Is Gandhi’s Approach to Technology Irrelevant in the Modern Age of Technology?

Gandhi’s most important work on technology, Hind Swaraj, seems hopelessly ignorant, anti-modern, and anti-technology. This essay focuses on Gandhi’s perplexing writings on technology, maintaining that Gandhi’s critiques and alternatives are very significant today, but only if we are creatively selective in appropriating, reformulating, and reapplying what remains insightful. It presents a detailed analysis of Hind Swaraj and technology and Gandhi’s debates with Nehru, Tagore, and others. This essay then considers Gandhi’s positions on “modern civilization,” true civilization, and technology, and the future significance of Gandhi’s approach to technology. Included are contributions from Herbert Marcuse and other twentieth-century scholars and formulations of contemporary crises such as climate change and growing inequality with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the power elite. We consider the insights of a dynamic, contextually relevant Gandhian position on the appropriate role of technology in addressing such personal existential and global crises.