Benjamin Studebaker has a foolish piece in Aeon- previously published in the Indian EPW- titled 'Citizens and spinning wheels'- For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?
The answer is obvious. It was stupid shit. Independent India turned its back on the spinning wheel. Pretending that the Brits had fucked India over so badly that all that Indians could do was spin a bit of cotton so as not to have go around naked was a piece of theater. That is all.
Political theorists often argue that citizens need to have certain capabilities for their political projects to be successful.
But only because such theorists are incapable of saying anything sensible.
Ancient and medieval political theorists, like Plato or Aquinas,
would shit themselves if they saw a fucking steam engine, forget about the forms of government we now have.
often demand that people receive advanced spiritual and civic education as a prerequisite for participating in rule.
Their demands meant nothing. They were lucky that invaders didn't kill or enslave them. Ruling meant being able to kill invaders or insurrectionists. That was the only 'capability' which mattered. India didn't have the capacity to protect itself- as the Second World War amply demonstrated- which is why most Indian people preferred a nutter like Gandhi pretend to be fighting the Brits when what he was actually doing was trying to prevent them from slyly fucking off.
This training is intricate.
To be fair, dudes like Socrates had received pretty intricate training in fighting on land or sea. Aquinas's training was in telling soldiers they would definitely get to Heaven if they killed infidels or heretics or dudes who thought the Pope was totes Gay.
It takes time, and it can be expensive. Pre-industrial economic systems do not generate a very big surplus. In highly stratified ancient republics, citizenship was often reserved for the rich and powerful.
No. In ancient republics, every able-bodied free man from an indigenous tribe or clan was expected to serve in the infantry. There might be an annual campaign season. What Studebaker is talking about an equestrian or patrician order who provided the cavalry or else financed naval expeditions. They too were citizens but, in some polities, they were eligible for certain superior offices or else for membership in the Senate or Upper Legislative House.
Modern liberals, like Adam Smith or Benjamin Constant, tend to take a different approach – they argue that most people already have the qualities that are necessary for citizenship.
Because there was a professional army, judiciary, etc. The division of labor explains this.
If they don’t have them, they can gain them by participating in markets and in civil society organisations, without need for careful planning.
In other words, they can pay taxes to finance the standing army, police, judiciary etc. In ancient Athens, every citizen was a soldier as well as a legislator or judge voting in the ecclesia. Specialization on the basis of comparative advantage reduced what was required from the subject or citizen to just one thing- viz. productivity. Gandhi thought the spinning wheel would increase productivity for poor Indians. He was wrong. Spinning cotton added negative value. It was a waste of time. What the weavers wanted was an assured supply of good quality machine spun yarn.
It helps that modern liberals envision a more limited role for their citizens – they need enough civic education to be able to vote for representatives,
No. They can be as stupid or as illiterate as fuck. It is up to rival candidates to get them to tick the right box at election time.
but they are not expected to make important everyday political decisions.
Nor is anybody not paid specifically to do so.
Gandhi was a different sort of thinker.
No. He was a 'Mahatma' with his own Ashram and a bunch of acolytes. In order to get money for his money-pit schemes he had to pretend to be against the British. He was useful to the Congress party from time to time and he definitely helped his big donors or other influential supporters in an extraordinary manner. Consider Motilal Nehru whose daughter had married a Muslim. Gandhi didn't just break up the marriage, he even got the girl a 'suitable' Brahmin husband. This was pretty damned magical.
Another example is Sarabhai, an industrialist, who got in trouble for killing dogs at the site of his new mill. The Parsis in particular were incensed because dogs are sacred in their religion. Gandhi wrote a number of articles saying that true Non-Violence meant chasing down and killing bow-wows. My point is, if you were important or rich, Gandhi could do stuff for you nobody else could do. That's why he remained in business till Atlee decided to pull the plug on the shit-show that was the Raj. Never again would British blood and treasure be squandered on protecting an ungrateful India. Malaya was a different matter. National Service men rid that country of Communists before handing over power to the indigenous people.
He wanted ordinary people to make difficult moral and political judgments themselves.
No. He wanted ordinary people to believe his crazy lies.
Instead of lowering the bar for citizenship or excluding the poor and the weak from citizenship,
The Brits had already made all Indians equal subjects of the Crown save those who lived in Princely States. There was nothing Gandhi could do about this.
Gandhi argues that it is possible to dramatically improve the capabilities of ordinary people.
No. He argued that they should stop fucking improving themselves and sit quietly spinning cotton. That's why he refused to send his sons to proper schools. Still, apart from the eldest, they did get good enough jobs thanks to Gandhi's wealthy sponsors.
To do this, he called for the reconstruction of the varna system, in which young people adopt the professions of their parents.
Fuck off! He wasn't saying he himself should become a merchant or that Nehru should become a priest. Like Rajaji, his relative by marriage, Gandhi was trying to reassure village landlords that the extension of primary Education (which the Brits were keen on) would be managed by Congress in such a manner that low caste kids wouldn't learn anything. Thus their labor would still be available. Sadly, this 'Basic Education' scheme pissed off the Muslims and lower caste leaders. After Independence, Rajaji as CM of Madras shat the bed by trying to promote kula kalvi thittam- i.e. education in one's ancestral occupation. The result was that anti-Brahmin parties went from strength to strength in Tamil Nadu.
In its original form, the system consists of four varnas. There are the Brahmins, who serve as scholars, priests or teachers.
Sadly, Gandhi didn't listen to actual Brahmins or Shramans. He was convinced that the Sun shone out of his own backside.
There are the Kshatriyas, who serve as rulers, administrators or warriors. There are the Vaishyas, who serve as farmers or merchants. Finally, there are the Shudras, who serve as artisans, labourers or servants. The members of all four varnas are householders, in the sense that it is permissible for people occupying any of the four varnas to produce children.
Women from a higher varna weren't supposed to marry those of a lower varna. Nehru complained that his sister's marriage to a Jain from the merchant caste was technically illegal. Still, nobody had any objection to the production of babies no matter how they were conceived.
One’s varna is determined by one’s parents’ varna.
You could pay a priest to change it. However, beating people could work just as well more particularly if you also raped and robbed them. In that case they would call you 'Lord'.
The Varnas are often ranked
by Brahmins
so that the Brahmins enjoy the highest status, followed by the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas and the Shudras. But Gandhi rejected ranking the varnas in this way.
Because he wasn't a Brahmin.
For him, the varna system becomes a caste system when the varnas become hierarchical status markers.
He was a stupid man. The Hindu view is that originally everybody was Brahmin but then as Society deteriorated, so soldiers and policemen and rulers were needed- i.e. a Kshatriya caste came into existence. As scarcity increased, commerce and industry and labor intensive agriculture became necessary. This was when the 'Vaishya' or ordinary people came into existence. Then there was a servant class and beneath them 'untouchables' who did ritually unclean work.
In his view, all four varnas are meant to be equal, and people in all four varnas are meant to be able to engage in spiritual development – not just the Brahmins.
Sadly, his own spiritual development involved sleeping naked with his grand-niece.
There are some Indians outside the varna system. The Dalits – or untouchables – are considered to be without a varna.
So are foreigners or tribal people or members of various monastic or other religious sects.
For Gandhi, the category of Dalit is itself an offence against the varna system, insofar as it is a category that presupposes a hierarchical ranking and excludes some people from spiritual realisation.
Gandhi's Mum told him that if a Dalit boy bumped into him at School he should be careful to touch a Muslim boy so the evil was transferred to him. Gandhi's politics was just this business of running between Muslim and Dalit till both told him to fuck the fuck off. Thankfully, a nutty Brahmin killed the nutter. This meant that both types of stupidity cancelled each other out. However, Gandhi's Congress Party remains the ancestral property of a Brahmin dynasty- albeit one which is half Italian and a quarter Zoroastrian.
There are also some Indians who are not householders, but have instead committed themselves to ascetic lifestyles. After some number of lifetimes at the householder level, a Hindu practitioner is said to advance into a new ashrama or stage of life.
No. High caste people are supposed to divide their 100 year life-span into four ashrams. The first is 'brahmacharya'- i.e. being a celibate student- then one is 'grhastha'- a married householder. After that come 'vanaprastha'- retirement to the forest (with one's wife). Finally there is 'sanyas'- i.e. becoming a wanderer.
What Studebaker means is that Hindus, Buddhists and Jains may expect to be re-born into a better or worse life depending on their good or bad deeds. For Jains and Buddhists, the hope is to be reborn as a monk at a time when a Tirthankara or Boddhisattva is preaching so as to gain ultimate liberation. Thankfully, if you know a bit of Sanskrit, you can ignore all this as 'exoteric' and delusive.
While Brahmins serve as spiritual teachers, they remain householders, and so have not yet transitioned to asceticism.
Plenty of monastic orders recruit only Brahmins- e.g. the Sankaracharyas. Mahesh Yogi wasn't a Brahmin and so had to content himself with becoming a billionaire by teaching people to spread 'peace rays' through Yogic levitation rather than turning a spinning wheel. In this way the Mahatma's true successor was the Maharishi.
A person who wishes to become an ascetic must not have any dependents.
Sadly, Acharya Kosambi didn't understand that being a Buddhist monk precluded having a nice wifey who gave birth to the brilliant D.D Kosambi. The case of Lala Hardayal, who- like Gandhi- gave up sex after meeting with Bhai Parmanand- is even funnier. The Punjabi dude kept marrying Swedish or Swiss damsels even though he was supposed to be a Brahmachari.
This does not necessarily mean that the ascetic can never have had a spouse or children, provided that when the ascetic embraces asceticism, appropriate provisions have been made.
No. You are welcome to abandon your family at any time. Some of Gandhi's female disciples told their husbands they would get no nookie. Indeed, even Kamala Nehru, who joined the Ramakrishna Sect, decided to cut off Jawaharlal.
Once asceticism is embraced, commitments to celibacy and childlessness necessarily follow, lest any new dependents be acquired.
In theory. But there are plenty of great monks and nuns who have large families.
Taken together, the whole varna system is called varnashrama, referring together both to the four kinds of householders and the four stages of life.
But it was purely notional. Gandhi was recruiting plenty of young people from all sorts of background who would remain celibate all their lives.
He believed the system could and should raise everyone to the same level of spiritual and political education
which was so utterly shit that any bunch of pirates or cut-throats could take over vast portions of India.
Why would Gandhi wish to revive this system, a system that – by his own admission – develops very easily in an undemocratic direction, into a system of hierarchical caste?
He didn't. He was trying to sound like a 'Mahatma'- a title he got from another non-Brahmin who was promoting himself to the status of 'Swamy'. The fact is, in Bombay and Madras, the Congress was Brahmin dominated and thus there was competition from anti-Brahmin formations- e.g. the Justice Party. Indians prefer to gloss over this aspect of Gandhi's maladroitness. Still, his political theater did prevent the Brits from fucking off and thus enabling the Japanese to conquer a large portion of the country.
When childhood is about preparing to compete in the job market and adulthood is consumed with worry about money, there’s no time for spiritual growth.
Sure there is. Gandhi knew that Raichandbhai Mehta- perhaps the greatest Jain spiritual personality of his time- was a householder.
But if children learn how to make a living at home, from their parents, Gandhi argues, they ‘need not even go to a school to learn it’.
Why was this important? Well, under Dyarchy, the Brits, and the evil Indian bastards who were willing to work with them, were trying to educate kids. But this meant property owners would have to pay a little money in tax. Naturally, they wanted to hear from Gandhi who said education is satanic. Nobody should be exposed to that shite. Also Hospitals are very evil. They spread diseases. As for this talk of having to pay a cess for the building of roads- that's totes Satanic. God gave us two legs to walk. Roads can be used by wheeled vehicles. Thus the building of roads could cause people to give up walking. They might prefer to sit in a tonga or, worse yet, a fucking motor car! This is against Hindu Religion! True Hindu walks to battlefield so as to lay down his life for Khilafat. He doesn't travel by train or bus.
This leaves the mind ‘free for spiritual pursuits’.
e.g. sleeping naked with teenage girls.
It allows the education system to focus on character development, on art and philosophy.
Tagore did have a school of that sort. But it was for affluent thickos. Nobody will pay good money to send smart kids to a school which doesn't teach STEM subjects.
By freeing Indians from the need to find their own way to earn a living, Gandhi hoped to give them the time necessary to become great souls.
Indians already had that. There were plenty of religious mendicants, not to mention crazy transgender 'hijras', wandering around the place.
Gandhi’s envisioned reform of the varna system faced obstacles.
No. Shit does not face 'obstacles'. It is shit. Either it is removed or people avoid the place where it accumulates. There were specific legal and policy issues relating to caste- e.g. the right of a particular Temple to prevent low caste Hindus (but not Muslims or Christians) from using a particular road- which were gaining salience. Gandhi turned out to be useless at this type of politics. However, he did do a deal with Ambedkar which has held up. But this was because Congress was able to recruit very good Dalit candidates and so, at a later point, Ambedkar himself couldn't get elected.
For one, the varna system and the caste system are often confused, even by Indians.
Varna is notional. Jati- i.e. endogamous, supposedly occupational, sub-castes- may want to collectively raise or lower their status in the that notional 'Varna' system. In 1900, 'lower castes' wanted 'Kshatriya' status. Now, dominant castes want Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe status.
Many people think that some professions are higher status than others. If profession is hereditary and different professions become associated with different levels of social status, this can result in a system of status hierarchy, in which some families occupy higher positions and others are subordinated.
For example, in the Congress Party everybody is subordinated to the cretin Rahul.
For Gandhi, caste hierarchy was a corruption of the varna system.
For Gandhi, sex was wrong. Nobody should do it.
Gandhi was a committed egalitarian
No. He thought he himself was the cat's whiskers. But otherwise he was a loyal subject of the King Emperor.
– he believed the system could and should be used to raise everyone to the same level of spiritual and political education.
Which is why he advised the Brits to surrender to Herr Hitler. To be fair, Bertrand Russell had suggested this first- but then Russell had been to jail during the Great War because, Pacifist that he was, he had urged the Americans not to come to the aid of their cousins across the pond.
However, caste perverted varna in the opposite direction, creating rigid, impenetrable social and political barriers between families.
No it didn't. That's why his son could marry Rajaji's daughter.
The varna system was plagued by caste hierarchy, but that was just the beginning of its problems. By the early 20th century, many of the traditional professions were no longer performed. Gandhi, for instance, had given up the profession of his parents to become a lawyer.
Actually, he hoped to get his Dad's old job because he had qualified as a barrister. But the Brits took a dim view of his family. Under his father, the State he served had been down-graded because of poor administration.
When he made the decision to go to England for a legal education, he was kicked out of Sabarmati Ashram.
No. He set up Sabarmati Ashram many years after he qualified as a barrister and returned to India from South Africa. He did have to perform a 'prayaschitham' ceremony on his return from Britain. But this was no big deal.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was born a Brahmin. But Nehru took no interest in reading spiritual works. Instead, he went to law school.
No. He went to public school and then Cambridge. He did qualify as a barrister but had little interest in the Law.
Gandhi became convinced that it was a great evil for Indians to abandon the hereditary professions. Indians must not go to law school.
They must not have sex.
If they do, this would give rise to a class of trained professionals, a group of bureaucrats, who would dominate India.
This already existed. Nehru's cousin was an ICS officer. But he didn't get paid a lot and had little power. That's why Motilal told his son not to bother sitting the Civil Service exam. The future lay with the politicians, not the lawyers or civil servants.
These bureaucrats would run India the same way the British had run India,
Indians predominated in that bureaucracy save at the very highest levels. The Nehrus had been junior officials under the Mughals. Later, they became vakils to John Company.
and under them ordinary Indians would remain incapable of participating in political decision-making.
Plenty of 'ordinary Indians'- like Dadhabhai Naoroji or Shamji Krishna Varma (both of whose fathers were manual laborers)- had risen up by their own efforts and were already 'participating in political decision making'. Consider Srinivas Sastri. He had just one shirt. One morning, it was too wet to wear and so he went to school covering himself with a cloth. The White Headmaster imposed a fine which the lad could not pay. That night, while saying his prayers, the Headmaster sought guidance from the Lord. His wife overheard and told him to just remit the fine already. Later, the pupil and teacher were reunited in England when Sastri was appointed to the Privy Council.
In 1915, when Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, he argued that Indians who had adopted the Western professions – like law, medicine and engineering – should give them up.
No. Don't be silly. At a later point, he raised money to pay lawyers not to go to court. That failed ignominiously. I should explain, Sinn Fein in Ireland had successfully organized a parallel legal system but the Indians had no interest in any such thing. That's one reason they were relieved they didn't get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in 1922. Thanks must go to Gandhi's unilateral surrender in February of that year.
They should instead take up traditional Indian crafts. Gandhi himself gave up the law and took up the spinning wheel, making khadi – a kind of traditional Indian cloth.
No. He just spun cotton. Weavers used that yarn to make shitty Indian cloth.
In the caste system, the manual crafts occupied the lowest position.
Nope. They occupied an intermediate position. The lowest position had to do with disposing of shit, dead bodies etc.
High-caste Indians were prohibited from engaging in manual work on pain of expulsion from their caste.
Nonsense! High caste Indians were welcome to engage in agricultural or factory work. They might lose caste if they engaged in 'polluting' activity- e.g. dealing in fish (the reason Jinnah's ancestor converted), or engaging in the tanning of leather. But this did not necessarily follow. You could pay a priest to perform expiatory rituals. Or else, if you were rich, you could simply declare yourself a Mahatma or Maharishi or Swamy or whatever.
By encouraging Indians to take up the manual crafts, Gandhi subverted the caste system.
Nope. He gave himself an alibi for having taken money from Indian mill owners to get his followers to burn foreign cloth- i.e. get rid of the competition. Gandhi was pretending to be too stupid to understand that weavers wanted high quality foreign yarn so as to produce fine fabrics which could be exported for top dollars. True, there were plenty of crap weavers who didn't mind producing shitty cloth for the Khaddar board. But this was a subsidy for being shitty. Gandhi got very angry with the skilled weavers who made good money by producing luxury cloth. He demanded that they wear the cloth they made. Sadly, they didn't demand, in return, that Gandhi eat his own shit.
But he also hoped to lay the groundwork for recovering varna.
No. He just hoped to keep getting money for his crackpot schemes. So long as the Brits were around, there would be 'Pax Britannica'. Then, after Pearl Harbor, he thought the Japs would win and so told the Brits to 'Quit India' so he could repeat his pantomime routine with the new rulers.
If all Indians could learn the traditional crafts – and if all Indians consistently refrained from purchasing industrially produced goods – the crafts would ensure the livelihoods of all Indians.
Gandhi received money from textile mill owners. They were diversifying into other fields and wanted to be able to import all sorts of things from abroad. Thus Gandhi insisted that only foreign cloth be boycotted. Also, he had raised enough money to subsidize only khaddar- i.e. shitty cloth. There was no way he could get Birla and Bajaj &c. to also pay for shitty chairs and shitty knives and so forth. The point about having a lot of shitty weavers enrolled under the Khaddar board was that it gave Congress a presence in the villages.
Future generations could simply learn the traditional crafts at home, from their parents, allowing them to pursue spiritual growth and participate directly in politics.
How? They would be living in shitty villages cut off from each other.
The manual crafts weren’t just a protest against the British but key to universal self-realisation in India
No. The Brits and Parsis and some Princes had brought in British and other skilled artisans to impart their skills to the natives. Kipling's dad was one such. One of his students was from the Punjabi 'Ramgarhia' carpenter caste. He got rich. There were many other such stories. Some German and American cinematographers had been imported to give Indian Cinema a head start. Incidentally, Gandhi's financiers brought in European managers and engineers to run their plants. That's one reason they wanted the Revolutionaries and Xenophobes and Religious nutters to be marginalized as far as possible.
So, at first, the schools would need to teach the crafts – to ensure they were known to everyone, and to violate caste prohibitions on manual labour.
No. The idea was that- as a British lady teacher who had joined Gandhi's Ashram reported- the kids would spin cotton and sell it and thus finance their own education. Thus, no tax on alcohol would be required. There could be complete prohibition without public education suffering. Sadly, the yarn that was spun was unusable. The British lady teacher suggested the yarn could be sold to the Government. But, by then, Indians were running the State Governments and didn't want to pay good money for useless shit. On the other hand, they did approve of the fact that 'vocational teachers' were completely illiterate. Since they could not make a living following their supposed trade, they would be grateful to be employed as teachers. In other words, politicians would be able to give jobs to useless people in return for votes.
But once the crafts were widely known and the caste prohibitions were no more, the crafts could be learned at home, and the schools could be turned to their true purpose – preparing young people to rule themselves.
How? Model UN debates?
Gandhi called this self-rule ‘swaraj’.
It was already called that.
Why the emphasis on crafts?
To reassure landlords that they wouldn't lose their workforce. The simpler course was just to say 'we will steal all the money in the education budget. The Brits might object but they are on the way out. Just accuse them of having raped your maid servant and sodomized your chauffeur and they will back off.'
For Gandhi, only the traditional crafts were universally available to Indians, even under British rule.
Fuck off! Gandhi had received 10,000 quid from the Tatas when he was in South Africa. He knew very well that they had set up a steel plant in Bihar. He could see for himself that there was a burgeoning Cinema industry by the time he returned permanently to India. Plenty of Indian engineers were setting up electricity plants and telephone systems in the Princely States.
Training Indians as farmers would not work as long as ownership of farmland remained concentrated.
Indian farmers were already trained as farmers. Ownership of farmland was not concentrated in most parts of 'ryotwari' India.
Indian farmworkers would be made to work long hours as agricultural labourers unless and until the land could be redistributed, and that could happen only after the departure of the British.
Peasant proprietors worked long hours as did the laborers they hired. Big landlords generally went in for sharecropping. This cretin simply does not understand how agriculture works.
Gandhi believed it was necessary to prepare for swaraj immediately,
No. He said he wanted Swaraj but unilaterally surrendered in 1922 so it could be delayed till Muslims and Hindus fell out with each other.
and the crafts presented themselves with practical and political appeal.
Which crafts? Gandhi was promoting the spinning wheel as a badge of allegiance to the Congress Party. To this day, members of that party have to swear that they are 'habitual' spinners of cotton.
It would be possible to revive the crafts only if Indians made a point to exclusively purchase products made by traditional methods.
No. Gandhi was paid by Indian Mill Owners to get rid of the competition. True, richer people could buy handloom cloth but ordinary folk had to settle for mill cloth. On the other hand 'netas'- i.e. corrupt politicians or those who wanted to suck up to them would buy overpriced, utterly shitty, 'khadi' which they might wear from time to time for a gesture political purpose.
For the crafts to survive in the long term, Indians would have to continue the anticolonial protest against manufactured goods even after independence.
The EPW published this shite. How far it has sunk! There was a political reason to subsidize khaddar and various crafts. This was about buying votes while stealing government money.
For Gandhi, the manual crafts weren’t just a protest against the British –
Crafts aren't a protest against anything.
they remained central to producing conditions for universal self-realisation in India.
But they existed at the time when Britain took over most of India. You may say, 'India's technological backwardness- as reflected in its arts & crafts- was central to the British takeover of the sub-continent'. You can't say that returning to the spinning wheel could raise up the Indian people to a condition where they could repel the Japanese.
As the Second World War drew to a close, Gandhi grew concerned that Indian independence would come too early, before this was properly grasped by the other independence leaders.
The Americans and the Brits ensured that India did not become a vassal to the Japanese. Gandhi had backed the wrong horse. His political career was over. Incidentally, Birla gave Tegart- the Police Commissioner who put down the Jugantar Revolutionaries- a seat on the board of his London holding Company in 1946.
His friend Nehru disagreed with him about the traditional crafts.
Nehru had also disagreed about 'Quit India'. He wanted to fight the Japanese.
In a letter to Nehru, Gandhi argued that by performing a ‘quota’ of manual labour, the people could ‘rest content’ with their ‘real needs’, freeing them up for spiritual learning. Nehru countered that traditional villages were ‘backward intellectually and culturally’, and that an economy based on primitive technology would be isolated and uncompetitive.
It would be ruled by foreigners. Even if the Hindus followed the Mahacrackpot, the Muslims wouldn't. They would once again rule over the country.
For Gandhi, Nehru had missed the point.
He didn't get that the if the Brits wouldn't rule India, then maybe the Japs or the Chinese or the Rooskis should do so. The problem was that if the Hindus did stupid shit, it would be the Muslims who would reestablish their rule. It was one thing to be ruled by people of a different color. But Muslims like Jinnah or Iqbal had been Hindu just two or three generations previously.
As long as Indians could produce all the necessaries of life through the traditional crafts and they refrained from purchasing industrial goods, there was no need to make the economy competitive.
But the country would be ruled by non-Indians who could make guns and planes and ships and submarines.
What good is it to make the economy competitive, if that means that most people will have to spend all their time struggling to earn a living?
The alternative to your making your economy competitive is that somebody else takes over your territory and kills you if you object.
What kind of life is that? How are people who live that way meant to find the time for politics and spirituality?
Very true! Churchill was not letting British soldiers have enough time for politics and spirituality. He should have given them a nice holiday so Herr Hitler could send his troops across the Channel.
Such a country would be riven with violence and exploitation. From Gandhi’s point of view, it would be hardly any different from British India.
In other words, it would be a country able to keep out invaders and put down insurrections.
After this exchange of letters in 1945, Gandhi became increasingly focused on preserving the traditional crafts, especially spinning cloth on the traditional spinning wheel. He emphasised the spinning wheel ever more heavily, so much so that, even to this day, the wheel lies at the centre of the Indian flag.
No. The spinning wheel had been on the Congress+ flag but Nehru dropped it. What we have is the Buddhist wheel of Emperor Ashoka.
After the Second World War ended in 1945, independence was imminent. With very little time left to win the argument, Gandhi became suspicious of the other Indian independence leaders. In late 1945, Gandhi accused them of wanting ‘to destroy khadi’.
If Gandhi had been able to get Muslims to vote for Congress, he would have retained some salience. But, in the 1946 election, Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the League. This meant the Mahacrackpot was useless.
In 1946, he emphasised that the introduction of the industrial spinning mill is so corrosive to his political project that
he had been taking money from guys who owned such mills for the last 30 years.
if a ‘tyrant wants to destroy the spinning-wheel itself … we should ourselves perish with the spinning-wheel and not live to witness its destruction.’
If a foreign tyrant wanted to rule India, he would promote Gandhi as a 'Great Soul' rather than a fucking nuisance.
He insists that spinning is the only way ‘to achieve swaraj for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak’.
He was wrong. His acolyte, Vinobha Bhave devoted himself entirely to spinning but found he could not feed himself with the produce even if he did nothing else all day.
In Gandhi’s final years, he grew more and more focused on khadi. His writings in 1946 and 1947 refer to this cloth hundreds of times. He worries about uncertified khadi dealers, its commercialisation, the use of fabrics and materials to circumvent khadi rules. He argues that it is necessary to create a ‘yarn bank’ to ensure that khadi workers always have access to the materials. Spinning will work as a vehicle for swaraj only if the spinners understand the role it plays. He writes: ‘[I]f workers themselves lack faith then the claim for khadi will fall to the ground.’
Gandhi controlled the Khaddar board and understood that he and it were being sidelined. Nehru had made it clear that though he respected Gandhi, he himself believed in modern, progressive, ideas. The question was whether Gandhi could sway the Muslim voter and thus keep the country together. He could not. Indeed, he had become a liability in that respect. Under the Cabinet Mission Plan, Liaquat Ali Khan had become Finance Minister. Allying with the Left, he threatened to tax Gandhi's financiers to the hilt. At this point, they abandoned Gandhi. He had outlived his usefulness. Still, once the Hindus had beaten the shit out of the Muslims on Direct Action Day, thus securing Calcutta for India, the financiers of Congress had no great interest in protecting Hindus in East Bengal. Gandhi was welcome to go there and it was in the interest of everybody to pretend he was a 'one man boundary commission' able to protect minorities by the magic of his presence.
Gandhi's mistake was to go on a fast to force the Indian Government to give Pakistan its share of some money even though hostilities were ongoing. At that point, it appears his personal security was neglected so he could be killed.
'The workers are to desist from adopting the mill because they know it is the thin end of the wedge, that to abandon the wheel for the mill is to start the process of colonialism all over again. If the workers do not understand that, then they will allow the wheel to be taken from them. Without the wheel, the varna system cannot be recovered, and any swaraj the workers obtain will be empty;
There was a Congress CM of Madras who threatened to shut down the Mills so the spinning wheel could take its place. Gandhi himself called for his sacking because he understood that this move was directed against him and Rajaji. The broader context was Congress's crackdown on the Communists. They were sending the signal that they could eliminate the industrial proletariat by eliminating industry. The Trade Unions had better come to heel- which they did. However, the real issue in Madras Presidency was the creation of a Telugu speaking state. After a Telugu politician fasted to death, this was granted. By then, India was independent and nobody gave a fuck about the spinning wheel.
. In July 1946, a critic accuses Gandhi of forcing the villagers to spin. Gandhi replies that Indian villagers ‘gave up khadi because they were tempted by mill-cloth’.
Sadly, they had also been tempted by sex. Not till everybody gave up sex and the race died out would Swaraj be attainable.
He compares mill-cloth to a poisonous drug, suggesting he is freeing the villagers from a kind of addiction. He denies that he is violating their rights – if mill-cloth is not available and the villagers do not make their own cloth, they ‘have the right to shiver in the cold and remain naked’.
Gandhi's right to talk bollocks was curtailed by a Hindu with a gun. Nutters can cancel each other out.
Commit to this new education, and Gandhi was confident that ‘in five years India will be a leading country in Asia’
He had promised to deliver Independence within 18 months back in 1920 provided that a certain sum of money was collected. It was. But, though Hindus and Muslims were united, Gandhi unilaterally surrendered in 1922. After that Hindu Muslim unity fell apart. Partition became inevitable.
In July 1946, Gandhi writes that towns existed before the arrival of the British. Things were ‘bad enough then’ but now ‘they are much worse’ because the towns have become cities devoted to enriching both ‘Indian millionaires’ and ‘British masters’.
Gandhi felt the Indian millionaires were turning their backs on him because 'British masters' wanted to run the fuck away as soon as possible.
Khadi is to ‘undo the great mischief’. That mischief is not just the British, but the spiritual situation that, for Gandhi, allowed the British to colonise India.
India had khadi before the British or the Turks or the Scythians or, indeed, the Aryans had turned up.
This is a view Gandhi maintained throughout his life.
No. He only went crazy and started babbling nonsense after Bhai Parmanand persuaded him to give up sex.
In 1908, he argued that the British were able to establish themselves in India only because the Indians assisted them.
That was obvious. The Brits provided a service for a price. Alan Octavian Hume had set up the Congress party because he thought smart Indians would be able to take over more and more of the administration so as to make the country richer. A day might come when it could afford its own Navy to protect its shores.
He writes that ‘in order to become rich all at once’ the Indians welcomed the British ‘with open arms’.
Gujarati 'banyans' like himself did do so. That's why his family- originally deputy Diwans, got promoted to Diwans because Pax Britannica meant merchants, rather than warriors, could head the administration of the smaller princely states.
In the autumn of 1946, Gandhi was still hoping that Nehru understood – or could be made to understand – the importance of khadi.
It had no importance. Congress wasn't gaining any extra votes because of it.
Gandhi says: ‘We shall have full freedom only when our uncrowned king Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues in the Interim Government devote themselves to the service of the poor as people expect them to do.’ He quotes Nehru as having called khadi the ‘livery of our freedom’.
Livery is worn by servants. It was true that Nehru & Co were pretending to be 'servants of the people' and that they wore khadi because it was shitty and thus a sort of penitential hairshirt, but that was just for publicity purposes.
In May 1947, Gandhi pleads for government workers to ‘forget their quarrels and disputes over ideologies and start learning and teaching spinning, khadi work and village industries’. If they commit to this new kind of education, Gandhi expresses confidence that ‘in five years India will be a leading country in Asia’.
He had become wholly irrelevant.
But, over the course of 1947, it became increasingly clear that Gandhi was not going to win the argument.
He had lost the argument in 1937, when Congress administrations tried his 'Basic Education' and khaddar schemes. They were money pits. Voters rebelled.
In June, he bemoaned the situation, calling the other independence leaders ‘selfish’.
It was Churchill whose selfishness had prevented Japan conquering India.
In November, Gandhi writes that if the village industries are neglected in an independent India,
i.e. if they are not subsidized so as to produce shitty stuff
‘we will be acting like a man who remembers God in sorrow and forgets Him when He showers [us in] happiness.’
By then, despairing of the weavers, Gandhi was reaching out to atheists and conducting their inter-caste marriages.
Later that month, he confesses that ‘talk of khadi and village industries does not interest people any more.’
It never had. But there was a time when Gandhi could deliver for wealthy or otherwise important people. Had he not insisted on turning his various schemes into money-pits, he could have been a money-provider to the Party rather than a drain on its resources. His financiers- Birlas, Bajajs, Sarabhais, etc.- wanted to take over British industrial conglomerates and Nehru was the man to help them. Gandhi's acolyte, Vinobha Bhave, agreed to wander around in the countryside while Nehru & Co took charge of the money and the modern sector.
‘I know that khadi and all allied activities have slackened because we have achieved swaraj,’ Gandhi writes, ‘India will get what is ordained for her. What can we do?’
Die. Don't sleep naked with little girls. Just fucking die already.
In the days and weeks leading up to his death in January 1948, Gandhi began suggesting a new political system designed to empower the villages – the Panchayati Raj.
Which the villages were welcome to implement themselves. On the other hand, unless you empower a person to defecate, he won't even be able to fart. This proves that it wasn't me who farted because you did not empower me to do so.
Representative democracy could not be relied upon to integrate the economy and religion into a system that unites the need to survive with the need to spiritually thrive.
Representative democracy is welcome to insist on the separation of Church and State. Spirituality can thrive anywhere.
But, before his alternative political system could be elaborated, much less implemented, Gandhi was assassinated.
Even if he had lived to the age of ten thousand years, it could never have been implemented. Also there was nothing to 'elaborate'. Gandhi believed every village should be self-sufficient. Trade and exchange should be discouraged. Obviously, if some nice invaders turned up, everybody should surrender immediately. Sadly, Hindus wouldn't surrender to Muslims who were their own cousins. They insisted on overlords of a different race.
Just a few weeks earlier, in December 1947, Gandhi had lamented that ‘the main implication of khadi’ was not grasped by the independence movement. He said he had ‘no doubt’ that khadi is ‘more important than ever if we are to have freedom’ for ‘the masses of the villagers of India’.
Because Indians aren't like British or American people who have freedom because they can kill any invader who wants to enslave them.
‘Through khadi,’ Gandhi struggled ‘to establish supremacy of man’ over machine. He strove for equality of all men and women, and he strove ‘to attain subservience of capital under labour in place of the insolent triumph of capital over labour’.
But, more important than khadi was giving up sex. Only once everybody has given up sex and quietly starved to death will anybody experience true Swaraj.
So, Gandhi saw varna as the way to discipline capital so that it served life.
Nobody, not even Gandhi, saw anything so utterly demented.
But his vision for the role of the varna system was always quixotic.
It was ignorant.
Indians, including Nehru, embraced economic modernisation. As Nehru put it, he felt there was ‘no reason’ why millions of Indians should not have ‘comfortable up-to-date homes where they can lead a cultured existence’. This was to be achieved with electricity, trade, modern transportation and heavy industry, not with a return to traditional village crafts.
Lots of crafts had disappeared- e.g. the production of Wootz steel. Poverty has that effect.
Gandhi left open the possibility that, if Indians felt it good and necessary, then they could add new professions beyond the traditional crafts.
e.g. putting on a Gandhi cap and stealing public money
He recognised that political decision-making is difficult
It isn't. Implementing decisions may be difficult if you have a shitty administration.
and requires capacities and specialties that are not easily cultivated in people.
No. Learning to fight is difficult more particularly if it involves learning to fly planes or pilot submarines. Queuing up to get hit on the head or to go to jail is easy but useless.
In 1930, Gandhi had written that, while all faiths ‘constitute a revelation of Truth’, they are all ‘imperfect and liable to error’.
He was wrong. You may have faith that such and such a text is part and parcel of Divine Revelation or that such and such doctrine is the Truth. But that faith is not itself either revelation or truth. An imperfect faith is one which easily disappears. One may say faith was misplaced or that you erroneously believed somebody acted in good faith but that is a different matter. The fact is Gandhi was stupid and ignorant. But, for a time, some people found it profitable to give him money or to support him in other ways.
He suggested that this stems from the fact that, while ‘the soul is one’, the ‘bodies which she animates are many’.
Gandhi believed in reincarnation. He should have said, one particular soul animates many bodies over its cycle of lives. However, according to Advaita, the particular soul is just an 'amsa' or limb of the universal soul..
Since we cannot ‘reduce the number of bodies’, faith in the unity will ‘partake of human imperfection’.
Human faith will partake of human perfection or imperfection whether or not there is one or many bodies.
Embodied human beings will put their faith ‘into such language as they can command’, and their words are interpreted by other imperfect beings. Everyone will think themselves right, but ‘it is not impossible that everyone is wrong’. This produces a need for tolerance – not an ‘indifference towards one’s own faith’, but a ‘purer love for it’.
Sadly, Gandhi was very intolerant of the views of others unless they told him to fuck off in which case he could become very tolerant. But if you move around collecting money for your crackpot schemes you have to operate in this way. Say 'if you don't give me money you will burn for all eternity in Hell!' If the dude beats you then you should say 'I respect your point of view. You are truly sweet and beloved of God. Bye bye.' That way he stops beating you and you can go off in search of another sucker.
In the spirit of this view, Gandhi often described himself as one who ‘experiments’ with truth.
He told stupid lies because he was a stupid liar. The odd thing was that, a lot of the time, his stupid lies were less mischievous than the ones others were spouting. The plain truth is, the Raj was a blessing, or could be made so. Pretending it was the source of all evil left India less able to defend or feed itself by the Nineteen Sixties.
For Indians to have true swaraj,
they would have to be able to defend their country. But this meant learning to fight and raising taxes for guns and ammo.
they must have the education necessary not merely to understand the reasoning behind Gandhi’s economic model,
there was none. It was shit.
but to participate themselves in reforming that model based on their own understanding of truth.
Gandhi's understanding of 'truth' was that it was any shit which bubbled up inside his brain.
They must be able to think for themselves about whether all Indians should perform the manual crafts.
The answer was no. Don't be stupid. Gandhi was merely engaged in political theater when he wasn't running a personality cult. However, Gandhi could deliver for the richer or more influential of his supporters. That's why he had salience.
They must be able to develop views about which professions are necessary and which are unnecessary.
Talking bollocks was unnecessary but everybody wanted to do it.
Gandhi’s desire to empower Indian citizens to rule themselves led him to
surrender unilaterally to the Brits and go quietly to jail from time to time
allow India’s citizens freedom to work in additional professions, provided they practise them out of love rather than greed.
Gandhi loved talking bollocks. Unlike other such charlatans, he wasn't greedy for more and more Rolls Royce limousines. Still, his ashram was a money-pit and so he had to pretend to be a politician so as to get money.
That proposal came with risks of its own. If one varna contains both those who depend exclusively on the traditional crafts and those who perform additional professions, this could lead to hierarchy within it.
If one guy in a family gets a well paid job while his siblings choose to remain idle, sooner or later the guy with the money becomes their superior. They have to pretend to love and respect him while making excuses for not doing what he tells them to do.
This is especially likely if those who perform additional professions are able to derive additional income from those professions.
Dorman Smith wanted to return England to Feudalism so that serfs couldn't earn extra money by working in factories or setting up businesses.
At points, Gandhi suggests that those who earn additional income from additional professions could serve as ‘trustees’, retaining some control over the wealth they gain from their additional professions, provided that they use this wealth to benefit others.
In other words, rich peeps should give Gandhi their surplus cash.
This would leave some economic and political inequalities intact. Over time, it could lead to the reemergence of caste.
England did not have a caste system. The serfs had been freed. That's why Dorman-Smith was so cheesed off.
Gandhi ultimately tasks the poor with preventing the varna system from ossifying into one of caste.
But this was best done by everybody giving up sex. There can be no hereditary wealth or occupation if nobody has babies.
To perform this role, they must acquire the advanced civic education necessary to engage in satyagraha,
but not sex
and that in turn is possible only insofar as they are able to earn a living through the crafts.
Fuck that! Let them starve to death! That way they will be too weak to have sex.
This was an enormous responsibility to place upon the shoulders of ordinary workers.
Don't have sex. Starve to death. If the Japanese invade, surrender immediately. That's your responsibility.
The varna system can resist lapsing into a system of caste only when
nobody has sex. That way there will be no babies who might inherit wealth or an occupation.
it is possible for the workers to consistently become spiritually learned and to remain spiritually learned across time.
till they starve to death.
For Gandhi, it is only when the poor gain knowledge that they ‘become strong’ and ‘learn how to free themselves’.
by dying.
Nothing less will do, because the varna system is too fragile to maintain itself by lesser means.
This nutter doesn't get that there will be no 'varna' or other class hierarchy if nobody has babies.
Those who view Gandhi merely as a critic of violence,
He tried to recruit soldiers during the Great War and had no objection to the Indian Army defending Kashmir from the Pakistanis.
hierarchical caste and untouchability miss what is meant here by freedom and equality.
It means not having sex and then quietly starving to death.
This is about securing for every Indian the economic prerequisites for spiritual growth.
Which everybody already has. Gandhi himself had been having sex and practicing as a lawyer before deciding to set up as a 'Mahatma'.
For Gandhi, it is only in a world where everyone practices the crafts – and everyone can learn them at home from their parents – that there will be time enough for every person to develop their own spiritual praxis.
In which case, only artisans would be Gurus or Mahatmas or Maharishis or (like Ambedkar) Boddhisattvas.
In such a system, there is clearly observance of hereditary occupation, and therefore of varna.
But if nobody has sex, there won't be any heredity.
Gandhi failed to establish this system,
He succeeded in making Congress supreme in Hindu majority areas.
and no alternative system has arisen to perform the same function. The poor are still compelled to trade away their time in the struggle for survival,
Some are. Others might beg or steal or rely on Government handouts.
while the rich waste the time they take from the poor.
Studbebaker may not be rich, but he has wasted his time like nobody's business.
But Gandhi tried to solve this problem, and many of us do not even try.
No. Gandhi needed money for his crackpot schemes and thus had to dabble in politics. He was successful because he could do very useful stuff for rich or important people who supported him. When this ability of his declined, he was abandoned. The Hindus put up with him because they thought the Muslims were stupid enough to be taken in by his shite. However, Jinnah proved better able to appeal to his co-religionists and thus was able to create Pakistan. Gandhi created nothing. Congress became the ancestral property, that too by primogeniture, of Motilal Nehru's descendants. The Mahatmas own grandsons have been unable to get elected. Still, some of them have made a bit of money by pretending to be Gandhian. Sadly, they have not abstained from sex. Not till everybody gives up sex will hereditary privilege or inequality disappear.
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