E-Book - Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi – His Life & Timeswas presented to the nation for giving occupation to the millions who had, atleast for four months of the year, nothing to do .... We send out of India sixtycrores (six hundred million) (more or less) of rupees for cloth...'Many intellectuals sneered at khadi. The stuff was coarse, they said.'Monotonous white shrouds,' some mocked. The livery of our freedom,'Jawaharlal Nehru replied. 'I regard the spinning wheel as a gateway to myspiritual salvation,' Gandhi said.Gandhi was trying to bridge brain and brawn, to unite city and town, to linkrich and poor. What greater service could he perform for a divided country andan atomized civilization? To help the underdog, Gandhi taught, you mustunderstand him, and to understand him you must at least sometime work as hedoes. Spinning was an act of love, another channel of communication. It wasalso a method of organization. 'Any single district that can be fully organizedfor khaddar is, if it is also trained for suffering, ready for civil disobedience.'Thus, khadi would lead to Home-Rule.Gandhi asked townspeople and villagers to spend an hour a day at the wheel. 'Itaffords a pleasant variety and recreation after hard toil.' Spinning does notreplace other reforms; it is in addition to them. But he stressed them less thanspinning.'For me,' Gandhi reiterated, 'nothing in the political world is more importantthan the spinning wheel.' One of India's greatest intellectuals, with a brain askeen as Gandhi's and as habitually skeptical as Gandhi was normally naive,enthusiastically supported the Mahatma's khadi contentions. ChakravartyRajagopalachari, the famous Madras lawyer, was second only to Gandhi in hissanguine expectations from the nationwide use of homespun. 'Khadi work is theonly true political programme before the country', he declared on April 6, 1926,in the textile-mill city of Ahmedabad. "You are living in a great city. You do notreally know the amount of poverty that has overtaken the country called India.As a matter of fact, in India there are thousands and tens of thousands ofvillages where men do not get more than 2½ rupees a month. There is no useshedding tears for them if we won't wear a few yards of khadi which they havewww.mkgandhi.org Page 262