Mahatma Gandhi spent the last three decades of his life battling for his country’s freedom from British colonial rule. In this time, he rarely wrote or spoke about what he felt a free India should look like. However, in March 1922, he offered a short, succinct definition of swaraj that is worth revisiting today. Here is what he said:

“Removal of untouchability, manufacture of khaddar, Hindu-Muslim unity, cultivation of non-violence are not measures of a temporary nature. They are the four pillars on which the structure of swaraj must for ever rest. Take away any one of them and it must topple down.”

“Removal of untouchability, manufacture of khaddar, Hindu-Muslim unity, cultivation of non-violence are not measures of a temporary nature. They are the four pillars on which the structure of swaraj must for ever rest. Take away any one of them and it must topple down.”

Let us unpack this statement and gloss each of its four elements.

We may take “removal of untouchability” to stand more broadly for the pursuit of social justice, which of course includes removing not just the inequalities of caste but also of gender. Unlike the other savarna leaders of the Congress – Nehru, Patel, Bose, et al – Gandhi was keenly aware of how the prevalence of untouchability undermined the Indian case for freedom. He therefore called it a “sin”, and those who practised it the “Dyers of Hinduism”.

However, Gandhi also paid attention to the emancipation of women. As he put it in a speech in 1917: “Women is [sic] the companion of men, gifted with equal mental capacities. She has the right to participate in the very minutest detail in the activities of man and she has an equal right of freedom with him.” In the decades that followed, women were to play a critical role in the satyagrahas against the raj that Gandhi led.

Gandhi’s social reform agenda had its limits. The term “Harijan” that he coined smacked of a patronising attitude, and has now wisely been replaced by “Dalit”. And he remained ambivalent about female participation in the formal economy. Nonetheless, in his alertness to caste and gender discrimination, he was ahead of almost all other nationalists of his time.

The first senapati of the Vile Parle chhavani was Jamnalal Bajaj, who initiated the Civil Disobedience Movement in suburban Bombay on the morning of 6 April........

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