Gandhi and the Emergence of the Modern Indian Political Canon

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores Mahatma Gandhi's contributions towards the evolution of the modern Indian political canon. Beginning with the Arthasastra, classical India had a political canon of its own. It flourished for over a millennium, but it suffered near extinction with the introduction in the nineteenth century of the Western political canon by the colonial state. Gandhi in the twentieth century intervened and challenged the dominance of the Western canon. He updated the old canon by deleting what was obsolete in it, preserving what was viable, and adding to it what was new and modern.