DOI: https://doi.org/10.36344/ccijhss.2026.v12i05.005

Pages: 137-143

This essay reframes Mahatma Gandhi’s engagement with science as a problem of epistemic brokerage rather than philosophical conviction. On 17 August 1935, Gandhi devoted his weekly column in Harijan to reproducing, in his own words, “practically...the whole” of an instructional leaflet issued by the Institute of Plant Industry, Indore, describing a composting technique that its director, the British agronomist Albert Howard, had codified from the observed practice of Indian cultivators and published, with the Indian chemist Y. D. Wad, as The Waste Products of Agriculture (1931). Gandhi's act of reprinting, addressed explicitly to “Harijans and village workers who handle cattle-dung and night-soil,” is read here as a documentable instance of knowledge circulation: peasant agricultural knowledge, systematised and partially re-credited by a colonial scientific institution, re-enters anti-colonial political discourse carrying the authority of that institution rather than of its original practitioners. A second, briefer case, the All-India Spinners’ Association’s crowdsourced design competitions for an improved charkha (1920, 1929), shows a structurally similar pattern of brokered validation in a different technical register. Drawing on the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi alongside Howard's own publications and recent secondary scholarship, the essay returns finally to the existing “Knowledge Swaraj” framework associated with the 2011 manifesto of that name to argue that Gandhi's practice of validating indigenous knowledge depended on, rather than transcended, colonial structures of scientific credit, a tension this literature’s aspirational use of the term has not fully reckoned with.