The philosophy of the Charkha

WE owe it to poet Rabindranath Tagore’s sharp criticism of Mahatma Gandhi’s “exclusive and excessive love of the Charkha” that the Mahatma has in the latest issue of Young India attempted a philosophical defence of his position. We cannot do better than put this defence in the Mahatma’s own words. He writes: “The poet thinks that the Charkha is calculated to bring about a deathlike sameness in the nation and thus imagining he would shun it if he could. The truth is that the Charkha is intended to realise the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads. Behind the magnificent and kaleidoscopic variety, one discovers in nature a unity of purpose, design and form which is equally unmistakable. No two men are absolutely alike, not even twins, and yet there is much that is indispensably common to all mankind... We need not debate whether what we see is unreal, and whether the real behind the unreality is what we do not see. Let both be equally real, if you will. All I say is that there is a sameness, identity or oneness behind the multiplicity and variety And so do I hold that behind that variety of occupations there is indispensable sameness also of occupation. Is not agriculture common to the vast majority of mankind? Even so was spinning common not long ago to a vast majority of mankind? Just as both prince and peasant must eat and clothe themselves, so must both labour for supplying their primary wants.” It has scarcely ever been our lot to come across a more glaring instance of the confusion of thought caused in an extraordinary clear and logical mind by the obsession with an idea.