Gandhiana

Sunday evening is shutters down at the Gym. So, random browsing at the library seemed like a good timepass idea. I took a “shared auto” to reach closer to the destination. “shared autos” run between important bus stop’s in the city, picking up passengers waiting for the bus. Its almost cost competitive with the bus, maybe one or two rupees extra, for which you get an immediate ride (need not wait for the bus) and a guaranteed seat (may have to stand in the bus). I like these shared economy solutions ! For a lot of people though, going in a bus or a shared auto seems to be a “prestige” issue. But i have no such reservations, and i try to spare ourselves of more fumes and traffic, as much as possible. On the walk to the library, i stopped over at the Shravan cafe, to enjoy a cup of filter coffee.

“Gandhiana” is a section of our local library devoted to Gandhian studies. I picked up at random, “Economics of the spinning wheel: Development without destruction” by Nandini Joshi (impressive background). After reading the first few pages, i realized that Charkha (the spinning wheel) is not a just about an instrument of production, but has an a lot of philosophy behind it, touching the topics of village economics, self-reliance, local markets, local production etc. In Nandini Joshi’s own words:

“The charkha is an economic concept, being an instrument of production; nonetheless it is the only instrument of production — except for its counterpart, the spinning machine — which has profound political, social, psychological, cultural, environmental and, above all, ethical implications. Gandhi conceived it in its entirety and therefore far more intensively, which had a vital bearing on the various aspects of an individual’s as well as a society’s growth.”

Photo by Margaret Bourke-White for Life Magazine, 1946.

Now, that’s interesting ! Iam curious to find out how Charkha could symbolize so many aspects. It seems to me, Charkha could be an emblem for distributed, localized, “small is beautiful” type of economy. I have checked out the book to take home, and will keep you all posted if i learn anything interesting.

While at Gandhiana, i remembered out of the blue that i read a book long time back, which had a passage on implications of Gandhi’s philosophy for environment. I searched out the book “Gandhi — A sublime failure” by S.S.Gill, and looked for relevant passages, and jotted them down on a paper. By the way, iam neither a Gandhian nor a non-Gandhian. I haven’t read enough about his philosophy nor thought through the full implications of his philosophy. But the passages below are about Gandhi’s views on ecology, and i have no problem relating to these views. I think he saw through the problems of hyper-industrialization decades ago. Here are the relevant passages from the book:

Gandhi was the first great ecologist of the twentieth century. His instinctive preference for an austere way of life and limitation of wants had an important ecological dimension. Then there was his innate reverence for life in all its manifestations. His strict adherence to vegetarianism owed, its origin to this view. Explaining his rationale for ‘cow worship’ he wrote, “Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives .. [it meant] protection of the whole dumb creation of God”.

Here again it was a question of clash of civilizations. (..) The western man treated the earth as his personal estate, and plundered and ravaged it for his pleasure. How far ahead of his times Gandhi was may be seen from the fact that it was only in 1962 that the publication of Rachel Carson’s ’silent spring’ and the club of Rome’s ‘The limits to growth’ ten years later, shocked the western world about the horrendous consequences of poisoning the earth’s environment and depleting its non-renewable resources in its blind pursuit of affluence. (..)

When people criticized Gandhi for his ‘villagism’, he said, “It is not an attempt to return to the ignorant dark ages but it is an attempt to see beauty in voluntary simplicity, poverty and slowness”. In 1927 he told Saklatwala, the communist MP from Britain, that he “detested the multiplication of wants and machinery, the mad desire to destroy distance and time, to increase animal appetites, and go to the end of the Earth for their satisfaction”. For him, the sole object of production was to satisfy needs and not wants. In a remarkably perceptive statement he said “The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every mans greed“. This should serve as a motto for all ecologists. It is well known that he just would not allow any waste. He scribbled notes on the vacant space of used post cards, incoming letters, undistributed leaflets, and any other scrap of paper. He used his pencils down to the stumps. Whereas every country is racing madly to raise the living standards of its people through sustained economic growth, Gandhi said in 1928,

“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If the entire nation of three hundred million people took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locust”.

This is a striking insight, and it shows how well Gandhi understood the dynamics of modern industrial civilization and its prognosis.