78 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019
the evening. I could not get any sleep that
night. I was determined to change my life in
accordance with the ideals of the book.” Th e
book was a radical critique of capitalism,
rejecting the classical economists like Adam
Smith and J.S. Mill, and advocated renun-
ciation of wealth so that everyone has their
own share of prosperity. Immediately after
reading Ruskin, Gandhi started his work to
establish the Phoenix Settlement in Natal—
his fi rst ashram—to experiment “a life of
labour”.
Th e self-sustaining rural settlement was
a practical solution he found to save the Indi-
an Opinion, too. Gandhi was preoccupied by
the mounting costs of running the newspa-
per. Westerners and Indians who joined in
settlement were told to work in the press and
simultaneously look for their own suste-
nance. Four years later, Gandhi translated
Unto this Last into Gujarati under the title‘Sarvodaya’, which means welfare of all—the
crux of his economic and social programme.
Th ere are more western thinkers than east-
ern ones to whom Gandhi owes an intellectu-
al debt. Th e list of books that inspired his Hind
Swaraj or Indian Home Rule include six books
of Tolstoy, two books each of Th oreau and
Ruskin, Plato’s Defence and Death of Socrates,
Edward Carpenter’s Civilisation, its Cause
and Cure and Th omas Taylor’s Th e Fallacy of
Speed. Th e only books of Indian thinkers in
the list were Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and
Un-British Rule in India and Romesh Chunder
Dutt’s Economic History of India.
Gandhi picked up many concepts from
diff erent traditions and combined them
within himself to form the man he was. He
never claimed to be an original thinker and
remained a lifelong learner. He revised his
opinions from time to time, but the base of his
conceptual framework remained the same.ASHRAM
LIFE
Gandhi repairing his
charkha, assisted by
his British co-worker
Madeleine Slade,
whom he named Mi-
rabehn, at Sevagram
AshramDINODIA