54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST "It is only those Indians who are imbued with real love who will be able to speak to the English in the above strain [condemning their reform/civilization] without being frightened, and only those who could be said to be so imbued who conscientiously believe that Indian civilization is the best and that the European is a nine-day's wonder" (Gandhi 1939:74). In the original Gujarati, the word which is translated above as "civilization" is sudharo, i.e. reform or change for the better, as we have already noted. The opposition in the original is not between two civilizations as such, but between two processes of change. The prose of Hind Svaraj derives its main terms from the ongoing debate in nineteenth-century Gujarati prose. This context makes the semiotics of Hind Svaraj available to our understanding. It is a prose of dialogue in many senses of the word. Many different sorts of dialogic interaction have emerged as Guj arati prose unfolded during the nineteenth century, starting from the prose of journalism and travelogue, moving through the prose of diaries andmemoirs, and reaching up to the prose of fictional narrative. The public and the priv ate, the realistic and the fictional, the inclusive and the exclusive— different modes of prose evolved gradually, reflecting the simultaneity of India's need to accept the West and India's equally basic need to expel it. The emerging Indian reality is a pafa (cloth) woven of both these tantu (threads) of conflicting hues, producing ^ fascinating Indian calico. IX Hind Svaraj, written in 1909, brings together conflicting elements of a century-long narrative of Gujarati prose. Even at the level of the different techniques of expression, from journalism to fiction, Hind Svaraj incorporates the efforts of the preceding hundred years. At a deeper semiotic level the structures of signification vibrate from the tensions generated by the semiotic meeting of conflicting elements of a constructive-deconstructive semiosis. Hind Svaraj was written during a voyage and so it evokes the memory of the early travelogues in Gujarati. It is a dialogue between the reader of the newspaper and its editor (and was first published in Indian Opinion, the journal which Gandhiji edited), and so reminds one of the dissociation of the readers and their newspaper so subtly—if unintentionally-—depicted in Smaran Mukur. It also links us up with the early Gujarati prose of the numerous newspapers of the early part of the nineteenth century. Hind Svaraj discusses the dynamics of the effort to regain freedom, and in this sense it relates to the loss of freedom depicted in Koran Ghelo as well as to the Utopian picture of the ways to freedom presented in the dream sequence oiSarasvaticandra. Narmad' s refusal to look at the past culture ofGujarat through the distorting eyes of colonial power finds its full strength in Gandhiji's refusal to look at India's past through the distorting eyes of the same colonial power, functioning in a much more subtle way. The polyphyletic and polysemic structures of the ontology and the epistemology of Indian reality were gradually revealed as nineteenth-century Gujarati prose gradually unfolded itself. Then, in Hind Svaraj, Mahatma Gandhi's unique genius