Gandhiji spent nearly 4 months in Bengal from 1 May 1925 to 31 August 1925. Except for a couple of very short visits made to Patna and Jamshedpur during this long phase he visited several parts of Bengal travelling from Midnapore to Chittagong and again from Darjeeling to Chandpur for multiple purposes.
It was the time we see Gandhi participating in several types of activities that includes walking along in the massive funeral rally of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das from Sealdah station to Keouratala crematorium, visiting St Xavier’s college to interact with the students, meeting Anglo Indian community leaders, having prolonged discussions with people like Rabindranath Tagore, PC Roy, Surendranath Banerjee and even participating in Ganesh Puja festival in Calcutta. He primarily kept himself busy in spreading his political message across Bengal by attending innumerable numbers of public meetings, workers camps, social gatherings and many other kinds of activities.
During this time, he received an invitation from the Rotary Club of Calcutta to deliver a lecture before the business community of Bengal on the commercial and spiritual importance of Charka, the a symbolic tool that Gandhi was then using as his supplementary economic growth model. This invitation created curiosity across India as Calcutta and Bengal being the most industrialised province of Bengal at that time, never took Gandhi’s rural based cottage industry seriously.
The meeting venue was fixed at the luxurious Grand hotel of Chowringhee a place Gandhi stayed at as a visiting guest to Calcutta from South Africa in the early part of the century. The date was 18 August 1925.
Gandhi as always entered the packed meeting hall in his trademark short dhoti and chadar holding a miniature wooden charka in his hand. He was given a roaring welcome by the audience comprising mostly Europeans and Indian businessmen. While questioned about the small spinning wheel that he was carrying in his hand Gandhi joyfully said that with this little spindle he wished to compete with his mill owning friends. His humor was taken well by spectators.
FE James the President of Rotary Club offered him a cordial welcoming note which went on to describe Mr Gandhi as not only a political leader but also a social reformer. The packed hall of Grand hotel was all ears eager to Gandhi.
Gandhi started by throwing light on India as a country which has 700000 villages mostly not connected by railways nor by any other means available in modern civilization. He pointed out that India is a country where 85% of its population are dependent on agriculture and most of these people are jobless in their villages for more than 4 to 5 months a year.
Gandhi cracked a joke by mentioning that even the Viceroy of India or a rich businessman will find it absolutely difficult to support his subsistence if they remain jobless for such a long period. By quoting historian Sir William Wilson Hunter he said that a large part of India’s village population live on a single meal a day and that meal consists of only dry bread and salt.
Gandhi pointed out that the real reason for famines in India is not because of shortage of grain but the lack of enough disposable income in the hands of the rural population who in the absence of supplementary occupation cannot effort to buy food. Thus Gandhi focused on finding a supplementary occupation for rural people and that quest led him to the small device that he was holding in his hand.
Though Gandhi did not discount the importance of modern machinery and industrialization he wanted to put in place an income generating option which the mass population of India could master very easily. He mentioned that wheeled charkas can produce just 50 yards per hour while a modern spinning wheel can produce 400 yards per hour in average which is almost same of a mill spindle capacity.
Gandhi said India’s rural population is looking for a universal supplementary occupation and spinning charkas can do wonders. He even explained the potential market for the product and pointed out that in Indian villages weaving activities have existed for 200 years and garments are spun and woven from locally produced materials by local people. He said that spinning will be a supplementary occupation for both farmers and weavers. Women folks across India will also be able to contribute to their family incomes.
Then Gandhi attacked the practice of international commerce in India where Rs 6 crores worth of foreign clothes are imported annually to generate a business revenue of nearly Rs 12 crores. Gandhi furnished more statistics. He referred to data recorded by Lord Curzon stating that the average income of an Indian is Rs 30 to Rs 33 only. Gandhi emphasized that the additional rural income generated out of spinning might add Rs 3 per year for an Indian and this as per him is a huge boost for a poor country like India.
Speaking about the spiritual side of the charka, Gandhi put forth a very weak and fragile logic, however. The Statesman reporting the event on 19 August 1925 writes “……..From his own personal experience he could testify to that peace of mind which the occupation provided and which no other occupation can give “.
Gandhi ended his speech by saying that he had nothing against modern industries and appliances but alerted the audience about the perils of those modern appliances “….which would starve a large body of men and render them perfectly useless and destroy human life in the minimum of time “ ( from the pages of The Statesman dated 19 August 1925 ).
As soon as Gandhi finished his speech there was a massive murmur in the hall which indicated that the content of his lecture generated enough dismay and disappointment. The audience mostly the rich and famous Europeans from Calcutta’s business community were shocked to find such an innocent economic solution from a man who is not known as an economist by any standards. There were questions from the audience countering his thoughts and some of those were indeed tough for Gandhi to answer.
One Mr H Hobbs expressed his disappointment strongly and put it before Gnadhi that British has taken initiatives of improving conditions of Indian agriculture with giant projects like making of 14000 miles of irrigational canals across India. He questioned the quality of products produced in cottage industries such as spinning which he found to be of highly inferior quality. Another gentleman named A T Weston put the question of quality control and uniformity in cotton spun in charkas. As per him this cotton will be unfit for commercial use. He voiced his support for mill woven yarn which as per him is more reliable, more uniform and cheaper.
Gandhi defended himself saying that homemade and homespun yarn will solve the issue of supplementary occupation and will get good market value because most of the Indians wear khaddar.
Present in the meeting was Sir D P Sarbadhikari who reminded Gandhi that while charkas are commonly used in Bengal’s rural culture and was even widely used by poor widows as a means of survival, it did not support economic growth. He mentioned that in Bengali marriages charkas are gifted by the husband to his wife for alternate income but that did not help to boost the economy because of its high cost. So what is Gandhi’s idea about bringing down the cost?
Gandhi found the question interesting and avowed to control free trade to save the culture of charka. He gave the example of Queen Elizabeth of England who once banned Holland lace in her court . She trained her people to master the making of the same lace and slowly came out of economic dependence on Holland. Gandhi said that free trade is good but for India it is ruinous because there are many industries to revive. Gandhi averred that industry dies because it is made to die and he picked the example of British East India Company which once for the sake of creating market of their own products imported devices to ruin India’s national industry. Gandhi pointed out that the industrial plundering of East India Company was recorded by the company’s own servants themselves.
At the end Gandhi hoped that the cost of charka spun yarn will come down and soon khaddar will compete in the market.
Bengal and Gandhi had a very interesting relation – Though he got a tremendous fan following in Bengal both as a political leader and social thinker but Bengal also questioned him on various issues.
His charka economics was not even acceptable to his best friend Rabindranath Tagore. Thus it is easy to assume that the titans and captains of industry and commerce of the richest city of India at that time did not immediately take to Gandhi’s idea on the chakra economy.
(The writer is a freelance contributor. Views expressed are personal.)