As the earth warms up, as glaciers melt and forests disappear, Gandhi’s words have turned out to be prophetic. But his horror of modern civilization led him to eulogise a mythical Indian past that was, in his telling, just and beautiful. Ambedkar, on his part, was painfully aware of the iniquity of that past, but in his urgency to move away from it, he failed to recognize the catastrophic dangers of Western modernity.
