Recent Articles
The Ellipsis of Touch: Gandhi’s Unequals
At the moment of writing Hind Swaraj in 1909, Gandhi was still more than two decades away from perhaps the most powerful gesture of consecration in the history of anticolonial thought: the Gandhian gesture of naming the Hindu untouchable harijan, tra…Gandhi and the Goa Question
Just as Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj was written in the literary genre of a dialogue, a dialogue between a newspaper Editor and a Reader, I start with an image (fig. 1) that represents a dialogue between a press and its readers, only the setting is not colonial…An “Eventful” History of Hind Swaraj: Gandhi between the Battle of Tsushima and the Union of South Africa
On July 1, 1909, Gandhi was on board the liner Kenilworth Castle en route from Cape Town to Southampton. The prosperous Johannesburg lawyer had recently emerged as a noted figure in the politics of the British Empire, through his leadership of the…Might as Well Face It, We’re Addicted to Gandhi
Hind Swaraj grapples with addiction. Gandhi tells us on its opening page that he writes because “I could not restrain myself,” an opening confirmation of a complicity in the pathologies of modern subjectivity he will condemn.1Violent Texts, Vulnerable Readers: Hind Swaraj and Its South African Audiences
In the first half of 1910, four English versions of Hind Swaraj appeared. The first was Gandhi’s translation taken down by Hermann Kallenbach and circulated in manuscript to a group of friends and associates. The second took shape between Natal, Bombay…