The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [8]
Prior to British imperial rule, manufacture of cotton into textiles had been a cottage industry. Homespun had been the ideal complement to agriculture, enabling the villagers to clothe as well as feed themselves, and providing work that could be carried on throughout the rainy season. Everyone could take part, moreover—the elderly and disabled, even the very young.
Over the years, though, the British had systematically suppressed the cottage textile industry. By the turn of the century, Indian cotton was exported to Britain, manufactured into calico in the Lancashire mills and returned for sale to Indians—to be bought with money they had an ever-diminishing chance to earn. While spinning wheels collected dust in attics, the villagers themselves grew poorer, more dispirited, and ever more dependent on the British raj.
Gandhi offered a deceptively simple solution. Drag out those wheels, he urged. If you don’t know how to use them, get your grandmothers to teach you. Boycott foreign-made cloth, and wear only what we can produce ourselves.
Homespun cotton was just the beginning. Gandhi encouraged use of village-ground whole wheat, too, instead of mill-refined white flour; of locally processed raw sugar, called “gur,” instead of white sugar, and greatly increased use of leafy green vegetables. He advocated employment of local materials for housing, and indigenous herbal medicines—every conceivable form, in short, of individual and local self-reliance.
The poor of India did not need alms, Gandhi maintained, they needed work. Finding themselves able, after all, to meet basic life needs through their own skills, they would begin to trust their capacity to govern themselves as well—and they would have the courage to try. A people thus transformed would be free in the most meaningful sense whether they were officially recognized to be or not. It would be only a matter of time before political institutions caught up. Gandhi saw in this transformation of the individual the very essence of nonviolent revolution—its driving power.
It would be very easy to look at India today—at the serious problems she has yet to solve—and conclude that Gandhi’s ideas haven’t worked there. Easy, unless you realize that in fact, they haven’t really been tried. The overall direction of development efforts in India has not been that of the Constructive Program. Even Gandhi’s closest followers did not all share his passion for homespun or his faith in what it promised for India. It seemed so terribly slow, after all, and the needs were so acute. Hoping to relieve their people’s suffering more quickly, many of these individuals were attracted instead to the industrialized models of the West, and they strove mightily, once they were in political office, to adopt similar patterns for India.
It’s quite understandable that Gandhi’s successors would have chafed at the long, slow process of change his approach entails. The darker side of life in the West probably didn’t look as dark to them as it did to him, and they may not have been as convinced as he was that our highly industrialized and primarily urban mode of life was largely to blame.
In the long run, Gandhi’s teachings might turn out to have fallen on more fertile ground here in the West, amidst people who have lived out the consequences of a highly industrialized, materially abundant way of life, and who have, like many of us, our own reasons to question it.
THE POSSIBLE relevance of homespun to life in the West is suggested in a scene that occurs well along in the Attenborough film. A bemused Margaret Bourke-White is struggling under Gandhi’s direction to master the charkha.
“I just don’t see it,” she says wryly, holding up the hank of cotton her efforts have produced, “as the solution to the twentieth century’s problems.”
He smiles and demonstrates