New Delhi: A hundred Dussehras ago, over a celebratory dinner at a London restaurant called Nazimuddin’s, Mahatma Gandhi sat and listened to a speech from V.D. Savarkar, the star pupil in what he called “the Indian school of violence”. The echoes of that speech rang so persistently in Gandhi’s ears that, when he sailed for South Africa a few days later, he reacted by writing Hind Swaraj, a slim exposition of his various philosophies, all of which would become immensely familiar in India over the next four decades.
Symbol of self-reliance: Mahatma Gandhi working on a (spinning wheel). In 1924, Gandhi had said: ‘What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such.’ Dinodia
Among its ruminations on freedom and religion and passive resistance,
Hind Swaraj, which marks its centenary this November, contains Gandhi’s ideas for economic prosperity —or, to be more precise, for the economic prosperity of India. They sound, in a 2009 that is even more avowedly capitalist and materialistic than 1909, quaint or impractical. But those who continue to champion Gandhian economics insist that his ideas bear relevance even—or especially—today, some compromises to the modern era notwithstanding.
Most notably to our 21st-century eyes, Hind Swaraj inveighs against machinery—not with any caveats, but absolutely and bluntly, as if the further development of the idea could come later.
“It is necessary to realize that machinery is bad,” Gandhi wrote. “We shall then be able gradually to do away with it.” On the subject of railways, in particular, he was withering: “Railways accentuate the evil nature of man.”
But these thoughts of Gandhi’s, says Pulin Nayak, a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, should not be examined in isolation. “Gandhi was too intelligent to insist on no machinery at all,” Nayak says. “What he wanted was for machinery to not displace labour.” (And indeed, to a question from a Shantiniketan student in 1924, Gandhi would say: “What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on ‘saving labour’ till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation.”)
Nayak first “seriously” read Hind Swaraj eight years ago, although he has been familiar with the precepts of Gandhian economics for far longer. He is reluctant to call himself a Gandhian economist, although he confesses that he agrees with much of what Gandhi says; where he differs, oddly enough, is in Gandhi not being radical enough. “He never considered any major changes in the ownership of the means of production itself,” Nayak says. “He believed that capitalists could go on holding factories and assets.”