How To Begin

Each person can examine all the articles of food, clothing and other things that he uses from day to day, and replace foreign makes or city makes by those produced by the villagers in their homes or fields with the simple inexpensive tools they can easily handle and mend. This replacement will be itself an education of great value and a solid beginning. The next step will be opened out to him of itself. For instance, say, the beginner has been hitherto using a tooth-brush made in a Bombay Factory. He wants to replace it with a village brush. He is advised to use a babul twig. If he has weak teeth or is toothless, he has to crush one end of it with a rounded stone or a hammer on a hard surface. The other end he slits with a knife and uses the halves as tongue-scrapers. He will find these brushes to be cheaper and much cleaner than the very unhygienic factory made tooth brushes. The city-made tooth powder he naturally replaces with equal parts of clean, finely ground wood-charcoal and  clean salt. He will replace mill cloth with village-spun Khadi, and mill-husked rice and hand-husked, unpolished rice, and white sugar with village-made gud. These I have taken merely as samples.

Harijan: Jan. 25, 1935.