Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule

Uh, both take culture seriously.

Uh, you know, I can give specific examples like, you know, in Gandhi's, uh, most famous book, uh, called Hind Swaraj, um, the, the figure of Gandhi has an interlocutor, um, who's I think called the editor.

Uh, so th-this interlocutor says, um, things like, uh, "The, the British should be kicked out." And Gandhi's response is, "Kicking out the British will just rep- w- who would you replace them with? You would replace them with Indians.

But these, those Indians would behave like the British." And, and so Gandhi's objection is to a broader frame.

know i i'm glad you like that chapter so much because i also felt that in some ways uh and of course that's that's about two very different cultural contexts and the extraordinary parallels between them and i enjoyed researching it writing it and uh hopefully you know uh some of the things i say they will be taken forward by the scholars

No, and why it filled me with a lot of joy was, if you'll remember in our very first episode, I pointed to many of the things Gandhi said in Hind Swaraj and I'm like, you know, what's going on here? And you gave me an answer which I still remember and which I cite to people because it's so right.

Where you said that, look, Gandhi got his ideas of the world from actions.

So he was so right about Satyagraha and non-violence because he did those things and he learned from the lessons.

I've been guilty of that myself, that assuming everybody knows PUNAP Act and this and that.

but actually most people don't like 75 of this country is born after 1990 most people don't have a sense so what i'm going to ask you to do is something slightly unusual i'm going to ask you to uh in whatever time you feel like give us a primer you know what did gandhi believe on cast a how did his views evolve over the years and what were the fundamental points of difference with ambedkar yeah

so i'll try and be as succinct and brief as possible So Gandhi writes his book Hind Swaraj in 1909.

It has a brilliant chapter on nonviolence, a moving and compelling chapter on Hindu-Muslim harmony, a contentious chapter on machinery and modern civilization, which I talk about in my book, but nothing on caste.

This is a mature man of 40, around your age, you guys.

And he writes Hind Swaraj.

And Hind Swaraj has really strange ideas.

I'll read out some of them.

He rants against doctors, railways, lawyers, calls them evil.

He's not reading that much.

So, you know, that kind of explains it.

And that might also explain, you know, that bizarre statement about the Bihar earthquake in 1934 that this is God's punishment for... practicing untouchability and the interesting thing is there's an essay I forget by whom but we'll link it in the show notes where he was asked about these views the Hind Swaraj views in 1946 and he said I still stand by them and he said that when I go through the entire body of work that i have done i don't find any major inconsistencies so even though a beautiful thing about gandhi is that he changed all his life you know as ram keeps pointing out people will accuse gandhi of being a racist because of some things he said in nineteen o one nineteen o two but he had changed massively later in time so you have to take all that into account so he was changing throughout his life but on these views he never actually kind of recanted them and you know so this is what it was so he paid lip service to his life being a series of experiments but he i don't think he had the epistemic humility that should have accompanied this because he was so certain about uh you know many of these views of the world and i think it is one thing like when i think about certainty in myself i am dogmatic about my values i am absolutely not dogmatic about the facts of the world the facts of the world anybody can correct me i may be wrong i'm dogmatic about my values that fine by now i've reached a stage where i believe in individual autonomy freedom whatever my values are but they're But the facts of the world, you can convince me I'm wrong.