Swaraj in Ideas of God, Man and Nature

Abstract

This chapter develops further the Gandhian proposition of swaraj in ideas and culture. It discusses the Orientalist–Anglicist debate in relation to education in India and Gandhiji’s proposition of a vernacular education as opposed to learning that is alienated from the home environment of the pupil and which in turn alienates the student from the environment of the home. There is also discussion of the colonial ‘master system’ of the classification of knowledge that we have inherited from the West. We are introduced to the divorce in modern dualist positivism between the universal sciences of nature and the local schools of poetry, art, religion and politics and its two intersecting dualisms of fact/value and theory/practice. This chapter includes extensive discussion about the ideas of Gandhiji, Rammohun Roy and K.C. Bhattacharya.