Hind Swaraj (1909) — Gandhi's Manifesto Explained हिन्द स्वराज

Who was M. K. Gandhi?

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was born in Porbandar in Kathiawar, trained as a barrister in London (1888–1891) and went to South Africa in 1893 on a legal assignment. He stayed for over twenty years, leading the Indian community's campaigns against discriminatory laws and developing the method of non-violent resistance he called satyagraha. When he wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909 he was forty, a lawyer-activist editing the weekly Indian Opinion from the Phoenix Settlement near Durban, and still largely unknown in India.

He returned to India in January 1915 and within five years led the Indian National Congress. He directed the Non-Cooperation movement (1920–22), the Salt March (1930) and the Quit India movement (1942), campaigned against untouchability and for Hindu–Muslim unity, and promoted khadi and village industry. He was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948. His other major books include Satyagraha in South Africa and his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

When and why it was written

In 1909 Gandhi spent several months in London lobbying on behalf of Transvaal Indians. There he met young Indian nationalists, some of whom admired political assassination; that July, Madan Lal Dhingra shot the India Office official Sir William Curzon Wyllie in London. Gandhi's book was, in the words of the 1938 Navajivan preface, written 'in answer to the Indian school of violence'. It also reflects his reading of Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau and Edward Carpenter, all of whom he lists in an appendix of recommended books, alongside Indian economic critics such as Dadabhai Naoroji and R. C. Dutt.

He wrote the Gujarati text on the return voyage to South Africa, between 13 and 22 November 1909, aboard the Kildonan Castle. It appeared in two instalments of Indian Opinion in December 1909 and as a booklet in January 1910. In March 1910 copies were seized in Bombay and the book was proscribed by the Government of Bombay. Gandhi responded by publishing his own English translation, Indian Home Rule, on 20 March 1910 at Phoenix; he had first prepared it for his friend Hermann Kallenbach. He sent a copy to Leo Tolstoy, with whom he was then corresponding.

Gandhi never disowned the book. In 1921 he wrote that he withdrew nothing in it except one word, though he cautioned that he was not then working for the swaraj it described, India not being ready; in 1938 he said he would change little beyond the language. In October 1945 he wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru that he still stood by the system of government the book envisaged.

Chapter by chapter

• Chapters 1–3 — Congress and Its Officials; The Partition of Bengal; Discontent and Unrest: the Reader is impatient with the moderate Congress. The Editor defends its founders and elders — Dadabhai Naoroji, A. O. Hume, Gokhale — as the people who prepared the ground, and argues that the 1905 partition of Bengal awakened India. The unrest that followed is a healthy sign, like the restlessness of a patient beginning to recover.
• Chapter 4 — What is Swaraj?: the book's turning point. The Reader wants the British out but their army, navy and parliament kept. The Editor says this is 'English rule without the Englishman' — wanting the tiger's nature but not the tiger — and that it would make India English rather than free.
• Chapters 5–7 — The Condition of England; Civilization; Why was India lost?: Parliament is attacked in deliberately harsh terms as ineffective and driven by party and the press. Modern civilization is defined as the pursuit of bodily welfare and comfort; the Editor calls it a disease and irreligion, curable but never to be mistaken for health. India was not taken by the British, he argues; Indians handed it over by welcoming the East India Company for the sake of trade and money, and keep them by the same habits.
• Chapters 8–12 — The Condition of India, with sub-chapters on Railways, The Hindus and the Mahomedans, Lawyers and Doctors: India's real poverty is the loss of religion in its deepest sense. Railways, he claims, spread plague and famine and made holy places unholy. Hindus and Muslims form one nation, as India always held many faiths; on cow protection he argues that he cannot kill or fight a fellow human to save a cow. Lawyers profit from quarrels and helped entrench British courts; modern medicine encourages indulgence by curing its consequences.
• Chapter 13 — What is True Civilization?: India's ancient civilization, which set limits to wants, kept the plough and the village, and treated morality as the path of duty, needs nothing from outside. Its endurance through every shock is its strength.
• Chapters 14–17 — How can India become Free?; Italy and India; Brute Force; Passive Resistance: swaraj begins when individuals learn to rule themselves. Italy's unification under Garibaldi and Cavour did not bring Mazzini's freedom to ordinary Italians. Means and ends are related like seed and tree, so violence cannot produce a good end. Passive resistance — securing rights through one's own suffering, refusing to obey unjust laws and accepting the penalty — is soul-force, and it demands more courage than arms.
• Chapters 18–20 — Education; Machinery; Conclusion: mere literacy is not education, and English-medium schooling has enslaved the educated; education should be in Indian languages, with Hindi written in Persian or Nagari script as a common tongue. Machinery, symbolised by the Manchester cloth that ruined Indian weavers, is called a great sin, and copying Manchester in India would be worse than buying from it. The conclusion addresses Extremists and Moderates alike and lists what Indians themselves must do: hand-weaving and spinning, swadeshi, giving up English goods, courts and titles, and readiness to suffer.

Key arguments

Swaraj is inner before it is political. Gandhi's most original move is to redefine the goal of the national movement. Replacing British officials with Indian ones while keeping the same institutions, economy and values would change nothing that matters. Self-rule starts with the individual's mastery over desire and fear, and spreads outward.

The enemy is a civilization, not a people. The book explicitly redirects hatred away from the English and towards modern industrial civilization, which Gandhi sees as harming England as much as India. This lets him argue for freedom without racial animosity.

Means determine ends. The seed-and-tree image in chapter 16 is the philosophical core of satyagraha: a free and just society cannot be built with violent or deceitful methods, because the method shapes the result.

Passive resistance is strength, not weakness. Gandhi presents soul-force as the normal force of everyday life — families and communities run on love, not violence — and argues that history records only the interruptions of that force.

India is one nation of many faiths. Written before the two-nation theory took shape, the book insists that religious difference does not divide a nation, and it treats Hindu–Muslim unity as a condition of swaraj.

Simplicity and the village. The idealised picture of a self-limiting, village-based Indian civilization anticipates his later programme of khadi, village industries and decentralised economics.

In the author's words

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms.

It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands.

Reception and criticism

Even Gandhi's closest allies found the book hard to accept. When G. K. Gokhale read the English translation during his visit to South Africa in 1912, he thought it crude and hastily conceived and predicted that Gandhi would destroy it after a year in India. Jawaharlal Nehru, replying to Gandhi's letter of October 1945, wrote that the book had seemed to him completely unreal when he first read it and that the Congress had never adopted its picture of society. The constitution of independent India followed a parliamentary and largely modernising path that the book had rejected; B. R. Ambedkar's well-known criticism of idealised village life in the Constituent Assembly (November 1948) is often read as a reply to this strand of Gandhian thought.

Critics have also pointed to the book's sweeping judgements on railways, lawyers and doctors, which Gandhi himself did not live by — he travelled constantly by train, practised law for two decades and accepted surgery for appendicitis in 1924. Others note the gendered language of chapter 5 and the idealisation of a past Indian civilization that glosses over caste and inequality.

Admirers read the book differently. The political theorist Anthony J. Parel, whose annotated Cambridge edition (1997) made it a standard text in universities, treats it as a serious work of political philosophy that balances the pursuit of wealth and power with ethical and spiritual aims. Scholars such as Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee have discussed it as one of the most radical critiques of colonial modernity written from within a colonised society. Environmentalists and advocates of decentralised, small-scale economics have found in it an early critique of consumerism and industrial excess, and its centenary in 2009 was marked by conferences and new editions in India and abroad. Thinkers of very different political schools in India, including advocates of swadeshi economics, have drawn on its argument against imported models of development.

Where to read it

The full English text, with Mahadev Desai's 1938 preface and Gandhi's appendices, is free on mkgandhi.org, the website maintained by the Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal and Gandhi Research Foundation. Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, publishes inexpensive print editions in English, Gujarati, Hindi and other languages. For study, Anthony J. Parel's edition, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1997; centenary edition 2009), adds an introduction, notes and related letters, including the 1945 Gandhi–Nehru exchange.

Read more on this site

• Mahatma GandhiThinkers
• The Story of My Experiments with TruthBooks & Ideas
• Integral Humanism explainedBooks & Ideas
• Glossary: Swaraj, Swadeshi, SatyagrahaShabdakosh

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