Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India

5. INHABITING NATIONAL SPACE: Khadi in Public

5 Inhabiting National Space Khadi in Public By marking and filling public spaces with khadi, nationalists and ordinary Indians, less focused on India’s identity, expressed both their political aspirations and laid claim to the territory of their community. With the popularization of the Gandhi topi and the khadi charka flag, it became possible literally to see and imagine the Indian nation in new ways. Visual and tangible, khadi objects made community imaginable not only by visually describing its boundaries, but also by providing a shared symbolic vocabulary that could be employed by a range of people. For example, newspapers and government files from the non-cooperation movement recorded the sudden appearance in 1921 of demonstrators wearing a khadi cap, which Gandhi had adopted shortly after his return to India (see figure 5.1).1 Seemingly overnight, this new form of men’s headdress appeared in India’s city streets, educational institutions, courts, and offices. The visual impact of the Gandhi topi had implications far beyond the individual’s affiliations. It opened up the way that people could see public space. The confluence of changing conceptions of the Indian body and Indian time provided the context in which public space too could be used in service of swaraj. Physically moving through a city in or with khadi challenged the right of colonial control over public space, making it possible to conceive of public space as national. Khadi caps, that is, visually and physically linked India’s public space to a body politic no longer colonial. Moreover, as local governments and associations increasingly displayed khadi on public buildings associated with government, they claimed the power of the foreign 119 inhabiting national space government for the people of the nation. Imperial control over public space eventually gave way. As successors to Mughal authority, the British government of India had borrowed and expanded upon rituals that defined the appropriate use of space for their subject population. In turn, nationalists recognized that the control of public space was essential to their political struggle. Two important case studies in the years between the non-cooperation movement and the salt satyagraha follow.2 The first case study involves controversies over the Gandhi topi and focuses not only on the multiple meanings associated with the white cap by its designer, Mohandas Gandhi, but also on the variety of circumstances in which people adopted the cap. The efficacy of the topi as a symbol lay in the fact that it was not defined by a single political agenda, but was employed more broadly, in varied ways, to register dissent. The second case study examines the marking of public and official spaces with the khadi charka flag. The use of the flag in public sheds light on the emergence of conflicts between the imperial regime and municipal bodies newly empowered Figure 5.1. Gandhi wearing the “Gandhi cap,” 1921. Copyright: Vithalbhai Jhaveri/Gandhiserve. 120 clothing gandhi’s nation under the Government of India Act in 1919. It was at the local level of governance that native members of the government employed khadi to protest imperial policies and to assert a distinctive identity. Khadi’s emergence as a prominent symbol in the visual vocabulary of nationhood depended not only upon the ideologies and activities of middle-class politicians, but also upon the use of these objects by ordinary people in public spaces.3 It was the ubiquitous use of khadi that rendered a nationalist public visible. The Public in South Asia Since the mid-1980s, historians of South Asia have grappled with Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere as a means to explain the emergence of the modern nation-state and the various communities that it came to represent. South Asianists have viewed the transformative nature of a Habermasian public sphere with skepticism, arguing that in a colonial context the public sphere provided a space for exerting power over a subject population, rather than for liberating it from an authoritarian regime. As Sandria Freitag observes, “an imperial state cannot function in the same way as a nation-state, nor can it create a role for its subjects that approximates that of a citizen.”4 South Asianists have alternatively used Habermas to understand the ways in which colonialism altered existing forms of community expression in South Asia and created new forms of authority. In 1991, the journal South Asia featured essays on the public sphere that...