Tradition, modernity and Gandhi’s ‘Hind Swaraj’
By: Aikant, Satish C
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: Seminar Description: 750, Feb, 2022: p.80-87.Subject(s): Tradition, Modernity, Gandhi, Hind Swaraj
In:
SeminarSummary: ONCE asked by an English reporter ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of the modern civilization?’ Gandhi famously quipped with a smile: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ That comment by Gandhi is his critique of ‘modernity’,1 or the kind of modernity which is predicated on a complete disjunction from ‘tradition’.
By modern or western civilization Gandhi meant that ‘mode of conduct’ which emerged from the Enlightenment, and more exactly, from the Industrial Revolution. ‘Let it be remembered’, he wrote in 1908, ‘that Western civilization is only a hundred years old, or to be more precise, fifty.’2 The industrial revolution for him was much more than a mere change in the mode of life, embracing a people’s outlook on nature and human nature, religion, ethics, science, knowledge, politics and economics. According to this outlook, nature was taken to be an autonomous entity operating according to its own laws, something to be mastered and possessed at will for the satisfaction of human needs, desires and ambitions. – Reproduced
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 750, Feb, 2022: p.80-87 | Available | AR127164 |
ONCE asked by an English reporter ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of the modern civilization?’ Gandhi famously quipped with a smile: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ That comment by Gandhi is his critique of ‘modernity’,1 or the kind of modernity which is predicated on a complete disjunction from ‘tradition’.
By modern or western civilization Gandhi meant that ‘mode of conduct’ which emerged from the Enlightenment, and more exactly, from the Industrial Revolution. ‘Let it be remembered’, he wrote in 1908, ‘that Western civilization is only a hundred years old, or to be more precise, fifty.’2 The industrial revolution for him was much more than a mere change in the mode of life, embracing a people’s outlook on nature and human nature, religion, ethics, science, knowledge, politics and economics. According to this outlook, nature was taken to be an autonomous entity operating according to its own laws, something to be mastered and possessed at will for the satisfaction of human needs, desires and ambitions. – Reproduced
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