Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India

1. A POLITICS OF CONSUMPTIONS: Swadeshi and Its Institutions

1 A Politics of Consumption Swadeshi and Its Institutions The Congress has placed special emphasis on swadeshi. The foundation of India’s freedom will have been laid only when the import of Lancashire cloth has stopped. . . . Our freedom will be won through the spinning-wheel. It is necessary to introduce it in every home. If every person in the country —man, woman and child—takes a vow today to give some little time of his to spinning, within a very short time we may cease to depend on others for clothing our people and save sixty crores of rupees for the country. —Gandhi, January 19211 In the weeks and months after the Indian National Congress passed the NonCooperation Resolution on December 30, 1920, Mohandas Gandhi spoke and wrote passionately about the vital connections between an indigenous goods movement, known as swadeshi, and the attainment of swaraj, or selfgovernment .2 The Congress leadership, while supporting the Non-Cooperation Resolution, was not convinced that spinning cotton was either a solution to India’s poverty or a strategy that would successfully bring about significant political change. Gandhi’s swadeshi approach failed to capture the full support of Congress leadership, but it nonetheless soon became familiar to the broader Congress membership and the wider public. At the heart of Gandhi’s swadeshi movement were the invention and popularization of a nationalist style. The most striking aspect of this style was a form of nationalist dress that was adopted by much of India’s predominantly middle-class Congress members, but swadeshi provided more than new ar-  clothing gandhi’s nation ticles of clothing. It popularized a reformed lifestyle. Patriots did more than wear khadi or khaddar (homespun) clothing; they slept on khadi bed linens and decorated their homes, inside and out, with the cloth. Even more significantly , because khadi was a tangible object, it easily became within a decade a popular, powerful political symbol used in protests and other gatherings in British India’s public spaces. Yet the power of khadi was not confined to those who supported Gandhi’s narrow, and sometimes rigid, ideas about community and politics. Instead, even though Gandhi’s movement failed to convince the entire Congress leadership or the broader population of British India of the effectiveness of swadeshi politics, it transformed an ordinary country cloth into a material and visual symbol that would be woven into the fabric of Indian politics and culture for decades to come. Neither the revival of traditional textile production nor the term swadeshi was unique to Gandhi’s movement; rather, Gandhi adapted international ideologies and the model of an earlier movement that had thrived in the eastern province of Bengal between 1903 and 1908. In the period of mass nationalism in India (1920–1947), Gandhi promoted swadeshi politics through three institutions: the Satyagraha Ashram, the All-India Khaddar Board, and the All-India Spinners’ Association. It was in the ashram that Gandhi transformed his swadeshi program from one focused on weaving and handloomed cloth to one defined by hand-spinning and khadi. The coordinated efforts of the Khaddar Board and the Spinners’ Association made it possible for Gandhi and his supporters to introduce the ashram’s experiments to the broader public. Beyond Gandhi’s control, the swadeshi movement and khadi were put to a wide variety of uses by people, many of whom did not subscribe to Congress, much less to Gandhian, views.3 Thus, over the course of the 1920s, khadi itself was transformed from the emblem of Gandhi’s utopian politics into a broader symbol that would endure long after the politics of Gandhi and his era. The Roots of Gandhian Swadeshi European traders traveled to the Indian subcontinent for spices in the seventeenth century, but it was her cloth, and eventually her cotton, that figured so significantly in India’s colonization. In the early eighteenth century, the British East India Company exported calicos and muslins to European and Southeast Asian consumers. The profits from trade with India, when coupled with the influx of Mexican silver, contributed to Britain’s industrialization. By the late 1820s, English mills reversed the flow of textiles.4 Once a great pro-  a politics of consumption ducer of cloth, India became a consumer of British manufactured textiles, the prominence of her traditional textile production undone by cheaper foreign goods. Indeed, the British themselves undertook several studies to discover how Indian textile production had been destroyed...