The Weekend Reading List series at The Law Blog is curated and brought together by Anshuman Sahoo, the founding editor of The Law Blog and Director at Law Matters Centre for Research, Education, and Social Action (LaMCRESA).
My first serious introduction to Gandhian ideology was through a random recommendation from Prof. Chimni leading me to www.swaraj.org, and then through the rabbit hole that begins on its ‘What is Swaraj’ page (highly recommended for anyone as uninitiated as I was)! And while I have, since then, read quite a number of books, articles, and papers on Gandhi, I have never quite grown accustomed to the idea of, or the intent behind, a lawyer putting the institution of Law (and courts) on a civilizational trial while readily complying to its sanctions. Gandhi, seen this way, becomes a problem in jurisprudence. And what better a theme than this for this weekend’s reading list?
While on a ship in 1909, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, arguing that courts and profession that lives off them are instruments of colonial rule, and their incentive lies in prolonging conflicts that the community mechanisms would otherwise settle. Thirteen years later, when he was charged for sedition for three articles he wrote for Young India, he readily accepted that he indeed intended to promote disaffection towards the State, called it the highest duty of a citizen, and asked for the heaviest sentence the law allowed. The same man who argued law to be a colonial trap submitted to it more readily and completely than any defense lawyer would have advised.
Is that ready compliance respect for law, or its most thorough rejection?
This question keeps coming back in different forms, across civilisations, across epochs, long after both Gandhi and British Raj are gone. Ambedkar, addressing the constituent assembly in Nov 1949, argued that while Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience were justified when no constitutional path was open to accommodate dissent, under the new Constitution it would lead the way for anarchy. Asgar Vazahat ji translates that discomfort brilliantly into fiction in his play Godse@Gandhi.com. Rawls built the Anglo-American theory of civil disobedience on the same intuition. Disobedience, for Rawls, is a public and non-violent appeal to the shared sense of justice of a nearly just society, made by people who accept punishment because they accept the system. Gandhi’s acceptance of the penalty became the template, but the colonial setting that gave it meaning was stripped away.
Two recent works put it back. Anushka Singh shows how the legal category of disaffection shaped the very vocabulary in which Gandhi could dissent, and how between 1919 and 1922 he moved from disowning disaffection to claiming it. Erin Pineda, reading the American civil rights movement alongside India, South Africa and Ghana, argues that the liberal account Rawls made canonical domesticated a practice its practitioners understood as decolonisation, not as a petition to a basically just order.
The thread runs from a barrister’s refusal of law to a republic’s demand for submission to it, and back to the question whether a constitution that inherited the colonial state’s machinery can claim that submission on its own say-so. On Tuesday a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court begins hearing the reference on legislative privilege and free speech, and sedition, repealed in name, has a successor in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Gandhi’s uncomfortable tryst with the law is still being litigated.
1. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, with the 1922 trial statement
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel, Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1997; centenary edition 2009), chapter XI, “The condition of India (cont.): lawyers”, pp. 58-61, and chapter XVII, “Passive resistance”. Read with M.K. Gandhi, “Statement in the Great Trial”, Ahmedabad, 18 March 1922, reproduced in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division, Government of India).
Open access: full text at https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Parel’s annotated edition is paywalled at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gandhi-hind-swaraj-and-other-writings/7CD5389A37B295F8A91F123B85B1B380. Trial statement: https://www.mkgandhi.org/voiceoftruth/greattrial.php.
2. Anushka Singh, Gandhian disobedience and the law of disaffection
Anushka Singh, “The Affect and Semantics of Gandhian Civil Disobedience: An Intellectual History of ‘Disaffection’ in India”, Global Intellectual History (2025), published online, DOI 10.1080/23801883.2025.2591928.
Singh’s article is the hinge between the trial statement and everything that follows. She reads Gandhi’s writings from 1919 to 1922 as a running argument with the language of section 124A, in which disaffection was both the name of a crime and, increasingly, the name Gandhi gave to a moral stance. Her claim is that the law did not merely punish Gandhian dissent. It supplied the terms in which that dissent was spoken, and Gandhi’s move was to appropriate them. This matters for the weekend’s question because it suggests the fidelity visible in the 1922 statement was never fidelity to the colonial statute. It was the capture of a legal category for a politics the category was designed to suppress. Singh writes from inside the Indian debate about sedition’s afterlife, which gives the piece a sharper edge than most Anglophone work on the subject.
3. Ambedkar, the closing speech to the Constituent Assembly
B.R. Ambedkar, speech in the Constituent Assembly of India, 25 November 1949, Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report, Vol. XI (14 to 26 November 1949).
Open access: https://eparlib.sansad.in/bitstream/123456789/763285/1/cad_25-11-1949.pdf.
Read this straight after Singh, because it is the moment the argument changes jurisdiction. The speech is best known for its warning about political democracy without social democracy, but the passage that belongs here is Ambedkar’s demand that Indians abandon the methods of the freedom struggle now that a constitution exists. Where constitutional methods are open, he says, unconstitutional ones have no justification. His logic is Rawls’s logic before Rawls, and he applies it to Gandhi’s methods by name, as the man who had fought Gandhi hardest over caste and who knew better than anyone that the new order rested on the old colonial state. Ask whether his argument depends on the Constitution being just, or only on its being available. The next two readings fight over exactly that.
4. Rawls, civil disobedience in a nearly just society
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter VI, “Duty and Obligation”, sections 55 to 59, beginning at p. 319. The 1971 edition has the same sections with different pagination.
Link: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674000780.
Rawls gives civil disobedience its most influential definition: a public, non-violent, conscientious breach of law aimed at changing a law or policy, addressed to the majority’s sense of justice, by people who accept the legal consequences. Read with Gandhi and Ambedkar in mind, the borrowings are obvious. But notice two conditions Rawls builds in. The society must be nearly just, and the appeal must be to principles the majority already shares. Neither held for Gandhi in 1922, and whether they hold for a postcolonial republic is Ambedkar’s question in different words. Critics from A. John Simmons onwards have argued that Rawls describes a narrow practice and then treats it as the whole of principled disobedience. Pineda turns that criticism into a history.
5. Pineda, civil disobedience as decolonising praxis
Erin R. Pineda, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2021), Introduction and chapter 2, “An Entire World in Motion: Civil Disobedience as Decolonizing Praxis”.
Link: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/seeing-like-an-activist-9780197526439
Pineda argues that the Rawlsian picture got the civil rights movement wrong, and in doing so got civil disobedience wrong. The introduction sets out the charge: liberal theory read the movement from the standpoint of a state assumed to be basically just, and so turned self-liberation into polite petition. Chapter 2 returns the argument to Gandhi. It reconstructs how African American, Indian, South African and Ghanaian activists between the 1920s and 1960 debated and borrowed non-violent direct action from one another as a way of unmaking a global racial order rather than correcting a local defect. Read after Rawls, it reopens the question Ambedkar thought he had closed: if disobedience is decolonising praxis, a constitution does not by itself settle whether the work is finished. Her critics note that she says little about what happens after independence, which is where India would complicate her story.
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