spinning
- naga nandini
- Feb 6, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 21, 2020
why do I spin?
I can merely show the hidden possibilities of old and even worn-out things. - Gandhi
Spinning cotton is about drafting, or pulling apart the cotton fibre, twisting to make it strong and then winding to draft the next part. I’m using a Book Charkha that we got from Bhuj. The machine itself is not finely made, the wood is new and somewhat rough. If I use it for a few years, it will be honed to a better finish. It is quite a simple contraption with two pulleys, which wind a spindle. This is supposed to be an improvement on the simple Takli.
Several times I feel as if I’m wrestling with the charkha, and it stubbornly refuses to listen to me. Of course, it is I who have to listen to it. Its early days yet, but I think I have got the hang of drawing and twisting. The charkha I have seems temperamental, but that’s because I still need to get to know it better. I have to feel that it is indeed an extension of my body, before I can use it comfortably. The recipe of following instructions from a website or video doesn’t quite work.
So back to the question, - why do I spin?
Here are 10 reasons why:
I want to understand what Gandhi actually meant when he said that everyone must spin
As an urban academic, I’m not spinning for a livelihood, so it is my long term engagement with material, without any outcome in mind
It is very simple and yet very complex to spin and quite addictive
It is one way to slip away from the pitter-patter of the mind – when I’m spinning I have to focus so hard that all other thoughts fly out
I believe that when working with something like spinning, as one acquires some expertise, it is possible for one’s mind to slip ‘upwards’ into another sphere, which is not the mind or the intellect. The closest word I can get to this is Flow. And this is where thinking of a higher order happens.
Gandhi had many reasons for choosing spinning as a regular activity that could unify a country. What relevance does it hold today, for the creators of today?
Tagore felt that spinning was not a creative activity, that it was repetitive and mindless, but could that very mindlessness lead to creative thinking? When the mind is freed from outcomes and logical thought, can it not roam more freely?
There is a frugal aesthetic in the charkha and the spun yarn, which is extremely simple and so asks me to step in closer to examine it more closely. The ritual of setting up and dismantling every time is like a miniature of some larger work that I don’t have the means to do – like building a mud house or ploughing a field or assembling a robot.
For students I believe there is humility in doing something very simple, regularly and acquiring some level of expertise. It will connect students to the world of craft where every stage of production is slow – it will help them to think about the opposites – labour versus work
Spinning somehow connects me in an intangible way when I’m reading anything by Gandhi.
I’m reading the conversation between Gandhi and Tagore. The excerpts below are taken from the book The Mahatma and the Poet (Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941. New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 2005.)
Tagore: But emotion by itself, like fire only consumes its fuel and reduces it to ashes; it has no creative power. The intellect of man must busy itself, with patience, with skill, with foresight, in using this fire to melt that which is hard and difficult into the object of its desire. We neglected to rouse our intellectual forces, and so were unable to make use of this surging emotion of ours to create any organisation of permanent value.
Gandhi: If we would gain swaraj we must stand for Truth as we know it, at any cost. I am not sure that even now educated India has assimilated the truth underlying the charkha. He must not mistake the surface dirt for the substance underneath.
Tagore: The loss which is incurred by this continual deadening of our mind cannot be made good by any other contrivance.
Gandhi: I do indeed ask the poet and the sage to spin the wheel as a sacrament.
Tagore: The call to make the country our own by dint of our own creative power, is a great call. It is not merely inducing the people to take up some external mechanical exercise; for man's life is not in making cells of uniform pattern like the bee, nor in incessant weaving of webs like the spider; his greatest powers are within, and on these are his chief reliance.
Gandhi: The spinning wheel is the reviving draught for the millions of our dying countrymen and country-women. 'Why should I who have no need to work for food, spin?' may be the question asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the spoilation of my countrymen. Trace the course of every pice that finds its way into your pocket, and you will realise the truth of what I write.
Tagore: We must learn the truth of love in all its purity, but the science and art of building up swaraj is a vast subject; its pathways are difficult to traverse and take time. For this task, aspiration and emotion must be there, but no less must study and thought be there likewise. For it, the economist must think, the mechanic must labour, the educationist and statesman must teach and contrive. In a word, the mind of the country must exert itself in all directions. Above all, the spirit of Inquiry throughout the whole country must be kept intact and untrammelled, its mind not made timid or inactive by compulsion open or secret.
Gandhi: To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages. God created man to work for his food, and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty percent of India are compulsorily thieves half the year. Is it any wonder if India has become one vast prison? Hunger is the argument that is driving India to the spinning wheel. The call of the spinning wheel is the noblest of all. Because it is the call of love. And love is swaraj.
Tagore: Why should he not say: "Come ye from all sides and be welcome.
Let all the forces of the land be brought into action, for then alone shall the country awake. Freedom is in complete awakening, in full self-expression." But his call came to one narrow field alone. To one and all he simply says: "Spin and weave, spin and weave".
Gandhi: I do want growth. I do want self-determination, I do want freedom, but I want all these for the soul. I doubt if the steel age is an advance upon the flint age. I am indifferent. It is the evolution of the soul to which the intellect and all our faculties have to be devoted.
Tagore: Swaraj is not concerned with our apparel only—it cannot be established on cheap clothing; its foundation is in the mind, which, with its diverse powers and its confidence in those powers, goes on all the time creating swaraj for itself.
Gandhi: It was our love of foreign cloth that ousted the wheel from its position of dignity. Therefore I consider it a sin to wear foreign cloth. I must confess that I do not draw a sharp or any distinction between economics and ethics. Economics that hurt the moral well being of an individual or a nation are immoral and therefore sinful. Thus the economics that permit one country to prey upon another are immoral. It is sinful to buy and use articles made by sweated labour. It is sinful to eat American wheat and let my neighbour the grain dealers starve for want of custom. Similarly it is sinful for me to wear the latest finery of Regent Street, when I know that if I had but worn the things woven by the neighbouring spinners and weavers, that would have clothed me, and fed and clothed than. On the knowledge of my sin bursting upon me, I must consign the foreign garments to the flames and thus purify myself, and thenceforth rest content with the rough khadi made by my neighbours. On knowing that my neighbours may not having given up the occupation, take kindly to the spinning wheel, I must take it up myself and thus make it popular.
Tagore: But, it may be argued, does not external work react on the mind? It does, only if it has its constant suggestions to our intellect, which is the master, and not merely its commands for our muscles, which are slaves. In this clerk ridden country, for instance, we all know that the routine of clerkship is not mentally stimulating. By doing the same thing day after day mechanical skill may be acquired; but the mind like a mill-turning bullock will be kept going round and round a narrow range of habit.
Gandhi: A plea for the spinning wheel is a plea for recognising the dignity of labour.
Tagore: One thing is certain, that the all-embracing poverty which has overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the neglect of science. Nothing can be more undignified drudgery than that man's knowing should stop dead and his doing go on for ever.
Gandhi: So far is this from truth that I have asked no one to abandon his calling, but on the contrary to adorn it by giving every day only thirty minutes to spinning as sacrifice for the whole nation. I have indeed asked the famishing to spin for a living and the half starved farmer to spin during his leisure hours to supplement his slender resources. If the Poet spun half an hour daily his poetry would gain in richness. For it would then represent the poor man's wants and woes in a more forcible manner than now.
Tagore: As a matter of fact we have the freedom to spin our own thread on our own charkha. If we have omitted to avail ourselves of it, that is because the thread so spun cannot compete with the product of the power mill.
Gandhi: Machinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace the necessary human labour. An improved plough is a good thing. But if by some chance one man could plough up by some mechanical invention of his the whole of the land of India and control all the agricultural produce and if the millions had no other occupation, they would starve, and being idle, they would become dunces, as many have already become.
Tagore: It may be argued that spinning is also a creative act. But that is not so: for, by turning its wheel man merely becomes an appendage of the charkha', that is to say, he but does himself what a machine might have done: he converts his living energy into a dead turning movement. The machine is solitary, because being devoid of mind it is sufficient unto itself and knows nothing outside itself. Likewise alone is the man who confines himself to spinning, for the thread produced by his charkha is not for him a thread of necessary relationship with others. He has no need to think of his neighbour,—like the silkworm his activity is centred round himself. He becomes a machine, isolated, companionless.
Gandhi: The Poet lives in a magnificent world of his own creation—his world of ideas. I am a slave of somebody else's creation—the spinning wheel. The Poet makes his gopis dance to the tune of his flute. I wander after my beloved Sita, the charkha and seek to deliver her from the ten-headed monster from Japan, Manchester, Paris etc. The Poet is an inventor—he creates, destroys and recreates. I am an explorer and having discovered a thing I must cling to it. The Poet presents the world with new and attractive things from day to day. I can merely show the hidden possibilities of old and even worn-out things.
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