Gandhi in his book Hind Swaraj has tried to reflect on what freedom means.

In
his concept of freedom, he disagrees with those for whom freedom of India is a
mere transfer of political control from British to the people of India while keeping
all the British institutions, from the parliament to the standing army. Gandhi
clearly puts his thoughts in words by saying, “We want English rule without the
Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you
would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not
Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj (freedom or self-rule) that I
want.”
Gandhi put forward the thesis that the real fight lies in freeing the millions of our
people and not simply changing the government. He argues that this freedom
cannot be achieved by the use of arms and violence, this has two reasons, first, any
resort to violent rebellion would require thousands of Indians being armed which
in itself is too much of a tall order. Two, more importantly, if India resorts to
arms, the 'holy land' of India would become 'unholy'. In the process, India would
become a land worse than Europe. Further, he not only rejects the basic
formulations of Indian revolutionaries that India could be freed only by violent
means both on moral and ethical grounds but also rejects the idea of the
Moderates view that Indians could be freed by mere petitioning.
He puts forward the importance of Satyagraha in Chapter 7, a form of passive
resistance in securing rights by going through personal suffering, he justifies the
use of soul force on the concept of truth, Gandhi also mentions that passive
resistance is not the weapon of the weak, he concludes that real home rule is only
possible through passive resistance.
Hind Swaraj goes on the task of ripping each claim of british colonialism, if the
rule of law was the claim made by the state, gandhi attacked the lawyers in Hind
Swaraj by saying that true civilised people would dissuade conflict but lawyers try
to exacerbate the conflict for an earning. If modern medicine was responsible for
pushing up life expectancy, he argued that it offered temporary relief and ended
up spoiling people’s habit. He claimed that even before railways people were able
to travel, and called trains to be carriers of disease.

Often, people try to understand what made Gandhi write Hind Swaraj, and tend
to point out the fact that many of his beliefs might have changed over time,
however what matters it that it gave people the intellectual and cultural resistance
against the British idea of civilising, it made the colonial and anti colonial projects
fight for the mind, and raise the question of swaraj.
Through Hind Swaraj he challenged the colonial claims of modernity which had
not been challenged before, as far as to say ,even though he agreed with the
concept of Nationalism, an aspect of modernity, rejected the idea of centralised
nation state, and argued in favour of decentralization with local self government.
Gandhi