SOURCE: "The Challenge of Gandhi," in Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on His Life and Work, edited by S. Radhakrishnan, George Allen & Unwin, revised edition, 1949, pp. 424-33.

Murry is considered one of the most significant English critics of the twentieth century. Anticipating later scholarly opinion, he championed the writings of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Paul Valéry, D. H. Lawrence, and the poetry of Thomas Hardy through his positions as founding editor of the Adelphi, editor of the Athenaeum, and as a longtime contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. In the following essay, he discusses Hind Swaraj.

I do not think that any serious student of Gandhi's teachings would deny that Hind Swaraj is the fundamental document. It is a strangely lucid and impressive little book which, one feels, was the outcome of some profound experience of illumination such as seems to have been the common destiny of...