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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hind Swaraj, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passive Resistance and Indian Independence
Modern Civilization and Colonialism
The Personal and the Political
Indian Nationhood and Identity
Summary
Analysis
The editor believes that machinery has impoverished India and is starting to impoverish Europe, too. Because of machinery, people leave their land. They work like slaves in mills and factories, which just produce wealth for the elite. It would be better for India to remain poor than to grow rich through capitalism and machinery. In fact, he thinks money and sex are the two worst human vices.
Gandhi’s critique of machinery, or technology, is based on the way it helps the powerful extract more from workers and deepen economic and political inequalities in the process. Notably, Gandhi does not have an issue with inequality per se—he thinks the poor can be just as happy as the rich. Rather, he takes issue with poor people being forced to work in order to survive, and he sees that technology and the centralization of power continually worsen this tendency.
Themes
But the editor thinks that people should persuade mill owners to close down, rather than forcing them to do so. Indians should refuse to buy anything machine-made or produce anything by machine. This will help them stay independent of the English. Giving up machinery and returning to older forms of production would be a slow process, but over years it could become a norm.
Gandhi responds to machinery with the same passive resistance strategies as he uses to respond to English colonialism: by taking the moral high ground and refusing to participate in unjust systems, Indians can eventually force business owners to do what’s right and shut down their mills. Indeed, his belief in boycotting machine-produced goods eventually became a centerpiece of the Indian Independence Movement and helped make it more profitable for the English to leave India than to stay.
Themes
The reader asks if the editor also rejects electricity and tram-cars, and the editor says yes: they are both harmful results of modern civilization. But the editor admits that printing machines are useful. “Sometimes poison is used to kill poison,” he explains, and Indians would have to be willing to get rid of printing machines once they’ve served their purpose.
Again, Gandhi refuses to deal in absolutes: technology is generally evil, he thinks, but because it gives people greater power, they can turn it around, put it in service of morality, and use “poison […] to kill poison.” Of course, the printing press was an absolutely necessary technology for the formation of India’s national identity and independence movement, because it’s what allowed ideas like Gandhi’s to spread (including this book). That said, Gandhi also clearly saw the danger of mass media as a propaganda tool (which he explained in his chapter on the English system of government).
Themes
