The Political Theory of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj

man we naturally tend to go back to his seminal work. This law of taking the short-cut to a man's thought brings us to Gandhi's Hind Swaraj.l What the Prince is to Machiavelli's writings, and the Social Contract to the writings of Rousseau, the HS is to the vast corpus of Gandhian literature. It sets forth in a brief compass what its author developed in detail in later writings. John Middleton Murry, one of Gandhi's earlier critics, called it "one of the spiritual classics of the world"2 and Sir Penderel Moon, "the first comprehensive, coherent expression of certain basic ideas that Gandhi never lost sight of throughout all his subsequent political career."3 George Catlin compared it to Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.4 Roy Walker