Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj refutes Marx’s account of India point by point

Evidence

What is remarkable about this passage is that whether or not Gandhi knew it, he seems to be refuting Marx on every count. If Marx raved against the slow (‘vegetative’) pace of change in India, Gandhi admires precisely that kind of stasis, while his sense of India’s eternal changelessness is much more radical than Marx could ever muster: that the Indian peasant has used the same kind of plough for ‘thousands of years’, while the education system has also remained the same, is said to be a good thing. The reason India did not have an industrial revolution (and was therefore particularly vulnerable to colonial capital, Marx might have added) is not that the antiquated systems of production and governance did not allow it, but that ‘our forefathers’, in their superior wisdom, had decided that it should be so; and we should of course follow in the footsteps of ‘our forefathers’. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 471

Categorization

• XREF: Directly juxtaposes Gandhi and Marx, echoing the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ pattern of pairing opposing thinkers.