure for nothing else. He calls it a disease that will destroy itself, the Black Age of Hindu teaching, and he makes it, rather than the English people, the book's real target.

What is soul-force, and how is it different from body-force?

Soul-force resists a wrong by suffering for it instead of making others suffer. The book's case is a law one thinks unjust: forcing the government to repeal it is body-force, while disobeying it openly and accepting the penalty is soul-force. Gandhi also calls it passive resistance or love-force, and he insists it is the weapon of the brave, since only someone who no longer fears punishment can use it.

Why does the book say means and ends cannot be separated?

Because means stand to ends as a seed to a tree: planting a noxious weed will not get anyone a rose. Whatever is won takes its character from how it was won. The Editor turns this on the Reader's argument that India may use force because the English did: by using the same means, he answers, India would get only the same thing the English got, which is exactly what it does not want.

What does swaraj mean in this book?

Swaraj, self-rule or Home Rule, carries two senses that the book pulls apart. The Reader's is political: Indians taking over the same offices, courts and armies the English run. The Editor's is personal first: swaraj is when people learn to rule themselves, their wants and their fear, and only a nation of such people is free. The Reader's version, he says, is English rule without the Englishman.

Why does the book come down so hard on lawyers?

Because lawyers profit from quarrels and so have every reason to multiply them. Before the courts, the Editor says, people settled disputes among themselves or through relatives; going to law made them weaker and taught them to let a third party decide. Worse, without lawyers the courts could not run, and without the courts the English could not rule, so the profession tightened the very grip it complained of.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

English Rule Without the Englishman

Driving the English out would change nothing if India kept what they brought. Whether the enemy is a people or a way of living decides what freedom could even look like.

The Editor measures modern civilization by what it calls progress: trousers instead of skins, fields ploughed by steam, a letter for a penny, machines that will spare people the use of their hands and feet. Measured that way, he says, it is a disease that will destroy itself, and India caught it by choice, trading with the Company, wearing Manchester cloth, taking its quarrels to English courts. Railways, lawyers and doctors are his three exhibits, each multiplying the very evil it claims to cure.

  • colonialism
  • civilization
  • technology
  • nationalism
  • national identity
  • professional ethics
  • poverty
  • political legitimacy

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The Seed and the Tree

Can a good end be reached by whatever means lie to hand? The answer decides whether India's young revolutionaries were patriots on the wrong road or simply right.

Gandhi wrote against the young Indians in London who had made assassination a patriotic act, and he grants them their bravery while refusing their logic. Means stand to ends as seed to tree, so what is won by force must be held by force. Against body-force he sets soul-force: break the unjust law openly and take the penalty. It needs more courage than a gun, he insists, and it is everywhere, since history records only the interruptions of love, never the families and villages living by it.

  • nonviolence
  • nonviolent resistance
  • civil disobedience
  • political violence
  • political resistance
  • means and ends
  • courage
  • conscience
  • self-sacrifice
  • love
  • law
  • morality
  • history

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Self-Rule Begins With the Self

Swaraj usually means a nation governing itself. Here it first means a person governing their own wants, and that shift changes who can grant it.

Freedom on this account is not handed over by a parliament; it arrives when people learn to rule themselves, and so it already lies in their own hands. Gandhi's warning case is Italy, which he holds still unfree because Italians changed rulers without changing themselves, as Mazzini had wanted. The same test falls on the quarrels Hindus and Muslims hand to a third party to settle, on an English education that leaves the honest peasant no better off, and on a civilization of restraint that kept the old plough by choice.

  • self-rule
  • self-government
  • home rule
  • self-control
  • education
  • language
  • religion
  • religious pluralism

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Within this work

passages held
97
distinct concepts
204
by passages held, corpus-wide
#504

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “colonialism” and “education”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 77 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
colonialismeducation6
civilizationreligion3
nationalismself-rule3
civilizationnonviolence2
civilizationself-rule2
colonialismnonviolence2
colonialismreligion2
nonviolenceself-rule2
civilizationcolonialism1
civilizationeducation1
civilizationtechnology1
colonialismself-rule1
colonialismtechnology1
educationnationalism1
educationreligion1
nonviolencereligion1
religiontechnology1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1909 Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Hind Swaraj) you are here EN
  2. 1922 Freedom's Battle

    An anthology assembled by its Madras publishers, with C. Rajagopalachari's help, rather than by Gandhi himself, gathering his Young India writings and speeches from the launch of non-co-operation; the 1922 edition closes on his statement at trial.

     EN
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