This essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological thought. Unlike ecologists, who think through the human and then reach for a wider post-human ecology, in the 1930s Gandhi journeyed in the reverse order, arriving at an emphasis on human withdrawal into nothingness after initially thinking through the withdrawal into nothingness of an infinitely extended, non-human, celestial being. The essay explores Gandhi's emerging anthropocentric conception of the piety of nothingness in the context of a household plan designed for him in 1936–37 by Madeline Slade, in the village of Segaon in Maharashtra. The essay draws out the architectural and political entailments of Gandhi's anthropocentrism and his emphasis on varnashramadharma.
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