‘Back To The Village’

During my extensive Harijan tour last year, it was clearly borne in upon me that the way in a which we were carrying on our Khadi work was hardly enough either to universalize Khadi or to rejuvenate the villages. I say that it was confined to a very few, and that even those who used Khadi exclusively were under the impression that they need do nothing else and that they might use other things irrespective of how and where they were made. Khadi was thus becoming a life less symbol, and I saw that, if this state of things were allowed to go on, Khadi might even die of sheer inanition. It is not that a concentrated, intensive effort devoted exclusively to Khadi would not be conducive to success, but there was neither that concentration nor intensity. All did not give ALL their spare time to the Charkha or the Takli, and all had not taken to the exclusive use of Khadi - though their number was larger than that of the spinners. But the rest were all idle. There were multitudes of men with quantities of enforced leisure on their hands. That I saw was a state which could lead only to our undoing.

To Restore the Link

‘These people’, I said to myself, ‘could never win Swaraj. For, their involuntary and voluntary idleness made them a perpetual prey of exploiters, foreign and indigenous. Whether the exploiter was from outside or from the Indian cities, their state would be the same, they would have no Swaraj’. So, I said to myself: ‘Let these people be asked to do something else; if they will not interest themselves in Khadi, let them take up some work which used to be done by their ancestors, but which has of late died out.’ There were numerous things of daily use which they used to produce themselves not many years ago, but for which they now depend on the outer world. There were numerous things of daily use to the town-dweller for which he depended on the villagers, but which he now imports from cities. The moment the villagers decided to devote all their spare time to doing something useful and town-dwellers to use those village products, the snapped link between the villagers and the town-dwellers would be restored.

Plea for Self-sufficiency

As to which of the extinct or moribund village industries and crafts could be revived, we could not be sure until we sat down in the midst of the villages to investigate, to tabulate and classify. But I picked up two things of the most vital importance: articles of diet and articles of dress. Khadi was there. In the matter of articles of diet, we were fast losing our self-sufficiency. Only a few years ago, we pounded our own paddy and ground our own flour. Put aside for the time being the question of health. It is an indisputable fact that the flour mill and the rice mill have driven millions of women out of employment and deprived them of the means of eking out their income. Sugar is fast taking the place of jaggery, and ready-made articles of the diet, like biscuits and sweetmeats, are freely being imported into our villages. This means that all the village industries are gradually slipping out of the hands of the villager, who has become a producer of a raw material for the exploiter. He continually gives, and get little in a return. Even the little he gets for the raw material he produces, he gives back to the sugar merchant and the cloth merchant. His mind and body have become very much like those of the animals, his constant companions. When we come to think of it, we find that the villager of today is not even half so intelligent or resourceful as the villager of fifty years ago. For, whereas the former is reduced to a state of miserable dependence and idleness, the latter used his mind and body for all he needed and produced them at home. Even the village artisan today partakes of the resourcelessness that has overtaken the rest of the village. Go to the village carpenter and ask him to make a spinning wheel for you, go the village smith and ask him to make a spindle for you, you will be disappointed. This is a deplorable state of things.

Rendering Back to the Villages

This cry of ‘back to the village’, some critics say, is putting back the hands of the clock of progress. But is it really so? Is it going back to the village, or rendering back to it what belongs to it? I am not asking the city-dwellers to go to and live in the villages. But I am asking them to render unto the villagers what is due to them. Is there any single raw material that the city-dwellers can obtain expect from the villagers? If they cannot, why not teach him to work on it himself, as he used to before and as he would do now but for our exploiting inroads?

Q. Will not this programme swamp the Khadi programme which has yet to be fulfilled?

A. No Khadi cannot be moved from its central place. Khadi will be the sun of the whole industrial solar system. All the other industries will receive warmth and sustenance from the Khadi industry.

Q. What exactly are the industries we must revive or promote?

A. I have indicated the lines. We must promote every useful industry that was existent a short while ago, and the extinction of which has now resulted in unemployment.

Q. Have we to declare a boycott of the rice and the flour mills?

A. We have to declare no boycott, but we shall ask the people to husk their own rice and to grind their own flour, and we shall carry on persistent propaganda in favour of hand-pounded rice and hand-ground flour as better articles of diet from the point of view of health. Let us declare a boycott of idleness.

-Harijan: Dec. 7,1934