Jefferson and Gandhi

Two democracies, two visions, and the realities that followed.

by Bharat Pathakjee

Born in Surat, I grew up in a city where the East India Company first established its foothold in India in 1608—twelve years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The same East India Company whose tea exports later helped ignite the Boston Tea Party. The same company that introduced calico, muslin, and chintz textiles from India to the Western world.

As middle-school students in newly independent, democratic India, we were taught the famous phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.” Since I attended an all-boys school, girls never entered my adolescent imagination of equality.

Years later, after immigrating to the United States, I was amused by the expression “Boston Brahmin,” having been born an Indian Brahmin myself. Around the same time, as a young physician practicing in small-town Wisconsin, one of my Native American Oneida Indian Nation patients was delighted when I answered her question about my origins by saying, “I am Indian.” Her next question was immediate: “What tribe?” My answer brought obvious disappointment.

Only later, while preparing for American citizenship, did I seriously encounter Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian philosophy. The similarities—and contrasts—with Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of self-sustaining village republics became strikingly apparent to me.

Jefferson envisioned a republic of small, independent landowners. Property ownership was not merely economic; it was moral and political. A citizen who owned and cultivated land was presumed to be autonomous, virtuous, and resistant to tyranny. Jefferson feared industrial capitalism almost as much as he feared excessive state power. He worried that dependence on wage labor would create a new form of aristocracy and servitude.

“Jefferson feared industrial capitalism almost as much as he feared excessive state power.”

Gandhi’s philosophy went even further in rejecting industrial modernity. He emphasized swadeshi—local production, self-sufficiency, simplicity, and minimal consumption. His spinning wheel became both an economic symbol and a moral statement. Yet for many urban Indian boys of my generation, exposed to Hollywood films and glossy copies of Life magazine, Gandhian simplicity was a difficult ideal to embrace.

Within only a few years of independence, Gandhi’s vision of spinning wheels, village economies, and religiosity was largely replaced by Fabian socialism under long-serving Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. India turned toward centralized planning, dams, steel plants, universities, and industrial modernization.

“Gandhi … emphasized swadeshi—local production, self-sufficiency, simplicity, and minimal consumption.”

After six decades, it is clear that neither India nor the United States followed the Jeffersonian or Gandhian path. Farmers in both nations increasingly depend on genetically engineered Monsanto seeds, monoculture agriculture, irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and industrial food systems.

Jefferson would likely be shocked by today’s America: mass shootings, extreme inequality, and a global military superpower dominated by corporate capitalism and Silicon Valley billionaires.

In the same vein, Gandhi would be heartbroken to witness an industrialized India marked by severe pollution, widening inequality, glacial melting in the Himalayas, water shortages, and ecological stress—problems that in some respects surpass even those of America.

Jefferson feared that industrial capitalism would erode republican virtue. Gandhi feared that endless material desire would destroy both community and moral balance. Neither man could have imagined the full scale of globalization, consumerism, artificial intelligence, climate change, and planetary ecological strain that define the twenty-first century.

As the United States reaches 250 years of independence, and India nears a century of freedom, both democracies stand immensely powerful yet deeply uncertain. What the future holds for the world’s oldest constitutional democracy and its largest democracy remains anybody’s guess.

Bharat Pathakjee, MD, is a retired cardiologist who earned his initial degree in his native India and took additional training in Michigan and at the University of Louisville. Dr. Pathakjee enjoys reading, running, and learning history, science, and philosophy. (Well, actually, Bharat enjoys learning about anything and everything.)

He will be teaching a class this fall on the history of America’s long and complicated relationship with India. Watch for it when the fall classes are posted on the OLLI-USF website.