For Global Peace with Social Justice in a Sustainable Environment

Economic Salvation and Mahatma Gandhi

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229

E-mail- dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net;

dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com

Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India

Economic Salvation and Mahatma Gandhi

Generally speaking, there are very few villages in India without weavers. From time immemorial, we have had village farmers and village weavers, as we have village carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, etc., but our farmers have become poverty-stricken and our weavers have patronage only from the poor classes. By supplying them with Indian cloth spun in India, we can obtain the cloth we may need. For the time being it may be course, but by constant endeavours, we can get our weavers to weave out of fine yarn and so doing we shall raise our weavers to a better status, and if we would go a step still further, we can easily cross the sea of difficulties lying in our path. We can easily teach our women and our children to spin and weave cotton, and what can be purer than cloth woven in our own home? I tell it from my experience that acting in this way we shall be saved from many a hardship, we shall be ridding ourselves of many an unnecessary need, and our life will be one song of joy and beauty.

I always hear divine voices telling me in my ears that such life was a matter of fact once in India, but even if such an India be the idle dream of the poet, it does not matter Is it not necessary to create such an India now, does not our purushartha lie therein? I have been travelling throughout India. I cannot bear the heart-rending cry of the poor. The young and old all tell me, “We cannot get cheap cloth, we have not the means wherewith to purchase dear cloth. Everything is dear provisions, cloth and all. What are we to do?” And they heave a sigh of despair. It is my duty to give these men a satisfactory reply.

It is the duty of every servant of the country but I am unable to give a satisfactory reply. It should be intolerable for all thinking Indians that our raw materials should be exported to Europe and that we have to pay heavy prices therefore. The first and the last remedy for this is swadeshi. We are not bound to sell our cotton to anybody and when Hindustan rings with the echoes of swadeshi, no producer of cotton will sell it for its being manufactured in foreign countries. When swadeshi pervades the country, everyone will be set a-thinking why cotton should not be refined and spun and woven in the place where it is produced, and when the swadeshi mantra resounds in every ear, millions of men will have in their hands the key to the economic salvation of India. Training for this does not require hundreds of years. When the religious sense is awakened, people’s thoughts undergo a revolution in a single moment. Only selfless sacrifice is the sine qua non. The spirit of sacrifice pervades the Indian atmosphere at the present moment. If we fail to preach swadeshi at this supreme moment, we shall have to wring our hands in despair. I beseech every Hindu, Mussulman, Sikh, Parsi, Christian and Jew, who believes that he belongs to this country, to take the swadeshi vow and to ask others also to do likewise. It is my humble belief that if we cannot do even this little for our country, we are born in it in vain. Those who think deep will see that such swadeshi contains pure economics. I hope that every man and woman will give serious thought to my humble suggestion. Imitation of English economics will spell our ruin. 1

And in the place of your suspended studies I would urge you to study the methods of bringing about swaraj as quietly as possible even within the year of grace. I present you with the Spinning-Wheel and suggest to you that on it depends India’s economic salvation. 2 So, young men of Bengal, if you will work in order to gain swaraj within one year, you will accept the advice of a man who has conducted a series of experiments, to whom this gospel came in the year 19081, and who has not yet been ousted from it by a hair’s breadth. The more I have studied the economics of India, the more I have listened to the mill-owners of India, the more convinced I have become that until we introduce the spinning-wheel in every home of India, the economic salvation and freedom of India is an impossibility. Go to any mill-owner you like, he will tell you that it will require fifty years if India is to become self-contained, so far as cloth supplies are concerned, if she has to depend upon her mills alone. And let me supplement the information by telling you that today hundreds and thousands of weavers are weaving and are able to weave homespun yarn, but they have to fall back upon foreign yarn because mills cannot supply them. So I ask the young friends of Bengal who have left their colleges to go forward in hope and courage and take up this neglected training of the hand for at least the time that we have not attained swaraj and then think of anything else. 3

Swaraj does consist in the change of government and its real control by the people, but that would be merely the form. The substance that I am hankering after is a definite acceptance of the means and therefore a real change of heart on the part of the people. I am certain that it does not require ages for Hindus to discard the error of untouchability, for Hindus and Mussulmans to shed enmity and accept heart-friendship as an eternal factor of national life, for all to adopt the charkha as the only universal means of attaining India’s economic salvation and finally for all to believe that India’s freedom lies only through non-violence and no other method. Definite, intelligent and free adoption by the nation of this programme I hold as the attainment of the substance. The symbol, the transfer of power, is sure to follow, even as the seed truly laid must develop into a tree. 4

This spinning is growing on me. I seem daily to be coming nearer to the poorest of the poor and to that extent to God. I regard the four hours to be the most profitable part of the day. The fruit of my labour is visible before me. Not an impure thought enters my mind during the four hours. The mind wanders whilst I read the Gita, the Koran, and the Ramayana. But the mind is fixed whilst I am turning the wheel, or working the bow. I know that it may not and cannot mean all this to everyone. I have so identified the spinning-wheel with the economic salvation of pauper India that it has for me a fascination all its own. There is a serious competition going on in my mind between spinning and carding on the one hand and literary pursuits on the other. And I should not be surprised if, in my next letter, I report to you an increase in the hours of spinning and carding. 5 My platform is India. My goal is to attain self-government for India. The means adopted to attain the end are Non-violence and Truth. Therefore, Indian self-government not only means no menace to the world, but will be of the greatest benefit to humanity if she attains her end through those means and those means alone. The spinning-wheel is the external symbol of internal reform, and its universal re-adoption in India ensures her economic salvation and frees millions of Indian peasants from growing pauperism. 6

The khaddar programme undoubtedly will bring about the economic salvation of India, if it succeeds. In my opinion, no concerted action is possible for the masses without their realizing their economic salvation. Moreover, the khaddar programme is impossible without concerted action. Thirdly, a successful khaddar programme necessarily means the conversion of Englishmen themselves into nationalists, or, at least, impartial spectators of the Indian movement. They will no longer succeed in holding India under subjection for the purpose of her exploitation. 7 This is remarkable for one who is ailing and also travelling. But I know that a President has to be exact and scrupulous about his own work before he can expect any from his followers. The Ali Brothers, however, represent not only the Congress but the Mussalmans also. The cry everywhere is that the Mussalmans are practically not responding to the call at all. It will require a tremendous effort to awaken them to a sense of their duty. And if the Mussulmans come up to the Hindu level in spinning, their work will react upon the Hindus. Boycott of foreign cloth will then become an accomplished fact and with it will be achieved the economic salvation of the masses. With that salvation will come self-confidence. Self-confidence must lead to swaraj. 8

Take up the gospel of spinning and khaddar. I have urged His Holiness to take up this thing in right earnest and ask every one of you to take to spinning and weaving and wear the product of your own labour. I understand that not very long ago every one of you or at least every woman in your community was a beautiful spinner. Thousands upon thousands knew how to weave. Both are noble callings. In spinning alone lies the economic salvation of India, I am convinced. 9 We may have different religions, we may hold different views about our conception of God, we may have different views about salvation. But there is one thing which binds all Indians to the soil. There is one thing which binds all Indians, one to another, is an indissoluble tie and that is the spinning-wheel and its product khaddar. I harp upon khaddar and the spinning-wheel in season and out of season because I know that in khaddar alone, in the spinning wheel alone, lays the economic salvation of India. The spinning-wheel is a symbol and a symbol of the binding tie between the masses and the classes. The classes derive their sustenance from the labour of the masses and I beg the classes to make some small return to the masses for what they receive from them. I, therefore, say to every Indian, also to every Englishman domiciled in India, or who derives his livelihood from India, let him adopt khaddar. In his own home let him dresses himself from top to toe in khaddar and make a return to the masses. 10

As you know, throughout my journey in India, I meet students, both boys and girls, but whenever I come to the South, I meet many more girls than I meet elsewhere except, perhaps in Bengal, because in Bengal the education of girls has gone forward much more than in other parts of Upper India but, by no means, so much as in South India. I was really surprised to see the stride that education among girls had taken in the State of Travancore. It was a perfect eye-opener to me. The question has always occurred to me: “What will India do with its modern girls?” I call you modern girls of India. The education that we are receiving on these institutions, in my opinion, does not correspond with the life around us, and, when I say life around us, I do not mean the life around us in the cities but the life around us in the villages. Perhaps some of you girls, if not all of you, know that real India is to be found not here in the very few cities but in the seven hundred thousand villages covering a surface of 1,900 miles long and 1,500 miles broad. The question is whether you have any message for your sisters in the villages. Men do not need the message perhaps so much as the women, and I have long before come to the conclusion that unless women of India work side by side with men, there is no salvation for India, salvation in more senses than one. I mean political salvation in the broadest sense, and I mean economic salvation and spiritual salvation also. 11

The constitution is not as rigid as I had at first intended. The drafts circulated by me required two thousand yards of yarn per month for membership of A class; and a declaration to the following effect was intended to be required from such members:”It is my firm belief that the economic salvation of the masses of India is impossible without the universal adoption by the country of the spinning-wheel and its product khaddar. I shall, therefore, except when disabled by illness or some unforeseen event, spin daily, for at least half an hour and habitually wear hand-spun and hand-woven khaddar, and in the event of my belief undergoing a change, or my ceasing to spin or wear khaddar, I shall resign the membership of this Association. 12 When I begin to talk of khadi I can talk about it endlessly if I get patient listeners; for I know that in khadi lies the economic salvation of our starving brethren and sisters scattered in seven hundred thousand villages and I wish that I can induce you to think that life is a burden to you as it is a burden to me so long as there exists in India a single man or woman who starves for want of work. I am passing so many days, precious days, in Chettinad with the high hope of being able to evoke the best of your benevolence on behalf of Daridranarayana. I want you therefore to give the most that you can and not the least you have. 13

In America, prohibition was a mighty weapon used by a powerful nation against an unwilling people. People were accustomed to drinking. Drink was fashionable. In India, mill-cloth was never a fashion, whereas khadi has become a fashion and a passport to respectable society. And, whatever happens I shall fight on for the economic salvation of my people and that, you will agree, is worth living for and dying for. 14 The public know or ought to know that it is a purely philanthropic institution having no interest save that of the millions of poor women spinners of the villages of India. As its name implies, all its activities are intended to subserve their interest. Economic salvation of the villages is impossible, unless the millions of women who have no occupation for nearly six months in the year have a steady and profitable occupation fitted to their constitutions. There is no such universal occupation as hand-spinning. I have been obliged to restate this oft-told truth in order to emphasize the necessity of the public patronizing certified khadi bhandars to the exclusion of uncertified ones, even though the latter sell khadi at less than the Association rates. The public should know that the Association rates alone make it possible to pay higher wages to spinners. 15

This is the non-violent way in action. If we could fulfil this programme, there would be no need to offer civil disobedience; there would certainly be no need to do violence. Thirty-five crores of people conscious of their numerical strength as one man would be ashamed of doing violence to 70, 000 white men in India, no matter how capable they are of dealing destruction and administering poison gas to millions in a moment. The charkha understood intelligently can spin not only economic salvation but can also revolutionize our minds and hearts and demonstrate to us that the non-violent approach to swaraj is the safest and the easiest. Though the progress may seem slow, it will prove quickest in the long run. 16

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