Looking Back The past, it is said, is a strange land, but it is also one in which serendipity has a role. Looking back at our first four (then quarterly) issues, we found to our delight that all our founders had contributed. In this section, ‘TBR@40: Looking Back’, we carry excerpts of reviews from these issues; the only exception is the review of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which was the first review of the Millennium issue. The other reviews are by our former Advisory Board Members—K.R. Narayanan, S. Gopal, V.P. Dutt, Romila Thapar, Mrinal Pande, K.N. Raj, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Raja Ramanna and Tejeshwar Singh; Chitra Narayan, our first editor; Our fathers, T.C.A. Ramanujachari, the architect of our Trust Deed and K.R. Acharya, a fount of never drying information on all matters of knowledge, B.S. Kesavan, the eminent librarian and Nikhil Chakravartty, but for whom the journal would have folded up while we were both away from Delhi. ……………Editors
Hind Swaraj*
by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Reviewed by Lalitha Zachariah
…. If by millennium one means not a thousand years by human computation of spatial time, but, true to the arcane spirit of the word, a period of glory and blessedness, of true freedom, then without a doubt, what qualifies the Indian millennium is the first half of the twentieth century. This period in modern history owes its uniqueness to the thought and soulforce of one man who made possible the translation of his master-plan for human freedom into the kind of mass action of which there is no replay in this time and age. The man who achieved this alchemy was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi canonized in his lifetime as the ‘Mahatma’. In an era overrun by the intellect, with books spreading revolutionary political philosophies across the globe, Gandhi made bold to submit his simple, soul-searching treatise on modern civilization for the edification of one and all. The book first published as Hind Swaraj in 1909 in Gujarati was proscribed in India by the empire-builders of British India and translated later into English as the Indian Home Rule. Hind Swaraj is the impassioned plea of an idealist Indian for an ideal India. A superb tract critiquing modern civilization, the booklet for all its fiery nationalism reflects a global mind, and remains an evergreen in the vast international market of books as an early warning staring into the ‘Eye of Chaos’ the world has become. Gandhi was indeed a globalist who needed none of the multitudinous tools of today—neither a personal computer nor a cellular phone—for a global mind-and-heart reach. He understood the importance of being integrated not only within the individual self, but also within a multilayered national polity before becoming a world citizen. ‘The introduction of foreigners’, he wrote in the pamphlet ‘does not necessarily destroy the nation; they merge in it.