Degeneration and Satyagraha: Hind Swarajand the crisis of Liberal Democracy

 

Degeneration and Satyagraha: Hind Swarajand the crisis of Liberal Democracy

 

Dilip Menon presented a lecture on the book Hind Swarajrecently. Hind Swaraj is a book written by the Father of the Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, when he was in Johannesburg, 1909. Hind Swarajargues that ‘Home rule is self rule’. It says that the power of pity is much greater than brute force, it hails the idea of Swadeshi and puts forward the idea of boycotting foreign, read English, material.

Anusha Malhotra Chairing the Lecture

Prof. Dilip Menon said that he would look at Swarajin its time. As he started he said, “Gandhi had very little to do with India at the time when he wrote Swaraj. At that time he used to travel to India as the spokesperson of Indians in South Africa. So, reading forward doesn’t work for me. Reading backwards doesn’t work for. So what would it mean to be the Hind Swaraj in its time?” He further added “There is a increasing lack of consistency in what Gandhi said and this has been my pet peeve against the lot of writing that has come in on Gandhi recently because there is an attempt to see an integrity to what Gandhi wrote. Integrity meaninghow the writing holds together”.

Prof. Menon while answering a question

He then referred to some of the works of Max Nordau, who was a Zionist leader and a renowned author. Gandhi mentions Max Nordau in the bibliography of his book Hind Swaraj. He said that this points to Gandhi’s close association with many of the Jewish intellectuals in South Africa. He argues that in many a sense Hind Swarajmust be read as a late Victorian text.

The chair and the speaker interacting