On October 2, we once again paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi. His remarkable legacy lives on, but there is one aspect of his persona I want to focus on: cultural rootedness, even while he was also a global citizen. To my mind, this is one of the less appreciated reasons for his extraordinary historical stature. At a time when colonialism had succeeded in persuading many Indians that western civilisation represented the summit of human achievement, Gandhi refused to accept that becoming modern required becoming culturally deracinated.

It was for this reason that he chose to be Indian in dress, custom, diet and deportment, shunning the debasing emulation of the rulers, and following the cultural idiom of his soil. He could speak the Queen’s English. He had been shaped by the institutions of the British Empire. He studied law in London and practised there as a barrister. Yet he wrote his first book, Hind Swaraj, in Gujarati. His effortless ability to belong to his own milieu, so different from the upper classes of Indians of the times — who were at best poor copies of the British — enabled him to meet the........

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