Mahatmaji and foreign clothes

90. ETHIC OF DESTRUCTION

The reader, I am sure, will appreciate my sharing with him the following pathetic and beautiful letter from Mr. Andrews:

I know that your burning of foreign cloth is with the idea of helping the poor, but I feel that there you have gore wrong. If you succeed in Boycotting all, or a greater part, of foreign cloth, it seems to Erie self evident that the price of mill-made cloth will rise and it will hit the poor. But there is besides a subtle appeal to racial feeling in that word “foreign” which day by

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day seeds to me to need checking and not fomenting. The picture of you lighting that great pile, including beautiful fabrics, shocked me intensely. We seem to be losing sight of the great beautiful world to which we belong and concentrating selfishly on India, and this must (I fear) lead back to the old bad selfish nationalism. If so we get into the vicious circle from which Europe is now trying so desperately to escape. But I cannot argue it out. I can only say again, that it shocked me and seemed to me a form almost of violence; and yet 1 knots how violence is abhorrent to you. I do not at all like this question of foreign cloth being made into a religion.

I was supremely happy when you were dealing great giant. olows at the great fundamental moral evils, drunkenness, drug-taking. un-touchability, race arrogance, etc., and when you were, with such wonderful and beautiful tenderness, dealing with the hideous vice of prostitution. But lighting bonfires of foreign cloth and telling people it is a religious sin to wear it, destroying in the fire the noble handiwork of one’s fellowmen and women, one’s brothers and sisters abroad, saying it would be “defiling” to wear it I cannot tell you how different all this appears to me. Do you know I almost fear now to wear the khaddar that you have given me, lest I should appear to be judging other people as a Pharisee would, saying, “I am holier than thou!” I never felt like this before.

You know how, when anything that you do hurts me, I must cry out to you and this has hurt me.

I wrote The Modern Review articles Which I have enclosed with such eager joy, because l felt certain that I had found your own life’s meaning. But now my mind cries out to you that you are doing something violent, distorted, unnatural. . . . You know that any love is stronger than over, just as your love for your brother was when you felt he was doing something wrong. Do tell me what you mean. What you said in Young India about burning¹ did not convince me a bit

It is so like him. Whenever he feels hurt over anything I have done (and this is by no means the first such occasion), he deluges me with letters without waiting for an answer. For it is love speaking to love, not arguing. It is the outpouring of an anguished heart. And so it has been over the burning of foreign clothes.

What Mr. Andrews has put in loving language, correspondents already out of tune with me have written in coarse, angry and even vulgar words. Mr. Andrews’ being words of love and sorrow have

¹  Vide “Notes”, 28-7-1921.

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gone deep down in me and command a full answer, whereas the angry ones I was obliged to lay aside save for a passing reference. Mr. Andrews’ being non-violent, charged with love, have told. The others being violent, charged with malice, took no effect and would have evoked angry retorts, if I was capable of or disposed to such retorts. Mr. Andrews’ letter is a type of non-violence we need in order to win swaraj quickly.

This is however by the way. I remain just as convinced as ever of the necessity of burning. There is no emphasis in the process on race feeling. I would have done precisely the same thing in the sacred and select family or friendly circles. In all I do or advise, the infallible test I apply is, whether the particular action will hold good in regard to the dearest and the nearest. The teaching of the faith I hold dear is unmistakable and unequivocal in the matter. I must be the same to friend and foe. And it is this conviction which makes me so sure of so many of my acts which often puzzle friends.

I remember having thrown into the sea a pair of beautiful field-glasses, because they were a constant bone of contention between a dear friend¹ and myself. He felt the hesitation at first but he saw the right of the destruction of a beautiful and costly thing, a present withal from a friend. Experience shows that the richest gifts must be destroyed without compensation and hesitation if they hinder one’s moral progress. Will it not be held a sacred duty to consign to the flames most precious heirlooms, if they are plague-infected? I can remember having broken to bits, when a young man, the loved bangles of my own dear wife, because they were matter of difference between us. And if I remember right, they were a gift from her mother. I did it, not out of hate but out of love—ignorant, I now see in my ripe age. The destruction helped us and brought us nearer.

If the emphasis were on all foreign things, it would be racial, parochial and wicked. The emphasis is on all foreign cloth. The restrictions make all the difference in the world. I do not want to shut out English lever watches or the beautiful Japanese lacquer work. But I must destroy all the choicest wines of Europe, even though they might have been prepared and preserved with all the most exquisite care and attention. Satan’s snares are most subtly laid and they are the most tempting, when the dividing line between right and wrong is so

¹ Kallenbach, a German associate of Gandhiji; vide An Autobiography, Part IV, Ch. XXX.

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thin as to be imperceptible. But the line is there all the same, rigid and inflexible. Any crossing of it may mean certain death.

India is racial today. It is with the utmost effort, that I find it possible to keep under check the evil passions of the people. The general body of the people are filled with ill will, because they are weak and hopelessly ignorant of the way to shed their weakness. I am transferring the ill will from men to things.

Love of foreign Cloth has brought foreign domination, pauperism and what is worst, shame to many a home. The reader may not know, that not long ago hundreds of “untouchable” weavers of Kathiawar having found their calling gone, became sweepers for the Bombay municipality. And the life of these men has become so difficult that many lose their children and become physical and moral wrecks; some are helpless witnesses of the shame of their daughters and even their wives. The reader may not know that many women of this class in Gujarat for want of domestic occupation have taken to work on public roads, where, under pressure of one sort or another, they are obliged to sell their honour. The reader may not know that the proud weavers of the Punjab, for want of occupation, not many years ago took to the sword, and were instrumental in killing the proud and innocent Arabs at the bidding of their officers, and not for the sake of their country but for the sake of their livelihood….

Is it now any wonder, if I consider it a sin to touch foreign cloth? Will it not be a sin for a man with a very delicate digestive apparatus to eat rich foods? Must he not destroy them or give them away? I know what I would do with rich foods, if I had a son lying in bed who must not eat them but would still gladly have them. In order to wean him from the hankering, I would, though able to digest them myself, refrain from eating them and destroy them in his presence, so that the sin of eating may be borne home to him.

If destruction of foreign cloth be a sound proposition from the highest moral standpoint, the possibility of a rise in the price of swadeshi cloth need not frighten us. Destruction is the quickest method of stimulating production. By one supreme effort and swift

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destruction, India has to be awakened from her torpor and enforced idleness. Here is what Mr. Allen, the author of the Assam Gazetteer, wrote in 1905 of Kamrup:

Of recent years the use of imported clothing has been coming into favour, —an innovation which has little to recommend it, as the time formerly spent at the loom is not as a rule assigned to any other useful occupation.

The Assamese, to whom I have spoken, realize the truth of these words to their cost. Foreign cloth to India is like foreign matter to the body. The destruction of the former is as necessary for the health of India as of the latter for the health of the body. Once grant the immediate necessity of swadeshi, and there is no half-way house to destruction.

And for a firm believer in swadeshi, there need be no pharisaical self-satisfaction in wearing khadi. A Pharisee is a patron of virtue. The wearer of khadi from a swadeshi standpoint is like a man making use of his lungs. A natural and obligatory act has got to be performed, whether others do it out of impure motives or refrain altogether, as they do not believe in its necessity or utility.

Young India, l-9-1921 [Nobody can come closer to Mahatmaji, when defending his principle and practice.—db]

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