Others have criticized Gandhi for other reasons, and for good ones. I do not want to say that once his thought is amended to include a critique of the normative framework of the global economy it becomes one hundred percent correct. Certainly he himself would not have made any claim to be one hundred percent correct about anything, with or without amendments. Many have made fun of Gandhi for wanting everyone to be a vegetarian and to abstain from sex. As a religious man he was haunted by the eternal curse of all religion: the temptation to sacrifice the liberty of others on the altar of one’s own beliefs. Fortunately for humanity, Gandhi’s desire to sacrifice himself for God took the form of a passion for social service. “Self-realization, i.e. Moksh, can be had only through the service of humanity.” (10) Fortunately, too, Gandhi’s was an ecumenical religion. He could find a room in his spiritual palace for every faith and even for a sophisticated secular humanist like the one who will be treated in the next chapter. Nevertheless, even this apostle of nonviolence, truth, and self-suffering could not exorcise the curse of all religion. I am afraid that this consideration will make my argument even more difficult to follow, since in addition to criticizing Gandhi for inconsistency, I will attribute merit to criticisms of the principle with which he failed to be consistent.

Now, in brief outline, here is an argument citing Gandhi’s religious passion to make clear another text which is otherwise problematic. It takes Gandhi’s early work Hind Swaraj to be one which:

a. Is puzzling and likely to be misunderstood, and

b. Can be given a clear meaning which is undoubtedly true.

Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in 1908 on a boat on his way back to South Africa from London. The list of recommended readings he appended to his text shows that Gandhi was not an isolated thinker whose ideas were different from everything that was in the air at the time he wrote, He was a member of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century anti-modernist school of thought. Gandhi’s fellow anti-modernists included John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, Taylor, Blount, Sherard, and Max Nordau. Gandhi also cited historians who had written about the traditional villages of India, Romesh Dutt and Sir Henry Maine.