Understanding Gandhi’s Approach to Technology: After the Critique of Modernity and Industrialism

Contemporary scholarship has portrayed Gandhi’s relationship with industrial civilization and technology as a complex one; as opposed to the more reductionist interpretations of his work suggesting that he was an anti-modernist and Luddite. This essay, in three parts returns to a historical moment dating back to the first two decades of the twentieth century to situate Gandhi’s reflections on industrialism and the “West” in the context of a larger social movement that he was instrumental in shaping and that shaped his own thinking. The second part briefly summarizes contemporary meta-reflections within STS on technology, in order to argue that the binary dichotomies that purportedly characterize Gandhi’s writings on the subject disappear when Gandhi begins to be seen as a social determinist on the question of industrialization and technology. And finally, the third part takes up a recuperation of Gandhi within the appropriate technology movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century in India to detail the issues wherein Gandhi continues to be relevant for the contemporary practice of science and technology.