I have written some chapters on the subject of Indian Home Rule which I venture to place before the readers of Indian Opinion. I have written because I could not restrain myself. I have read much, I have pondered much, during the stay, for four months in London of the Transvaal Indian deputation. I discussed things with as many of my countrymen as I could. I met, too, as many Englishmen as it was possible for me to meet. I consider it my duty now to place before the readers of Indian Opinion the conclusions, which appear to me to be final. The Gujarati subscribers of Indian Opinion number about 800. I am aware that, for every subscriber, there are at least ten persons who read the paper with zest. Those who cannot read Gujarati have the paper read to them. Such persons have often questioned me about the condition of India. Similar questions were addressed to me in London. I felt, therefore, that it might not be improper for me to ventilate publicly the views expressed by me in private.

These views are mine, and yet not mine. They are mine because I hope to act according to them. They are almost a part of my being. But, yet, they are not mine, because I lay no claim to originality. They have been formed after reading several books. That which I dimly felt received support from these books.

The following books are recommended for perusal to follow up the study of the foregoing:

1. ‘The Kingdom of God Is Within You’ – Tolstoy.

2. ‘What Is Art?’ – Tolstoy.

3. ‘The Slavery of Our Times’ – Tolstoy.

4. ‘The First Step’ – Tolstoy.

5. ‘How Shall We Escape?’ – Tolstoy.

6. ‘Letter to a Hindoo’ – Tolstoy.

7. ‘The White Slaves of England’ – Sherard.

8. ‘Civilization: Its Cause and Cure’ – Carpenter.

9. ‘The Fallacy of Speed’ – Taylor.

10. ‘A New Crusade’ – Blount.

11. ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’ – Thoreau.

12. ‘Life Without Principle’ – Thoreau.

13. ‘Unto This Last’ – Ruskin.

14. ‘A Joy For Ever’ – Ruskin.

15. ‘Duties of Man’ – Mazzini.

16. ‘Defence and Death of Socrates’ – From Plato.

17. ‘Paradoxes of Civilization’ – Max Nordau.

18. ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’ – Naoroji

19. ‘Economic History of India’ – Dutt.

20. ‘Village Communities’ – Maine.

Question: You have said in your article in the Harijan of July 15, under the caption ‘The Real Danger’ that Congressmen in general certainly do not know the kind of independence they want. Would you kindly give them a broad but comprehensive picture of the Independent India of your own conception?

Answer: I do not know that I have not, from time to time, given my idea of Indian independence. Since, however, this question is part of a series, it is better to answer it even at the risk of repetition.

Independence of India should mean independence of the whole of India, including what is called India of the States and the other foreign powers, French and Portuguese, who are there, I presume, by British sufferance. Independence must mean that of the people of India, not of those who are today ruling over them. The rulers should depend on the will of those who are under their heels. Thus, they have to be servants of the people, ready to do their will.

Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus, every village will be a verity for my picture in which the last is equal to the first or, in other words, no one is to be the first and none the last.

reader: I have now learnt what the Congress has done to make India one nation, how the Partition has caused an awakening, and how discontent and unrest have spread through the land. I would now like to know your views on Swaraj. I fear that our interpretation is not the same.

editor: It is quite possible that we do not attach the same meaning to the term. You and I and all Indians are impatient to obtain Swaraj, but we are certainly not decided as to what it is. To drive the English out of India is a thought heard from many mouths, but it does not seem that many have properly considered why it should be so. I must ask you a question. Do you think that it is necessary to drive away the English, if we get all we want?

reader: I should ask of them only one thing, that is: ‘Please leave our country.’ If after they have complied with this request, their withdrawal from India means that they are still in India, I should have no objection. Then we would understand that, in our language, the word ‘gone’ is equivalent to ‘remained’.

editor: Well, then, let us suppose that the English have retired. What will you do then?

reader: That question cannot be answered at this stage. The state after withdrawal will depend largely upon the manner of it.

reader: Now you will have to explain what you mean by civilisation.

editor: It is not a question of what I mean. Several English writers refuse to call that civilisation which passes under that name. Many books have been written upon that subject. Societies have been formed to cure the nation of the evils of civilisation. A great English writer has written a work called ‘Civilization: its Cause and Cure.’ Therein he has called it a disease.

reader: Why do we not know this generally?

editor: The answer is very simple. We rarely find people arguing against themselves. Those who are intoxicated by modern civilisation are not likely to write against it. Their care will be to find out facts and arguments in support of it, and this they do unconsciously, believing it to be true. A man, whilst he is dreaming, believes in his dream; he is undeceived only when he is awakened from his sleep. A man labouring under the bane of civilisation is like a dreaming man. What we usually read are the works of defenders of modern civilisation, which undoubtedly claims among its votaries very brilliant and even some very good men. Their writings hypnotise us. And so, one by one, we are drawn into the vortex.

reader: This seems to be very plausible. Now will you tell me something of what you have read and thought of this civilisation?

Mary Astell's life

Born on 12 November, 1666 to Peter Astell, a member of the Company of Hostmen at Newcastle upon Tyne, and his wife the former Mary Errington, Mary Astell is an unlikely candidate for the role of England's first feminist (Hill, 1986). Her father, although described as a gentleman, began as an apprentice to the Company of Hostmen, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the cartage of coal and grindstones. He did not complete his apprenticeship until Mary was eight years old and died when she was twelve, leaving the family debt-ridden. In the 1660s and 1670s 83 per cent of North Country women, and in the 1680s and 1690s 72 per cent, were illiterate; as calculated from signatures to court records, unable even to write their names (Cressy, 1977, 1980). Mary Astell, lacking formal education, found a family mentor in Ralph Astell, curate of St Nicholas church, Newcastle, author of ‘New-castle's heartie Congratulations’ to the King, the poem Vota Non Bella (1666), which had established his Royalist credentials. According to George Ballard, the eighteenth-century source on contemporary learned women, Astell mastered French, gained some knowledge of Latin and ‘under his [Ralph's] tuition made considerable progress in philosophy, mathematics and logic’ (Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, p. 382).

Note on the Text

Astell's pamphlet is a reply to Bishop White Kennett's sermon, A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War, preached on the anniversary of the death of Charles I, 31 January 1704. Kennett's sermon earned him notoriety for Whig tepidness on the merits of Charles, while Astell's reply is one of the famous set pieces of the Tory canon lamenting the death of the Royal Martyr, appealing to standard authorities, the Bible, the Earl of Clarendon and Henry Foulis, with broadsides in all directions.

Kennett is referred to by Astell as a writer in the Convocation Controversy who had assisted Archbishop Thomas Tenison to assert William's prerogative forbidding the convocation of the lower clergy in Parliament. Archbishop of Canterbury from 1694 to 1714, Tennison was William III's appointee and replacement for Archbishop William Sancroft, Astell's nonjuring friend. Sancroft and Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, the former Mary Astell's patron, the latter her intellectual mentor and much-cited source, were representative of the Anglican hierarchy of the 1680s, Laudian descendants uncompromising on the status and independence of Anglicanism. Astell, a firm supporter of the autonomy of the Anglican hierarchy, like her High Church authorities, represented what Goldie (1978, 64) has suggested to be the real roots of Tory constitutionalism in the revolt against James: the choice of church over king.

Note on the Text

A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons of 1704 was Astell's answer to Daniel Defoe's anonymous More Short-Ways with the Dissenters of the same year. It belongs to the pamphlet skirmishing over the Occasional Conformity debate, initiated by the introduction of the parliamentary bill in 1702 to permit Dissenters who attended the Anglican Church at least once a year to enjoy the privileges of government office. Although the Corporation and Test Acts of 1673 had not been repealed, an entire class of occasional conformists had grown up, to whom no serious objections were made until the flagrant conduct of Sir Humphrey Edwin, a Presbyterian Lord Mayor of London, drew attention to the matter by attending in full regalia both Dissenting and Anglican services on the same Sunday. Opening shots were fired in what was to become a pamphlet war by Daniel Defoe, whose pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters, of 1698, opposed any conformity on the Dissenters’ part. In 1701 the new Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Abney, repeated the performance of his predecessor, providing the occasion for republication of Defoe's tract; this time he replaced the Preface to the mayor with one to John Howe (q.v.), pastor of the Dissenting church to which Abney belonged, and a supporter of Occasional Conformity as a conciliatory measure.