Community of the future and the future of community

The Community of the Future was written in the United States, and in the first place for the United States. References to India are few, brief, and incidental. But the importance of the subject in India is especially great and especially urgent. The Community of the Past, the autonomous, close-knit village with its web of intimate human relationships, is still in India a community of the present. Its inherent strengths and weaknesses, the stresses and strains which may lead to degeneration, are not here a matter of past history but of the present experience of a very large majority of our people. Furthermore, our history for the past half-century is, at least in part, a record of the struggle of some of our greatest men to give to the word swaraj not a merely political meaning on the modern western pattern, but a social and economic meaning in which the ancient demo cratic communities of the villages should be purified and strengthened, and made the basic units of a free and better India.

Gandhi's Hind Swaraj was, as it were, the manifesto of this 'community movement'; it is a declaration of faith in the old, small community. His constructive programme is a programme of community service; the charkha is the symbol of the economic self-reliance of a healthy local community. The work of Vinoba Bhave, the campaign for Gram-dan and Gram-swaraj, carries the same movement further in the context of political independence. With dramatic clarity and force it sets before the nation the vision of a new society, a society of integrated, inter-related village communities, rooted in the best of the old wisdom and alert and open to the best of the new science. The reading of The Community of the Future may enable us to see more clearly, in a world-setting, the significance of what is happening in India. It would be a most valuable exercise for any group of men

and women which is concerned for right community develop ment' in India to make the principles enunciated by Dr Morgan in each chapter of this book a starting-point for study of their own neighbourhood and their own experience as workers. How far are these principles valid for us? insofar as they are valid, how can they be applied in Indian circumstances? The fact that a few of the illustrations used are remote from our present situation should not lead us to conclude that the principles which they illustrate are irrelevant to the work of Gram-swaraj. It is essen tial that we bring to our work not only a warm heart but a cool head; we need a clear and objective appraisal, on the broadest possible basis, of the forces which are working for and against the new community. Dr Morgan has both the cool head and the warm heart, and there is much that we can learn from his book.