Khadi : the fabric of India

I had gone for work at Central Avenue and was passing the Khadi Bhandar where I stopped to have a peep inside. It is only recently that the fabric has caught the attention of high fashion. The common man has been wearing it simply for its versatile character and comfort. At the cash counter in a Khadi Bhandar, I found a motley crowd from middle-class India who thinks of the fabric as durable and affordable.

Khadi is part of the warp and weft of India. Khadi first caught the imagination of the nation during the freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi, who propagated it as not just a fabric, but a way of life.

In India, khadi is not just a cloth, it is a whole movement started by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The Khadi movement promoted an ideology, an idea that Indians could be self-reliant on cotton and be free from the high priced goods and clothes which the British were selling to them. The British would buy cotton from India at cheap prices and export them to Britain where they were woven to make clothes. These clothes were then brought back to India to be sold at hefty prices. The Khadi movement aimed at boycotting foreign goods including cotton and promoting Indian goods, thereby improving India’s economy. Mahatma Gandhi began promoting the spinning of khadi for rural self-employment and self-reliance in 1920s.Instead of using cloth manufactured industrially in Britain to spin our own cloth, thus making khadi an integral part and icon of the Swadeshi movement. The freedom struggle revolved around the use of khadi fabrics and the dumping of foreign-made clothes. Adopting khadi as a lifestyle choice symbolised the move away from British textiles and products , resulting in all those spontaneous bonfires into which people flung their rich silks and laces from England and the promotion of all things Indian.

But it was not simply about the making of yarn at home, it was the spirit behind it. Gandhi’s vision was clear: “If we have the khadi spirit in us, we should surround ourselves with simplicity in every walk of life… The khadi spirit means illimitable patience… The khadi spirit means also an equally illimitable faith… The khadi spirit means fellow-feeling with every human being on earth.”

Spinning yarn on the charkha, Gandhi believed, inculcated discipline and dedication. It was meant to be a great social equaliser — “It sits well on the shoulders of the poor, and it can be made, as it was made in the days of yore, to adorn the bodies of the richest and most artistic men and women” — and was also a tool to bring women into the fold of the freedom movement.

Khadi was, in fact, a masterstroke, taking the freedom movement beyond the rarefied circles of the social elite and the educated out to the masses. And the image of Gandhi sitting in front of a charkha acquired the weight of historical symbolism.

In the decades after Independence, the government institutionalised the khadi industry, setting up, in 1957, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission through an Act of Parliament, with the aim of providing employment through the production of saleable articles and, through this, creating self-reliance among the poor and building a strong rural community. The commission works towards supplying raw material and implements to producers, promoting research in production techniques, quality control of khadi products and promoting the sale and marketing of these products.

But in popular culture, the perception of khadi changed. It came to be synonymous with politicians. The association between politics and khadi was mostly due to the Congress, whose membership criteria requires one to be a habitual wearer of khadi. The common man came to understand that khadi as a strong symbol of political associations and activism.

Khadi has evolved a lot. Earlier, you would not get coloured or printed fabric, or salwar-kameez sets, or readymade clothes. You could only get the plain fabric, in cotton or silk. Khadi is now far smoother and lighter than what it started out as; consequently khadi clothes are now more comfortable and the fabric can hold many more dyes.

A lot of khadi is also not hand-spun any longer; traditionally the yarn is meant to be hand spun and the cloth hand-woven. The mechanised ambar charkha has replaced traditional hand-operated charkhas in many parts of the country. At the Khadi Bhandars, though, all the clothes are hand-spun and hand-woven, in the true spirit of the movement.

Khadi has become a luxurious fabric that needs to be restored and preserved. I think it is the most sophisticated fabric. It has a quiet dignity that is absent in mill-made fabrics. It also stands for the fact that luxury is not something you can get by simply throwing money at it. Luxury is a state of mind. And khadi represents all that.

But is has not been easy to make it acceptable to all. Khadi is either associated with politicians, or with the poor. Our country also suffers from the gloss syndrome. Anything that is dull or matte, is not appreciated easily.

But the mindset is changing. The people who chooses khadi is one who is completely at ease with it. They are educated and cultured enough to know the significance of khadi.

The traditional khadi fabric has issues such as shrinkage and maintenance. It also has colours that can bleed. The hand-spun and hand-woven fabric needs to be chemically treated to make it softer and more pliable, so that it can be adapted to contemporary designs and cuts.

The best Khadi comes from Dastkari in Andhra Pradesh. It is made in small pockets, sometimes the poorest ones. Its quality is not consistent either. But all this makes it more of a luxury product. Khadi is too intelligent a fibre to be treated. The challenge of working with it does not lie in its characteristics. A lot of designers today are launching khadi lines. But most of them are using it simply as a fashion trend. Not because they believe in the philosophy behind it.

Mahatma Gandhi used khadi as a tool to bind India together. But today, that philosophy has become anachronistic. We should work towards the revival of the fabric and looking at it purely for its political symbolism will do it disservice.

Khadi is perhaps no longer what it was when Mahatma Gandhi sat with a charkha and spun a philosophy around it. It has lived a life of its own despite its heavy baggage of political symbolism, absorbing contemporary shades and blemishes, and evolved. It has added more layers to its characteristics, while retaining its fundamental ones, making it a fabric that reflects the times.
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Image : Mahatma Gandhi with his famous Chakra.

Photograph by Margaret Bourke. Khadi Cloth. Khadi Bhandar.