Khadi

“Her material and moral sustenance came from two sources: the material from Nehru’s confident India and the moral from Gandhi’s ethics.”

This statement at the very beginning of the book, Gandhi’s Khadi written by Rahul Ramagundam, tends to establish a barrier between radical progressive development and morality. The same ideology as demonstrated by E.F. Schumacher in his paper, Buddhist economics. A modernist economist must transform into a Buddhist economist, if one wishes to incorporate morality into a conventional way a nation works.

It was the cultural conviction and material aspirations that served as inspiration to the Indians to turn a mere commodity into a political symbol of assertion and independence. Khadi turned out to be one of the mainstream developmental departments of the independent India. Ramagundam puts across the essence of khadi through some of these beautiful phrases.

 Gandhi’s approach was simple and effective. Khadi movement was the first movement that put issues of the masses, poverty and livelihood rights into the forefront, and managed to bring innumerable diverse ethnicities together to fight against the British. He took a simple issue, relatable to every common man. They came to buy, and remained to sell. So Gandhi took the machine-made cloth, produced in bulk that was flooding the Indian markets and replaced it back with the simple, manually spun and woven, khadi. If we think about it, we can relate to the nucleus of the movement till today. Ultimately, if the British didn’t, the striving for westernization did take the best from us. When I say this, I am not completely disregarding all the progress we have made. But, in that rat race, we lost a lot of culture. The classic example is the silk handloom industries at the brim of extinction. Our thumbs were cut off and now the skill is about to be lost.

The production of khadi, solved a dual purpose. It brought everyone together to fight against independence and was a provision of supplementary work for the idle and underemployed. It was practical, subsidized production and a source of income! All they needed was the mental revolution. A perfect amalgamation of religious values and economic progress, which is a preamble to adopting Buddhist economic approach.

Wearing khadi was like a cathartic transformation. One could wear khadi and change affiliations. Bernard Cohn called it a “uniform of rebellion”. Khadi became a token of coalition. Though it was an instrumental visual element that got together the diverse cultures, that even found it hard to communicate, it was creating, unknowingly, a divide. It was probably the pioneer of division of society through class. Even today, we judge what class a person belongs to by looking at their clothes. After talking to my father and grandmother about their notions of khadi, I could see it coming. For the grandparents, it was symbolic of a revolution and autonomy. And, for my father, it was like donning the identity of an intellectual; the jhola and khadi look bereft of superficial ornamentation was the ornamental value of this piece of textile. The value addition helped mask the fact that it is was cheap. Later on, it appealed to all politicians and then crept into fashion, when designers were looking for something more than mere ornamentation.

The only explanation to all these overwhelming thoughts is that every coin has two sides. When the Nehruvian economy prevailed over Gandhi’s, it only left the latter’s ideologies as an alternative modernity. But people referred to it as ‘an old man’s fad’. Similarly, khadi, was a revolution, that bought us our independence but did create a divide. Buddhist economy may seem like the right way to go in text, but can definitely be an obstacle in hardcore progression that sometimes needs us to be crude and not sentimentally pristine all the time!