Gandhi, Technology and Employment

I should clarify at the outset that I am neither a Gandhi scholar nor a Gandhian. I am in no position to say anything on how Gandhi’s thinking on unemployment evolved, or its complexities. My reason for talking at all about Gandhi however is the fact that Gandhi understood unemployment in a way that very few others in modern India have done; he saw the relationship between capitalism and unemployment, and traced the roots of mass poverty under colonial rule to the fact of such unemployment being inflicted upon India. This perspective of his interests me as an economist. But since Gandhi was not a professional economist, and was not writing a tome on unemployment, what I say about Gandhi has an element of what I read into him; hence I should not be criticized on the grounds that he had said elsewhere in his writings something very different from what I have culled out from his work.