Europe Seen through the Eyes of a Hindu

  • Abstract:

    In his way from London to South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote one of his most important and for sure the most controversial writings. The book written in 1908 and entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule is a hard and explicit, outright criticism of the “modern civilization”, considered by the Mahatma to be embodied by Europe. What Gandhi is trying to show us in his book is the picture of Europe seen from India, from a different cultural space. He is calling in question the superiority of the European civilization and trying to stress the risks which are implied in this Western world. The main goal of the paper is to present the Gandhian way of thinking about the European civilization and to try to give an answer to the question if all these ideas written more than 100 years ago got any relevance for Westerners, for the European man of the 21st century?