Indian Nationhood and Identity Theme Analysis

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi speaks to a profoundly fractured population. Largely because of English colonialism’s divide-and-conquer strategy, Indians have started to define themselves as separate groups based on differing religious, linguistic, regional, political, caste, class, and cultural identities. When they start turning against each other instead of working together to fight for independence, Gandhi thinks, Indians are letting these artificial divisions get the best of them and indirectly helping the English maintain power. While Indians bicker about who should belong to the future Indian nation, Gandhi argues that India has always been—and will always be—a single unified nation. He declares that Hindus and Muslims, North Indians and South Indians, and moderates and extremists in the Indian National Congress are really all like quarreling brothers: their conflicts are temporary, but their familial bonds are eternal. In fact, Gandhi emphasizes India’s historical, cultural, and spiritual unity precisely in order to help Indians learn to view themselves as a single nation and demand independence with a single, unified voice.

When he wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909, Gandhi was confronting a profoundly divided India, and he worried that these divisions would weaken the movement for independence. The first division Gandhi notes in his book is the bitter political divide between extremist and the moderate independence activists in the Indian National Congress. He also talks about the militant activists he recently met in London, who call themselves the Young India Party—the reader initially appears to be one of them. The moderates and extremists are divided by their tactics: the moderates want to petition the colonial government for independence, while the extremists want to start an armed rebellion and assassinate British officials. But because the moderates and extremists can’t agree on anything, they aren’t making any progress towards actually liberating India from British rule.

The other crucial division that Gandhi addresses is the growing animosity between Hindus and Muslims in India. Indeed, the reader—who is clearly a Hindu—argues that there is an “inborn enmity” between Hindus and Muslims. He considers Muslims to be violent, unclean, and immoral—especially because many Muslims eat meat. These beliefs were common, and they particularly disturbed Gandhi. As a result of the religious split, India’s Muslim minority had begun advocating for a separate state. Gandhi strongly disagreed with this idea, which threatened the prospect of a unified fight for independence.

Gandhi argues that Indians are divided not because of their differing political or religious beliefs, but because of colonialism and modern civilization. In reality, he concludes that India always has been—and always will be—a single, unified nation. Although moderates and extremists disagree on how to achieve Indian independence, Gandhi emphasizes that this is only a superficial division: they want the same thing and belong to the same party. Even though the reader looks down on the leaders of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi carefully emphasizes that they—like several generations of Indian activists and revolutionaries before them—have dedicated their lives to the cause of Indian independence. In other words, while the extremist revolutionaries think they stand alone against the British, Gandhi reminds them that they are actually part of a long tradition of Indian nationalists and independence fighters. This long tradition only exists because Indians have long seen themselves as a unified national community.

Gandhi also insists that Hindus and Muslims can and should live in harmony. They did so for many centuries before the British arrived, and they only became rivals because of Britain’s divide-and-conquer strategy. While the reader subscribes to the common misconception that India was a unified Hindu nation until Muslims invaded and took over the Indian Subcontinent, the editor corrects him: India has always been ethnically, culturally, and religiously mixed. Hindus lived peacefully under Muslim rulers and vice-versa. Most importantly, Gandhi emphasizes that Hindus and Muslims fundamentally believe the same things. They worship the same God, their scriptures are very similar, and they subscribe to the same fundamental moral values—specifically, they are humble with regards to material things, but strive ambitiously for spiritual improvement. Gandhi argues that Indians should unite around these shared values, which he calls ancient civilization, or the “religion which underlies all religions.” Because they share the values of ancient civilization, Hindus and Muslims also follow a common social structure: they traditionally live in rural, relatively egalitarian village communities. He believes that these shared values and traditional social structures should form the basis for Indians’ demand for independence.

The implications of Gandhi’s argument are clear: if India has and will always be a single nation, then the Indian people should look past their superficial differences and demand independence with a unified voice. As a result, Indians could form a single, democratic, and pluralistic nation—not a patchwork of different ones based on divisions of religion or ideology. This is why Gandhi wanted India to be a secular democracy, even though he thinks its people should be traditional and deeply religious. The government shouldn’t follow any particular religion, but rather the “religion which underlines all religions” and therefore unifies all Indians, whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Jewish, Baha’i, or Parsi.

Ultimately, the British ultimately partitioned India into two, against Gandhi’s wishes. Pakistan became an officially Muslim state, but India was founded to be an inclusive, secular democracy. However, Gandhi would likely see this as a limited victory, because in practice the Hindu nationalist movement—which was responsible for Gandhi’s assassination and has fought to oppress Muslims since independence—remains powerful to this day.