This book by Mahatma Gandhi is a series of 17 articles written in the form of a dialogue and published in 1909. The book is important for any lover of India to understand the core worldview of the person who exerted the greatest influence on Indian polity and society during the crucial decades between 1920s and late 1940s.

It should be noted here that Gandhi defines India’s nationhood through the oneness of her culture and spirituality. He wants Indians, especially Hindus, to be accommodative in the process of building a national movement. This would later degenerate into a dangerous policy of appeasement.



That said, the author, despite being crude in his seemingly negative approach to Western civilisation, had intuitively grasped the fundamental problem of the West being built on a mountain of human suffering. To him India needed to find her own unique way.

Though coarse, the book contains the seeds of Hindu environmentalism. A book which can complement the reader and make Hind Swaraj more relevant is Gandhian Economics: A supporting Technology (Impex India, 1977), by a deep thinker of Hindutva and a seer, Ram Swarup.

Whether it is securing freedom for the nation or protection of the cow, Gandhi wants Indians in general and Hindus in particular to give up their own lives instead of taking other’s lives. In principle, Gandhi sees India as defined by her pilgrimages and in practice he wants India to remain India — deeply religious in the most expansive meaning of the term.

A reader today, in hindsight, may agree or disagree with Gandhi but for that reading Hind Swaraj becomes a must.