Swaraj and Swadeshi教程.pdfVIP

Swaraj and Swadeshi : Gandhi and Tagore on Ethics, Development and Freedom * Nalini Bhushan and Jay L Garfield Smith College 1. “Svaraj in Ideas”; Ideas about Swaraj Gandhi introduced the terms swaraj and swadeshi to colonial Indian discourse. While many academics and activists adopted these terms in their framings of the Indian independence struggle, consensus on their interpretation was hard to come by. The debate between Tagore and Gandhi is often taken as crucial in the contest over the meanings of these terms, but the interpretation of that debate is itself contested. We would like to re- examine that well-known debate as it is refracted through the lens of an epistemological predicament articulated by KC Bhattacharya. This will allow us to see more clearly both the agreement and the disagreement between Tagore and Gandhi, and to better understand why Tagore regarded Gandhi’s ideology as not only shortsighted, but incoherent. In his lecture ”Svaraj in Ideas” (1928) Bhattacharyya articulates for his students the kind of swaraj worth fighting for. At a moment when the desire for political freedom was at center stage, Bhattacharyya focuses instead on a form of subjugation at the same time more subtle and more powerful than political colonialism, a form so subtle as to be phenomenologically invisible. We speak today of Svaraj or self-determination in politics. Man’s domination over man is felt in the most tangible form in the political sphere. There is however a subtler domination exercised in the sphere of ideas by one culture on another, a domination all the more serious in the consequence, because it is not ordinarily felt. Political subjection primarily me