Examine Gandhi’s critique of ‘Modernisation’. (2016, 15 Marks)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj (1909) aboard the Kildonan Castle, returning to South Africa from London. Its target was not Britain or the West as a region but modern industrial civilisation as a way of life, judged by what it does to the moral person rather than by what it produces.
The Indictment
- Multiplication of wants. Modernity equates progress with comfort and ever-new wants. Appetite has no ceiling, so the outcome is restlessness, and self-mastery over one’s cravings, the freedom that matters most, drops out of view.
- Materialism as the measure. Treating material welfare as the whole of welfare sacrifices the spiritual life. Against the utilitarian greatest-number rule he later set sarvodaya, the good of all.
- Institutions of dependence. Railways spread plague and famine; lawyers thrive on quarrels and prop up the Raj; doctors license excess and then cure its effects.
- Accumulation and empire. Unlimited wants need markets and raw materials, hence imperialism. In Young India (1928) he warned that an industrialised India would strip the world bare like locusts.
- The modern state is violence in concentrated form, replacing self-government with administration.
He called this civilisation “Satanic” and expected it, given patience, to destroy itself.
What He Did Not Reject
- He opposed the craze for machinery, not machines. The sewing machine and charkha were welcome; labour-displacing machinery in a labour-surplus country was not. Hence production by the masses, not mass production.
- He admired the scientific spirit and drew on Western dissenters: John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau.
- His alternative is moral: civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty, built on swadeshi, bread labour and the self-reliant village.
Testing the Critique
- Romanticism. Answering Gandhi’s October 1945 letter reaffirming Hind Swaraj, Jawaharlal Nehru called the village intellectually and culturally backward. The Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis strategy of the Second Plan settled the policy question.
- Hierarchy. B. R. Ambedkar saw the village as a den of ignorance and communalism; for Dalits, modern law, the city and the state were routes of escape.
- Productivity. A small-producer economy lacks a theory of accumulation and may freeze poverty in place.
- Scholarly recovery. Partha Chatterjee reads the text as a critique of bourgeois civil society itself; Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph show Gandhi using tradition to build modern mass politics, which qualifies the anti-modern label.
Present Relevance
India emits about two tonnes of CO₂ per person against a world average near five, so universal Western consumption fails Gandhi’s planetary arithmetic. Mission LiFE (launched at Kevadia, October 2022) urges mindful consumption, echoing the limitation of wants while coexisting with high-growth targets.
Conclusion
Gandhi lost the policy argument of 1947 but kept the role of permanent critic. His answers, the self-sufficient village and restrained machinery, are weak on scale and caste. His questions are stronger: what growth is for, who bears its costs, and whether its wants fit one planet. The critique survives as a moral test for modernisation, not a rival blueprint.