期刊名称：Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences
印刷版ISSN：1944-1088
电子版ISSN：1944-1096
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
期号：3
页码：938-942
出版社：Guild of Independent Scholars
摘要：2009 is the 100thanniversary of Hind Swaraj.1In this little booklet, Gandhi launched his critique of modernity and ever since, Hind Swaraj has been treated as Gandhi's seminal work.2Gandhi attracted many scholars and there is a vast literature on Gandhi. For or against Gandhi, all agree on at least one aspect of the Gandhian discourse in Hind Swaraj: its simplicity. In the following paragraphs I will try to make sense of this simplicity. The consensus amongst the scholars on the point that Hind Swaraj is a very simple text tends to disappear when it comes to interpreting this very aspect. While according to some, Gandhi's message is simple as he was a weak thinker with a reactionary mind -which they argue, reveals his medieval and mystical ideology-; for others like Anthony Parel, such views are missing the point that it is very easy to misjudge the simplicity of Hind Swaraj with a casual reading (Mukherjee:1991; Parel:1997). Parel and his line of thought contend that since Gandhi sought simplicity in all things, unless the readers focus on the subtle messages of the book, they will be unable to grasp the deeper meaning of the text (1997: xvii). The literature is full of similar views from both sides. Although those views have nuances, they share one thing in common. They tell us more about the authors than Gandhi himself. In this essay, I am 1In 1909, between 13 and 22 November on his return trip from England to South Africa, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj. Excerpts of the text were first published in the Gujarati section of the Indian Opinion. Gandhi personally translated the book into English with a few revisions. Then, the text as a whole was published in book form in 1910. Gandhi translated 'Hind Swaraj' as 'Indian Home Rule'. All of my references in this essay are from the English edition of the book. Nevertheless, I still use 'Hind Swaraj' to refer to the book, not 'Indian Home Rule'. var currentpos,timer; function initialize() { timer=setInterval("scrollwindow()",10);} function sc(){clearInterval(timer); }function scrollwindow() { currentpos=document.body.scrollTop; window.scroll(0,++currentpos); if (currentpos != document.body.scrollTop) sc();} document.onmousedown=scdocument.ondblclick=initializeTamer S.yler, Humboldt University939 not going to fall into a similar pattern and speculate on the nature of the simplicity of the Gandhian discourse but the impacts of it. We cannot know why Gandhi presented his messages in a simple form but we can discuss how this special genre served his cause. To do this, a simple question needs to be answered first: Why did Gandhi write Hind Swaraj. This is a key question to ask and it has a rather simple answer. Gandhi wrote the booklet in order to communicate. First to the Indians, then the rest of the world. Nevertheless, such an answer does not reveal much for us. It rather calls for another question: Why did Gandhi choose to communicate his ideas to others. To answer this question is hard if not totally impossible. It is self-evident that we cannot know why Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj as it is and make sense of his action exhaustively. If we try to do so, we will end up isolating one or more aspects of the Gandhian discourse from others which would give us a partial view. But, be that as it may, this is the only way to utilize a theory/model to make sense of any subject matter in social sciences. Keeping our reflexivity concerns, we still have to turn to Hind Swaraj and discuss why it may be that one or more reasons bear more importance than the others for Gandhi writing Hind Swaraj. In that sense, I think the words Gandhi carefully chose as titles for the Gujarati and English editions of Hind Swaraj reveal much. Gandhi named the Gujarati edition as Hind Swaraj. Later, he translated the booklet into English as Indian Home Rule. Without disregarding the possibility of over-interpretation, I argue that with those titles, Gandhi expressed the rationale behind the booklet: Promoting the cause of self-rule in British India. In Gandhi's collected writings there is enough evidence to back up this argument. This indeed cannot be the only reason for Gandhi writing Hind Swaraj, but perhaps this was the most important reason. Then, to make sense of the simplicity of the Gandhian discourse in this historical text, we need to ask how it served the cause of self-rule. By his effort to communicate through Hind Swaraj, Gandhi brought Indian self-rule to the attention of the world. Primarily, Indian people's attention. According to relevance theory, communication is mainly about relevance. By communicating to someone, we imply that the information
