Punk & Pedagogy
Cart
☆ Find Your Stage
Hind Swaraj cover
FEEL THE FISSURE MAKE SOMETHING BETTER

Hind Swaraj

by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi argues that modern civilization itself is the problem.

For you if

you want to understand Gandhi's politics at their most radical — before the world turned him into a poster

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$16 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Gandhi wrote this on a ship in 1909, returning from London to South Africa, in the form of a dialogue between a reader and an editor. It is his most radical text — arguing not just for Indian independence from Britain but for the rejection of Western modernity entirely: railways, hospitals, lawyers, modern medicine, industrial civilization. Gandhi believed that India's salvation lay in returning to village life and hand-spinning, not in replacing British industrialism with an Indian version. Controversial then, more controversial now, essential always. The most punk thing Gandhi ever wrote.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
India • South Asia
Voice
Written by a Indian author
Themes
anti-colonialismcritique of modernity
Topics
indian independence movement

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

5 Broken Cameras poster

5 Broken Cameras(2011)

dir. Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi

Five cameras destroyed. Every one kept filming.

A Palestinian farmer in Bil'in documents his village's nonviolent resistance to encroaching Israeli settlements over five years, structured around each of his cameras' destruction.

Why it’s here: Shot almost entirely by a Palestinian farmer with no filmmaking background, on cameras that kept getting destroyed and kept getting replaced — testimony in the most literal sense, edited (not directed) into shape by an Israeli co-director after the fact.

Letterboxd ↗

The Battle of Algiers poster

The Battle of Algiers(1966)

dir. Gillo Pontecorvo

Studied by insurgents and the Pentagon alike.

Docudrama reconstruction of the FLN's urban guerrilla campaign against French colonial rule in Algiers, shot in a deliberately newsreel-like style with mostly non-professional actors.

Why it’s here: Reconstructed with a documentary's texture and an insurgency's actual tactics — studied for decades by both sides of colonial conflict, reportedly including the Pentagon itself ahead of the Iraq occupation. A rare case of a film about power becoming an actual tactical document, not just a representation of one.

Letterboxd ↗