Gandhi's Khadi: A History of Contention and Conciliation

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DHI'S

I

A History of Contention and Conciliation

Rahul Ramagunclam '1'-

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ORIENT LONGMAN PRIVATE LIMITED

Rqjste,ed Office 3-6-752 Himayat11agar, Hyderabad 500 029 (A.P.), India email: [email protected] Othn- Offica Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubancshwar, Chennai, Ernakulam, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Patna CO Orient Longman Private Limited 2008 First Published 2008 ISBN 13: 978 81 250 3464 3 ISBN 10: 81 250 3464 1

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To Malay with whom it all began, to Mamsi far her magnanimity, to Ma, who bore all the pain as it progressed

and to Pritha, the ultimate, where it all endr. Thank you all far enriching love.

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Contents

•

Preface

1X

1

1. Memories of a Moral Movement

2. Morality of the Movement, 1915-22

24

3. Mobilising a Movement

66

4.

Ideology of Innocence

100

5.

Clothing the Congress

124

6. A "Clear Clash of Ideals"

172

7. Authentic Khadi: Agency, Activism, Agendas

197

/

8. Quest for Freedom of the Lowest, 1933-45

237

9. Epilogue ·

266

Bibliography

281

Index

289

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Preface

My formative years were spent with my paternal grandparents. They were first-generation migrants from a rural area to an urban location, part of Nehru's modern India that had burgeoning public sector units with townships for its workers. While my grandparents benefited materially from Nehru's developmental model, their thinking and habits were drawn from Gandhian idealism. They were simple people. And they always wore khadi. I remember my grandfather going to his workplace in khadi dhoti and lturta with an angavastram wrapped around his neck and a Gandhi topi on his head; he looked resplendent and fashionable. My grandmother didn't speak any language other than her own rural dialect and yet never felt incomplete in any way. She was tiny and tenacious, confident and cautious. She could write only two words: one, Sitaram, which while being an invocation of the name of God was also her husband's name. The other word was her own name Arti, which she sometimes had to write when my grandfather brought some bank papers for her to sign. She wrote "Sitaram" repetitively in discarded old diaries and asked her relatives, if someone happened to go anywhere near the Ganges, to immerse them in the sacred river. Her illiteracy however never deadened her sensitivity or fanaticised

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GANDHI'S KHADI

her religiosity. She was pained as she watched the demolition of Bahri masjid in December 1992 on television. She was a highly religious woman who would keep many fasts and worship many gods. Every morning, after her bath, she would stand in the courtyard before a tulsi plant, with folded hands, and invoke Surya to bring happiness, first to each and every one in the universe and then, lastly, to her family and herscl£ Her material and moral sustenance came from two sources: the material from Nehru's confident India and the moral from Gandhi's ethics. This book is a tribute to the memory of my grandparents, habitual khadi wearers, who now departed, had sown the seeds of this work by their cultural convictions and material aspirations. Some sixty years after it was wrapped up as a non-violent voluntary movement that transformed a commodity into a political symbol of assertion and autonomy, this interpretive history of the khadi movement is being written. In this time, khadi was appropriated by the newly independent state as one of its "developmental departt;nents". This time-frame is important because it shows the apathy with which khadi, its ideology and its history were seen by India's state architects and development thinkers. But more than intellectual apathy, the absence of a serious, policy-oriented assessment of Gandhian socio-economic practices shows some deeper symptoms of the malaise in the making of the state and its priorities in India. Khadi, ironically, in its own lifetime as a movement, had lost its sheen and had been declared as an "old man's fad" bound to vanish along with his mortal remains. "The East India Company", Gandhi said to Katherine Mayo on 17 March 1926, "came to buy, and remained to sell. It compelled us to cut off our thumbs. This is the history of how our skill was lost." The khadi movement was an attempt at reclaming a lost skill in a restricted colonial environment. It was a massive voluntary exercise. However, Gandhi's critics, including established Congress politicians, saw his effort as a futile attempt

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PREFACE

XI

at revivalism. Gandhian ideology was perceived as "religiously oriented, backward-looking". I began to look at the khadi movement with a curiosity to discover elements of an alternative development modd. But as the research progressed, I discovered newer strands. I realised how massively it was organised on a nationwide scale. I also discovered the almost continuous ideological contcstation that the khadi movement wimcsscd as Gandhi and his close followers determinedly pursued it. But the most important discovery was its importance in Gandhi's attempt to establish self-rule for the "dumb-millions". In many ways, khadi was central to the conversion of the Congress into a mass-based organisation. And, yet the Congress was most vehemently opposed to khadi's occupying a central position in the struggle for freedom. The second-hand set of the 90 volumes of the Collecud m,,ks ofMahatma Gandhi that Delhi's Gandhi Peace Foundation (GPF) was about to sell to a junk dealer in the winter of 1995, which I bought at the princely sum of five hundred rupees, became the backbone of this work. The book is equally informed by my grassroots engagements, to which Rajagopal, the then Secretary of the GPF, introduced me. During 1995 to 2001, while studying at JNU, I was simultaneously engaged with grassroots activism on the livelihood rights of the adivasi people in Madhya Pradesh. Those years lent me the perspective to look at Gandhi's khadi movement, which in many substantive ways was the first social movement in modern India that brought poverty to the centre stage of Indian consciousness and made livelihood rights an issue of mass mobilisation. This book, in the making as it was for the last ten years, has incurred many debts and belongs primarily to the friends whose unstinted support and unwavering affection helped realise this dream. Akhilesh Kumar, Sarai Ganguli, Sobha Tiwari, and Samskruti were some of those friends who supported this long drawn academic struggle with their faith, love and understanding.

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GANDHI'S KHADI

Samskruti's irreverent questioning enriched many ideological and narrative enunciations. I feel deeply for Malay, with whom it all beg.in, and Mamsi, who provided vital support as it progressed; unfonunately their patience ran out before the dream had run its full course. But for my parents, Mithelesh and Nitya Nand Singh, whose love and affirmation were my strength, this work would not have been possible. They put their aspirations on hold to let me complete this work. My brothers Niraj and Rajiv have been pillars of strength. Professor Bhagwan Josh guided my Ph.D. at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. He was affectionate, and friendly all through the research engagement; his inputs added sharpness to my irlcas and enriched the arguments. Aditya Mukherjee, as the supervisor of my M.Phil dissertation, read its very first draft. Ramachandra Guba, Deepak Kumar, Mridula Mukherjee, Biswamoy Pati, Mahcsh Rangarajan, Qamar Aga, Salil Mishra, Subrat Rout and Dunu Roy have influenced the evolution of this work by their friendship, encouragement and critical engagement. My association with Pitamabar Bhatt of the KVIC, which gave me some financial support to undertake empirical research on khadi-producing institutions in Bihar and Haryana; Ragini Prem of the Banwasi Sewa Ashram; Y. P. Anand, the director of the National Gandhi M11scum; late Som Bhai and Jailok Thakur, institutions in themselves in the khadi sectors of Haryana and Bihar, respectively, and many others were vital preparatory ground when I began to explore archival sources. With gratitude I acknowledge contributions of libraries at JNU, GPF, Teen Muni, National Gandhi Museum in Delhi, Sabarmati Ashram at Ahmedabad, and the Sarva Sewa Sangh at Wardha. My thanks to the reviewer of the manuscript for his helpful suggestions all of which have been incorporated. My deep gratitude to my publishers, Orient Longman, Delhi, for their inputs.

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Certainly, in this long engagement, I have incurred many more debts than I have mentioned. Margaret Chatterjee wrote in from Wcstminister College, Oxford: "a Ph.D. thesis on Khadi! I do not think Ph.D. level work would be worthwhile on it". It was an academic challenge to prove that the project was well worthwhile, viable, and much more. RAHUL RAMA.GUNDAM

DELHI

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Memories of a Moral Movement

~h charltha topt hai, Barood Isltt ban gayt gole, lsi st Lunltashayar Manchtstn' Ito ud4dmga. 1 The very thing that was a cause of our slavery will open the door to our freedom. 2

Weapons are made in adversity. They are not produced by competition among societies or cultures, for such competitions can generate in the societies mutually enriching and ennobling 1

2

This spinning wheel is a cannon, Yarn-balls are its ammunition, With this we shall smash, Lancashire and Manchester. A nationalist song quoted in Outloolt (Delhi), 18 August 1997, 150. Gandhi in a speech at the All India Spinners' .Association meeting, KhaJi ]agat, December 1941, in Colkcttd Works ofMahatma Gandhi, hereafter CWMG, 75: 176.

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GANDHI'S KHADI

experiences. Weapons arc born of threats to survival. During India's mass campaign for freedom, a new weapon was forged from a threat-perception which arose with regard to the British textile industry. The new weapon was charltha with its product lthadi, the handspun and handwoven cloth. Early nationalists blamed the British for the destruction of India's once Rowishing cloth industry. They were the ones who demonstrated to Indians how "the English had sucked our life-blood". 3 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, too, inferred that it was not machines but machinations of the East India Company that had led to the decimation of India's craft-based cloth industry. Gandhi said in August 1925 to a Rotary Club gathering at Cal~utta that the indigenous cloth industry "was made to die".• The Company's persecution was so cruel as to force Indian craftsmen to "cut off their own thumbs in order to avoid imprisonment". 5 Khadi (from lthad, Hindi for pit), made from handspun cotton yarn by weavers working over a pit, acquired emblematic status in the first half of the twentieth century during India's freedom struggle. Gandhi, largely acknowledged as the one who not .just 3

Gandhi was explaining the role that the early nationalists played in vitalising the consciousn~ of Indians (Parcl 1997, 15). Foremost among the "early nationalists" was Dadabhai Naoroji whose Drain of Wealth theory was the first to draw India's attention to the baneful impact of imperialist rule. • "Speech at Rotary Club", Calcutta, reponed in Th~ Englishman, 19 August 1925, CWMG, 28: 84. The cotton industry of Manchester acquired a folkloric imagery in India. Writing in 1909 in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi stated: "It is difficult to measure the harm that Manchester has done to us. It is due to Manchester that Indian handicraft has all but disappeared" (Parel 1997, 107). 5 "Who Cut The Thumbs?", Young India, hereafter YI, 30 March 1921, CWMG 19: 487. Gandhi was referring to the regime of the East India Company when "spinning or weaving had become almost a crime". He believed that it was not the gum1Utas of the Company who had cut off the thumbs of the artisans but that the mutilation was self-inflicted.

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MEMORIES OF A MORAL MOVEMENT

3

established the fabric but also invested it with immense symbolism, saw khacli as heralding real freedom to the millions of poor and marginalised Indians. Gandhi's khadi campaign made Indians sec in the "slender thread of cotton" the essence and the practical structure of swaraj. 6 Swaraj, in Gandhi's view, hung on a thread, the cotton thread spun on a charkha. For the non-violent army, the charkha was its arsenal. In the heydays of his friendship with Gandhi, Maulana Mohammad Ali had declared that yarn cones were the bullets with which India would win her swaraj. 7 Jawaharlal Nehru, though distanced ideologically from his political mentor, called khacli "the livery of freedom". Scholars too have eulogised khacli in similar lines. Bernard Cohn calls it a "uniform of rebellion", and for Susan Bean, khadi is the "fabric of independence". SITUATING THE KERNEL OF l