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This article provides information about the Gandhi’s Idea about Khadi and Village Industry:
Gandhi firmly believed that the essence of swadeshi consisted in producing enough cloth to wrap each Indian, which would be possible through spinning and weaving by the masses. The people needed to pledge themselves to the use of swadeshi cloth only. He added that the use of Khadi cloth for covering the body has greater implications. In his own words, “Khadi must be taken with all its implications. It means a wholesale Swadeshi mentality, a determination to find all the necessaries of life in India and that too through the labour and intellect of the villagers.
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That means a reversal of the existing process. That is to say that, instead of half a dozen cities of India and Great Britain living on the exploitation and the ruin of the 7,00,000 villages of India, the latter will be largely self-contained, and will voluntarily serve the cities of India and even the outside world in so far as it benefits both the parties”.
The potential to produce khadi lying at the fingertips of an individual makes him/ her empowered and proud of the identity. For Gandhi, khadi was a means of uniting the Indians, of acquiring economic freedom and equality. More importantly, khadi marked the decentralisation of production and distribution of the “necessaries of life”. “If we feel for the starving masses of India, we must introduce the spinning wheel into their homes.
We must, therefore, become experts and in order to make them realise the necessity of it, we must spin daily as a sacrament. If you have understood the secret of the spinning wheel, if you realise that it is a symbol of love of mankind, you will engage in no other outward activity. If many people do not follow you, you have more leisure for spinning, carding or weaving”.
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The spinning wheel was a means of the economic upliftment of the poor and the despised on the one hand, while on the other it afforded considerable appeal on moral and spiritual grounds. The towns in the country that had flourished at the expense of the villages now had the opportunity to compensate the villages by buying cloth, which was spun and woven in the villages. This initiative went a long way in knitting economic and sentimental ties between people in the villages and in the towns.
The spinning wheel became the centre of rural development. Anti-malaria campaigns, improvement in sanitation, settlement of disputes in villages and several other endeavours for enhancement of the quality of life in villages revolved around, in one way or the other, the spinning wheel. It provided an alternative means of livelihood to the underemployed and the unemployed people. For Gandhi, its adoption by the common people marked the protest against industrialism and materialism.
More importantly, the use of khadi reflected the faith and commitment of the masses to the practice of obtaining the necessities of life through the labour and intellect of the villagers. This marked the empowerment of the people in villages by making them self-sufficient and generating the confidence and the potential in them to overthrow their exploitation by the city dwellers. The use of khadi also ushered in the process of decentralisation of production and distribution of the basic necessities of life. Gandhi urged Congressmen to promote khadi rigorously.
Gandhi said that other village industries stand apart from khadi primarily because they do not involve voluntary labour in large numbers. These industries may continue as a “handmaid of khadi” but they cannot exist without khadi: It may, however, be added that Gandhi did agree that the village economy could not be complete without the operation of village industries—those of hand-grinding, hand-pounding, soap-making, papermaking, tanning, oil-pressing and others of this kind. What lay at the core of this thought was the urge to make the villages self-sufficient.
He added that since it was not easy to close down the established, functioning mills, it was appropriate to register resistance and protest at the time they were being set up. He was deeply convinced about the ability of the village people when he argued that no machinery in the world was a match for the willing hands and feet of the village people and of course the few simple wooden instruments that they make themselves.
Gandhi was convinced that agriculture did not need revolutionary changes. The Indian peasant required the introduction of the spinning wheel, not the handloom. This was because the handloom could be introduced in every home unlike the handloom. The restoration of the spinning-wheel would solve the economic problems of India at a stroke.
The All-India Village Industries Association (with headquarters at Maganwadi) supported those industries in villages that did not require help from outside the village and could be run with little capital. It was hoped that such industries in the villages would generate employment and purchasing power in the villages. Interestingly, the Association took upon itself the responsibility of training village workers. It published its own periodical, the Gram Udyog Patrika.