The Swadeśi Movement and the Khadi Project vs. Alternative Visions of Indian Modernity

Abstract

Gandhi’s swadeśi movement went beyond India’s goal of independence and a critique of British colonialism. Gandhi created a vision of an alternative “traditional modernity” that was the fruit of the intellectual interactions of Indian and “foreign” thought in the spaces of his life. In this vision, India was becoming a vital whole created and nourished by Ruskinian rural artisan communities working for the material and moral well-being of the whole. The redefinition of modernity provided the basis for Indians to enforce the fundamental right of the nation, the right to exist, under India-specific colonial narratives. Imperial narratives made the possibility of national self-determination contingent on development understood in terms of technological progress and the associated concept of rationality. Khadi became a symbol of Gandhi’s alternative modernity. A symbol that still functions today in the spaces of national belief in the creative possibilities of one’s own culture in relation to the global challenges and constraints of modernity. The main purpose of this article is to provide a glimpse of the development path and the complex nature of India’s struggle for independence and modernity in the context of the swadeśi movement and the alternative Gandhian economy of values. In this text I also try to show selected, less exposed aspects of Mahatma Gandhi’s thought, life and general sensibility.