Gandhi on the Wider Significance of Science

It is well-known that in his major work Hind Swaraj as well as a vast number of dispatches, letters and speeches, Gandhi (2010 [1909]) expressed a recoil from the various elements of modernity that he detected in the last two-and-a-half centuries or so of what he (somewhat omnibusly) called ‘Western civilisation’. Central among these elements are: science, capital, industrialisation and the (centralised) state. In this brief lecture, I will focus on the first of these since I have been asked to speak about Gandhi’s views on science, but – given the integrating links between them – the rest will inevitably surface briefly in the discussion.