THE DOCTRINE OF CHARKA
[The opening session of the National College, Calcutta, under the auspices of the Board of Education, formed by Srijuts Chittaranjan Das, Jitendralal Banerjee and other non-co-operation leaders, took place on Friday the 4th February 1921. In opening this College, Mahatma Gandhi addressed the students and professors, from which the following is culled.]
We have sufficiently talked about Charka and how it is going to free India—how a nation that came through the Charka to this country as traders, merchants and travellers settled themselves down as rulers with our co-operation, and how non-co-operation and by means of that very Indian Charka they will go back to their own country if they cannot live as fellow-citizens in India.
There are peoples who say—"how can you expect the Mahomedans to be non-violent." How, I do not want to speak out. I want the Charka itself to speak out. The whole Europe will know when we place these Charkas in our mosques. Something like 800 Charkas had been ordered for the mosques so that the people who come there should be able to produce Indian yarn with which Indian clothes should be woven by Indian hands in Indian homes to clothe our nakedness or at least to provide home-spun shrouds for us. Thus every revolution of the Charka I can assure you, will bring the success of this bloodless revolution the nearer every day. That is the doctrine of Charka. Therefore I ask you to work up this doctrine which will be a great advertisement both of our determination to win freedom, and if possible, through peaceful means.
If you are determined to have the freedom of your country, if you want to see the cessation of our slavery in which we are living for close upon two centuries, it requires from you a peaceful battle—the battle of the Charka.
Y. I.—9th Feb. 1921.
THE MESSAGE OF THE CHARKA
The Indian Social Reformer has published a note from a correspondent in praise of the spinning-wheel. The correspondent in the course of his remarks hopes, that the movement will be so organised that the spinners may not weary of it. Mr. Amritlal Thakkar in his valuable note (published in the Servant of India) on the experiment which he is conducting in Kathiawad, says that the charkha has been taken up by the peasant women. They are not likely to weary, for to them it is a source of livelihood to which they were used before. It had dried up, because there was no demand for their yarn. Townspeople who have taken to spinning may weary, if they have done so as a craze or a fashion. Those only will be faithful, who consider it their duty to devote their spare hours to doing what is to-day the most useful work for the country. The third class of spinners are the school-going children. I expect the greatest results from the experiment of introducing the charkha in the National Schools. If it is conducted on scientific lines by teachers who believe in the charkha as the most efficient means of making education available to the seven and a half lacs of villages in India, there is not only no danger of weariness, but every prospect of the nation being able to solve the problem of financing mass education without any extra taxation and without having to fall back upon immoral sources of revenue.
The writer in the Indian Social Reformer suggests, that an attempt should be made to produce finer counts on the spinning-wheel. I may assure him that the process has already begun, but it will be some time before we arrive at the finish of the Dacca muslin or even twenty counts. Seeing that hand-spinning was only revived last September, and India began to believe in it somewhat only in December, the progress it has made may be regarded as phenomenal.