One of Gandhi’s main obsessions was the idea of the self-sufficient village—one that would service most of its inhabitants’ needs and act as an independent republic of its own. The idealization of the small-scale, self-sustaining and communitarian village was a characteristic reaction to the global emergence of large-scale, bustling industrial cities and trading centers that had changed the way the world organized itself from the nineteenth century onwards. The city had become a larger-than-life figure perceived to be simultaneously mechanistic and out of control, environmentally destructive and socially alienating, while the village was posited as a human-scale alternative in tune with Indian traditions, morality, and spirituality.

As brilliantly argued by political psychologist Ashis Nandy, the archetype of a Gandhian village could not have emerged anywhere else than in the unsettled mind of an urbanite. Gandhi, a city boy by all accounts, produced most of his village visions during his stay in South Africa and later from his colonial Bombay home. This image, according to Nandy, was as much the product of Gandhi’s late explorations of rural India as the fruit of deep introspection, which slowly brought to the surface the ideal vision of a village in him—as in every Indian.