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Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India

Gandhi’s use of the spinning wheel was one of the most significant unifying elements of the nationalist movement in India. Spinning was seen as an economic and political activity that could bring together the diverse population of South Asia and allow the formerly elite nationalist movement to connect to the broader Indian population. This book looks at the politics of spinning both as a visual symbol and as a symbolic practice. It traces the genealogy of spinning from its early colonial manifestations in Company painting to its appropriation by the anticolonial movement. This complex of visual imagery and performative ritual had the potential to overcome labour, gender and religious divisions and thereby produce an accessible and effective symbol for the Gandhian anticolonial movement. By thoroughly examining all aspects of this symbol’s deployment, this book unpacks the politics of the spinning wheel and provides a model for the analysis of political symbols elsewhere. It also probes the successes of India’s particular anticolonial movement, making an invaluable contribution to studies in social and cultural history, as well as South Asian Studies. Rebecca M. Brown is visiting Associate Professor in Political Science and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, USA, researching colonial and post-independence South Asia. Her publications include Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009) and Asian Art (co-edited with Deborah S. Hutton, 2006).


Routledge Studies in South Asian History

The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India Edited by Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison

Radical Politics in Colonial Punjab Governance and sedition Shalini Sharma

Decolonization in South Asia Meanings of freedom in post-independence West Bengal, 1947–52 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India Exploring transgressions, contests and diversities Biswamoy Pati

Historiography and Writing Postcolonial India Naheem Jabbar

The State and Governance in India The congress ideal William F. Kuracina

Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities The England-returned Sumita Mukherjee Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal Symptoms of empire Ishita Pande

Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India Rebecca M. Brown


Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India

Rebecca M. Brown


First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Rebecca M. Brown All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Brown, Rebecca M. Gandhi’s spinning wheel and the making of India / Rebecca M. Brown. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in South Asian history ; 9) “Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada”—T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869-1948—Influence. 2. Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869–1948—Political and social views. 3. Spinning-wheel—Political aspects—India—History. 4. Spinning—Political aspects—India—History. 5. Painting—India—19th century. 6. Photography—India—History. 7. Symbolism in politics—India—History. 8. Nationalism—India—History. 9. India—History—Autonomy and independence movements. 10. India— Politics and government—1919-1947. I. Title. DS481.G3B76 2010 954.03’5092—dc22 2009050227 ISBN 0-203-85270-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 978–0–415–49431–1 (hbk) ISBN 978–0–203–85270–5 (ebk)


Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: spinning, anticolonial nationalism and the visual

vi vii ix

1

1 Action and identity: colonial representations of spinning

18

2 Capturing the wheel in motion: photography and spinning

40

3 Discovering spinning: towards Gandhi’s visual rhetoric

66

4 Gender and the modern charkha

86

5 National symbols: Gandhi and the spinning wheel Notes Bibliography Index

106 117 130 145


Figures

0.1 Anon., Weavers combing a warp and women reel ing and spinning, c. 1785, Madras 2 0.2 Vithalbhai Jhaveri, Kasturba Gandhi spinning, c. 1940 3 0.3 Prabhu Dayal, Conversation on Peace Between Gandhi and Irwin at Delhi/Suleh Charcha (Compromise Discussion), 1931 6 1.1 Anon., Woman spinning, c. 1830 19 1.2 Anon., ‘Spinning’, 1798–1804. Kolkata 29 1.3 Sona Kumari, Woman spinning, 1850–60 30 1.4 Anon., ‘Weaver and his Wife’, c. 1800 33 2.1 Anon., ‘Weavers. Hindoos. Delhi. (191)’, c. 1868–75 50 2.2 Anon., ‘A woman of Jeypore spinning’, c. 1890 54 2.3 Frederick Bremner, ‘A Kashmiri (Mahomedan) spinning’, c. 1890s 55 2.4 Anon., ‘Indian women spinning’, early twentieth century 57 2.5 Anon., Woman spinning, c. 1930s–1940s 60 2.6 Anon., Weavers’ courtyard with woman spinning, c. 1946 62 3.1 Staged group spinning demonstration, c. 1940 79 3.2 Women spinning at a meeting with Gandhi in Surat, 22 April 1930 81 3.3 Gandhi with J. B. Kripalani, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mani Behn Patel and others spinning at Wardha, Maharashtra, June 1936 82 4.1 Anon., Woman spinning with child, c. 1930s–1940s 87 4.2 Gandhi spinning at the house of the Raja of Kalakankar (near Allahabad), 14 November 1929 102 5.1 Margaret Bourke-White, Gandhi and spinning wheel, 1946 108 5.2 Gandhi, c. 1920–21 111


Acknowledgements

This book began with a generous invitation from my good friend and colleague Deepali Dewan to work with the collections at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and I think neither of us had any idea where the invitation would lead. That initial generosity proved to be the rule for the entirety of the development, research and writing of this book, whether I sat at the table in the Prints and Drawings room at the British Library, chatted over photographs with the staff at the Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, or shared pieces of the research with the scholarly community. Colleagues at Swansea University, Johns Hopkins, and around the world have assisted me in this project by providing critical and engaged commentary at various stages, and archivists, curators and librarians have pointed me in new and exciting directions as the work has progressed. Funding for this research came from a British Academy grant, with additional support provided by Swansea University’s Politics Department. Peter Rühe of the Gandhiserve Foundation in Berlin assisted me in numerous ways, whether through good conversation or answering questions about obscure photographs in the foundation’s collection. Varsha Das, S. K. Bhatnagar and the staff at the Gandhi Museum shared their extensive knowledge with me as I examined the visual material in their collection and worked to establish the timeline of the spinning wheel. The staff at both the Cambridge Centre of South Asia and Bradford’s National Media Museum spent valuable time and energy helping me sift through large volumes of photographs and films, and Jody Butterworth and others at the Prints and Drawings room in the Asian collections at the British Library helped me find key examples of spinning in their collections. Alan Finlayson, Terrell Carver and Dan Healey heard early versions of the central arguments of the book and in their responses fundamentally shaped the directions I pursued in my thinking and writing. Lisa Trivedi shared her extensive experience and knowledge with me towards the end of the project, opening up new directions and helping me to focus my thinking. In addition


viii

Acknowledgements

to the generous and constructive comments of the anonymous reviewers, my colleagues Ruth Feingold, Pika Ghosh, Deborah Hutton and Susan Bean read portions of the manuscript and provided crucial feedback for the final shape of the book. Audiences at the British International Studies Association, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Swansea University, the Association of Asian Studies, Bowdoin College, Washington University and Johns Hopkins University helped me hone the ideas presented here; for invitations to speak in these venues I thank Jonathan Githens-Mazer, Crispin Branfoot, Catherine Becker, Sonal Khullar, De-nin Lee, Melia Belli and Naveeda Khan. The staff at Routledge supported this project from the start, and I thank especially Dorothea Schaefter for her expert guidance and friendly encouragement along the way. I finished writing this book in Phil Chambers’ workshop, a place of construction and the making of things with one’s hands. I have learned a great deal about craft and the importance of doing from Phil and Tim Chambers, and while my writing work cannot compare to the physical precision and skill involved in their carpentry, I hope one day to demonstrate a similar mastery and care. I owe profound thanks to the Chambers family for nurturing the final stages of this book with their generous gifts of time, space and mountain air. Sam Chambers, my partner in all things, read the manuscript multiple times, helped me work through the arguments that emerge here, and supported my desire to avoid all textile-related metaphorical language. The threads of this project would not have been spun, twisted and woven into this textual tapestry were it not for Sam’s careful, steady hand on the wheel. Portions of the book are adapted from ‘Spinning without Touching the Wheel: Anticolonialism, Indian Nationalism, and the Deployment of Symbol’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 29, issue 2, pp. 230–45. © 2009, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. With permission of the publisher.


Abbreviations

CW 1958

CW 2000

YI

Gandhi, Mohandas. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1st ed. Gandhi, Mohandas. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 6th rev. ed. Available online at http://www. gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html Young India, periodical, 1919–31.


Introduction


Spinning, anticolonial nationalism and the visual

In 1909, in an anticolonial move towards Indian self-sufficiency, Gandhi decided to revive a craft many saw as already dead: the hand-spinning of cotton into thread. In the 1920s he called upon everyone in India, regardless of class, region or religion, to spin thread for at least half an hour each day. He saw spinning as an economic and political activity that could bring together the diverse populations of South Asia. Gandhi’s programme of spinning (as practice) and deployment of the spinning wheel (as icon) represents one of the most significant unifying elements of the nationalist movement in India, and a key component of the struggle for swaraj, or self-rule. Spinning allowed the formerly elite nationalist movement to connect to the broader Indian population, and it enabled the production of a unifying, pan-Indian national symbolism that transcended regional, caste, class and religious divisions. In visual culture, spinning, as a household, daily, mundane task, did not enjoy widespread representation prior to the late eighteenth century in India. The Mughals occasionally include spinning in their works: a c. 1606 painting from the emperor Jahangir’s atelier includes a woman at the spinning wheel.1 But the representation of spinning remained erratic, and not until the emergence (in the late eighteenth century) of a colonial demand for vignettes of cottage industry did paintings of spinning begin to multiply. With the arrival of photography in the 1840s, and the subsequent focus on encapsulating ethnic and professional types, images of spinning faded, only later to be purposively and energetically revived by the nationalist political movement led by Gandhi in the first decades of the twentieth century. How might we understand the transformation from a c. 1785 playful and dynamic image of spinning to the c. 1940 studio portrait of Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, seated at the wheel (Figures. 0.1 and 0.2)? The former includes a bejewelled, brightly clad woman seated cross-legged behind the spinning wheel, or charkha, dramatically twisting her body towards her raised left hand as she pulls the cotton into thread. The latter depicts a central leader of the nationalist movement gracefully lifting that same left hand and smiling at


2

Introduction

Figure 0.1 Anon., Weavers combing a warp and women reeling and spinning, c. 1785, Madras. Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS 75:32–1954, 43/B4.

the camera, seated behind a flat wooden apparatus that barely resembles the common image of a charkha. These two images demonstrate the overarching trajectory of spinning across almost two centuries, and they draw out key facets of my argument in the book as a whole. The dramatic composition of the painting from Madras (today called Chennai) produces a playful, almost dance-like quality, embodying the action and motion involved in cloth production. Spinning takes place as part of a larger process, depicted here with twisting the spun yarn and combing the prepared warp. One can almost hear the clatter of the wheel, the tap of the spindle, the sweep of the brush, the hum of activity. And, in this early phase, in which paintings are produced by local Indian artists usually for a European market, the dynamism and activity of spinning, and its participation in cloth production, mean that we find depictions of spinning-as-action rather than spinners as representative of an ethnic or occupational type.


Introduction

3

Figure 0.2 Vithalbhai Jhaveri, Kasturba Gandhi spinning, c. 1940. Photograph. Source: © Vithalbhai Jhaveri/GandhiServe.

The Chennai painting also erases any marker of regional specificity: the figures work in front of a blank white background, and the composition privileges dynamic diagonals and active bodies over any concern with illusionistic depth. And, despite slight regional variations in style, for Company painting and photography through the nineteenth century, one usually sees spinning depicted in the pose shown here: we rarely see spinning from behind, and the figure almost always gazes at her raised left hand. A consistency emerges: a woman behind the wheel spins, in concert with other elements of cloth production, and against a generic background. She could be anywhere in India; she therefore has the potential to stand for all of India. Kasturba, on the other hand, is one, specific person; her image is simultaneously a portrait of a famous Indian and a representation of a set of qualities spinning came to represent for the nationalist movement. She spins, and it is an action, but spinning is also frozen in time. She works at a charkha, but instead of the upright wheel, the new apparatus called the box charkha has


4

Introduction

reshaped spinning and made it portable and modern. She sits cross-legged like the eighteenth-century figure, but she eschews jewellery and adornment, wearing undyed homespun cloth (khadi), her traditional, narrowly defined role as a woman in the reproductive economy undercut by her age and ascetic dress. The photograph is a bundle of contradictions: the activist is not active; the charkha is not a wheel; the productive woman is past reproductive age. She poses, sitting still for the camera in the gesture held also by the eighteenth-century spinner. But she does not move, and the horizontal disc she touches with her right hand does not spin. Spinning has become an abstracted symbol, separated from the larger production of cloth, and instead linked to different kinds of activity. Excerpted from cottage industry, Kasturba engages in a political act, modernised by the new wheel. Her ascetic appearance echoes that of her husband, and together they reformulate femininity and masculinity for the new nation, resignifying what it means to be strong and valorising activities like spinning, normally found only in the hands of women. How do we get from spinning in 1785 Chennai to spinning at the heart of the nationalist movement in 1940? Why, in 1909, does Gandhi turn to spinning as the core of his nationalist movement, stating later that ‘without the spinning wheel there was no swaraj’?2 By tracing the visual genealogy of spinning, and examining its meaning for different historical and political moments, this book draws out the connections between the exuberant, vibrant clacking of the Chennai charkha and the elegant portrait of Kasturba Gandhi, demonstrating the crucial importance of spinning for nationalism and the centrality of visual symbolism for politics. Verbal political rhetoric relies on known patterns, references and shared narratives to persuade the listener, bringing together echoes from past speeches, perorations that find rhythmic parallel in song or storytelling, and tonal qualities borrowed from earlier, successfully persuasive speakers. This book finds the same political rhetoric but locates it in the visual.3 For a few decades at the beginning of the twentieth century, those fighting for India’s independence deployed the imagery of the spinning wheel to aid in that battle, tying it to a myriad of political arguments and using it to spur the movement for swaraj. But, like verbal rhetorical references, the spinning wheel’s efficacy also depended on historical precedent. A century of imaging the spinning wheel preceded its appropriation for the nationalist cause, setting the stage for its central role as a national symbol. I consider this study a ‘genealogy’, and in doing so I resist an outmoded art historical approach of tracing direct influences, instead mapping the trajectory of spinning and cloth-making imagery in South Asia from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Genealogy tracks what Foucault calls ‘an order of descent’, meaning that what comes before does


Introduction

5

not directly cause what comes after. Genealogy therefore refuses a search for origins and instead attempts to follow the path – or better, maze – that produces the present (Foucault 1984). And a maze it is. Starting at the turn of the nineteenth century, my study of the imagery in painting, photography and film indicates no linear progression in the meanings and concerns attached to spinning. While the composition and iconography of spinning exhibits some consistency across a century and a half, what that imagery does changes dramatically. Moreover, spinning often embodies something past: a lost craft, a dying tradition. It references a mythical time before colonialism, before industrialisation – an ahistorical, undefined time. Along with the swaraj movement in the early twentieth century, it retains many of these overtones but also becomes modern and forward-looking. Its re-emergence into the present and its reconstitution, in Gandhi’s hands, as a crucial part of India’s future produce a genealogical temporality.4 Spinning has a long history in the subcontinent, and cotton cloth production and the textile trade have served as major elements of India’s cottage industry for millennia.5 The economic, political and social history of cloth and textile production plays a role in this book, but in large part my focus remains on spinning – and only on spinning. Naturally, weaving and the other steps in cloth production enter into the picture, both literally and figuratively, while discussing spinning and its related tasks. But in discussions about Gandhian politics within the literature, too often these other processes overwhelm and obscure spinning, even to the extent of hiding spinning from scholarly view. Spinning, as word and image, stands metonymically for much of the politics of self-sufficiency, swadeshi, and the production of homespun cloth. But often, when discussing this project with colleagues, our conversation quickly shifted into weaving, homespun cloth (khadi), or the history of textiles, and away from spinning as either icon or practice. This subtle slippage from spinning to weaving and the political implications of cloth for colonialism and nationalism help to make spinning an effective symbol. It embodies a wide range of meaning and as a result can be deployed differently for new audiences, and massaged to fit new political needs. Part of its efficacy lies in this slipperiness. The spinning wheel, a static image, stands for swaraj, Indian self-sufficiency (swadeshi), a revival of handicraft, a recentring of the economy in the village, a meditative, disciplined practice, a sign of participation in the nationalist movement, a weapon for fighting colonialism, an attribute of Mother India, the strength of the feminine, the hoary past of India, the entire process of making cloth, and homespun cloth itself. Spinning also, in its simplicity and perceived backwardness, served as a locus for ridicule and criticism. Nobel poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore famously characterised his friend Gandhi’s programme, deriding it as a call to ‘spin and weave, spin and weave’.6 Cartoons lampooned Gandhi’s


6

Introduction

commitment to spinning as world wars loomed, Indians faced police beatings and unconscionable massacres, famines spread and communal violence took hold. But the graphic arts, from cartoons to popular prints, also employed the iconography of spinning to support Gandhi’s political manoeuvres. Spinning encapsulated a mass of complex debates and conflicts into a simple icon and action. Prabhu Dayal’s print of Gandhi’s meetings with the viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, in February 1931 illustrates the strength of the spinning wheel as a symbol, further abstracted from its position in front of a woman spinning (Figure 0.3). In fact, the print incorporates two types of spinning tools: a charkha drawn on a piece of paper, and a drop spindle or takli, resting on the table. The series of meetings is a direct result of Gandhi’s pivotal protest against the prohibition on Indian production of salt the previous year, during which he walked from his ashram near Ahmedabad in Gujarat to the sea at Dandi, defied the law by picking up a handful of salt from the beach and then called on his followers to make salt (Gopal 1957: 89ff; Brown 1977: 168ff).

Figure 0.3 Prabhu Dayal, Conversation on Peace Between Gandhi and Irwin at Delhi/Suleh Charcha (Compromise Discussion), 1931. Print. Source: Published by Shyam Sunder Lal, Picture Merchant Kanpur, Lakshmibilas Press Ltd., Calcutta. With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, acc. no. 2004.60.49, ©ROM


Introduction

7

The symbolic power of the meeting was such that it invoked disgust and outrage for Winston Churchill, who, on 23 February, six days after the start of Gandhi’s talks with the viceroy, spoke in London to the Epping and Woodford Councils protesting that it ‘was alarming to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor’ (Gilbert 1976: 390; Thomas 1995: 55; Parel 2006: 170). While the facts of the situation include Gandhi’s imprisonment for much of the prior year at the hands of the viceroy, those like Churchill received a clear message. And, while many in India saw Gandhi’s meeting with Irwin as a weak move, one that resulted in the end of an extremely effective year-long non-cooperation movement, Churchill correctly ascertained that Gandhi’s presence on the steps of the newly built viceroy’s palace made a strong statement of equality and parity between the British empire and the recently jailed ‘rebels’ of the anticolonial movement. Gandhi’s presence at 10 Downing Street later that same year repeated the image in the empire’s very seat of power. The print of Gandhi and Irwin at parley includes many symbolic elements that operate almost as attributes of the two men and identify their respective positions. Irwin rests his hand on a stack of books and holds a detailed document; Gandhi’s hand lies next to a takli and rests on a paper that says in Hindi: ‘my few demands’ (meri chand sharten). Both of them have a small piece of paper depicting two parallel symbols: the traditional charkha for Gandhi (marked ‘charkha’ in Hindi) and a wheeled cannon for Irwin, marked ‘gun’ in large letters and nicely visually parallel to Gandhi’s spinning wheel. Both images represent ‘old’ technologies and both, by the 1930s, have declined in use. In part due to these similarities, the contrasting message is clear – Irwin sides with violence and English books; Gandhi has straightforward demands that are related to the simple practice of spinning, now associated with the anticolonial movement. The spinning wheel has come to represent not just the daily practice of spinning by those participating in the movement but an entire complex of non-violent civil disobedience Gandhi is undertaking. The ‘fakir’ fights royalty with the spindle. In this print, the abstracted, simply drawn symbol of the upright, circular spinning wheel appears labelled with vernacular text. The repetition of spinning imagery with the three-dimensional spindle – put aside for a moment in order to gesture in dialogue with Irwin – and the two-dimensional charkha embodies the element of practice paired with a static icon. It uses them both to stand in for the multifaceted positions and demands of the anticolonial movement.7 If spinning expands quickly to discussions of textile production and cotton trade, muddling the types of processes involved in


8

Introduction

handloom industry, that very ability to stand in for something larger serves the symbol well in the context of political messaging, through both verbal and visual rhetoric. Working through these three images provides a taste of the issues to come in the chapters of the book. Chapter 1 focuses on Company painting: works by Indian artists made primarily for the British or European market. As the work from Chennai shows, most Company painting depicts spinning outside of any spatial context but embedded in part of the larger process of cloth production. I explore how the repetition and circulation of these images in sets reinforced an iconographic pattern for spinning, articulating it not as an occupation that identifies a particular ethnicity or caste but instead as an action. Spinning imagery produces a romanticisation of bucolic village life, reinforcing contemporaneous picturesque modes of imaging India’s landscape and monumental ruins. Paintings of spinning during this period also tap into a European nostalgia for a pre-industrial era, one now putatively accessible only in India. These concerns to salvage a lost craft tradition continue as photography’s presence grows in the second half of the nineteenth century. But large photography projects like The People of India (1868–75) focused on the identification of types of people, by tribal, caste or professional designation, mixing in portraits of elite, named individuals. Chapter 2 traces spinning’s disappearance in these photographic projects, as spinning and the person of ‘the spinner’ fail to support typological projects of identification. Spinning appears instead in studio and amateur photography, separated from the processes of cloth production but retaining an element of colonial desire, perhaps honed here in the body of the woman as spinner, inhabiting a generic village setting or a bucolic picturesque landscape. Even as spinning fades in the photographic archive, it does so because it cannot be linked to a particular caste, class, religious or regional grouping. This becomes its strength for Gandhi. Gandhi alights on spinning in 1909, after having initially confused it with weaving. Chapter 3 explores the discovery and continued reinvention of spinning for the nationalist movement, and asks why spinning, rather than other elements of cloth production (or khadi itself), becomes a central symbol. Gandhi leans on the narratives of salvage and loss, reclaiming this ‘ancient’ craft as something to be rediscovered and reinvigorated in order to accomplish the same ends for India. Gandhi’s appropriation draws on the bucolic village imagery so desired by the earlier colonial viewer and relies on spinning’s lack of regional, caste, religious and class specificity to use it as a unifying icon. The nationalists’ spinning also reinserted action as a crucial element in the process: like Company paintings, spinning no longer inhabited a static, isolated space. Done actively and enthusiastically in groups as well


Introduction

9

as domestically in the home, spinning had the potential to penetrate all India and to unite people in action. Chapter 4 examines the ostensible hurdle of spinning’s association primarily with women. While this facet of spinning, along with some hesitation based on class, limited the easy practice of spinning across the entire population, it also produced a space in which Gandhi could resignify masculine and feminine and their relation to strength and weakness. I discuss the box charkha that Kasturba uses, exploring how it not only provided a portable spinning wheel but also distanced nationalist spinning from prevailing gendered iconography. Spinning, rooted in a pre-industrial and pre-colonial past, became modern. The imagery of spinning often explicitly recognises the overlap between familial reproduction and the production of both yarn and new Indian citizens. Spinning became one way of enabling the newly forming nation to think outside of the episteme of British colonialism by challenging gender norms. Both spinning and Gandhi himself serve as major icons of the nationalist movement, and Chapter 5 explores how the two interact in imagery both before and after his death in 1948. I look at the various stories surrounding Margaret Bourke-White’s 1946 photograph of Gandhi and the spinning wheel, and demonstrate how the action and the icon collapse into one another. After independence, spinning and the charkha gradually fade as important elements of India’s iconography, disappearing from the flag and from much of Gandhi’s hagiographic iconography. My concern here lies with pictures because they enable a particular perspective into the discourse surrounding anticolonial politics in India, and scholars rarely examine them as archival documents in their own right. Those who have investigated the political economy of cloth production and trade or the politics of dress for the nationalist movement usually do not analyse the imagery itself, instead exploring only the rich textual archive. A close reading of pictures in conjunction with textual study engages one of the untapped elements of anticolonial rhetoric, one that communicated the Indian struggle around the world at a time when the globalisation of the media had truly begun to shape world politics. And, in addition to close readings of individual paintings, prints, photographs and films, I examine the circulatory pathways for these images, whether as sets purchased by colonial travellers, snapshots shared among amateur anthropologists, glossy prints sold by established photography studios, newsreel footage or journalistic imagery found in major international glossy publications like Life magazine.8 Within the subcontinent, images operated across language barriers and allowed for the spread of the movement’s message in profound ways. Images drive the nationalist movement: they serve to communicate quickly and effectively what words cannot. Investigating how they operate allows


10

Introduction

for a greater understanding of the way imagery works to shape politics. The example of spinning as a political symbol allows me to unpack how symbols operate. In this case, one finds a diversity of visual images subsumed within an overarching symbol – spinning – often gathering together inconsistent meanings to produce a synthetic rhetorical whole. Symbolism marks a political movement and articulates its multivalent goals, but it also allows for diversity within its message. It operates not as an empty signifier, into which any number of meanings might fall, but a signifier of a wide but limited group of referents, a symbol that encapsulates everything from the specific (the practice of spinning cotton into yarn) to the abstract (swaraj). One of the abstract ideals embodied in spinning is swadeshi, the movement for self-reliance, handmade goods, and making and purchasing things within India instead of relying on imported goods from the colonial metropole. Swadeshi did not emerge from Gandhi’s nationalist movement; earlier activists had promoted both self-rule (swaraj) and swadeshi. Bal Gangadhar Tilak is often credited with being one of the first to advocate swaraj in the late nineteenth century (Wolpert 1962); swadeshi became a central plank of anticolonial struggle during the protests against the partition of Bengal from 1905 to 1911. In an ill-advised move to streamline governmental bureaucracy, then viceroy of India Lord Curzon divided the large state of Bengal into two, effectively splitting the region into a western half that contained a minority of Bengali-speakers, and an eastern half that was overwhelmingly Muslim (Sarkar 1973). Intellectuals and elite Bengalis in Kolkata protested vociferously, calling for the reunification of Bengal and, in the process, creating a locus for protests against the British government that galvanised several factions of the then nascent nationalist movement. As part of these protests, a call for loyalty to Bengal across the population led to one of the first full-scale swadeshi movements in South Asia. Swadeshi literally means ‘my country’ or ‘own country’ and the movement focused on the production, purchase and sale of goods made within India rather than imported from Britain. Bengal had been particularly hard hit by the shift in the international cotton industry over the previous century. Once known for the finest woven cotton in the world – Dhaka muslin – Bengal had been transformed under British rule to a provider of raw materials for Lancashire mills, and a consumer of printed cotton textiles from Britain (Sarkar 1973; Sartori 2003; Trivedi 2007). The same shift from supplier of finished cotton to consumer of British cotton was largely true for much of India’s textile production; the Mumbai mills provided an India-based alternative to Lancashire but took the manufacture of cloth out of the hands of weaving communities and into the factories. The rise of the northern England cotton textile industry in the nineteenth century depended on the dismantling, through duties, of the Indian textile industry.


Introduction

11

Textiles, then, had particular resonance for Bengal, a region that had a millennia-long history of producing the finest, world-renowned cotton textiles. Bengal had been sent into an economic decline due to the colonially supported imbalance in trade (Yule 1903: 705–9; Ahmed 1986; Chaudhury 1993: 321–2). The nationalists in Kolkata used this historically significant symbol – locally spun and woven cotton – to rally support for the anticolonial movement. They called for Bengalis to boycott imported Lancashire cotton and instead buy Bengali (Bayly 1986). Unlike earlier movements supported by merchants or catalysed by major rebellions, the 1905–11 swadeshi movement combined a ‘buy local’ message with a strong boycott of foreign goods. Swadeshi, while applying to all Indian goods, was embodied by textile – the clothes you wore indicated whose side you were on. This symbolic level was seen as directly related to all levels of swaraj, or self-rule, as the Bengali nationalist leader S. N. Banerjea framed it: ‘We must be swadeshi in all things, swadeshi in our thoughts, and in our educational methods and development’ (Mukherjee and Mukherjee 1908: 203; as quoted Bayly 1986: 311). The decade saw a rearticulation of the framework of the movement against British rule in terms of objects that were seen as quintessentially Indian. Freedom was cast as an ancient Sanskrit concept, the Mughal era of patronage of Bengali cloth cast as a glorious time of Indian harmony, and the notion of self-sacrifice – associated with the fourth, ascetic stage of the householder’s life – became central, even at this nascent stage, for the nationalist movement (Bayly 1986: 309–11). In part as a result of this earlier swadeshi movement, and its links to the politics of Bengali textiles, later nationalist appropriations of swadeshi also focused on cloth. Therefore, when one examines the scholarship on Gandhian swadeshi, one finds two discussions: one analysing the potential economic impact of Gandhi’s call to spin and the other investigating the efficacy of homespun, or khadi, as a political symbol, focusing primarily on textual debates about khadi. Many, reading swadeshi and khadi through the lens of economic history, have seen it as an economic ideal at least partially unfulfilled (Sarkar 1973; Sartori 2003). Complicating these economic arguments, Manu Goswami has discussed swadeshi as productive of a crucial articulation of economic difference from Britain and British India (2004). Most studies of Gandhian symbolism cite khadi as a central element in his political mobilisation (Parel 1969), and it certainly played a major role. Others have looked to the way the visual impression of groups of people dressed in undyed khadi communicated the strength of the masses behind Gandhi (Bean 1989; Tarlo 1991, 1996). Susan Bean’s work on khadi carefully retells the story of the development of spinning as a central practice for the nationalist movement and Gandhi’s own ‘discovery’ of spinning; but she does not examine visual images of spinning, relying primarily instead on


12

Introduction

textual evidence (1989). Still others have examined the historical resonance of cloth within the Indic context (Bayly 1986; Cohn 1996 [1989]).9 More recently, scholars have re-examined khadi as an aspect of material culture clearly central to the development of institutions and infrastructure that supported the nationalist movement (Trivedi 2007). All of these contributions to the discussion of the anticolonial movement in India help to explain the importance of the swadeshi movement for the success of the nationalist cause, despite any economic shortcomings it may have had. Within this, they point to khadi as the driving force behind the movement. While I acknowledge the import of khadi as a symbol within textual and some visual material from this period – particularly the imagery of crowds of khadi-clad supporters and the efficacy of marking oneself part of the movement by wearing khadi – I propose that while unveiling one important aspect of the nationalist movement, this prior scholarship has overlooked the related but, I argue, more salient symbol of spinning, in large part because its efficacy resides in visual rhetoric, not verbal. Those agitating against the Bengal partition in 1905–11 recognised, at least implicitly, that khadi was ineffective as a visual symbol. Despite a wide-ranging literature arguing for khadi and home industry, the images arising from the movement against Bengal’s partition were not focused on the manufacture of cloth, nor even on the clothing worn. The images that circulated instead engaged with a Hindu-inflected vision of India-as-goddess, referencing and directly invoking the two major aspects of the goddess worshipped in Bengal and elsewhere in the subcontinent: Durga and Kali (see Virmani 1999: 173; Ramaswamy 2001; Davis 2007). Abanindranath Tagore’s painting of Bharatmata (1906) became an icon for the movement (see Guha-Thakurta 1992; Mitter 1994: 295–6; G. Sen 2002; Sinha 2006: 3). She carries swadeshi cloth as one of her attributes (in her proper right upper hand). The cloth hovers close to her face and is therefore one of the primary elements of the work. But as a visual symbol an abstract bundle of cloth does not read well, nor does it fully resonate with existing cultural iconographies. Few viewers can easily identify Bharatmata’s khadi without prompting. And, even more damning for the symbol, Tagore’s iconography was not effective enough to be repeated in later images of Mother India.10 Bharatmata herself served as a strong rallying point for both the Bengal partition and later articulations of nationhood. But she remains a goddess image, however newly constructed, and the goddess did not lend itself to adoption by non-Hindu communities, particularly Muslims.11 Some visual elements of the Bengal partition protests strove to overcome this division, incorporating multiple symbols of Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and other religions into the flags from the first decade of the century, for example (Virmani 1999; Roy 2006). But despite these attempts to project an image


Introduction

13

which unified the diversity of communal symbols, the combination of Bharatmata-as-goddess and the Hindu-focused iconographies of the time helped to solidify the nascent religious-based division within the nationalist movement, alienating the now-majority Muslim East Bengal from the Hindu-inflected political movement in West Bengal. Economically and politically, despite this difficulty with the symbolic standards for the movement, swadeshi was largely supported across religious lines. However, what was missing in Bengal was an image for swadeshi that could not be identified with particular sectarian interests. The goddess wasn’t going to bring diverse religious and cultural backgrounds together, and the swadeshi discourse had no visual counterpart. The nationalist movement in Bengal grounded itself in an image of Hindu origin, with its visual counter-arguments taking the form of a combination of religious symbols, still linking the diversity of India to its religions. As a result, this pivotal historical moment fell short of uniting the subcontinent behind an anticolonial movement, and instead served, at least after the fact, as a first step, one learnt from and reshaped by later nationalists. For Gandhi’s movement, the recognition that khadi offered a limited range of visual symbolism, and the understanding that any visual symbol must not ally itself with communal or regional groups, meant that spinning emerged as a metonym for the nationalist movement. Spinning allowed the movement to slightly side-step controversies over khadi at the time, including its prohibitively high cost, the class-based variations in khadi itself, from high-quality woven silk to coarse simple cloth, and the difficulties the All India Spinners’ Association (AISA, established 1925) had in distributing raw materials and training workers in the various aspects of cloth production. These controversies meant that khadi did not truly operate as a symbol to draw people together on the subcontinent, nor did cloth or clothing; the symbol of spinning served that purpose. The discussion of the visual in this book also changes our perspective on studies of nationalism, particularly in relation to national symbolism. Scholarship at the intersection of nationalism and the visual usually examines the way nations project a vision of themselves through architecture, high art, ‘national’ cinema, the representation of the nation as a woman, or photography, alongside analyses of the various media for the dissemination of nationhood (newspaper, magazine, television, cyberspace).12 While these visual analyses of the formation and continual reinvention of the nation directly relate to the work I do in this book, I also engage with the question of symbolism. My project seeks to focus the study of national symbolism, normally discussed broadly by Anthony Smith, George Mosse and others, in which symbolic values or ideas might shape national identity or conflict between nations. Rather than this broad framework, I instead examine


14

Introduction

symbolism in the visual sense, as an image that represents something other than itself, often ideas and concepts, but also actions and other objects.13 Scholarship maintaining that nationalism’s efficacy often lies in the myths, symbols and popular memories informs my argument here (Mosse 1975; Smith 1999). I focus on one deployment of a particular visual symbol to see how nationalism operates through these visual icons. This facet of symbolism is not often found in the literature, with two primary exceptions: woman-asnation imagery (addressed also in this book in terms of Bharatmata) and the appropriation of the swastika for National Socialism in 1930s Germany (for the swastika, see Quinn 1994; Heller 2000). Literature on the swastika often traces its pre-Nazi archaeological and global heritage, exploring the choice and appropriation of the symbol by Hitler, particularly in the context of the party’s flag. In part to counter the weight of the study of this particular political symbol in relation to the horrific history of Nazism and its visual rhetoric, this book engages in analysis of a different kind of national movement and its symbols, one that sought self-rule, not world domination or the eradication of portions of the population for national purity. Gandhi’s symbol seeks to include all constituents within the diverse Indian nation, including even the British, if they too strive for the ideals of swaraj (Gandhi 1997 [1910]: 73). It is also an example of a fully constructed, invented tradition, one that unlike the Scottish kilts of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s now famous analysis (1983), did not become fully naturalised as a marker of national identity.14 Spinning marks a case of national symbolism that attempted, without hiding the machinations of those attempts, to construct an image and a practice through which a multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic and multi-religious group might find common ground. In direct contrast to the Nazi swastika, then, which claimed an ancient and pure racial heritage for a constructed and narrowly defined German people, the spinning wheel sought to overcome difference and draw India’s diverse people together. Spinning looked to a constructed, bucolic past of peasant farming and handicraft, but it did so while explicitly acknowledging the reinvention of this tradition for a new Indian citizen. As a result, and in contrast to many theories of nationalism, spinning enabled the resignification of the Indian subject without a strong link to modern industrialisation. Perhaps Gandhi’s openness about his struggle to find the spinning wheel, his own confusion of spinning and weaving, and the ongoing reinvention of what the spinning wheel looked like and meant contributed to its short-lived role as a unifying symbol for the anticolonial nationalist movement. Gandhi deployed spinning as both icon and practice, and it is tempting to examine the daily rituals of spinning in the context of societal formation and habitus. Gestures and bodily practices centre discussions of the construction


Introduction

15

of society and the unity of culture: a shared habitus enables a culture to distinguish itself from others. But the bodily practice of spinning does not fall into the rubric of habitus, except to the extent that we might consider it an attempt to create a new national regularised practice. Habitus is action not consciously mastered, and Gandhi sought to instil a common daily discipline and encourage wide participation in the nationalist movement precisely through the learning of a new practice, a new way of thinking, and therefore an unlearning of the old, colonial mode.15 Spinning, ideally, operated to upturn the normal habitus of those living in India to promote self-rule and to unite a wide range of cultures in a new daily pattern. Its overt status as a constructed symbol and action enabled it to challenge Indians to overturn their normal routine, to think and act differently. Spinning served a particular purpose for Gandhi’s political rhetoric as he and others struggled to shift the anticolonial movement from a discussion among elite nation-builders to a mass struggle.16 By tracing the genealogy of the imagery of spinning, I do not ask after the origins of nationalism in South Asia, nor do I care to enter the debate within the nationalism literature about the relative antiquity of the idea of the nation. I am instead concerned with something overlooked in the focus on origins. I examine the transition to a mass movement: why does one symbol work when others do not? What did spinning do that Bharatmata did not, that khadi could not, that songs, poetry, literature and Gandhi’s many newspapers could not? My central query concerns the efficacy of visual rhetoric and the deployment of visual symbols. The hope is that in investigating spinning in the Indian context, I spur others to ask after other similarly constructed national symbologies and wonder why they emerged in the way they did – what kinds of resonances did they effect, and what did they eschew? Spinning, as static image and active practice, gives us a well-documented, historical example of the machinations of political visual symbolism, and perhaps offers a new way to understand the role of the visual in political movements. Examining the literature from the other side – from art history, visual anthropology and disciplines not centred on questions of nationalism – several studies address the relationship of both popular and high art to nationalism, but few trace the purposive deployment of a particular symbol, or seek to investigate how a political symbol might consolidate a nation. Studies of Bharatmata have begun to explore the role of symbolism for both visual culture and nationalism; research on other elements of visual culture, from Ravi Varma’s late-nineteenth-century painting to popular prints, have also expanded our understanding of the relationship between anticolonial movements and art.17 Scholars of Gandhi focus primarily on his political thought, the appropriation of his politics for later movements, his biography and hagiography, or


16

Introduction

his historical role as a leader. Often, Gandhi’s relation to art is dismissed or overlooked; recent writing by Anthony Parel seeks to fill this void by probing both his philosophical and practical relation to visual culture (2006: 157–74). Joseph Alter’s (2000) work on Gandhi’s body has informed my understanding of his iconicity in sculpture, painting, print and photography, but Alter’s project does not directly address visual representations of Gandhi. In terms of visual culture, the figure of Gandhi has anchored exhibitions of contemporary art, collaborative commemorative visual projects and studies of the way his image is deployed.18 Just as I depart from the central debates within scholarship on nationalism, I also depart from approaches found within art historical scholarship. This book asks after a particular iconography, a particular imagery and traces its genealogy as it transforms from a marker of colonial nostalgia to a political symbol in the hands of Gandhi. It therefore touches on art historical debates about how to read images and examines the participation of visual culture in society and politics. But rather than looking primarily at ‘high art’ or even popular visual culture produced for a market, I am interested here in investigating any and all instances of spinning from this period – those that circulated extensively and those that did not. I also examine the places where spinning disappears in favour of other subject matters, whether during the rise in ethnographic photography in the late nineteenth century or the decline in the efficacy of the wheel as a symbol after 1947. As a result, rather than examining how art shapes the rise of nationalism, or how the economies of popular visual culture demonstrate the multilayered, changing distribution of images, and rather than asking after Gandhi’s philosophy of art or visual culture, I instead ask why a particular symbol might be effective, when others were not. I ask how political visual symbols operate, how they rise to the surface of the visual rhetoric and communicate the important messages of political movements. My aim is for this project to expand the purview of literature on nationalism and nationalist movements as well as challenging art historians to explore how a broadly defined visual culture works for politics. I also speak to the so-called ‘visual turn’ in a range of disciplines, from history to anthropology, so as to encourage collaborative thinking across the often quite different questions these disciplines engage as they look at pictures. I am aware that my project leaves out several crucial elements of spinning, ones that would push us to expand our understanding of the experience beyond its iconic, static status in the visual realm. One must hear the rhythm of the wheel, something Gandhi romanticised in the context of the crushing of grain in village contexts, but something too that underscores the unifying practice of groups spinning together, breaking their normal routine to spend half an hour or an hour in shared silence or shared singing at the wheel. Spinning involves the other senses as well: the spinner tastes the cotton


Introduction

17

when wetting the fingers or dampening the raw cotton. Cotton fragments fly about in the air, impregnating each breath with the fibres produced in the process. Wet cotton, dust, wooden implements and the sweat of labour combine with those fibres to produce a particular scent. The texture of the raw cotton, the feeling of the wooden crank, the bodily relation to the wheel all produce different sensations beyond the visual observation of spinning discussed here. Our ‘visual turn’ may be far from complete, but we also owe attention to the other aspects of sense that shape the efficacy of spinning as symbolic and political practice.19 Finally, I note that writing a book even tangentially on Gandhi and his legacy involves treading a careful line between overvaluing his role in history and erring on the side of cynical criticism of an ostensibly failed movement. I imagine and hope that my own desire for and romanticisation of a simpler life, informed as it is by my own experiences and political and social context, finds a balance here with my training in critically engaged analysis of the extant historical and visual archive. The book, probably like many that discuss Gandhi, did not begin as a book on Gandhi; instead, as Chapter 1 details, it began in the storage rooms of the Royal Ontario Museum, where I saw five Company paintings depicting cloth production. Spinning struck me as a particularly interesting example for exploring the workings of political symbolism and iconographic transformations. Along the way, I have learned much from my study of Gandhian thought and history, and I humbly submit this book as a small addition to that vast literature.

1

Action and identity


Colonial representations of spinning

In a storage room filled with paintings and drawings at the Royal Ontario Museum, among boxes of imperial Mughal painting, portraits of regional kings, rural ‘folk’ painting from Bengal and popular prints, I stumbled upon a set of Company paintings depicting five stages in the production of cloth: spinning raw cotton into yarn, stretching and twisting the yarn in preparation for the warp, combing or brushing the warp to eliminate flaws and make it consistent, weaving, and selling the produced cloth. Simple, easy-to-read images portrayed the path from cotton to the merchant in the bazaar, the style recognisable as Company painting – Indian painters working for a British clientele – from 1830s Patna on the Ganges in north-eastern India. I saw in these images a genealogical connection to the Indian nationalist movement, where symbols of spinning wheels adorned everything from flags to buildings and the practice of spinning centred a large portion of Gandhi’s visual political rhetoric. Some of these posters also appeared in the museum’s storage, documenting the vibrant period of anticolonial agitation. Spinning imagery in India finds its roots in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenthcentury Company painting, at an historical moment during which Indian painters produced imagery specifically for a British (East India Company) audience. This body of work enables us to ask why cloth production and spinning became attractive subject matters for the British, when they had rarely been depicted in India prior to this time. Company paintings help us to see the heritage upon which Gandhi later builds his political symbol. These types of paintings have only recently begun to enjoy a positive reputation as works of art worthy of art historical study. Up to now, they have instead normally played a role in illustrating the intersection of Indian and British in India, operating as a demonstration of hybridity, with an emphasis on their derivative aesthetic. Their presence in the Royal Ontario Museum’s collection, however, was not strange, as the museum’s collecting patterns have long been shaped by an interest in arts and crafts of all types, high and low, rural and urban. The nineteenth-century collecting heritage of the ROM


Action and identity 19

Figure 1.1 Anon., Woman spinning, c. 1830. Patna School. Watercolour. Source: With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, acc. no. 998.126.2, ©ROM.

meant that these images took their place alongside contemporary wood carvings, paintings on mica and other objects associated with the British colonial period in India. When Julia Ferryman journeyed to India in the 1830s, she kept an album of sketches and while there she purchased a selection of paintings, including architectural scenes, the set of cloth production images and two other Company paintings in the same style – one of a butcher and one of a barber.1 This combination of subjects, the choice of Company painting and the overarching desire to keep a memento of her journey in these objects puts Ferryman in a large group of similarly inclined British travellers, who collected similar sets of images, brought them home to Europe and passed them on to their descendants, some of whom, as in this case, donated them to major museums. That spinning and cloth production occupy such a large portion of her souvenir collection indicates the import of this subject for


20

Action and identity

nineteenth-century visual culture; in what follows I unpack the context for these images, ask after the reasons for their popularity and ascertain what they represent for our understanding of colonial discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate how spinning worked within visual colonial rhetoric of this period, when the East India Company and not the crown controlled Britain’s economic and political interests in South Asia. This chapter grounds arguments in later chapters as I follow spinning from its early colonial imaging, through photography (Chapter 2), and to Gandhi’s resignification of it (Chapters 3 and 4). Iconographically, this early phase of the representation of spinning established a single visual form, rarely deviated from. This imagery produced an expectation of what spinning should look like in an Indian context, thereby establishing the norm upon which later nationalists built their symbols and iconographies. While later iconography focused on the spinning wheel and spinning, in the first half of the nineteenth century, spinning operated as but one element of the imagery of cloth making, appearing as part of a set of paintings that depicted the transformation of raw cotton into folded piles of textiles at the local cloth seller. Despite similarities in pose and composition, early spinning paintings operated in a different rhetorical field distinct from later nationalist appropriations of spinning. In addition to tracing the genealogy of spinning imagery for the later nationalist movement, I analyse these Company paintings to rework our current understanding of how these images operate. My two-part reassessment has a direct impact on the way Gandhi then appropriated spinning for anticolonial visual rhetoric. First, often these paintings are encapsulated by descriptors like ‘ethnographic’, but I find that these images do not fit that scholarly label, because they do not develop a typology of Indian tradespeople, nor do they identify castes or occupational and professional types. Instead, they depict an action and a process, slipping out of any attempt to fold them into the ethnographic schema that emerges only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We see spinning, not the spinner. Second, these paintings contrast India with the newly developing industrial revolution in Europe, and thereby idealise the hand industry of an abstracted and generic village life. In doing so, they convey an aspect of colonial desire, as these images demonstrate a nostalgia for a lost pre-industrial British past while offering a living example of that past in the form of the hand production of Indian cloth.2 Their widespread collection in sets, establishing a market for groups of paintings across northern India, meant that this vision of India’s villages shaped the colonial and local understandings of the role that cottage industry played in the subcontinent. This imagery helped to establish a narrative of nostalgia for a lost Indian past invoked by Gandhi and others almost a century later.


Action and identity 21 In order to pursue this line of inquiry, I will first situate Company painting in terms of artists and patrons, regions and circulation by providing an overview of the late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century context of East India Company rule over north-eastern India. I discuss the role of craft in the articulation of ‘Indianness’ both for the colonising British and also for later resignifications of craft for Europeans and Indians attempting to reclaim these practices and images for an Indian identity. I then analyse the images themselves, starting with the ROM paintings, and then examining the larger iconography of cloth making across northern India and the Gangetic plain.

Painting and the East India Company In 1763, the Mughal emperor granted the East India Company the office of Diwan of Bengal, a title which included the remit to gather revenues from the regions along the Gangetic plain from Bengal and Orissa in the east to Varanasi in the west. The Mughal empire had been loosening its hold on this region over the course of the eighteenth century, and major battles had taken place across the region in the late 1750s and 1760s as part of the process of securing for the Company the economic and political position it enjoyed for the subsequent century. Company servants were stationed across the region, and worked in the patterns of their European mercantile predecessors: establishing trade links, expanding agricultural investments and delivering export goods to the ports on the Bay of Bengal. Portions of colonial cities became the sites of European settlements, and small towns grew into large commercial and trading centres. In the 1820s and 30s, military cantonments were built on the edges of many of these cities, and companies of sepoys, or Indian soldiers under the command of European officers, helped to secure the interests of the monopoly Company controlled by shareholders in London (King 1976; Bayly 1983; Oldenburg 1984; Marshall 2000; Brown 2003). Living in these European enclaves, many Company servants, officers and European travellers engaged in patronage of local artists, and even themselves produced sketches, paintings and, if the equipment was available, prints. From the late eighteenth century, images of the picturesque landscape of India became popular in European circles, and albums of prints based on the work of professional painters started to circulate among the middle and upper classes. The picturesque, an eighteenth-century aesthetic mode that celebrated the ruin, the asymmetrical and the exotic, was easily applied to the subcontinent, and indeed became the primary mode through which artists depicted the ruins of India’s ancient cultures. Albums like William and Thomas Daniells’ Oriental Scenery were but the most famous of a wide range of these kinds of images circulating at the time (1797).3


22

Action and identity

Alongside the professionals, amateur British painters depicted the landscape and people where they found themselves living and working. Sir Charles D’Oyly, the opium agent in Patna – a city on the banks of the Ganges in north-eastern India – set up a group of amateur artists in the city, and even went so far as to import a lithographic press in the first decade of the nineteenth century, only a few years after the technology had been invented (Losty 1989; Brown 1997). Groups like this existed in Kolkata, Dhaka and other sites across the East India Company’s holdings. Europeans – women and men alike – painted and sketched various subjects, from the bustling city bazaar to detailed portraits of servants and others they encountered in their travels. Sketching was one of the skills many European women in particular brought with them to India, and diaries are often interspersed with drawings of local colour illustrating the reminiscences in the text itself. In Patna and elsewhere, these European artists engaged with the local artist community, recognising the talent of those families of artists working in the area, some of whom could trace their ancestry to painters in the Mughal or Awadh courts. The elite in Patna comprised groups of Persian-speaking courtiers who had emigrated as the strength and wealth of the Mughal empire declined in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Lehmann 1967; Chatterjee 1996; Yang 1999). Likewise, the rise of regional courts since the late seventeenth century had produced groups of artists across northern India who sought patronage from these smaller regional governorships and developed what are sometimes termed late Mughal or provincial Mughal styles in places such as Murshidabad, Dhaka and Varanasi. Local late Mughal styles shifted as the patrons’ tastes changed, whether aristocratic governors for the Mughal emperor or mercantile Europeans serving the East India Company.4 The classification ‘Company painting’ arises from this conjunction of, on the one hand, European interest in producing and collecting images relating to the experience in India, with, on the other, the dispersal of artists across northern India and the shift in patronage from regional Mughal governorships, or nawabi courts, to East India Company officers and servants. It designates paintings made by Indian artists for European patrons, although some ‘Company’ paintings were made for and collected by Indian elites.5 Company painting emerged alongside rural art and woodblock print production; during the nineteenth century artists employed a range of painting media from small simple paintings on mica to reverse glass painting to gouache and watercolour on paper. Styles varied across the region, with specific ‘schools’ emerging at Murshidabad, Patna, Varanasi and elsewhere. Similar patronage relationships arose in other regions of the subcontinent as well, centred on Chennai and regional courts, with a wide range of styles developing to serve the tastes of a wide range of Company servants. Company painting

Action and identity 23 therefore stands for a variety of painting and patronage patterns spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6


Validating Company painting The discussion of Company paintings in this chapter departs in significant ways from the existing literature on these kinds of works. Scholarship over the past three decades has sought to valorise the study of these paintings, building on earlier identifications of regional schools and specific artists. Mildred and William Archer led the way in both collecting Company painting and then publishing catalogues tracing artist families and regional schools. One of the earliest publications in this field was Mildred Archer’s Patna Painting, a slim volume that described the characteristics of this regional school and provided a genealogy of the family of painters who comprised it (1947). From her position overseeing the collections of the India Office Library, Archer wrote extensively on Company, rural and British painting from this period. Archer thereby built the foundation for the study of this field through her collecting and the detailed catalogues she compiled. Early study of these works focused on their embodiment of the encounter between the British (or Europeans more broadly) and Indians. Some examined a perceived ‘hybridity’ of style and the adaptation of Indian artists to new patrons and markets. Others traced the history and development of the appearance of Company painting, from early examples under the Portuguese to the early British centres in Madras/Chennai.7 Discussions of the works sprang largely from the colonial British reaction to them. Nineteenth-century diaries, letters and other texts communicate a desire on the part of the British patrons to record the scenes which they encountered while in India. As active critics, these nineteenth-century commentators also tended to point to the Indian artist’s lack of ability to render shading and perspective well, or they remarked upon a propensity to use bright colours (see Archer 1992). Mid-twentieth-century scholarship on these works challenged these British texts, countering their criticisms, and validating Company paintings as legitimate objects of study. The perception of a lack of quality in the painting, combined with the discounting of the works as weak attempts to adapt to European styles, found its response in Archer’s valorisation of this adaptation and mixture as a fascinating moment in the development of Indian art at its encounter with the British. Archer’s scholarship brought these paintings into the discourse in a positive light, but nonetheless remained tethered to a larger argument about legitimacy and quality. Scholarship in the late twentieth century turned to the analysis of these paintings as they related to colonialism. In part this new direction followed from the mid-1980s Festivals of India and the concomitant ‘Raj revival’ – a


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Action and identity

period of nostalgia for British imperial culture and a renewing of interest in objects from that era.8 It became legitimate to display and analyse eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works from India, something that had not truly happened in prior decades. But this revival also coincided with renewed interest across disciplines in rethinking colonialism, and many exhibitions offered more than a chance to relive the British colonial period: they provided a window into the machinations and changes within colonial discourse from the late eighteenth century through the transition to the crown in 1858 and independence in 1947. Often this window opened inadvertently, alongside the general celebratory overtones of these exhibits. But the shows took the study of the visual culture of colonial India in a different direction. They often included works by British professional and amateur artists alongside Company paintings and late Mughal paintings. Scholars began to mount a critique of the very idea of a unified ‘Company painting’ and called for more regional and contextual analysis of these works (Pal and Dehejia 1986). Parallel critical studies of British amateur painters, printmakers and the picturesque image of India produced in these objects meant that, by the 1990s, scholarship on the painting of this period engaged directly with emerging critical histories of colonialism (Rohatgi and Godrej 1995; Brown 1997; Pelizzari 2003). Company paintings now stand with popular bazaar prints, painted photographs and arts and crafts as legitimate objects to collect and display in museum contexts.

Colonialism, cloth and craft Company paintings depict festivals, portray religious and political leaders, and give glimpses into everyday life in India. These works took part in a larger body of colonial imaging and information gathering across the subcontinent at a difficult transitional moment for colonialism at the turn of the nineteenth century. After the battles for Company control of northern India during the 1750s and 60s, the growing bureaucracy of the East India Company needed time to take over patterns of earlier revenue collection and assert its own bureaucracy on its holdings. In order to better control the region, and to understand the contours of the area from which the Company gathered revenue, various surveys were carried out between 1780 and 1830, beginning with the mapping of the rivers and expanding from there to the wider geography and related socio-economic and agricultural concerns. James Rennell’s Bengal Atlas of 1780 sought to map the rivers of the region (Cook 1978), and Francis Buchanan’s diaries and survey reports from the first decades of the nineteenth century discuss a broad range of social, agricultural and demographic issues (1925).9 These and other surveys, alongside the various images of India circulating during this period, provided the Company with a framework for


Action and identity 25 understanding the region and allow us insight into the shifting discourse of colonialism as it formed during this period. These surveys also illuminate the role of small-scale industry in the region, including cloth production. Many scholars have worked to understand the extent to which local craft traditions and small, family-run cottage industries declined or limped along during the nineteenth century. I will touch upon the politics of this scholarship in later chapters, particularly in relation to the Gandhian construction of a loss of this craft tradition. For now I simply note that the decline of local craft, particularly as it related to cloth, has been well documented for the nineteenth century.10 The debates over the reasons for this decline, and the resultant problems arising from it, including Hindu–Muslim communal conflict and labour disputes, have been discussed elsewhere at length (Pandey 1990; Gooptu 2001). I wish instead to turn to the range of types of production and the regional variations of cloth making often overlooked by those studying broad economic patterns. As a cottage industry, cloth production overlaps with larger craft practices, from leatherwork to carving and pottery. As a result, concerns for the loss of the cotton industry on an economic level find an echo in calls for the preservation of India’s fading craft traditions. Partha Mitter’s work has explored European attitudes towards the art of India, providing insight into late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial actors who, working against prevailing British opinion, attempted to valorise the visual culture of the subcontinent (1992 [1977]). Of these, Ananda Coomaraswamy, a geologist-turned-art historian who defended India’s artistic heritage, and E. B. Havell, the head of the art school in Kolkata and advocate for the study of South Asian art, became important figures in an intellectual history that drew from the Arts and Crafts movement in nineteenth-century Britain to claim an authentic, spiritually driven handicraft tradition in South Asia (Parker 1987; Guha-Thakurta 2004; Achar and Tarar 2007). These early polemicists for Indian craft served as the historical voice upon which later scholars built arguments about the role of craft in the nineteenth century, the shifting discourse of the art schools in Madras/Chennai, Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata and Lahore, and the engagement of rural art and craft with the nationalist movement at the turn of the twentieth century (Dewan 2001; Guha-Thakurta 2004; Achar and Tarar 2007). In recent decades, additional art historical and anthropological investigations into the history of craft across the nineteenth century and the museumisation of craft tradition have deepened our understanding of the role of craft in India’s cultural economy and in the construction of ‘Indianness’ for both the coloniser and the nationalists (McGowan 2005). This research has largely confirmed the common narrative put forth by the scholarship of Coomaraswamy and Havell: that India’s craft traditions, like


26

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its cotton textile production, were in decline across the nineteenth century (Coomaraswamy 1964 [1916]; Havell 1911). The causes for this decline vary widely depending on the particular craft one investigates, the political stance of the author and the period in which he or she writes. Cloth, because of its intimate connection to colonial economics and politics, remains one of the more politicised arenas for this discussion. The wide-ranging policies of the British that led them to secure raw materials from India (and elsewhere in the empire), mill them in northern England, and then sell them again to those in the subcontinent have been well documented elsewhere (Harnetty 1972; Wolcott 1991; Chatterji 1992). These policies included outlawing the purchase of Indian-made cloth in Britain, so that the production of fine Dhaka muslin, for example, died out largely due to these monopolistic colonial trade arrangements (Hossain 1988). The production of cloth through cottage industry became a rallying cry for the agitators against the Bengal partition of 1905 and for the later anticolonial movement. The rhetoric of a ‘dying craft’ became central to these later political movements, and, as a result, it remains difficult to pull apart the narrative from the facts. The earlier history of cloth production on the subcontinent is relatively clear. Medieval historians provide a detailed view of the cloth-making industry (particularly in the south) before the sixteenth century. We have economic evidence for the shifting of exports under the nineteenth-century colonial policies (Sarkar 1973; Hossain 1988), and historical records of the movement of handloom weavers from one location to another in search of work during the nineteenth century (Haynes and Roy 1999). Scholars have also found links between the decline in the fortunes of rural weavers and East India Company policies in northern India, specifically Bengal (Hossain 1979, 1988). Studies of the movements of artisans during this period confirm a downturn in the ability of weavers to make a living pursuing their craft. Workers shifted into mills or changed professions in order to maintain their livelihoods. In this case, the rhetoric of a dying industry largely matches the reality on the ground. With this wealth of scholarship on weaving, cloth production and cotton trade in the subcontinent, it is important to keep in mind that this research into the decline of cottage production of cloth traces the movements of weavers and weaving families, and does not necessarily reflect a concurrent decline in spinning practices. Part of the project of this book is to construct and maintain the distinction between weaving and spinning, a distinction too often collapsed within contemporaneous rhetoric and later scholarship. One thinks primarily of cotton spinning and cotton cloth production in India, as the subcontinent had a supply of the raw material and could thereby produce cotton, yarn and cloth without importing anything, and indeed without moving far from the source of the cotton. While courtly patronage


Action and identity 27 included silk and metallic cloths, the bulk of the subcontinent’s production lay in cotton.11 Unsurprisingly, then, painted images of spinning from the early nineteenth century focus on cotton as well, but one also finds a great deal of regional diversity, often coincident with variation in the material spun. Wool and jute finishing use several of the same techniques as cotton spinning and cloth production. Metalwork also includes a thread-production and weaving component for including gold in cloth or making tassels for various purposes. As a result, one finds images labelled ‘spinning’ or ‘weaving’ from a variety of craft traditions. Spinning, too, incorporates within it a wide range of practices and tools, from the vertical pull of the simple, gravity-driven drop spindle or takli to the rhythm of the more elaborate upright wheel, or charkha. Regional differences in the make of the charkha are evident in the historical record, from paintings, textual descriptions and extant nineteenth-century wheels preserved in museums. Sometimes these differences map onto regional ones: wool spinning occurs in sheep-rearing areas, particularly the Himalayan regions, Tibet and Assam. The variations also map onto the place of spinning within the daily work of the household, as the takli is easy to take up casually while doing other things, and it is also easy for children to use. While paintings largely depict women with the charkha, and only very rarely does one see a man behind the wheel, men do appear spinning with the takli, again particularly in representations of wool-producing regions (see Chapter 4). The variation in spinning implements, techniques and materials is matched by a wide variation in the styles of painting across the subcontinent. Most of the paintings analysed in this chapter come from northern India and the Gangetic plain with works from Thanjavur and the Malabar coast in southern India serving as contrasting examples. A strong pattern of iconography emerges from the paintings of the Gangetic plain, one that, as later chapters explore, becomes a metonym for all spinning, collapsing the takli and diverse materials into one symbol.

The iconography of spinning The framework within which images of spinning occur crucially shapes the following analysis in three ways. First, in Company painting, spinning is rarely if ever depicted as a separate activity; rather than distance spinning from weaving and the other elements of cloth production, Company painting depicts them together as part of a set of linked processes. A single painting may include only a scene of spinning, but the work will usually exist as part of a series. Second, in examining a wide range of images of spinning from the middle of the nineteenth century, a specific, repeated iconography emerges for certain types of images, indicating a market for certain ‘sets’


28

Action and identity

that transcended the traditional regional boundaries separating different schools of Company painting. This iconography does not always carry over into British amateur painting and sketches of the period, and is primarily limited to northern India in the nineteenth century (although it persists in later media and thereby spreads across the subcontinent). Third, while these images did not arise entirely independent of what came before, they were largely a new phenomenon in South Asia. Spinning appears infrequently in both Mughal contexts and in the painting of other South Asian kingdoms.12 For the subcontinent, then, these images represent a departure from earlier patterns of iconography. The iconography of the spinner in nineteenth-century Company paintings often follows the example of the image from the ROM (Figure 1.1, c. 1830). On a plain paper background, the unknown artist has positioned the subject in the bottom half of the frame, with the woman on the right and the wheel on the left. She raises her left hand into the air, a cleaned and prepared ball of cotton in it, and gazes at the wheel while her right hand turns the crank. She sits on a small woven stool – the detail is such in the ROM painting that one can see the warp and weft of the cane or cotton bands. A basket of cotton sits waiting for her in the foreground, and the frame of the spinning wheel recedes away from the picture plane at a diagonal, upwards and to the left. Her head tilts towards the wheel and she tucks her knees into her body. As I mentioned in the Introduction, these elements, arranged in this manner, appear in a wide range of paintings of spinning from the beginning of the nineteenth century. First, a work collected by the Marquis Wellesley, and therefore dating roughly to his tenure as Governor-General of India (1798–1805), exhibits a similar iconography (Figure 1.2). Small details differ: in this painting, the subject’s left arm pulls the cotton out on an angle closer to horizontal; she appears older than the woman in the ROM image; and she braces the frame of the spinning wheel with her foot. But the overall composition suggests a pattern. The Wellesley spinner comes from Kolkata, c. 1800, whereas the ROM image comes from 1830s Patna. Second, in both detail and composition the ROM image is extremely similar to a c. 1850–60 painting in the Patna style (Archer 1947, pl. 17; Figure 1.3). Collected by the Archers in the 1940s, this image has a verbal provenance communicated by the descendants of the artist, whom the family identified as Sona Kumari. It differs from the ROM image only slightly: the alignment of the wheel here matches the alignment of the frame of the spinning apparatus, and one can see slight variations in the depth of the cotton basket and the angle of the spinner’s body. Third, a painting in the British Library by Shiva Lal, dated to the 1850s by the Archers, repeats once again the iconography; here the barest of settings makes an appearance, with hints of cloud in the sky above and a horizontal wall behind the figure.13 Lal’s figure faces the viewer directly,



Figure 1.2 Anon., ‘Spinning’, 1798–1804. Kolkata. Wellesley Albums. Watercolour. Source: © British Library Board, Add.Or. 1215

her legs forming a ‘V’. This work demonstrates a greater attention to detail, a facility with shading and a mastery of the spatial relation between wheel, gaze and raised left hand. Many more paintings may be added to this sample. Other images echo the composition but with cruder depictions of details like the sari pattern, the stool, the texture of the basket and the rendering of the face and hands. Regardless of the level of detail and care in the production of the image, this iconography can be found from Lucknow to Kolkata during the nineteenth century, as well as at other regional centres in the Gangetic basin. This repeated iconography forms one piece of a larger trade in images, one which serves as a precursor to contemporary postcards and tourist photos. Families of painters produced sets of paintings on this model, sets sometimes referred to as ‘firka paintings’ or ‘firka sets’.14 A firka is an administrative unit that brings together several villages in its purview. Several firkas comprise a taluk, and their administrators – talukdars – controlled the land and tax revenues for large regions, reporting during this period to the East


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Action and identity

Figure 1.3 Sona Kumari, Woman spinning, 1850–60. Patna School. Watercolour. Archer Collection. Source: © British Library Board, Add.Or. 3992

India Company. A firka, then, comprises a collection of smaller entities, an appropriate metaphor for the groups of images these artists produced in the nineteenth century. The ROM set represents a typical ‘firka’. These works have several things in common. All are abstracted from any setting or background. The space they inhabit is simply the white paper of the page; three-dimensionality occurs through the objects surrounding them, a rug upon which they sit, or the modelling of their bodies. All of them are situated just below the midpoint of the page, and all leave a generous bottom margin, so that the scenes seem to float across the centre. The exception to this pattern is the second vignette of the woman with two long spindles twisting the already spun yarn around vertical poles. Here we are given a horizon line and a shaded ground that establishes the landscape around her. Nonetheless, the setting is far from elaborate, and the figure remains isolated, with the white empty space above her focusing our attention on the painted portion of the image.15



The cloth-making series I have detailed the repetition of iconography in the spinning image; the same repetition can be found in each of the other images as well. The butcher and barber images are often repeated, along with other village professions: chumar or shoemaker, water carrier, fringe maker, bangle seller, metalworker, smith, vegetable seller, sweets seller, or a man with a cart pulled by a bull. These vignettes of everyday life map onto professions (shoemaker), crafts (cloth making), everyday commerce (vegetable seller), or services (transport).16 In each case, one finds a repetition of how these vignettes appear, with details of garment varying slightly and the relative crudeness of the painting ranging across a wide spectrum. Nonetheless, the patterns are extremely stable in paintings from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1860s. Groups of images within this larger genre of abstracted village activity can be found, but it is specifically cloth making that generates so much interest within the repertoire of Company paintings. The cloth-making images of the ROM set demonstrate the variety of stages of the process. These five appear quite often within the larger body of Company paintings, but not always in the same combination. Additional subjects in the cloth-making category include the cleaning of the cotton with a bow, ginning cotton with a handgin (or, rarely, by hand), and occasionally the winding of cotton yarn onto a large spindle in preparation for stretching and twisting. The cloth seller image, included in the ROM set, does not appear very often. This diversity of subject matter within paintings of the cloth-making process derives in part from the division of labour across cloth-making itself. While the spinner sometimes shares familial bonds with the weaver – and therefore the process from spinning to weaving takes place within the same household – the cotton carders are part of a separate profession, the dhuniya or pinjari. Even so, one sees a great deal of differentiation across the spectrum of cloth making. One could metonymically represent this entire range of activity with weaving, and indeed the weaver subject is the most popular among the extant paintings. But rather than concentrating there, or depicting spinning and weaving alone, the additional steps of twisting the thread and preparing the warp feature fairly regularly in firka sets. Other processes see some differentiation of steps as well, for example grain harvest and grinding. But handicraft-related tasks other than cloth making are usually represented by one image: only a potter at the wheel, not kneading clay, drying pots or firing the kiln. Cloth making differs from other crafts in important ways which encourage its depiction in series. Some elements of cloth making call for a good deal of outdoor space to be effective. The stretching and twisting of the yarn requires


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Action and identity

an open area across which one can place the vertical posts. The subsequent combing and picking at the warp demands a long space across which to hang the length of yarn. These processes generally do not share the same space as spinning, weaving or selling the cloth, whereas the potter often inhabits the same general area for his work and commerce. Cotton carding is messy work, and must have its own space separate from the spinning area; spinning can be done anywhere, but weaving requires a stationary loom, usually under cover. Finally, different people do these activities. Aside from the separate profession of the dhuniya, women spin cotton, and in the images they also tend to twist the yarn (one finds occasional images of men and women twisting the yarn together). Weaving is a particular profession done by men; men also clean the warp and sell the cloth. Part of the reason for the differentiation of the steps in the imaging of cotton production, then, falls to the wide variety of activities, their different settings and the division of labour in the processes involved. What the Company paintings tell us about the market and patronage for these repetitious iconographies, then, is that the process of cloth making, in all its detail, was a popular subject for painters and Europeans who collected these images. Due to the wide range of subjects produced within Company painting, I don’t claim cloth production to be the most popular subject matter; indeed, no clear primary subject appears from a survey of the albums and collections available. But I do argue that a particular attention to the variety in the context of cloth production indicates a heightened interest for patrons in the Gangetic region in that particular subject – an interest that did not collapse cloth making into simply weaving or spinning. The consistent elaboration of the multiple steps in cloth production contrasts markedly with later metonymic moves made by nationalists in the early twentieth century.

Contrast I: Pondicherry, Thanjavur and the Malabar coast Comparing this pattern with others from elsewhere in the subcontinent brings to the surface the particular concerns of these firka sets. The consistency across northern Indian iconographies does not entirely continue to the south, although similarities remain. Of course the colonial context differs substantively as one moves from the Gangetic basin towards Chennai. Images from Pondicherry at the turn of the nineteenth century are labelled in French, and some exhibit a certain comic character; for example, one album of painted drawings includes a watercolour of an old woman spinning while she smokes a pipe, her lips painted bright red and wearing a red-checked cloth around her waist.17 Others, like the painting from Chennai dated to c. 1785 and discussed in the Introduction, place spinning in the same composition with other elements of cloth production (Figure 0.1). But the basic iconography remains:


Action and identity 33 the spinner usually sits behind and to the right of the wheel, with the wheel itself at the left of the composition. In the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, one finds albums illustrating the costumes of Malabar, and these emphasise the dress of the figures, as is the case with the pipesmoking aged spinner above.18 This focus suggests an overall distinction in subject matter between the early-nineteenth-century Gangetic region and Pondicherry and the Malabar coast of the same period. The former develops sets of craft production including an elaborated multi-image iconography of cloth making. The latter looks more to costume and focuses on illustrating India not through what the people do but through what they wear. In nineteenth-century images from the Malabar coast and Thanjavur, the differentiation between this broad area and the Gangetic region continues. Where codified sets of iconographies have developed in Patna, Kolkata, Murshidabad and Varanasi (all of which illustrate village activities in blank

Figure 1.4 Anon., ‘Weaver and his Wife’, c. 1800. Thanjavur. Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, AL 8940 N


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or generic settings), the pattern in these southern areas tends towards illustrating types of people through costume and attributes of their occupation, and only occasionally do the subjects perform that occupation. Rather than dividing out the steps of cotton production into several paintings, these images, where they illustrate them at all, place multiple steps within the same painting or drawing, showing us spinning, combing the warp and weaving in the same frame. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘Weaver and his Wife’ (Thanjavur, c. 1800; Figure 1.4) is one of a set of paintings with similar compositions. The normal pattern includes two figures, a man and a woman, with a setting that has a slightly curved horizon line, dotted with palm trees and employing vegetation to mark the division between earth and cloudy sky. In this image, the man holds a brush for combing the warp while the woman at the left holds a large spindle used for stringing and twisting the thread for the warp. One cannot see precisely how her spindle connects to the stretched thread below, and as a result the spindle operates as an attribute she holds to identify her with the cloth-making process, rather than as an object she actively uses. Painted in the same decade as the Wellesley Kolkata spinner (Figure 1.2), the Thanjavur composition demonstrates a different sensibility and a different set of concerns on the part of the patron. Rather than illustrate individual figures and focus on their occupation – that is, what they do – the ‘Weaver and his Wife’ presents two people in the same frame, providing us with an illustration not simply of what they do but instead of who they are. While many images from the Gangetic region are not labelled at all, most of those that are labelled point to the action depicted, not the identity. The Wellesley spinning image is labelled simply ‘spinning’; the labels in the Thanjavur and Malabar regions more often attempt to identify the people in the image – a weaver and his wife, or Malabar weaver caste. An emphasis on illustrating action can be found in the Gangetic examples where an emphasis on identity can be observed in those of the Malabar and Thanjavur regions.19 This distinction demonstrates the diversity within the group of images often found under the rubric of ‘ethnographic’. More pointed analyses that move beyond the noting of subject matter to analyse the contexts of circulation and collection, labelling and grouping of these works demonstrate that Gangetic Company painting images of this genre do not easily fall into a typologising, ethnographic category, instead depicting actions and processes. When one moves to the mid-nineteenth century and compares the ROM set with contemporaneous paintings from Thanjavur, one finds the differentiation between identity and action maintained. In the Thanjavur context, multiple elements of cloth making appear in the same painting, or separate vignettes appear on the same paper.20 Labels mark the caste of those in the images


Action and identity 35 rather than their actions. In the Patna paintings, one sees studies of individual steps of the process with generic, interchangeable figures performing them. My focus here lies with the Gangetic image sets, and so the contrast with the Thanjavur and Malabar images demonstrates several important points. Rather than provide a setting with vegetation and trees, along with specified costumes, the ROM images and others in their iconographic pattern give us blank backgrounds, generic figures sitting behind the spinning wheel, and a variation only in the level of detail, the modelling of the figure, and the precise relation of the spinner’s body to the angle of the wheel itself. These Patna images, along with the other Gangetic Company schools, do not illustrate individual identity types or castes. They illustrate occupations as actions – as things people in everyday India do, in contrast to things people in a newly industrialising Britain do. These images thereby engage in a project not of designating occupation-as-caste, nor of describing types of Indians under some other rubric outside of caste. These images illustrate actions, not identity types. When Gangetic imagery shifts to identity later in the century, spinning as a subject matter fades. Its inability to serve as a mark of differentiation within a metric of ‘identity’ means both that spinning becomes less valuable for later colonial projects of caste identification and that it serves an important purpose for the nationalist movement as an action which transcends caste and religious identities.

Contrast II: European sketches of spinning If one examines the sketches made by both professional and amateur British artists, the contrast with the Company paintings makes clearer the paintings’ focus on what people do and how they live, rather than emphasising caste or typologisation by a metric of identity. George Chinnery, a professional artist who travelled in India in the early decades of the nineteenth century, made several sketches of women spinning.21 As one might expect, these sketches do not follow Company school iconography, but they do demonstrate a separate and related pattern within many European representations of spinning. Chinnery’s sketches or preparatory studies depict the figures from both front and back, and one finds several images of spinning wheels alone at different angles.22 Often Chinnery depicts the spinner from behind. In addition, for Chinnery, the subject of the spinner gave him an opportunity to illustrate anatomy, and one finds several spinning figures with Michelangelolike musculature, from front and back.23 Later artists continue the trend of depicting the spinner from behind, and also pick up on the iconography of the sari-clad woman as it resonates with Madonna and child imagery, focusing on the outline of the draped form. William Simpson’s sketchbook of 1859–60 includes several studies (one of a woman spinning sketched from behind in


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Action and identity

this mould);24 and Sir Charles D’Oyly places the spinner-from-behind in a picturesque landscape on the bank of a river, in keeping with his larger body of work that often centres on landscape and cityscape imagery.25 The European artists’ sketches and drawings also include images of spinning not usually found in Company painting sets, most prominently images of men spinning with the drop spindle or takli rather than the wheel (charkha). Frances Eden’s sketchbook diary of an 1838 visit to the Punjab includes a vignette of a man and a woman, identified in the text as tentpitchers spinning thread to mend the tent.26 The spinner is not the seated woman in the image but instead the man, who stands with a takli held high in his left hand, using his right hand to steady the thread as the bob pulls down on it. Sir Henry Yule, in a drawing dated 29 May 1849, also depicts a man spinning thread, again standing with the takli in front of him; he is identified as the headman of Kursali in the Himalayas.27 Women are also occasionally depicted with the takli in British sketches and paintings, and very occasionally in Company painting. An early Company painting example from the Wellesley collection at the turn of the nineteenth century illustrates a woman spinning with a takli, her body shaped like a kidney bean with her knees tucked under her chin.28 Much later, a c. 1940 painting from Jamini Roy’s studio picks up this isolated image and reinterprets it in his particular modernist style.29 But the Wellesley takli represents an exception in the wider body of Company painting, and the Roy image lies well outside of the period in question here. These examples of takli, both on the periphery of Company painting and within the British drawing repertoire, indicate a wider everyday practice of spinning than that seen in the firka sets. The takli’s near absence from Company painting spinning imagery, and the varied approach that British amateur and professional artists took to the image of the woman spinning at the charkha, both indicate the strength of the iconographic pattern for spinning images in firka sets. They also remind us that we see in these images a particular selection of occupations and actions, not a comprehensive survey. The exceptions to this emerge from British hands, in Himalayan regions outside of the primary East India Company area, and, in the twentieth century, in Roy’s modernist vision of a spinner. The consistent repetition of the spinner behind the wheel in Company painting from the major centres in the north – Patna, Murshidabad, Kolkata, Varanasi and Lucknow – demonstrates the strength of this iconography, even when other forms of spinning and other approaches to the subject matter existed. This ubiquity also underscores the difference between images that circulate in an economy of popular imagery and nostalgia as opposed to personal, non-circulating, one-off images. In Company painting we find a precursor to the mass production of both print and photography later in the century. Different kinds of images emerge from Company painting, not because of

Action and identity 37 an essentialised assumption about the artist’s Indian or European identity but because of the way in which the images circulate.


Spinning, not spinner Company paintings of spinning exhibit several characteristics, repeated with consistency across the Gangetic plain throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. First, spinning occurs within the context of other images of cloth making, which together make up a larger programme of images depicting cotton carding, stretching and twisting the yarn, combing the warp, weaving and selling the cloth. While the image of a woman spinning at a wheel most often appears alone on a single page, she does not stand in for the entire cloth-making process. Second, the generic, usually empty setting for the images abstracts them from any particular location, and identifications of painting styles are the only things linking these works to a city or region. In themselves, they do not indicate a place, nor do they usually provide even a generalised location – outside a house, in a village, in the open air – where these activities occur. Third, unlike the pattern of Company paintings from Thanjavur and the Malabar coast, paintings from Patna, Kolkata and elsewhere in the northern region do not delineate caste identities, either in their composition or in their labelling. Instead, as I argue above, they provide illustrations of what people do – that is, action, not identity. Fourth, the consistent repetition of the iconography of the spinner marginalises other types of spinning and other visual approaches to the subject. These elements characterise the body of extant paintings from the Gangetic plain; variations appear in painting style, attention to detail and the level of care with which modelling, colouration and shading have been pursued in these works. While these differentiations help to identify painting schools, families and regions, my purpose here lies in the analysis of what the overwhelming pattern of this iconography tells us about the construction of ‘spinning’ and its participation in the construction of ‘India’. The primary iconography, as demonstrated by the ROM set and others, provided viewers with a pre-formed vision of everyday life in India. Travellers who could not draw well but wanted images to bring back to Britain could purchase these sets and thereby retain memories of what they saw in India, or – whether or not they had seen spinning in person – these travellers could construct memories of the India they had visited. Just as in other contexts visitors to Egypt or the Taj Mahal strove to get the ‘perfect view’ or capture a place’s mythic qualities in paint or on film, these Company paintings provided the parameters within which spinning was imagined in India.30 Alongside the larger repertoire of Company paintings, this particular vision of cloth production framed what British travellers experienced when they


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Action and identity

went to India, such that the alternative modes of spinning were forced to the periphery. In part, this constructed vision of cloth production and of India more broadly depended on the modes of circulation of these images. Like picturesque landscape prints by the Daniells and others, Company painting moved within an economy of image circulation, developed for an audience of elite colonial consumers (see Jain 2007). There was thus a feedback loop. Travellers to India from this elite group had already imagined India through Company painting, and they travelled to India to ‘experience’ this vision of India – which meant precisely that they would purchase Company painting when there. Furthermore, spinning, despite a range of practices related to it and despite the variety of modes of spinning itself, narrowed in its iconography to a singular form. It appears as the woman behind the wheel, head tilted at an angle, left arm held out and right hand turning the wheel. If the spinning image consolidated around the repeated iconography of Company painting, that iconography itself did not exhibit several traits normally assumed in our analyses of this period and this body of visual culture, often overly structured by assumptions of ethnographic interest on the part of the British coloniser. The image of spinning was not explicitly tied to a particular caste in the north as it was in Thanjavur and the Malabar coast in the south. Paintings from these southern regions depicted costumes of particular castes and tribes, with a man and a woman holding the attributes of their occupation dressed in appropriate clothing, thereby representing a designated identity. In the Gangetic region of interest here, the images instead depict action: spinning, weaving, carding. The interchangeability of the images across regions in the north, and the lack of labelling that relates to caste designations, indicates that this body of images, while possibly capable of assimilation to a larger project of caste differentiation, does not in itself demonstrate such a project. The concern in these cloth-making firka sets was one of process, not identity, and one finds this concern reflected in the generic nature of the images, the consolidation of them into sets, and the labelling that often privileges gerundic action: spinning, not spinner. This distinction becomes crucial in the appropriation of the image of spinning for the nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. Direct links to caste, religion or region would have undermined the efficacy of the symbol to draw the diversity of India together. As I discuss in the following chapter, several of the characteristics of the spinning image are lost in this appropriation, in particular its context in a series as part of a larger process. But colonial era spinning paintings, in their ubiquity, consistency and lack of specificity, provided an excellent source for the production of a national symbol. I turn next to photography, and find that spinning, now separated from its existence in a set of cloth-making images, disappears from ethnographic



contexts and only occasionally occurs in studio and amateur photography. This isolation and lack of connection to caste or regional labels enabled Gandhi’s appropriation of spinning as a unifying symbol, which I analyse in Chapter 3. Company painting grounds what I trace in the later trajectory of spinning imagery: photography moves away from action (spinning) to person (spinner) while the nationalist movement reclaims spinning-as-action.

2

Capturing the wheel in motion


Photography and spinning

If Company painting from the first half of the nineteenth century presents a standard, stable iconography for spinning, the ubiquity of this type of imagery fades in the second half of the century as the medium of photography takes over the role of recording the ‘everyday’. This chapter examines the image of spinning and the spinner in extant photographs from the midnineteenth century to the 1940s. In this analysis one sees a shift away from the depiction of action that we witnessed in the Company paintings from the Gangetic plain. Photography, as a new technology, was deployed to fix identity through the production of stable, static images of posed individuals or groups. This did not depend entirely on the new medium; the shift towards identity relates also to larger changes within colonialism on the subcontinent after the uprising of 1857–8. Like earlier Company paintings from Thanjavur and the Malabar coast, photography largely produced a typologisation of caste, tribe and profession. Spinning, unable to assist in defining these roles, almost entirely disappeared. Spinning was done by women, and so was not a ‘profession’ that could be easily delineated by caste designation. Spinning also involved motion, something early photography could not capture. As a result, the major photographic projects cataloguing Indian peoples do not normally include pictures of spinning. Instead, one finds rare images in studio photography collections, in snapshots taken in situ of village life, and in the photographs of individual travellers. But it is precisely this lack of late-nineteenth-century images of spinning that enables spinning’s appropriation by Gandhi in the early twentieth century as a renewed symbol of Indian unity, deployed in the service of the anticolonial movement. Because spinning did not participate in typologisations of India’s people, and because it played only a marginal role in colonial production of knowledge, it could more easily anchor later attempts to transcend these constructed and entrenched categories in the struggle to unify India.


Capturing the wheel in motion 41 Photographs of spinning draw on their Company painting predecessors, but with crucial differences. The framing and iconography of the spinner behind the wheel with left arm raised remains overwhelmingly the ‘proper’ view for the photographer to capture the subject. One still finds a range of photographs depicting the cloth-making process (carding, ginning, weaving), but they do not appear within a series format, and more often spinning images exist apart from any grouping. Many of these other steps in the process appear more frequently than spinning: they are done by men and often carry a community or caste label. Within spinning photographs, the generic nature of the Company paintings continues, despite the ability of the photographic medium to capture the specificity of individual features. Labels rarely indicate which village or region appears in the photograph, and the backdrop often remains a simple wall or nondescript village, eliminating any geographic or spatial specificity. Unlike Company paintings, however, one now sees the added dimension of the subject interacting with the lens, sometimes to hide the face, sometimes to perform for the camera, or sometimes to challenge the viewer. Yet, despite the range of possibilities available through photography, particularly once the technology becomes portable and moves away from the posed studio photograph, the iconography for spinning remains remarkably stable. Others have commented on a marked conservatism in visual culture at times of technological transition – a conservatism that appears despite the opportunities that new technologies offer.1 This chapter argues that while the basic iconography remains the same for spinning in this time period, the historical and discursive field for these images changes, and in the end one can see a marked shift in the underlying subject matter of the works. That is, despite the picture itself staying more or less the same, its content changes from one depicting action and doing to one defining identity. In large part, this leaves spinning behind, as the spinner cannot be easily subsumed into categories of caste, profession, religion, tribe or region. As a result, spinning fades as a subject matter, and becomes separated from the larger process of cloth production, while retaining its generic quality, a quality which becomes crucial for Gandhi and other nationalists when they appropriate spinning for the nationalist movement. On the one hand, the waning of spinning anchors Gandhian narratives about the craft; the perception of its demise produces a need to save spinning and thereby salvage the Indian nation. On the other hand, spinning’s consistent iconography makes it recognisable. Its inability to assimilate to the requirements of colonial ethnographic projects left it free to be reworked for swaraj (selfrule). In the hands of the nationalist movement, spinning returns to its early status as an action rather than a marker of identity, an action now employed to serve the anticolonial movement.

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Photography from document to index South Asian photography, while crucial for the development of archaeology, architectural history, anthropology and art history, has not enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention in its own right. Just as the study of Company painting emerged from Mildred Archer’s catalogues of the India Office collections, the study of photography in South Asia rests on the research of a few scholars working in similar circumstances who argued for its legitimacy. Ray Desmond’s work at the India Office Library in the 1970s provided crucial early insights into photography in India (1974, 1977). His successor, John Falconer, continues to publish essays and articles on a range of photography collections, writing everything from accessible outlines of nineteenth-century photographic history in the subcontinent to discussions of the architectural categorisations found in photography of this period (Falconer 1995, 2000). Exhibitions of photographs have served as venues for scholarly analysis, including the 1976 show at New York’s Asia Society, The Last Empire (Worswick and Embree 1976). With the flurry of exhibitions surrounding the mid-1980s Festivals of India around the world, Indian photography found small footholds in museum and gallery spaces. In the 1990s, more pointed scholarly attention focused on the photography of the subcontinent, as legitimacy for its study grew.2 The Last Empire show in 1976 included many subject matters, from portraits of princes and wealthy Indian individuals to architectural and landscape views, as well as a wide range of ethnographic photographs, from tribal typologies to mundane professions and occupations. British photographers dominate the catalogue, although a few major Indian photographers also make an appearance. The exhibition illustrated India through contemporaneous photographs, rather than critically analysing those images or the India they presented. Even the title demonstrates nostalgia for the lost empire and the fallen Raj, a trope that continued through the middle of the 1980s. Judith Mara Gutman’s Through Indian Eyes (1982) accompanied a travelling exhibition of the same name at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work was ground-breaking in that instead of merely illustrating colonial India, it attempted to answer the prevalent questions of the time: namely, whether photography represented a ‘Western’ medium that South Asian photographers merely took up, or whether one could find anything ‘Indian’ about the works by Indian photographers from the late nineteenth century. Like Mildred Archer’s early defence of Company painting discussed in the previous chapter, the question Gutman sought to answer sprang from the need to legitimise the study of Indian photographs. Gutman’s analysis occasionally sought to link something ineffable in the image with an Indian ‘essence’. She argues that photography, while in many ways a break


Capturing the wheel in motion 43 from earlier forms of visual representation, also shows traces of continuity with earlier media. She highlights portraiture in this regard, noting the consistencies between princely photographs and earlier paintings of princes in South Asia. In making this argument Gutman revalues these works, moving away from earlier dismissals of them as ‘derivative’ in order to reclaim them as legitimate objects of study taking their position alongside the rest of the visual culture of the subcontinent. While Gutman’s book thereby brought Indian photographers’ work into the orbit of study, and built a bridge between legitimated forms of Indian art (pre-colonial painting, for example) and photography, her critics point to the ways in which her argument falls into a mode of essentialising the ‘Indianness’ of photographs produced by Indians. In valorising the study of Indian photography, Gutman’s analysis sometimes attached an ‘Indianness’ to the objects produced by Indian photographers, linking something ineffable in the image with an Indian ‘essence’. Christopher Pinney (1997) and Vidya Dehejia (2000) take Gutman’s work to task for oversimplifying the relation between style and a vague labelling of ethnic or national identity. Both call for more local, contextual analyses of photography that help us to unpack the wide range of representational practices taken up by European and South Asian photographers alike. In the 1990s, the questions driving scholarly study of India’s photographic history thereby shifted to focus on more localised studies for the production of photographs by European and Indian photographers. This move paralleled wider changes in scholarship that analysed visual culture in relation to a burgeoning literature on colonialism and empire. Speaking from the discipline of anthropology, Pinney situates his ethnography of contemporary studio photographers in Nagda, Madhya Pradesh, within nineteenth-century photography and major typologising ethnographic projects organised by the colonial government. Camera Indica focuses on the ways in which bodies and faces circulate in the cultural economy; the book’s argument rests on a theoretical apparatus indebted to Barthes, Bourdieu and photography scholars such as John Tagg (Pinney 1997). By paying careful attention to the positionality of the photographer and the photographer’s subject, Pinney argues that the traditions and motifs carried over in photography should be read as ‘highly complex, “modern” attempts to formulate visual identities under specific historical and political conditions’ (1997: 96). Pinney’s body of work acknowledges the participation in this process by both the photographer and the sitter. He sees the colonial ‘drive for knowledge’ as in part embodied in a concern with fixing the identity of those under colonial purview. Colonial knowledge-production, Pinney argues, is linked to photography’s truthquality – its indexical, physical relation to the object photographed as light bounces off of the body. In other words, if a painting’s relation to its subject


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is once or twice removed from the object represented – the painter’s eye, the paint on the canvas – a the very process of photography largely eliminates those steps. It is indexical because the photograph records light bouncing off of the object and onto the camera’s lens. Photography, therefore, despite a certain remove from its subject matter, embodies a more direct, physical relation to the object represented: an indexical relation.3 Pinney’s work then probes the de-linking of photography and indexically grounded truth in contemporary popular studio practices. He asks whether and how nineteenthcentury photography operates as an index for colonial knowledge production about Indian identity, and contrasts that with contemporary practices in Indian photography. My work builds from the foundations of Pinney’s scholarship in that I explore the colonial underpinnings of the relation between knowledge production and photography’s indexical qualities. Sometimes images do not participate in identity differentiation within the colonial archive; I instead examine the wider range of photographic manoeuvres within nineteenth-century colonial discourse. Photography’s primary space for scholarly study remains, in the 1990s and 2000s, the gallery and museum exhibition. Individual collections have been highlighted in shows and their catalogues (Dehejia 2000; Pelizzari 2003; Falconer et al. 2006) or in edited volumes supported by the collectors themselves (Llewellyn-Jones 2006; Michell 2008). These exhibitions and edited volumes map the interest of both scholars and the public over the past two decades. One reviewer of the India Through the Lens show at the Sackler Gallery in DC4 remarked on the selectivity of the subject matter as compared to the breadth of the Last Empire exhibition of the mid-1970s: The photographs for the most part represent the India that was intended for public view – picturesque vistas, productive enterprises, exotic peoples. Where is the India that most of its inhabitants experienced? We see plenty of princes and tribal peoples, but no peasants, no merchants, no sepoys, no servants (with one exception). Nor do we see the famine victims in late-nineteenth-century Madras whose emaciated bodies were the subject of some famously horriﬁc photographs. Even the British community in India is largely neglected. It is instructive to compare the contents of this catalogue to the one that accompanied an Asia House exhibit in 1976, The Last Empire: Photography in British India, 1855–1911. That earlier catalogue gave far more attention to the everyday lives of Britons and Indians (Kennedy 2003). The relatively wide-ranging subjects included in the Raj nostalgia of earlier decades has shrunk in recent decades, with exhibitions and edited volumes refocused on a narrow band of well-preserved images of India’s nobility,


Capturing the wheel in motion 45 architecture and landscape produced for the elites of both countries (Dehejia 2000; Pelizzari 2006). Exhibitions often lend themselves to works produced by and for the upper classes rather than those arising from the body of amateur or popular photography. Work on particular photographers, whether Samuel Bourne or Raja Deen Dayal, has expanded the parameters of the field as these studio artists captured a wide range of subject matter, from the mundane to the artistic. Art history has focused on these elite spaces of production and developed analyses of studio and courtly photography. Yet, even within seemingly elite studies new questions emerge regarding the circulation of photographs in visitation albums, the sometimes banal imaging of courtly ceremonies and military parades, and the gendered spaces of upper class families and princes (Carotenuto 2005; Dewan and Hutton, forthcoming). Addressing photography from an interdisciplinary, visual anthropology perspective, Pinney’s work stands as a corrective to the focus on elite subjects and artists, particularly in the analysis of contemporary studio photography in India (1997). Comparative studies that draw on the visual culture of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific have deepened the link to the larger study of colonialism and its relations of power (Thomas 1994; Ryan 1998; Hight and Sampson 2004). Major photographic projects supported by the British colonial government – including most prominently The People of India – often draw scholarly attention (Pinney 1990, 1997; Falconer 2004). Photography in India has therefore seen a range of frames for analysis in the past few decades of scholarship. A focus on spinning bridges many of the disciplinary concerns found in earlier studies of photography from the subcontinent. The project here differs from concerns to legitimate Indian photography, use it as illustrative of India’s past, or analyse it as an indexical producer of knowledge. Some current work on photography in India spends time looking closely at the different kinds of subjects addressed across the extant archive of images (see Hutton 2007). Other work has criticised the quick equation between colonialism and photography, and called for more attention to the photo-asobject (Edwards 2001). This chapter follows these leads in tracing spinning in photography through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, asking after its multivalent role in the larger colonial ethnographic project to typologise and image India.5

The photographic archive Spinning photographs appear in a range of physical contexts – both in their initial mode of circulation and later positions in archives – that shape our readings of them. Photographic projects commissioned at the turn of the twentieth century by local governments in the presidency cities of Mumbai,


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Kolkata or Chennai6 often differ substantially in purpose and coverage from the earlier The People of India, but they share its governmental support and their content often overlaps with the subjects found in these volumes.7 Studies of remote ‘tribes’ and regions also fall into this category, with the peoples of the Andaman Islands or hill tribes serving as the basis for compilations. Text accompanying these volumes usually consists of much more than mere captions; The People of India includes several printed pages with each photograph, leading the viewer through the photograph and characterising the people within it. But these books are only the most public and official sets of collected images circulating during the second half of the nineteenth century. Princely courts produced albums as gifts for visitors or dignitaries, often including photographs of the actual visit recently concluded. Album-making occurred within the everyday European population as well, particularly once the camera became a more accessible and easy-to-use technology in the late nineteenth century. Studios in Kolkata and other major cities developed sets of pictures of India for sale, in the same mode as the Company painting sets discussed in the previous chapter. Visitors could then collect images of the places where they had travelled in order to record their journey; one often finds catalogue numbers on studio photographs indicating their place within a larger group of pictures for purchase. Collections and archives today include photographs in bound volumes and in official and unofficial albums, but primarily one finds photographs loose, often entirely detached from the contexts of their production and collection. Because of the ease with which photographs could be reproduced, the same image often appears in multiple settings – as a loose photograph in a folder, pasted on a page as part of an album, and neatly cropped and set with text in an official publication. Images therefore circulated in multiple locations and could take on different meanings. In other words, even a photograph produced from the same negative could, in a new context, embody entirely different content. Photographs, like paintings, changed with the demand of the consumer. The painted photograph gave colour and animation to early portraits, and the difficulty of photographing in outdoor light while retaining detail in faces and costumes meant that backgrounds were often added to photographs through masking and overprinting (Gutman 1982; Pinney 1997, 2004). A wide range of cropping also appears across the archive, with an image appearing as a vertical scene in one collection and reappearing as a horizontal oval-framed vignette in another. Through all these transformations, captions and surrounding text also change. In addition to governmental and princely albums, studio photographs and related loose images, a wide range of amateur photographs provide further insight into the representation of India in the late nineteenth and


Capturing the wheel in motion 47 early twentieth centuries. Many photographs start to resemble contemporary ‘holiday snaps’ by the 1920s. Early scholarly field photographs – intended to play a role in the understanding of the activity and behaviour of tribal groups beyond simply analysing the body and face – form an interesting contrast to static ethnographic images (Seligmann and Seligmann 1911; see Pinney 1990). Film makes an appearance early in the twentieth century, and aside from the studio-produced films, amateur movies of everyday life in India provide glimpses into practices like spinning. Because this chapter traces the path of the image of spinning, rather than focusing on a particular patron, region or genre of photograph, one finds this elusive subject matter within all of these multifarious sites. If, as many have argued, identities emerge through photography’s indexical quality and the ‘authenticity’ of the photographic representation of the body, then my research probes what types of identities arise from such projects by examining not just what the camera captures but also how the composition operates, and the visual discourse it emerges from and simultaneously shapes. I also engage with the unrepresentable within this identity-driven framework. Spinning – as an action, not an identity – does not figure a great deal in many of the canonical sites for photography investigation.8 As a result, following the sometimes faint trail of spinning images demonstrates the nuanced particularities of colonial knowledge production in the late nineteenth century, a project that shaped the representation of India as a whole. Gandhi and others in the nationalist movement built their symbol of spinning on a foundation of Company painting and nineteenth-century photography; by tracing spinning’s path through a wide range of physical contexts, I explore how and why spinning – not weaving, or basketwork, or pottery or another handicraft – became such an important symbol for the anticolonial movement.

Captured on film: The People of India While photography ostensibly allows for capturing everything on film, one instead often finds a fairly limited range of subjects, sometimes carefully chosen and sometimes unwittingly selected by photographer, patron and collector. I trace in this section the limited instances within which spinning appears. Since spinning is not easily categorisable or pinned down into one particular archival location, paying close attention to those places where it does and does not appear provides insight into the transformations of this symbol in the late nineteenth century. Scholars have often taken the eight volumes of The People of India as a quintessential example of colonial racial categorisation, but this oversimplifies the diversity of the contents of these volumes.9 Large-scale photographic projects rarely had specific institutional guidelines for the posing and composition


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of photographs, with the result that even in publications presented in a uniform package, one finds a fluidity in the modes of representation within that seemingly singular object. In The People of India, 15 different photographers exhibit great variety in the treatment of their ostensibly consistent subject, and therefore these volumes serve as an excellent starting point for unpacking the archive to ascertain where, when and how spinning appears. The preface to the eight-volume work makes clear that the project began somewhat haphazardly in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857–8, and that the information presented in the books should not fall under an entirely scientific rubric (Watson and Kaye 1868, vol. 1).10 The gathering of images began in 1861 with a general call to the local colonial governments to send photographs to Kolkata for inclusion in the 1862 London Exhibition. Only later did The People of India become a project devoted to capturing the entire subcontinent (Pinney 1997: 24). As a result of this circuitous route to its current state, The People of India volumes contains a wide range of subject matter, presented with varying approaches to composition. That said, a few commonalities draw the volumes together as a unit and produce a certain coherence from the 468 photographs. Each plate includes one photograph with a caption of a few lines identifying the person or individual, usually by way of a generalised group label. These labels include those of the major (varna) or minor (jati) caste markers, or they simply indicate an occupation or profession (Pinney 1990: 264). In addition, all images in the People of India volumes are posed, and many are taken either in a studio or with a cloth backdrop that at least partially blocks out the immediate setting (on occasion, one can see the hands of the man holding up the cloth, or the gap between the cloth and the ground).11 In the absence of a cloth, photographers in this set would often choose a generic backdrop like a brick wall or the corner of a house. Props and furniture are sometimes repeated in several different photographs, demonstrating their staged nature. At times, one finds the figure or figures portrayed in ‘nature’: in front of a tree or with a village out of focus in the background. These outdoor settings do not appear often in The People of India, instead occurring more frequently in less formal compilations.12 With either the generic village background or the white cloth backdrop, the photographs therefore focus the viewer’s eye on the bodies of the figures, their costumes, and the objects they hold in their hands. These objects operate as attributes, much the same way that in religious iconography the object held by a figure identifies the saint or goddess appearing in the sculpture or painting. The posed quality of the works combined with the use of attributes means that the photographs lack a sense of action or ‘doing’. The closest these pictures come to providing an image of a figure ‘in action’ occurs when the subject stands still in a pose that indicates action. A photograph labelled


Capturing the wheel in motion 49 ‘Bhotanese’, for example, provides the drama of an armed challenge through composition and setting so that one man with a sword in his hand steps onto the platform the others sit upon.13 Often the accompanying text will explain the objects the subject holds, linking it to the group’s essentialised qualities as ‘martial’, ‘aristocratic’, ‘scheming’, or ‘friendly’. Individual portraits include both generic members of a group representing their caste, occupation or role in the community (snake charmer, fakir) or named individuals (royalty and other aristocrats). One does not usually find a continuation of the pattern within Company painting from Thanjavur and the Malabar region discussed in the previous chapter, in which dual-figure compositions included a man and a woman to represent the caste or occupation. Instead, dual-figure photographs usually portray two men holding different objects, pretending to interact, or posed in different attitudes for compositional variety. Group photographs exhibit a range of compositions, but again in these pictures the individuals hold attributes to mark their identities; occasionally an individual portrait of a ruler will include his or her entourage. Groups may be arranged into poses that mimic their occupation or present a ‘characteristic’ of the group’s identity.

Finding spinning in The People of India Among all of these 468 photographs, a pattern of representation emerges in which the body (or multiple bodies) stand in for a group identity further described in the accompanying text. Only one of these images includes spinning. Given the ubiquity of spinning and weaving imagery within Company painting earlier in the century, this number indicates a shift in the visual archive away from recording the activities of the everyday in India towards collecting identities together to present India through caste and ethnicity. Spinning occurs as a subsidiary subject within a group composition (Figure 2.1). The caption – ‘Weavers. Hindoos. Delhi. (191)’ – indicates the central subject matter, and three of the five figures prepare the warp for weaving. Another man sits in profile and holds a block of wood; his task remains unclear. The fifth figure, a woman spinning, sits at the bottom right of the composition. All freeze themselves so as to produce a good photograph, and thus while the photograph describes action it does not capture an image of doing. Working against normal practices for where these disparate activities might take place, here they occupy the same space – the courtyard of a well-built house in full, bright light, a choice likely made for the camera and not for the comfort of those in the photograph. The accompanying text operates in tension with several facts regarding spinning, yarn and cloth in this period. In nineteenth-century reports on the production of cloth in South Asia or on the mechanisms for producing yarn,


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Figure 2.1 Anon., ‘Weavers. Hindoos. Delhi. (191)’, c. 1868–75. Source: The People of India, volume 4 (Watson and Kaye 1868–75), plate 191. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Institute.

one often finds discussions of spinning as a lost craft, or as something in decline across the subcontinent (Anon 1851). As later chapters will show, this narrative anchored Gandhian articulations of the history of spinning (Puntambekar and Varadachari 1926; Kotak 1927; Anon 1931). European nineteenth-century writers often contrast what they see in India with the technological strides made by the British in the industrial revolution – contrasts that appear alongside remarks about the simplicity of the Indian spinning wheel when compared to those found in Europe. The nostalgia for a simpler time, a time when spinning anchored women’s lives both in India and in Europe, repeats throughout the nineteenth century. In the case of South Asia, the narrative has an added element akin to those found in ‘salvage anthropology’: while this craft may be completely gone in Europe, it is still at least minimally in operation here in India, and therefore we must ‘salvage’ whatever record we can of it (Pinney 1997; Edwards 2001: 157; MacDougall 2006: 227–63). In contrast, The People of India text accompanying the ‘weaver’ photograph plays into some of these patterns but it does not exhibit a concern for a lost practice nor overtly articulate a sense of nostalgia:


Capturing the wheel in motion 51 The woman seated near the centre figure is spinning with the common wheel of the country, which is rude in construction, but which is on the same principle as all other spinning wheels, that is, a catgut cord passes over the large wheel to a spindle, which it turns with proportionable velocity, and the thread, as fast as it is drawn out and spun, is reeled upon the small spindle at the end. The thread, or yarn, spun by this means is never very fine, but suffices for the lower order of manufactures, and spinning forms part of the daily work of almost all Hindoo and Mahomedan females of the lower classes throughout India. When women have finished their household duties, and the men are absent in the fields, or on ordinary occupations, groups of spinners may always be seen in every village, sitting on the ground, or on low stools, under the shade of a tree or a high wall, busily employed with their wheels and enjoying a comfortable gossip, while their children play about them. The wheel is worked by the hand only, the foot treadle being as yet unknown in India, and the quantity of yarn produced is enormous, finding a ready sale with itinerant dealers, or at the village markets or fairs of the neighbourhood. English machine-made yarn is employed to a great extent; but for many of the softer articles of ordinary wear, such as turbans, scarves, and waist cloths, the native yarn is still, and most likely always will be, preferred. It bears daily washing better, and never becomes stiff or harsh, as the more closely twisted machine yarn is apt to do (Watson and Kaye 1868–75, vol. 4, pl. 191). Several elements mark this text’s tension with the traditional representation of the place of spinning in South Asia. Importantly, it demonstrates an optimism regarding the presence of this activity across ‘all Hindoo and Mahomedan females of the lower classes throughout India’. Stated in present tense, and without an indication of decline, this presents an extremely positive outlook, especially when combined with the later statement that the handspun yarn ‘likely always will be preferred’ for everyday items of clothing and the note that this yarn easily finds buyers at markets and with dealers. This optimism contrasts with statements from earlier commentators who note that the decline of Dhaka cotton, one of the finest materials produced on the subcontinent, dates to the late eighteenth century (Anon 1851: xi) and that: ‘Spinning was formerly the general leisure occupation – in many cases the principal employment – of Hindoo and Mahomedan females in the district, but particularly of the former, who have always been distinguished for their unrivalled skill in this art’ (Anon 1851: 71, emphasis added).14 The lamenting of a decline in the manufacture and the loss of employment for weavers, linked to statements about the ‘former’ activities of many women at the spinning wheel, echoes throughout the textual record. This discussion


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of Dhaka cotton from 1851 falls therefore into a ‘salvage’ genre, not wholly in an ethnographic or anthropological sense of the imminent disappearance of a culture or a people, but simply as a record of a vanishing craft – a record that later became valuable to those attempting to study or revive cottage industries. The sketches and much of the text from the 1851 report were reused later to illustrate the mechanics of spinning and handloom in J. Forbes Watson’s The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India, published in 1867, one year prior to the publication of the first volume of The People of India (co-edited by Watson).15 Comprised primarily of coloured photographs of costumes organised by type (turban, sari), Watson’s publication indicates that an awareness of the narrative of ‘decline’ circulated from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In contrast to this discourse, the passage from The People of India presents a picture of active daily spinning by the lower classes and ongoing patronage of handspun, handloomed cloth for certain items of clothing. The text also exposes a gap often found between the verbal and visual within The People of India. The purpose of the text lay not in describing the photograph precisely but in elucidating the subject matter broadly, or expanding upon what appeared in the image. The photograph, therefore, exhibits a single woman spinning rather than a group of women spinning under a tree while gossiping, as the text imagines. This discrepancy marks the part standing for the whole – metonymy – in The People of India. The five figures provide a shorthand for the types of activities done by this group of people rather than illustrating a vignette of village life including a weaver and his family, the steps in the cloth-making process, or a group of women spinning under a tree. This sole example of spinning within the entirety of The People of India demonstrates as much about that particular project as it does about the way in which spinning was represented in the late nineteenth century. For, while the eight-volume work serves as a wide-ranging starting point for an analysis of the colonial photographic corpus, other projects and individual photographs provide a view of the nineteenth century less constrained by what became a comprehensive project to document the people of India. The People of India volumes encapsulate several aspects of ethnographic photography in the late nineteenth century: the staged and posed quality of the images, the use of the body and face to communicate an identification with a group, and the demonstration of that identity through attributes and objects. But these pictures also reveal (both to us and to those who compiled them) the gap between the photographic and the scientific, or the gap between image, however close it might be to the physicality of the object represented, and knowledge.16 The captions slip between categories, from individual names to aristocratic titles, and from caste labels to occupational markers. This diversity makes

Capturing the wheel in motion 53 The People of India a crucial document for studying colonial discourse in the 1860s and 70s. As a result, this eight-volume work provides a starting point from which to examine photographs of spinning during this period.


Spinning beyond The People of India A wide range of official and unofficial photographs survive from the late nineteenth century, including many taken of the same subjects as those found in The People of India, as well as views of architecture, landscape and British life in the subcontinent. On the official end of the spectrum lie the photographs commissioned for various regional volumes illustrating caste, costume or occupation in Mumbai and elsewhere. Photographs also served as major elements of international and India-wide exhibitions in this period under the auspices of various British societies and governmental agencies (Harvey 1996; Ryan 1998). On the personal and amateur side one finds scrapbook-like albums of photographs, paintings, sketches and notes, as well as formal albums for limited publication. Studio photographs circulated in all of these forms – indeed one of the sources for The People of India volumes was the studio of Shepherd and Robertson. These studio photographs transcend the popular, personal space of the scrapbook as well as the professional, official space of the major volume or the exhibition. In between lie photographs taken by officers in the government or military in India, as well as those by ethnographers and scientists who circulated images among themselves for research purposes (Edwards 2001: 28–48). Photographs from this wide range of sources will of course vary; not all photographers demonstrate an interest in spinning, cotton cloth manufacture, women, village life, or even the everyday, and as a result spinning imagery appears erratically. Nonetheless, when these images appear, a survey of spinning within the photographic archive from this period reveals a high level of consistency. Spinning repeats the general formulation of iconography found in Company painting, and one finds only a few examples in which the ‘traditional’ composition does not shape the photographer’s framing. This consistency produced an easily recognisable image that Gandhian nationalists could appropriate. Studio photography As one might expect, studio photographs continue the core iconography most strongly. Just as Company paintings circulated in ‘firka’ sets of repeating iconographies, studios’ catalogues included many of the same stock photographs. The grouping of these pictures in sets did occur, but these works nonetheless exhibit several key differences from the earlier Company


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painting model. First, unlike Company paintings, the studio photographs often note the specific region they depict in their labelling, costuming and occasionally their settings. An anonymous photograph from the 1890s, for example, carries the caption: ‘A woman of Jeypore spinning’, and recalls courtesan photographs in the amount of jewellery, make-up and fancy costume the figure wears (Figure 2.2). The dark backdrop marks this as a studio photograph and also eliminates any visual tether to a physical setting aside from her clothing and the caption. Frederick Bremner’s work also falls into this studio-posed professional category, despite being shot outside; Bremner worked in a studio in Lahore when he first arrived in India, and later had his own studios in various cities across the northern subcontinent (Sharma 1989). His ‘A Kashmiri (Mahomedan) spinning’, like the Jaipur image, exhibits the iconography of Company paintings, and specifies the region not only through the caption but also through costume and setting at the side of a lake (Figure 2.3). Even so, this photograph participates in some of the abstraction found in the blank backgrounds of the Company paintings and studio photographs, using a very narrow focal depth to capture only the figure and wheel in focus while the rest of the landscape fades in comparison.

Figure 2.2 Anon., ‘A woman of Jeypore spinning’, c. 1890. Source: © British Library Board, Photo 867/1(31).


Capturing the wheel in motion 55 Second, studio photographs like these appear in an incredibly wide range of archival locations, due to their commercial availability. One would expect to find them in amateur photo albums, but they also appear in other settings. Both the ‘Jeypore’ and the ‘Kashmiri’ spinners now exist individually within the British Library’s collection, but other studio spinners appear in official volumes and collections as well as amateur albums. For example, a presentation album entitled ‘Sirohi Views’ (c. 1905) and made for Kesari Singh Bahadur, Maharao of Sirohi State in Rajasthan, included a studio portrait of a woman spinning depicted against a dark backdrop. The album includes views of his kingdom and photographs of various people, from groups of his servants and exemplars of tribes to occupational images of silversmiths and activities such as spinning.17 Spinning made up only a small portion of the studio photographer’s repertoire. Most studios focused on individual portraits of named individuals, group portraits, studies of landscape or highlights of the subcontinent’s architecture. One finds few examples of spinning in these studio images, and when they do appear they often resonate with courtesan portraits or, as

Figure 2.3 Frederick Bremner, ‘A Kashmiri (Mahomedan) spinning’, c. 1890s. Gelatin silver print, 288 × 239 mm. Source: © British Library Board, Photo 938/5(16)

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in the case of Bremner’s photograph, meld easily with other depictions of the wider Himalayan landscape. The studio photograph, therefore, provides us with an example of the ‘proper’ iconography, taken by those that came closest to pursuing photography as a ‘high art’, and circulated within contexts as wide ranging as government projects and amateur albums.


The postcard In the 1890s, studios began producing photographic postcards in addition to their normal catalogue.18 While some of these pictures came out of the interior studio, or from bucolic staging in the landscape, many of them did not. Postcards of spinning in particular tend towards the more casual end of the spectrum, in part coinciding with a greater ease of use in camera technology at the turn of the century, and its concomitant ability to capture somewhat more candid moments. The postcard emerged at the height of the imperial era and circulated widely, particularly from the last decade of the nineteenth century through to the First World War. As Saloni Mathur has argued, its role as a form of ‘low culture’, in general, and its repeated imaging of women, in particular, establish the medium itself as a feminised one (2007: 130). In part, the postcard continues the categorisations of earlier periods, with occupations, servants, tribal groups and other scenes found in The People of India and other ‘ethnographic’ publications. But postcards also turn the camera on the European traveller, and they provide a more casual view into Indian life for the collector and sender of these cards, both in the images and through the dissemination of the material object. Postcards circulate alongside amateur photographs during this period, and a resonance occurs between the mass-produced postcard and the multiplyproduced photograph. The former encapsulates the specific experience of the purchaser/sender/collector in India, living with servants, travelling to important monuments, or moving through bustling streets. But it does so with an anonymous, ‘generic’ picture that anyone could purchase. The personal photograph, on the other hand, preserves a sense of the photographer’s or viewer’s presence behind the camera, and despite the possibility for multiple reproductions, the amateur photograph articulates a direct and authenticating sense of ‘I was there’. The photograph as a medium remains slightly less anonymous and generic than both the postcard and its predecessor, the easily purchased studio photograph. The postcard of ‘Indian women spinning’ (Figure 2.4), exhibits some of the characteristics found in these images while incorporating a few oddities that make the composition stand out. Two of the three women look directly at the camera and one of them smiles; this comfort with the camera in the


Capturing the wheel in motion 57 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurs quite often. The three women remain ‘posed’ as in earlier compositions: none of them is actually spinning, and each holds her left hand up in the characteristic gesture found throughout spinning iconography. Again, while a few fully candid snapshots appear in the archive, this semi-posed approach aids in capturing an action with a great deal of motion in it. The arrangement of the three women, however, does not follow an existing pattern and reinforces the sense of staging seen in the individual figures. They have not arranged their wheels to chat with one another, nor do we find a vignette of village women under the shade of a tree as described in the mid-nineteenth-century text from The People of India. Instead their wheels are awkwardly arranged by the side of a canal. Further underscoring the off-kilter posing and composition, the woman in the foreground rests her leg on the cross-bar of her spinning wheel while the spindle end of the wheel appears to float off of the ground. This diagonal, along with her tilted body and protruding foot, echoes the diagonal of the canal behind and reinforces the picture’s overarching awkwardness. The picture continues the posed qualities of earlier photography but with certain key differences: the women now address the camera directly, and the composition lacks the balance found in earlier studio photographs. The image bridges the entirely posed and composed photograph with the candid snapshot of later ‘point-and-shoot’ cameras.

Figure 2.4 Anon., ‘Indian women spinning’, early twentieth century. Source: Moorli Dhur and Sons, Ambala, printed in Germany. Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, box 9, p. 3, no. 1 (Effeny).

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Postcard companies – here Moorli Dhur and Sons of Ambala – produced pictures such as these for sale across India. These more ‘generic’ images, once purchased, joined personal photographs and other objects in collections, albums, and – sometimes – discarded piles in boxes. They therefore operate in dialogue with personal photographs, sometimes taken by visitors to or residents of the subcontinent, sometimes taken for more ‘scholarly’ purposes of ethnography (Edwards 2001).19 Individual in situ photographs Even more candid, in situ photographs of spinning – those outside of the studio or official context – individual photographers tend to follow existing patterns for the visualisation of spinning. As a result, the iconography from Company paintings, repeated in studio photography in the second half of the nineteenth century, continues in the amateur photography of the first decades of the twentieth century. While exceptions do occur, overwhelmingly the images follow the pattern of a single woman behind the wheel with left arm raised, looking down at the wheel, the crank or the ground. These photographs might fall within a genre generally accepted as ‘ethnographic’. This label suggests a scientific heritage behind these pictures, even if that heritage is dismissed as incompatible with today’s ideas of science and anthropological analysis. Some of these photographs did circulate among anthropologists and ethnographers, but this practice had largely faded by the First World War (Edwards 2001: 46). Rather than ‘ethnographic’ I have chosen in situ in order to differentiate these images from studio photographs, although this labelling should not be taken to suggest that they are in some way authentic to ‘real’ village life. These in situ images do not fall into the category of ‘studio’ photographs, nor do they immediately relate to the anticolonial nationalist movement, despite the fact that many of these examples post-date Gandhi’s 1920s call to those supporting swaraj or self-rule to spin. Spinning within the nationalist movement appeared in postcards, casual photographs and more ‘official’ contexts as well. Here I focus on the imagery external to this movement. Nonetheless, in my overarching argument I acknowledge and rely on the idea that these nationalist images are not truly separable from those concerned, on the surface level, with presenting a visual record of the subcontinent (largely for visitors’ eyes). What follows therefore extracts and examines one genre of spinning imagery from the archive in order to trace the iconography inherited and adapted from Company paintings discussed in the previous chapter. As the production of photographs rested more and more in the hands of ‘normal’ individuals travelling in India, the subject of spinning occurs with


Capturing the wheel in motion 59 greater frequency in the archive. Several photographs from the late 1930s in the Sir Malcom Darling collection in Cambridge depict versions of the ‘classic’ iconography. In one, the moving wheel stands parallel to the picture plane (Figure 4.1). The woman spinning raises her left hand while smiling down at the child in her lap. The setting, in front of the wall of a village dwelling with a thatched roof, emphasises ideas of tradition, simplicity and village life often found in photographs of this subject. The image exhibits a gradation of different tonal qualities, from the shine of the wooden dowels that hold up the blur of the wheel to the echo produced between the tone of the spinner’s hair and the shadow cast by the overhanging roof. Light and dark work in counterpoint, providing a balance and framing the primary subject with a darkened doorway, the shadow of the roof, and a wooden pole. The setting, while ‘generic’ in the sense that it could be anywhere, includes a small view outwards to the right that adds details to the scene, such as a crumbling mud wall and both distant and nearby vegetation. For a bucolic, idealised view of village life in India, the photograph does it all: a mother, smiling, at work at the wheel in front of her tidy village house. The staged bucolic perfection of the woman spinning with the child in her lap comes about in the combination of the studio photograph’s posed figure and the candid-yet-staged aesthetic of many of these twentieth century in situ images. Another example from the same collection lies closer to the norm (Figure 2.5). At first glance very similar to the ‘mother-with-child’ spinning photograph, here a woman smiles broadly at the camera. She holds her left hand up, but pulls the yarn above her head rather than out to the side. The wheel does not move, underscoring the posed quality of her facial expression and gesture. Another woman and child sit in the background; the child pays little attention to the proceedings but the woman holds up her hand to shield her face from the camera. A charpoy at right and an oven at left further complicate the composition; we see a glimpse of other buildings to the right. This picture has none of the clean compositional choices of the mother-with-child spinning photograph. It undermines the idyllic perfection of the village found both in the other photograph from this collection and in the expectations this particular subject raises. The archive contains many of these somewhat cluttered-yet-staged views of village life. On the surface, the photograph presents a typical scene of village occupation – spinning – but the awareness of the camera, the clearly posed nature of the spinning action, and the figures at the fringes of the frame interrupt the perfection of the other Darling photograph. The gaze of the spinner and the related modesty of the second woman remind us of our presence and complicity in the production of the image. The photograph does not hide the fact that the photographer (and, by extension, we the viewers) have placed these women in a particular relationship to the abstract idea of ‘the village’. Their gestures and gazes lay


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Figure 2.5 Anon., Woman spinning, c. 1930s–1940s. Source: Sir Malcolm Darling Collection, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, box 6, p. 137, no. 2.

bare the construction of the image of spinning, the spinner, Indian women and the village – all of which participate in the imaging of India. Darling was an administrator and government adviser who worked across northern India both before and after independence. He spent the late 1930s and 1940s primarily in the Punjab, where these snapshots likely were taken. As part of his duties, he generated reports on village life and agriculture in the region.20 Alongside those reports, these photographs serve as part of the knowledge-production undertaken by imperial actors with the participation of a wide range of local actors. By the late 1930s, spinning had already been largely resignified by the Gandhian nationalists, but one finds in the Darling papers a continuation of an earlier understanding of spinning as it constituted knowledge about village life. The two images here provide slightly different views into this process. One shields us from direct knowledge of the machinations of that construction, offering us a view of India that we expect but that also allows us some distance from that view. We are not included in the bucolic, idealised interaction of mother, child and spinning wheel. The other shows us an India engaged in its own construction, one that challenges the viewer to acknowledge the involvement of not only the photographer and his or her subjects but also us as viewers and consumers of the image. These two photographs do not comprise the entirety of the compositions involving spinning in in situ photographs. Some place the wheel at a diagonal to the viewer, echoing more precisely many Company paintings, and one


Capturing the wheel in motion 61 does find spinning wheels ‘hidden’ in other images that focus on different subject matter altogether. In rare cases, the framing completely ignores traditional iconography, and rather than portraying the wheel ‘frontally’, with the spokes visible, some pictures include a spinning wheel seen from the ‘rim’, so that the wheel becomes almost unrecognisable. Most of these photographs appear in the archive as isolated pictures. They do not usually form themselves into series. One can find exceptions, however. A set of photographs dating to the mid-1940s presents a series of a group of ‘weavers’ according to the undated hand-written note on the back of one of the snapshots. The photographs all depict the same courtyard space with one side of the area covered to protect two looms from the weather. These looms remain in place throughout all five photographs, but the people and other objects shift. One photograph from this set incorporates a woman spinning (Figure 2.6). Her wheel is set up between the two looms, in the central bay of the courtyard’s roofed area. Her legs are tucked up in front of her, but rather than following the iconography fully, the camera takes in her activity while including the larger workshop setting. An elderly man sits at the loom to the right, and two women crouch down against the wall next to the warp. A man stands behind the spinner. All of these people appear in the other photographs of the overall scene – with the sole exception of the spinner. She arrives for the camera to take her picture, and disappears from other shots of the space. One can almost hear the photographer saying: ‘Could I get a shot of someone spinning as well?’ In addition to the picture that includes the spinner, the set comprises an overall view of the work area (without spinner), a close-up view of each of the two weavers at the loom, and a group portrait of primarily women and children seated in the courtyard in between the two warps stretching out from the looms. In the last photograph, a disembodied arm waves at the right edge of the composition, cautioning everyone to keep still for the camera. Unfortunately, no caption or inscription exists aside from the brief mention of weavers on the reverse of one of the photographs. Nonetheless, the images themselves provide a narrative distinct from that of the sets of Company paintings discussed in the previous chapter. Where the paintings illustrate the cloth-making process from beginning to end, and do so with individual vignettes for each step in the process, these photographs instead provide a range of views of a working family or group. The photographs do not follow the cloth along its production narrative. They instead show us the family group in the space of labour. The unifying element throughout this set is the covered courtyard; the looms (and the weavers) remain permanent static fixtures of this space, while the others move in and out as needed. This distinction between the moveable wheel and the static loom accurately reflects the relation of spinning to weaving; spinning takes place when the


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Figure 2.6 Anon., Weavers’ courtyard with woman spinning, c. 1946. Source: Sir Malcolm Darling Collection, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, box 7, p. 167, no. 1.

women have time, and the wheel can be moved. Weaving embodies the identity of the family and the occupation of the patriarchs. It remains a solid, consistent element of the life of the courtyard and the livelihood of the family. The photographs present a series of images to us, but instead of tracing the process of cloth production, or giving us an isolated woman spinning in the village, they produce a multilayered portrait of the weaver family as it inhabits its space. If one looks beyond the photographs incorporated within large official and semi-official compilations such as The People of India, a fuller range of spinning imagery emerges. From professional, commercial studio photography to more candid individual snapshots of the early decades of the twentieth century, spinning continues to be imaged, albeit on a relatively small scale. The consistency of the iconography within this group demonstrates the power of the norm in shaping photographers’ choices and,

Capturing the wheel in motion 63 just as important, the expected poses taken by the women captured in the photographs. Most pictures come down to us as individual shots of a spinner against a blank backdrop, blurry landscape, or in front of a generic village house. Even the rare sets of images that incorporate the spinner present a portrait and a concern with identity rather than an action or a process.


Escaping capture: missing from the archive Two basic characteristics emerge from this survey of spinning in photography between 1850 and 1940 – and these two, in turn, produce the foundation upon which the anticolonial movement built its symbol of spinning. First, gender shapes the range of representations one finds in the archives. In official and semi-official compilations like The People of India, the project restricted the appearance of women in particular ways. One sees women occasionally in the aristocratic and princely portraits included in these volumes, and tribal exemplars will sometimes (although not very often) include a woman either in a separate photograph or alongside a man, jointly representing the ‘tribal’ group. In occupational images, including those labelled in relation to caste, women rarely appear. Reinforcing the presumed connection between occupation and caste, the focus in these pictures is on professions taken up by named caste groupings, and in these cases overwhelmingly the compositions include only men.21 The pattern found in Company paintings from the Malabar coast and Thanjavur occurs occasionally – one does find ‘weaver and wife’ images within the photographic archive. But more often photographs concentrate on the defining element of caste or occupational identity: ‘weaver’. Second, the narrower focus eliminates the need for a series of images depicting the larger process of cloth production. Individual portraits of cotton carders and weavers appear within official and semi-official volumes. But the steps in the process do not occur together in a series as they did in Gangetic Company painting of the early nineteenth century. As a result of this, few depictions of spinning appear in these large official projects. The trajectory of spinning from the Company painting of the previous chapter through official photographic projects like The People of India uncovers the machinations within colonial discourse. In the early nineteenth century, the collector and image-maker focused their attention on representing a generic, repeatable process and action, relatively free of identity markers, regional specificity and religious or caste labels. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the concern had shifted to producing and recording identity through imaging the body, face and attributes of types across India – that is, marking people as representative of a caste, occupation, rank or tribe. Action had disappeared as a concern to be replaced by a focus on identity.


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Within this longer arc across the nineteenth century, spinning wanes and largely disappears as a subject matter. Its partial disappearance within the visual archive occurs because it is no longer necessary to depict every step in a larger process, nor is it necessary to provide vignettes of the quaintness of village life for British and European travellers, Company servants and aristocratic Indians. Once the discursive emphasis shifts to identity, the serial narrative of cloth making disappears, and spinning cannot participate in the project to define occupation or caste: a weaver alone suffices. And, because spinners can be found across regions, religions, castes and even occupations – agriculturalists often spin even if they do not belong to a weaver family – the image of the spinner adds nothing to the project of identifying and differentiating the people of India from one another. When one looks outside of The People of India and similar projects, photographic images of spinning occur more frequently. For the most part, they repeat the iconographic pattern found in Company painting, but they do not participate in series illustrating cloth production. Like those found in The People of India, the subject takes up the iconic pose for the camera; in some of these snapshots, however, the relation between photographer and sitter rises to the surface, and informality interrupts the consistency of the iconography of spinning. These photographs return to the Company painting concern to record village life, to capture on camera a vignette of rural India. But they do not replicate the cloth-making series. Where groups of photographs do exist, they illustrate a familial or occupational grouping, not the process of producing cloth.22 With the rise in number of individual photographers recording their time in India, the number of spinning images also increases. These snapshots usually isolate the spinner alone in the set iconography, and they also provide glimpses into the machinations of the set-up, the framing and the construction of a ‘proper’ depiction of women spinning in village India, one that echoes the pre-1900 studio photographs and the early-nineteenth-century Company paintings. These spinning photographs participate in the project of imaging India, and they do so by situating these spinners within a relatively generic, pan-Indian framework. Where earlier studio photographs often mark the regional identity of the figure, later in situ snapshots return to the generic qualities of the Company paintings. An analysis of dress, vernacular architecture, or type of spinning wheel might place these figures in particular regions for viewers today; but the pattern across photographs from the first decades of the twentieth century points to a distinct lack of specificity in the compositions. As the postcard example indicates, one wants to take home a typical subcontinental image of ‘Indian women spinning’. While the in situ photographs have departed from the project of identifying caste types and do not align fully with earlier ethnographical ‘scientific’ projects, they remain


Capturing the wheel in motion 65 pictures of isolated figures. As a result, the spinner doesn’t represent a caste or an occupational group. She represents a particular constructed vision of India, one bound up with images of village life, authentic rural encounters and the bucolic, happy peasant. Because spinning did not resonate with caste or occupational descriptors, and instead shifted to a representation of ‘India’ as embodied in a bucolic scene of a village woman spinning, its representation remained separate from regional and caste groupings. This construction happens through a concern with recording rural India on the part of the European visitor rather than as part of a larger project of typological identification. The two operate together to isolate spinning from the process of cloth production and resituate it as a pan-Indian icon representing India’s rural roots. Its status as ‘women’s work’ and (as The People of India’s accompanying text states) as an activity done by ‘almost all Hindoo and Mahomedan females of the lower classes throughout India’, allows the imagery of spinning to transcend local, religious and occupational distinctions. As I elaborate in the following chapter, this pan-Indian, pan-religious, agricultural and working-class status for spinning in turn enabled its appropriation as a unifying symbol for the nationalist movement. And, to make this move the nationalists had to negotiate the fact that spinning’s place outside of caste and occupation depended in large part on the way in which women remained exempt from the categorisations of occupation. In Chapter 4 I then turn to the ways in which the anticolonial deployment of spinning resignified spinning to accommodate the gendered nature of this symbol.

3

Discovering spinning


Towards Gandhi’s visual rhetoric

The wheel is still being discovered. – Gandhi, YI 20 September 19281

The first two chapters traced the path from early-nineteenth-century paintings of spinning to its isolation as a standardised, gendered iconography of nostalgia for the constructed, bucolic Indian village. This chapter serves as a culmination of these discussions, and examines the appropriation of spinning by the anticolonial movement, specifically within Gandhi’s visual rhetoric. It asks why spinning operated as a potent symbol of unity, swaraj (self-rule), and swadeshi (support of India-made goods) during the early years of the movement, how it was deployed alongside other symbols like khadi (homespun cloth), and what visual and political payoffs came from employing spinning as a symbol and performative act. As discussed in the previous chapter, the deployment of photography in the service of colonial knowledge production, and the particular focus on professional trades over more general images of rural workers, meant that by the turn of the twentieth century the imagery of spinning existed as a separate activity outside the framework of cloth production. Unmoored from its earlier context among images of carding, weaving and textile sales, spinning depicted individual women, posed in a relatively standard iconography, representing a generic (though gendered) subcontinental villager. The labour of making cloth largely remained distinct and distant from the moment of producing yarn, and this isolation meant that spinning could, because of its essentialisation as a pan-Indian village ideal, be moulded to serve emerging political causes. This isolation allowed the anticolonial movement to appropriate spinning as a symbol that united India in daily practice, because it could overcome visual and political difference while simultaneously expressing some of the central tenets of Gandhi’s programme. Spinning supported swaraj, becoming a symbol of self-rule as


Discovering spinning 67 it connected the individual spinner to the larger movement, and ultimately to the nation. According to his own testimony in 1928, the first time Gandhi considered spinning as crucial to his political programme was in 1909 in London, in discussion with a number of young Indian students and others in the metropole’s capital. It was indeed an epiphany: ‘We had many long conversations about the condition of India and I saw as in a flash that without the spinning wheel there was no swaraj. I knew at once that everyone had to spin’ (YI 20 September 1928; CW 1958, vol. 37: 288; CW 2000, vol. 43: 34). In this short response to a reader’s letter, Gandhi does not expound upon the reasons behind his ‘flash’ of knowledge; he discusses spinning often and does so in an open-ended fashion, never completely defining its role and importance for the movement, and therefore never fully limiting it either. As the epigraph to this chapter proclaims, the wheel is still being discovered, over and over again, by individuals and also by the nationalist movement, as Gandhi and other leaders continue to develop and negotiate its significance. And the significance is great: ‘without the spinning wheel there was no swaraj’. The numerous discussions of spinning across his Complete Works as well as in additional publications and speeches demonstrate the centrality of the spinning wheel to Gandhi’s movement.2 Its import can also be seen in the growth of the infrastructure around spinning, including the All India Spinners’ Association (AISA). This verbal and institutional context both produces and finds its support in the visual rhetoric surrounding spinning in Gandhi’s movement. Moving images of the act of spinning appear in newsreel and documentary film. Numerous images of the spinning wheel, as well as of other spinning implements, appear on posters, banners, art decorations at rallies, the Congress flag, in political cartoons, in photographs and in prints relating to the anticolonial movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The sheer repetition of images and texts related to spinning does not, however, explain why spinning – and not something else entirely – sprang to Gandhi’s mind in 1909. Nor does it explain why this particular epiphany led to a wealth of discourse surrounding spinning, when some of Gandhi’s other early ideas did not reach such fruition.3 Why did he choose spinning and not another craft, another part of cloth making, or cloth itself? With India’s long legacy of cotton cultivation and cloth production, the choice of a craft somehow related to cloth made good political sense. Laments over the decline of high-quality, handmade cloth in eastern India, particularly in Dhaka’s muslin traditions, anchored the rhetoric of nineteenth-century colonial administrators and surveyors as well as anti-British agitators during the 1905–11 swadeshi movement. By the 1920s, nationalists and sympathisers with India’s cause commonly denounced the shift in the subcontinent’s trading relationship to Britain from one of cloth manufacturer and exporter


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to that of exporter of raw materials and importer of finished goods. Cloth had taken the role of unifying anti-British rhetoric and symbolising colonial economic injustice. While salt also entered the discourse with Gandhi’s march to the sea at Dandi in 1930, cloth continued to occupy a primary place in arguments surrounding India’s relation to its coloniser. Gandhi’s visit to the Lancashire mills in 1931 reinforced the embedded problem of India’s involuntary support of northern England’s industrial cloth production. But rather than choose weaving, or simply cloth itself, the visual image of spinning and the wheel rose to prominence. In what follows I detail the narrative of the initial ‘discovery’ of the wheel and of the technique of spinning and I explain how and why it served as a particularly helpful symbol for Gandhi’s movement. Spinning became central to swaraj because it was visually easy to read and fairly easy to do. Its simplicity meant that it could transcend regional difference within the subcontinent, and it also meant that it could represent an ideal associated with retrieving a lost rural craft from an earlier, simpler time. Spinning also side-stepped problems related to other symbols; perhaps most important, it did not embody a communal identity.4 Spinning could be associated with Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Parsi, or Christian practitioners. Spinning did, however, encounter problems in relation to gender and its adoption as a practice; I address these problems and the path taken to overcome them in the following chapter. These cumulative factors do not magically show us Gandhi’s thought process in 1909; I offer them here as explanatory elements of both the initial choice and the subsequent success of spinning as a symbol for the nationalists. Had spinning not encompassed these myriad elements, it might not have appeared so often in visual and verbal discourse associated with the anticolonial movement. Spinning might have dropped out of the discourse entirely, ceasing to claim a central role in Gandhi’s programme. Instead, spinning has a major role in the production of a nationalist movement and its spread beyond elite groups to the rest of India.5

Seeking the wheel Spinning, in retrospect, seems almost an inevitable symbol for the nationalist movement, but the contemporaneous narrative surrounding the adoption of it as a central plank of Gandhi’s politics emphasises the difficulty in finding and deploying this simple technology. When Gandhi first considered spinning, he did not have access to or know anyone who spun, or who worked in a handloom, hand weaving context. Among the elite circles of the Congress Party, the intellectuals and students he circulated among in London, or the people he had worked with in South Africa, spinning techniques were not known. From Gandhi’s epiphany onwards, as he retells each step of his


Discovering spinning 69 arduous project to develop spinning, his words stress its fragility as a practice, its imminent disappearance from the subcontinent and its recovery from certain demise by the nationalist movement. This story arc, traced through Gandhi’s letters and short essays, dramatises spinning and makes its adoption important in that it refigures both Gandhi and those who take up spinning in his cause as saviours of a lost craft – one recognisable to those in the subcontinent and around the world. Gandhi’s recovery built on that earlier discourse in which colonial consumers of Indian culture saw spinning nostalgically as a last vestige of pre-industrial craft. India could retain its status as the preserver of ancient and medieval artistic practice, while also demonstrating the contemporary success of non-industrial village economy. But first, Gandhi had to identify and learn how to use the spinning wheel. This process did not occur smoothly, and emerges from an initial, fundamental mix-up. In his first public call for spinning, he confused spinning with weaving, encouraging the use of ‘ancient and sacred hand-looms’ in his Hind Swaraj (Gandhi 1997 [1910]: 109). In a 1928 Young India piece, he admits: ‘I knew at once that everyone had to spin. But I did not then know the distinction between the loom and the wheel and in Hind Swaraj used the word loom to mean the wheel’ (CW 1958, vol. 37: 288; CW 2000, vol. 43: 34; Gandhi 1997: 109, n. 220). If the wheel continues to be discovered, again and again, for Gandhi and for the movement, this might represent the first discovery of spinning – a confusion of spinning and weaving, followed by a recognition of the mistake. Gandhi’s ‘discovery’ of spinning emerges, as many discoveries do, from a slight stumble, a small misstep; Gandhi’s initial expression of his epiphany in print confused or perhaps even collapsed spinning and weaving, the wheel and the loom. This slippage in the initial discovery interests me because it parallels the near erasure of spinning in the visual archive of late-nineteenth-century occupational images, which focus on the weaver and his loom. Gandhi’s mistake echoes and indeed partially relies on the nineteenth-century shift from paintings of spinning to spinning’s near disappearance in photography. We have moved from Company painting’s distinct depiction of each step in cloth production to the photographic replacement of those steps with one element of the process: weaving, only rarely accompanied by spinning. Photographs of spinning isolated the practice in a timeless studio space or, in the hands of amateur photographers, used the practice to represent a bucolic village India. Both spinning and weaving existed apart from the process of cloth production, and as a result these two near-independent activities both stood in for cloth making, craft and local cottage industry. They both served as representative elements of this ostensibly lost process. As a result, Gandhi’s confusion is not surprising. It also demonstrates an ongoing mistaking of spinning for other elements of cloth production, as


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spinning often stands in for weaving or becomes conflated with khadi itself, or represents the entirety of the politics of cotton. This multiplicity of political resonances for spinning enhances its efficacy as a symbol. But Gandhi’s mistake also produces an impression of naivety, of revelation and of ignorance corrected. Rhetorically, in admitting this mistake, Gandhi has shown himself to be as ignorant of India’s pre-industrial craft as anyone. Gandhi elaborates his misstep in his autobiography, noting that he had not seen a spinning wheel before he went to India in 1915 (Gandhi 1957 [1927]: 489; see Bean 1989: 369). No expert himself, he enables followers to overcome their own ignorance, fear and worry about taking on a practice outside of their culture, class or gender orbit in order to participate in something simultaneously new – to them, as anticolonial activists – and ancient. Gandhi’s recognition and subsequent lack of embarrassment over his mistake forms part of his larger story arc surrounding spinning, and brings Gandhi’s own journey of discovery in line with those who might take up spinning who had not done so before. At the very beginning of spinning’s appropriation, then, one finds both the confusion with weaving and a parable of overcoming ignorance. Once Gandhi established himself in India at the Sabarmati ashram, overcoming the definitional loom–wheel confusion posed few problems compared to the obstacle of finding a wheel and learning to spin. He found this process extremely difficult. Gandhi had hoped that siting his ashram near Ahmedabad in Gujarat, an historic centre for cloth production, would facilitate the development of hand spinning and hand weaving (Gandhi 1957: 395). The latter proved easier to set up; Gandhi found a weaver to install handlooms at the ashram and to teach their use, but he struggled to find someone who knew how to spin by hand. Hand-woven cloth produced with mill yarn did not fulfil the remit for a fully swadeshi, handmade, India-produced cloth. In 1917, after two years at the ashram, Gandhi met Gangabehn, a widow who pledged to find a spinning wheel and someone to instruct ashram residents in spinning (see Morton 1954: 106–13). As Gandhi relates in his autobiography, Gangabehn finally found families with unused wheels stored in their homes, and some of them proved willing and able to teach spinning to those in the ashram. The problem then shifted to the provision of slivers, or small, cleaned cotton bundles, to spin. Gandhi initially received slivers from the benefactor and mill owner Mr Umar Sobani, but again, frustrated by any dependence on manufactured goods, he sought local sources (Gandhi 1957: 492; see Sheean 1949: 154). Meanwhile, Maganlal K. Gandhi, Gandhi’s nephew, replicated the spinning wheel apparatus, making minor simplifications to its form to make it easier to build and repair. By 1918, the ashram at Sabarmati produced a regular supply of its own locally sourced and made khadi (Trivedi 2007: 8). A school for teaching


Discovering spinning 71 spinning and weaving was set up at the ashram and greater institutionalisation of spinning and khadi production followed (see Trivedi 2007). The gradual ‘birth’ of the spinning wheel as an object for production of homespun yarn from locally sourced cotton took place over several years at the beginning of Gandhi’s tenure at Sabarmati. The discovery of spinning continued over the course of the nationalist movement as Gandhi employed it as a key symbol of his economic vision for self-rule in India. Its institutional path met with varying success around the country, as regional centres for khadi production and weaving propelled the movement forward in different regions. The fits and starts of the initial discovery of spinning, from Gandhi’s epiphany to achieving the ability to weave him a full-sized dhoti at the ashram, reinforced the constructed narrative of recovery embedded within Gandhi’s rhetoric surrounding spinning and enabled the participation of a wide range of people who could follow Gandhi’s example and build their skill at the wheel. The weight of this story arc was reinforced in the pages of Young India, both in letters as seen above and in the autobiography passages themselves, published in English in that venue. The difficulties in producing truly swadeshi yarn belie the simplicity of the initial idea of spinning as an anchor for the nationalist movement – in what follows I examine the practice and the symbolism of spinning to ascertain why, despite the hurdles at the beginning, Gandhi remained committed to this vision.

Doing spinning Spinning comprises a practice, a complex of physical objects (the wheel or charkha and the cotton or raw material) and a symbolic, abstract idea or ideal. In part its efficacy comes from its simplicity and relatively modest price as a practice and an object. In his writings and speeches, Gandhi often defends his choice of spinning and the charkha against other crafts and even over the handloom.6 The charkha, he argues, is easily produced from local materials, whether wood or bamboo.7 Its repair is a fairly simple matter easily accomplished by the spinners themselves without recourse to difficult to find materials or the specialised expertise of a carpenter. And as many articles in Young India and elsewhere attest, one doesn’t need a charkha to spin – a simple drop-weight mode of spinning with the drop spindle or takli often formed the basis for advice to eager spinners hoping to take up the practice. Raw materials to spin often become the primary hurdle within the context of the nationalist movement. As Gandhi required a hand-cleaned, handcarded source for his cotton slivers, the search led him to local carders (pinjari or dhuniya) who provided slivers at elevated prices to Gandhi and his followers. Eventually, the entirety of the cloth-making process, from growing cotton, picking, cleaning, ginning and carding it through to weaving


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and selling it became part of the movement, largely under the leadership of Gandhi’s nephew, Maganlal. Maganlal led the Sabarmati Ashram’s training programmes in these various processes and became an expert at assessing proposed upgrades to spinning wheels, methods of carding and weaving tools. He developed new types of spinning wheels himself, experimenting with the traditional upright charkha form to try to heighten the quantity and the quality of the yarn produced. With materials available and simple charkhas distributed to various centres, the All India Spinners’ Association (AISA), or Charkha Sangh, had its institutional hands full insuring the equitable spread of resources, highquality yarn production, and easy access to raw material and yarn markets. The AISA’s ability to do this effectively varied considerably and the organisation struggled to meet the needs of the new movement and to spread the use of the charkha in a manner appropriate to the swadeshi movement. Lisa Trivedi’s research on the institutional difficulties associated with the national and regional AISA organisation maps the massive problems encountered by the machinery of a national spinning programme (2007). Despite these hurdles, with the support of the Congress for the spinning programme in 1920 and the founding of the AISA in 1925, Gandhi had effectively linked spinning with the national political cause. Each person committed to self-rule was to spin for at least half an hour every day. Gandhi’s writings encouraged people to devote more time to spinning each day, and asked schools of all levels to include spinning in their curricula.8 Membership to AISA involved spinning either 2,000 yards of yarn in one year or, for the higher level of membership, depositing at an approved Council office 1,000 yards of ‘self-spun yarn, well-twisted and uniform’ each month (AISA 1925). Spinning became integral to participation in the nationalist movement, and leant focus to many of Gandhi’s speeches as well as his day-to-day practice. Spinning takes time to learn how to do properly, and doing it improperly did not constitute true participation in swaraj for Gandhi. One of the attractions of spinning as a central element of political action lay in the commitment participants had to make in order to learn to do it well. While Maganlal and others published manuals for spinning, particularly on the takli, these texts did not presume to substitute for in-person apprenticeship.9 From notes published in Young India and discussions within the AISA, the discourse often returns to the problem of training new people in spinning on the charkha or the takli. Records from the time praise instances of individuals training a number of local teachers in the charkha who then go out and each train a dozen further teachers.10 This mode of knowledge transmission required interpersonal contact and local networks and in the end fostered community – something crucial for the nationalist movement. The educative

Discovering spinning 73 facet and the inability to learn spinning from a book or diagram meant that participants worked together and exercised different kinds of learning abilities to practise effectively at the wheel.


Seeing spinning Doing, however, remains only one piece of the larger discourse of spinning. Spinning’s efficacy also lay in its easily communicable visual element: the spinning wheel, and the combination of the practitioner and the wheel together. Earlier swadeshi movements had focused on cloth and the clothing industry as a unifying call against British and other foreign-made fabrics. The swadeshi movement of the Bengal partition in 1905–11 deployed a variety of symbols in song, poetry and visual imagery in order to support the new move towards swaraj and swadeshi (Sarkar 1973; Goswami 2004). Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharatmata painting of 1906 remains one of the most important images from this time. Figuring Mother India as a goddess standing on a globe, Abanindranath placed key attributes in her four hands: a palm-leaf manuscript, a sheaf of wheat, rosary beads and, in her proper upper left hand, a piece of hand-woven cloth.11 The draped undyed cloth in her hand fails to translate well into an abstract symbol on its own, and after Abanindranath’s representation of Bharatmata, this attribute loses its place in her iconography. As clothing, khadi operated effectively as a symbol, marking the wearer as a participant in the nationalist cause and visually unifying groups of people as they gathered to hear speeches, march or protest (Tarlo 1996: 101–102). But as an object, khadi depicted outside of this sartorial framework does not make a good visual symbol. C. A. Bayly has traced cloth’s power as an abstract symbol, one that taps into long-standing ideas of transformation (cotton into cloth) and traps in its weave the bodily and spiritual elements imbued in it by society, its maker and its wearer (Bayly 1986: 187). But as a visual symbol, cloth only works well either as an abstracted concept or when worn. The spinning wheel, by contrast, forms an excellent visual object, one that can be read even when the symbol exists simply as lines on a surface. This legibility explains why the wheel appears in a wide range of locations, from various versions of the Indian National Congress flag starting in 1921, to decorations on the facades of buildings, elements of nationalist posters and logos for various institutional elements of the anticolonial movement. Its form could be drawn easily and cleanly, flipped horizontally to operate as a symmetrical framing device on paper publications, around doorways, or on the dais from which the movement’s leaders would speak. At Congress meetings, strings of small flags with charkhas on them often decorate the interiors of temporary tents set up for the gatherings, echoing larger flags


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and other spinning wheel designs picked out in marigolds and serving as a backdrop for the proceedings. The wheel served as a ubiquitous symbol at gatherings and to mark publications of the movement. The wheel succeeds because it is easy to abstract as a symbol. It works as a line drawing, and one doesn’t need the spinner behind the wheel, nor even the yarn coming off the wheel to indicate the wide range of activities, meanings and ideas evoked around this single, simple icon. The abstraction of the image also serves to unify the image – spinning wheels in the Punjab, for example, tend to be made of wide planks without spaces between the spokes; elsewhere in the subcontinent wheels have thin, pointed and wellspaced spokes, or are made of bamboo, and appear much less solid than those in the Punjab. These regional differences disappear in the face of a generic line-drawing outline of the spinning wheel, which then can be read regardless of regional location. The spinning wheel’s symbolism also resonates with the simpler wheel or chakra, a form found in a wide range of Indic traditions, and often appropriated as a symbol for both political and religious ends. In the following chapter, I discuss the connection between the imagery of the third century BCE Ashokan wheel, now on the Indian flag, and the spinning wheel form. The fact that the spinning wheel is indeed a wheel, however, certainly contributes to its legibility across regions as well as religions within South Asia.12 The symbol of spinning spanned regions because its practice was known in a variety of agricultural and rural contexts. Despite differences in climate, crops and daily activities, one finds spinning in the Himalayas, where often the material spun is wool, not cotton, and in coastal areas where jute is spun or twisted. Yet these variations are elided in the simplicity of the line drawing for the spinning wheel. This pan-regional aspect allowed the symbol to communicate across culture: it may not look exactly like the wheel seen in one area, but it represents spinning broadly and that remained something a wide range of Indians could relate to. Unification across the varied regional practices also extends to different types of spinning as well, whether based on material (cotton, wool, jute) or technology used to spin (wheel, takli). One finds the occasional takli represented, but most spinning wheels in printed form take the form of the charkha. Nonetheless, spinning-as-symbol transcends the singular representation as upright spinning wheel. The abstracted, simplified image of the wheel on the flag, on publications, and on architecture marks spaces, events and texts as affiliated with a larger group of ideas and practices than just spinning alone. The abstraction of the symbol enables its malleability such that it stands in for a set of ideas, overcoming differences in material and technology and connecting viewers of the wheel symbol to the larger programme of anticolonial action led by Gandhi.

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The spinning wheel operates as an easy-to-read icon that, when deployed in the numerous contexts we find it in the visual record, also echoes the large numbers of people involved in the nationalist movement. Masses of spinning wheels appear on flags at the Congress sessions, on platforms, in logos and in print; the repetition of the wheel reinforces the importance of spinning and the swadeshi it stands for. The spinning wheel visually saturated the nationalist movement.

Spinning in India, spinning in the world In addition to transcending regional difference, spinning – as both static symbol and symbolic practice – also largely overcame religion and caste distinctions, because it was practised within the domestic sphere as an additional income for agricultural labourers, or as a part of a larger family business focused on cloth or net production. The benefit of its role as domestic supplemental labour meant that it escaped codification and restriction in terms of the identity of the spinner, who could be from any religion and subcaste, and be associated with a wide range of occupations (see Kumar and Desai 1984). Furthermore, its lack of connection to a particular group within the community eased its appropriation as a political symbol. Having a spinning wheel in the home did not mean that the household earned its money primarily from cloth production; while weavers often spun, not all spinners wove.13 Even the preparatory stages for spinning, like cotton ginning and cotton carding, took place within a caste-specific and often religiousspecific familial context. The pinjari would card and clean your cotton, and the weavers would weave it, but anyone could spin it.14 Caste and religion also precluded the appropriation of entirely different handicraft traditions such as leathercraft, jute ropes, baskets, painting, terracotta or woodcarving. Each of these crafts (and many others) fulfil the swadeshi criteria in that they employ individuals using simple tools and local materials, but they all fall short of unifying the subcontinent in the way that spinning does. These trades require specialised skill, which eliminates them as good options, and some also depend on local resources, like jute. Some crafts emerge from a particular regional need or rely on practitioners from a particular caste or religion. Even when, for example, painters work for patrons of differing religions, any individual piece of work carries its own message, thus diluting the unifying force of the simple, undyed yarn produced through spinning. Class did restrict spinning to particular income levels at which it made a small dent in the overall family income. This barrier would have to be overcome by Gandhian rhetoric, and was one of the major problems facing his movement in the introduction of spinning across India. Convincing the


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upper classes to spin became crucial for Gandhi, particularly when it came to prominent figures in business and politics.15 Not always successful in persuading his colleagues to participate in spinning, the various concessions to Gandhi’s movement within the Congress platform did mean that spinning lost some of its class-based limitations. Nehru, for example, spun occasionally with Gandhi or when it was politically expedient; documentary scenes of him unable to produce a thread while spinning produced a great deal of laughter in Indian audiences (Chettiar 2007: 36). In contrast, other nationalist leaders closer to Gandhi, such as Abdul Ghaffar Khan, are often seen in photographs spinning.16 Nonetheless, spinning never truly became as ubiquitous as Gandhi wished, particularly among his peers within Congress. Gender, as I explore in the following chapter, represented the major hurdle for the appropriation of spinning as a political activity for the nationalist movement. The negotiation of masculinity and femininity within Gandhi’s politics as well as the transformation of spinning and the spinning wheel itself allowed spinning to escape its status as a women-only activity. Despite these hurdles, Gandhi’s choice of spinning proved communicable across a range of divisions within the subcontinent, including caste, religion, region and gender. Rather than relying solely on text or print to communicate and build a sense of national belonging, Gandhi adopted the additional symbol of spinning and the spinning wheel. Prolific in his writings in Gujarati, Hindi and English, and recognising fully the power of the media and publications for swaraj and for producing and unifying the nation as nation (Anderson 1985), Gandhi recognised the need to employ this more abstract visual, physical and practical symbol of rural industry that allowed for the production of a national mythos. Spinning tapped into commonalities across India, but it also mined imperially produced assumptions about India’s national imaginary. The emphasis on this village-based domestic activity meant that India’s idealised village core drove the symbolism of spinning. Despite the surge in migration towards urban spaces even as Gandhi began his early non-cooperation campaigns in the 1920s, and despite the call for industrialisation from his colleagues in the nascent government – even despite protests from his patrons in the mills and other industries in Mumbai – Gandhi saw the spinning wheel’s power to unite India behind a constructed but powerful village-based identity. That this idea drew from colonial constructions of bucolic rural townscapes with happy women spinning in front of mud-brick dwellings did not detract from its power to support Gandhi’s swaraj movement. Indeed, that legacy only enhanced spinning’s ability to unify India around a central idea. Swaraj and spinning traced their genealogy back to the desires of colonial actors as they commissioned and purchased Company paintings of cloth production, and as they snapped photographs of village India for


Discovering spinning 77 perusal in the metropole, as discussed in earlier chapters. The mythos of the nation centred on the village, and spinning served to represent that central, organising trope for Gandhi’s movement.17 The spinning wheel was not, however, a long-standing Indian symbol. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of this choice of icon lies in its lack of deep heritage within subcontinental storytelling and folklore. One finds references to spinning wheels in the framing narratives of some stories – the grandmother might sit in front of the house and spin while she relates a tale.18 But the Indian narrative repertoire lacks those stories that centre on the act of spinning. Unlike European fairy tales that often include the task of spinning, the threat of the spindle as a site of injury, or the spinster as a catalytic character, Indian folktales rarely include this figure. In many ways this simplifies the appropriation of spinning for Gandhi. It remains unassociated with particular characters in religious or folk tradition, which enables spinning to take on different meanings for the nationalist movement without fear of relation to an established folk tradition. The spinning wheel does, however, have such resonances for the northern Atlantic audience, ones inflected too by the particular historic moment of appropriation in the early twentieth century. As a result, spinning’s easy communicability across cultures allowed the message of those working against British rule in India to spread. The subcontinental versions of the spinning wheel did not sit on legs above the ground, nor did they incorporate foot treadles; their size in general also remained slightly smaller than traditional spinning wheels in Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the shape of the spinning wheel remained similar enough to translate easily across these contexts, and while each regional culture might have its own narrative surrounding the wheel, many of these stories paralleled the message Gandhi sought to put forth via spinning. In northern Atlantic folk literature, the wheel’s transformative powers drive many stories, whether that means a literal spinning of straw into gold or a shift in bodily chemistry upon pricking one’s finger on the spindle. The magic associated with these transformations relates both to the fairy-tale context of the stories and to an understanding of the power of the spinning wheel to transform raw material into yarn that could then be made into cloth and clothing. The magical aura surrounding cloth, particularly handmade cloth, has been discussed elsewhere, both for Europe and for South Asia (Bayly 1986; Jones and Stallybrass 2000). Spinning in these transformative narratives operates as a catalyst for the narrative: a woman is able to spin straw into gold, and so she must do so at great speed and at great physical cost; a woman pricks her hand on the spindle and falls unconscious, setting the remainder of the story in motion. The power of this catalytic transformation enabled the transmission of Gandhi’s transformative message beyond the subcontinent.


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In both southern Asia and the northern Atlantic, spinning is done by women in a domestic capacity, and is often marked as a skill all women have and yet some upper-class women disdain as below their station. Thus gender and class issues impact the reception of spinning in European regions, in part echoing the position of India in the colonial imagination as a feminine space trailing behind Europe in economic development. In addition to this feminisation of both spinning and India, the decades around the turn of the twentieth century also saw a rise in interest in spinning, particularly in the United States, where the craft became a central part of the recuperation of local historic handiwork. Calls to preserve spinning wheels themselves as well as the techniques related to spinning came out of the former colonies and echoed similar revivals of handicrafts as part of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. Just as in Company painting one can see a nostalgic desire for a pre-industrial time, now lost in Europe but still alive in South Asia, at the end of the nineteenth century the preservation of craft traditions became an important part of cultural and national identity formation, something the Indian nationalists both drew upon and participated in. Handicraft serves a vital political role in the context of industrialising countries within Europe and North America, who look to South Asia as a space that retains the so-called purity and authenticity associated with village life. That this visual rhetoric resonates with similar movements for British or American national identity in the form of lost handiwork skills enabled Gandhi’s message to travel around the world, even to the extent of reaching those involved directly in industrial cloth-making activities. This discourse mined the nostalgia and desire for an idealised past seen in the Company paintings of the early nineteenth century, and turned it towards consolidating an Indian nation in the service of Indians. Gandhian rhetoric on handicraft and spinning shifted that nostalgia from colonial claims surrounding the salvation of South Asian handicraft to nationalist arguments in support of self-rule.

Spinning together Unlike the idealised vision of handicraft, however, and as an activity done solely in the domestic sphere either alone or in small localised groups, spinning took on a public face as various group spinning demonstrations produced images of an India united behind Gandhi’s leadership. Images of these so-called mass spinnings appear less frequently in the archive than images of important persons spinning or even individuals at the spinning wheel. But when they do appear they circulate in a similar framework as many of the images of khadi-clad Congress supporters, marching, demonstrating or gathering to hear their leaders speak.19 Several types of spinning images


Discovering spinning 79 emerge from the archive, and together constitute a loose genre best termed ‘group spinning’ rather than ‘mass spinning’. Their politics, as I discuss below, operates differently from later ‘mass’ movements associated with marches, sit-ins and group protests. The power of sartorial unity in both substance – khadi – and its natural, undyed colour produces a unified visual impact of the nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. Alongside the pictures of masses of followers wearing white khadi and Gandhi caps, images of groups spinning operate to demonstrate to both domestic and international audiences the massive wave of supporters for the movement. Instead of the repetition of line drawings of spinning wheels on flags or in the decorations for nationalists’ meetings, these images include the human body and, just as important, provide an image of action – of nationalism in motion. Several images of group spinnings appear in A. K. Chettiar’s 1940 documentary on Gandhi (Martin and Reynolds 1953),20 and illustrate one type of mass spinning imagery (Figure 3.1). Groups of women, seated on the ground behind spinning wheels in neat rows, spin at the same time. In contrast to photographs that highlight the unifying force of khadi clothing, these images provide a sense of the crowd through the repetition of both the spinning wheels themselves and the bodies. The wheels, lined up in rows, spin quickly while the left arms of the women rise and fall in a syncopated rhythm. The overall effect balances the unity of the repetitious crowd with an emphasis on the fact that those in the crowd physically move and work as part of their participation. Unlike khadi, which often drew criticism for enabling relatively passive participation in the movement, group spinning asserts the idea of physical work and bodily labour in that participation.

Figure 3.1 Staged group spinning demonstration, c. 1940. Source: Film still from Martin and Reynolds 1953.


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The filmic shots of group spinnings vary from capturing the spinners at a diagonal and without horizon line, serving to heighten the size of the group, to close-ups of rows of spinners that parallel earlier photographic representations of single women or small groups of women spinning. The film does not specify the physical or political context for these collective spinnings, and so the viewer is left with a vision simply of a group of spinners, detached from any historical frame. In light of this decontextualisation, I argue that the label ‘mass spinning’ does not apply, as for the contemporary reader it suggests a parallel with later civil disobedience campaigns of the civil rights movement in the USA. These groups of spinners do not constitute a peaceful takeover of a politicised space, and their coming together does not relate to a particular catalytic event that calls on the movement to respond. Instead, these large groups of spinners promote the very activity of spinning as part of the nationalist movement, and indicate to those not yet participating that many others are. Indeed, the footage in the film was inspired by a still photograph of a group of spinners, and subsequently Chettiar worked with that photographer and the Khadi Board in Tiruppur, Tamilnadu to stage these shots of thousands of women spinning.21 Their massiveness forms the core message of these groups of spinners; rather than a protest against a particular policy, or an occupation of a particular space, here we see the political salience of the mass or group itself. In the shots collected in Chettiar’s footage, all of these spinners are women, all spinning on a relatively simple upright or traditional charkha. In one exceptional shot, spinners line up along the side of a wide pathway, framing the entrance to a building, perhaps in honour of a dignitary’s arrival – the film does not indicate, and Chettiar’s commentary on the making of the film does not elaborate. Chettiar and his collaborators within the Khadi Board understood that this footage would spread the word about the charkha, and would provide excellent positive publicity for the movement. Indeed, this so-called mass spinning became one of the most circulated images from the film, and is the only image excerpted from the film and included in Chettiar’s book. Scenes of large numbers of women spinning on traditional charkhas in a village setting represent one type of collective spinning image; other photographs take a different approach and force us to unpack further the idea of ‘mass spinning’ within the context of the photographic archive. Images from a large gathering of women at Surat on 22 April 1930 depict both Gandhi and the group spinning on taklis (Figure 3.2). Occurring in the weeks between his defiance of the laws prohibiting the manufacture of salt and his arrest, these photographs offer a different type of ‘mass’ than the staged depiction of village women found in Chettiar’s film. At Surat, the women sit in a large group on the ground, facing Gandhi and a group of khadi-clad


Discovering spinning 81 and Gandhi-capped men who sit on a dais. Rather than a gathering primarily to demonstrate the power of spinning, this group focuses on Gandhi himself and his leadership, as he takes up the central position in the space, with all bodies pointed towards him. The shared spinning with the takli certainly underscores the unity, but again it represents neither a takeover of the space nor a particular protest. (Aside from Gandhi, none of the men on the dais spins, underscoring the difficulty of expanding this practice even to his most dedicated male followers.) Despite the context in relation to the recently completed Salt March, here the practice of spinning as a group allows participants to signal their inclusion in the community. In these images, it is Gandhi’s leadership that we see highlighted, not the spinning itself. Since takli spinning requires only a small weight and cotton slivers, its visual impact centres on the raised arm necessary to provide height for the weight. These images show groups of women with raised arms and Gandhi with a raised arm – this gesture alone constitutes the representation of spinning. The photographs of Surat include one image taken from above, probably from a roof adjacent to the courtyard where the gathering takes place. Elevated points of view often feature in such group spinning imagery, especially in contexts outside of the staged mass spinning. The perspective from above allows the photographer to capture the crowd, the speaker and the activity of spinning, especially as in this case when charkhas are not used.

Figure 3.2 Women spinning at a meeting with Gandhi in Surat, 22 April 1930. Source: © Vithalbhai Jhaveri/Gandhiserve.


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Other elevated points of view occur in images of the leaders of the movement spinning together (Figure 3.3). In these cases, they spin on a box charkha or peti charkha (i.e. a charkha in a peti, or case).22 I discuss in the following chapter the development of this type of charkha and its impact on the visual imagery surrounding Gandhi’s movement. In the context of these group spinning images, however, I note simply that the elevated view enabled the visibility of both the individuals as well as the charkhas. These photographs do not, however, evince the same kind of crowded mass found in either the Chettiar footage or the Surat gathering. The focus settles on the famous individuals in the crowd (here, for example, Gandhi, J. B. Kripalani, Vallabhbhai Patel and others). In some instances, the Surat relationship of leader-on-dais and audience below occurs, in other contexts nationalist luminaries sit on a cloth on the ground in a fairly casual arrangement, spinning together. Finally, the photographic archive includes images of groups of students spinning within the context of AISA-sponsored training sessions or at the main Sabarmati ashram itself. The staged rural women, crowds gathered to hear nationalist leaders, informal groups of those same leaders, or students learning the craft – all four of these group spinning contexts support different visions of the movement. While some photographs emphasise the large numbers of people spinning, others depict the relationship of leader to

Figure 3.3 Gandhi with J. B. Kripalani, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mani Behn Patel and others spinning at Wardha, Maharashtra, June 1936. Source: © Vithalbhai Jhaveri/Gandhiserve


Discovering spinning 83 audience. And whereas some show the groups of young students (usually girls) learning how to spin, others show the anticolonial leaders practising their daily spinning ritual together. All attempt to articulate the relationship of spinning to the movement, but each communicates a slightly different message: the high number of people participating, the ritualistic communal aspect of spinning, or the commitment of the leadership to this practice as a part of the larger nationalist programme. This diversity in message indicates the wide range of communication spinning as a political symbol enabled.

Spinning as visual political rhetoric The case of group spinning images demonstrates the variety of ways Gandhi’s spinning wheel represented and communicated the political message of the nationalist movement to an Indian and international audience. Political symbols must draw together people with diverse interests, backgrounds and motivations to join a cause; these symbols must also communicate that cause to those still outside the movement, and to opposing political factions. Rhetorically, images are slippery things. Deceptively simple, they can embody a wide range of meaning – a characteristic of great benefit to any political actor. But they can also slip out of the grasp of those who choose to deploy them. That same flexibility can quickly transform into a message disconnected from any given political cause. Finding a symbol that works both in terms of flexibility and stability proves difficult, but once found, and in combination with verbal and textual support, these political symbols often endure, allow for the rearticulation of their meanings over time and shape the course of politics. The spinning wheel enjoyed a relatively brief period of political efficacy, from its ‘discovery’ in 1917 to the mid-1930s, when it faded as other visual and textual rhetoric took precedent. It remains a powerful symbol of Gandhi’s movement, still employed by Gandhian organisations worldwide, but it no longer enjoys the national and international prominence it enjoyed during Gandhi’s lifetime. During this brief period, one can use the spinning wheel to identify elements of Gandhi’s visual rhetoric as it interfaced with his voluminous writings and speeches. With its ‘discovery’ by Gandhi, spinning becomes something new and something old; it taps into the rhetoric of salvation already in place with colonial archaeologists, surveyors and administrators to recover and preserve India’s craft tradition while simultaneously celebrating spinning as something new.23 Gandhi’s own mistakes in confusing spinning and weaving contribute to this newness, especially as he then acknowledged his lack of knowledge and validated all those whom he urged to take up spinning for the first time. This nostalgic newness builds upon the colonial


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desire represented in paintings and photographs of rural women spinning, images that themselves communicate a timeless, ancient handicraft still living in the present. By appropriating spinning from this earlier iconography, Gandhian visual rhetoric taps into existing relations to these dying arts, and casts itself as reviving and reclaiming these arts. Spinning no longer serves to feed colonial nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, it now feeds a nationalist desire for that same past, augmented by a reclaiming of one’s own handicrafts, practices and history. Swaraj is here embedded in the discourse of discovery and of spinning. Spinning worked because it had this iconographic history, but it also prevailed as the primary symbolic element driving swadeshi and swaraj because it transcended regional, caste, religious and to a lesser extent class divisions. Cloth had already anchored earlier swadeshi movements; spinning, and not the cloth itself or the involved processes of weaving and making cloth, proved to be the most malleable symbol available. Its ability to speak across boundaries – both within the subcontinent and across the world – allowed it to communicate a range of messages to different audiences while retaining its core rhetorical role as the symbol of self-rule for India. But unlike earlier iconographies of spinning, this movement required not just a passive, static image but also an active doing: a physical, bodily participation. And that participation then needed an imagery to go along with it. Scenes of groups spinning in a range of contexts provided this. Spinning could be done and was being done by many people, in many contexts, under the leadership of Gandhi and the Congress. One of the crucial elements of these group spinning images, however, is the absence of negative protest. Unlike other mass political action such as marches, sit-ins and rallies, these ‘mass spinnings’ do not primarily protest British rule, or respond to a particular attack or event. They sometimes complement existing protests, as in the gathering at Surat in 1930 after Gandhi’s Salt March, but they rarely serve as protests in and of themselves. Instead, group spinning unifies those participating in the movement through the simple action undertaken, and it promotes spinning as a way that individuals everywhere might join in the movement. In some cases, it underscores the numbers of people working with Gandhi for swaraj, communicating to those who argue for a continuing colonial presence the weight of the population behind the nationalist leaders. In other cases, it depicts those very leaders as part of that mass, rhetorically suggesting their unity with Indians of all regions, classes and religions. Bodies spinning all across India, in groups or alone, produced not just yarn but action. The visual rhetoric of images of spinners and images of leaders like Gandhi spinning alerted India and the world to these bodies, and formed an invaluable part of the political efficacy of the spinning wheel as icon. In his writings and speeches, Gandhi emphasises the idea that the action

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of spinning – the doing – represented the key to swaraj. The imagery of spinning, resting on an earlier iconography of colonial desire and nostalgia, concretised the otherwise abstract, ritualised daily movement involved in working at the charkha. Alongside this bodily practice and its textual discussion, the visual imaging of spinning communicated its multifaceted meaning, mounting an argument in favour of swaraj by presenting a productive action in symbolic form.


4

Gender and the modern charkha

The wheel whirls in a blur, supported by strong wooden dowels and obscuring her right arm as she turns the crank. Her left hand pauses away from her body and above her head, a head looking down, beaming at the baby in her lap. Does the child echo the mother’s gesture, left hand raised, emulating her body with its tiny form? Does she rock the child to sleep with the rhythmic sound of the wheel? Or does the child turn to hide from the sun, from the photographer, from the camera by nestling deeper in her lap, blending back into her body with the pattern of her garment? The genealogy of the image of spinning, traced over the previous three chapters, reveals a certain continuity. A woman, like this one, seated behind a spinning wheel, raising her left hand and pausing at the uppermost point of her motion to provide the painter or the photographer with the quintessential image of the spinner at the wheel. Beginning with Company painting of the 1830s (Chapter 1), through the treatment of spinning in photography at the end of the nineteenth century (Chapter 2), up to the reasons driving the appropriation of spinning by the anticolonial movement in the early twentieth century (Chapter 3), elements of spinning’s imagery have proven themselves valuable. For those commissioning and purchasing Company paintings, one sees a desire and nostalgia for handicraft industries already lost in the European context. Spinning operates as part of a larger complex of cloth-production imagery, moving, along with carding and weaving, in sets illustrating not the people who spin but the activity of spinning as part of a larger process. Photography isolates spinning from its processual, cottage industry context. Spinning cannot illustrate a particular caste or tribe, because it is done across these increasingly important and solidifying definitional boundaries. It cannot illustrate an occupation or profession because spinning is done primarily by women. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aside from courtesans and related professional roles, women rarely represent a particular occupation (see Oldenburg 1991). Spinning therefore finds its photographic niche in studio images that provide viewers


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Figure 4.1 Anon., Woman spinning with child, c. 1930s–1940s. Source: Sir Malcolm Darling Collection, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, box 6, p. 116, no. 1.

with a bucolic vision of village women spinning atop Kashmiri hillsides, or spinning in village settings found in a generic ‘real India’ by amateur photographers in the early twentieth century. Gandhi’s declaration of the importance of spinning to swaraj (self-rule) began with a confusion between spinning and weaving, and proceeded from this moment through a constant series of ‘rediscoveries’ of what spinning might be.1 The abstract symbol of spinning and its bodily practice served as powerful unifying elements for the subcontinent, across region, caste, class and religion. This chapter unpacks the multiple relations between spinning and gender, particularly as they shaped Gandhi’s appropriation of spinning for the anticolonial movement. In the previous chapter I investigated the question of why spinning, and not another symbol, emerged as a unifying image and practice for Gandhi and the nationalists. Several gender-related elements of spinning worked against its adoption as such a symbol. Women, not men, spun; it was a practice done in the home or in small groups within familial or village contexts; and in addition to its gender-specificity, often only certain classes of women spun.2 Its image as ‘women’s work’ extended beyond


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South Asia, shaping its perception overseas, and undermining its ability to communicate India’s strength and claims for swaraj. But Gandhi’s deployment of spinning and his approach to gender, the body and political symbolism turned these apparent disadvantages around. Spinning was a crucial element in Gandhi’s revaluing of gender norms for the movement, upturning the equation of the feminine with weakness, redefining the visual image of bodily strength, and producing a new matrix of masculinity and femininity that he linked to existing patterns of behaviour particular to South Asia.3 Spinning was resignified in this context as a new kind of practice, as Gandhi made this gendered, domestic task a political act. By resignification here I do not mean to suggest that Gandhi effected a wholesale and permanent shift in the meaning of the spinning wheel or its links with women actors. Instead, I wish to embrace a richer understanding of resignification as articulated in feminist theory following Judith Butler’s work, in which she addresses the resignification of gender norms (1990, 1997). For Butler, ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (1990: 33). Resignification in this context requires repeated enactments that challenge the norms associated with masculine and feminine, man and woman. Always working in the context of those norms, this performative resignification operates politically to reveal underlying assumptions about gender norms and to elicit a critical engagement with those norms, both from within the bodies of those performing the resignification and for those witnessing the enactments. Subversive resignification can operate at the level of words (claiming the derogatory term ‘queer’ as a positive descriptor, for example) and also at the level of action. To be effective, however, it must operate from within the terms of existing power relations – it cannot appear from nowhere.4 Gandhi’s resignification of spinning involved repeated actions, verbal political rhetoric and the deployment of visual symbols. Femininity and masculinity emerge from this process slightly revalued, but not significantly changed. Spinning, however, took on new roles; Gandhi sought to make normal the idea that simple, small acts, formerly associated with the home and the domestic sphere, could be political. And thus spinning had to shift from an everyday chore to one that enabled political and personal self-rule. This resignification arose from within both existing political discourse and established patterns, including the genealogy of spinning I trace in this book. To deploy spinning as an effective symbol, the question of its gendered history and location within the home had to be addressed, resignified and redeployed as a supportive element of Gandhi’s political programme. I argue here that this ongoing resignification of spinning, rather than operating


Gender and the modern charkha 89 negatively to limit the political efficacy of the symbol and practice, instead helped to produce a rhetorical field in which Gandhi could advance his movement, connecting it to economic production, domesticity and the village, and bringing together a wide constituency. To support this argument, I first examine the exceptional imagery of men spinning. I analyse such images starting from the late nineteenth century through to the early decades of the twentieth as a foil for the primary role of women as spinners. The contrast between imagery of men and women spinning underscores how spinning embodies domesticity, production and reproduction. I then turn to Gandhi’s revaluing of gender norms, both feminine and masculine, as found within his rhetoric related to spinning and gender. I situate here his deployment of the gendered practice of spinning with and against the earlier use of the goddess in swadeshi movements. I then turn to a crucial element of the resignification of spinning in the creation of a new spinning wheel, the peti or box charkha, and argue that its introduction has as much to do with gender as it does with its portability. Because the box charkha takes away the compositional element of the upright wheel, I explore what this loss might mean by tracing the wheel’s symbolic resonance for Indic cultures. I conclude that spinning, traditionally in the hands of women, was successfully appropriated and resignified by Gandhi to support the swaraj movement. And while Gandhi never wrested spinning wholly from the hands of women, while his deployment of spinning never transcended the historic gendered role of the spinner, those goals proved neither possible nor, in the end, desirable.

The domestic, economic and the sacred: women and spinning The first three chapters of this book have demonstrated the ubiquity of the imagery of a woman seated behind the wheel, left arm raised at the top of her rhythm to twist cotton (or wool) into yarn. According to the textual and visual archive, the spinner was a woman, and only rarely does one find men spinning. The exceptional images of men spinning outside of the context of the anticolonial movement are precisely that – exceptional. Thus they contribute to the normalisation of spinning as a woman’s activity. Visual records of men spinning often operate at the margins of Indian society, whether geographically or socially. The archive includes sketches and photographs from Himalayan contexts with men and boys spinning on the drop spindle or takli, geographically peripheral to the subcontinent and working not on a charkha or spinning wheel but instead with a simple weighted spindle.5 Frances Eden, during her visit to the Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab in late 1838, made a sketch in her diary of a man using


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a drop spindle to wind thread for mending tents.6 Fishermen also used taklis to make and mend nets.7 Both tent-mending and net-mending place spinning at the margins – an activity done to shore up existing tools rather than to produce anew. Prison offers another venue at the periphery of society for men to spin. An image from the late nineteenth century portrays a group of men spinning in Karachi Jail, and operates as a pair with a photograph of women prisoners spinning.8 These Karachi images comprised part of the group of photographs displayed at the Wien Weltausstellung (Vienna World Exhibition) in 1873 to represent British India.9 The first includes five male prisoners; the two outermost wind cotton yarn onto reels, while the three in the middle sit behind spinning wheels, the centre prisoner facing the viewer with the other two angled towards the middle of the compositional space. A supervisor stands behind them. The staging of the image finds its echo in the photograph of women prisoners: here one finds only three spinners, but they are arranged in a similar composition to the men, with the central woman facing forward and the other two facing towards the centre. They sit against the same wall as the men, underscoring the staged nature of both photographs. Another photograph likely included in the 1873 Exhibition also portrays a man behind a spinning wheel, but in this case he is winding the thread from the spindle on the wheel to a larger reel to his left. A boy sits at the right edge of the photograph, watching the man as he works. The photograph is clearly staged, with the central figure facing the camera and positioned between the two wheels, his head on the same level as their axles. This photograph was taken by Shivashankar Narayan, who had contributed to The People of India volumes, and produced several photographs for the Vienna Exhibition, particularly a series of photographs of cotton manufacture.10 That these three photographs took part in the international exhibition positions them as representatives of a particular ethnographic mode, one set up to represent India as a vibrant part of the British Empire, with cottage industries that also served as rehabilitative tasks used by the colonial administration in prisons. On rare occasions, an image of a man spinning on an upright charkha enters into a more mainstream space within the visual record. In a 1939 album, likely made for his own consumption, amateur photographer Edward Hilder Colebrook included an image of a man spinning from South India.11 The spinner sits on a porch or veranda and shares the composition with a woman, who leans over to touch a winding reel. The image is taken from above, and the context provides no framing that would help us ascertain if the action is related to the call to Gandhian spinning, or a staged image of a man at the wheel. A film from 1929 also depicts a man spinning, in this case at the other end of the subcontinent in Choa Saidon Shah village in the Punjab (present-day Pakistan).12 Just as in the album, the filmic context does


Gender and the modern charkha 91 not indicate any connection with Gandhian anticolonial politics, but it also does not entirely rule that possibility out. The composition frames the spinner in the traditional iconography; he sits behind the upright wheel, watching his left hand as it pulls the thread from the cotton. He does not demonstrate a high level of ability on the wheel, as in the short time we observe his work he fails to produce any yarn at all or even to achieve a rhythm. In all, it is an awkward and odd image: he covers his head as if with the end of a sari, mimicking more fully the iconography of the female spinner. One wonders if the camera captured him spinning because the women who normally work the wheel did not wish to be filmed. Like the photograph of the man spinning with the woman as a secondary figure, this filmic image does little to convince the viewer that the practice of spinning at the upright charkha is normally the province of men. Other images labelled as ‘men spinning’ often turn out to represent different moments in the cloth production process, usually winding the thread from the spindle onto a reel. Occasionally, a man will pose behind a spinning wheel, or the colonial labeller or modern archivist will misread the image as spinning when it is the twisting of the yarn, another stage in weaving, or even an entirely different process, such as shoe repair or knife sharpening. In at least one instance, a bearded woman was misread as a man, further complicating the representation of gender in the nineteenth century.13 As a result, the number of images of men spinning remains very small, largely isolated to regional or situational exceptions such as scenes in the Himalayas, the depiction of prisoners in jail or the demonstration of handicraft for the ethnographic lens. The vast majority of spinning imagery discussed in this book and found in the archive depicts women at the wheel, in a similar pose and composition to the opening photograph of the chapter. While men certainly did spin prior to Gandhi’s call, the imagery of spinning represents primarily women, working almost exclusively at the upright charkha. Several mid-nineteenth-century studies of cloth production in India echo this evidence from the archive, noting that men clean the cotton, do many of the other steps in the clothmaking process, and women spin it (Anon 1851; Scott 1862: 78; Watson 1867). Writing in 1851 about the Dhaka cotton industry, James Taylor goes a step further, even providing an age limit for the finest thread: All the fine thread is made by Hindoo women. They excel – nay, almost rival Arachne’s fabled skill – in spinning; and, doubtless, it is to the delicate organization and fine sensibility of touch with which they are endowed by nature that their inimitable skill in this art is to be ascribed. […] The finest thread is spun by women generally under thirty years of age (Anon 1851: 18).


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While Taylor’s ascription of higher quality to younger Hindu spinners perhaps tells us more about the discourse surrounding spinning in the midnineteenth century in Dhaka than it does about the reality of yarn production, it also indicates that a wide variety of women spun, Hindu and not, old and young. He goes on to confirm this and reiterate: ‘Spinning was formerly the general leisure occupation – in many cases the principal employment – of Hindoo and Mahomedan females in the district, but particularly of the former, who have always been distinguished for their unrivalled skill in this art’ (18). The connections this nineteenth-century text makes to the Greek mythological figure of Arachne have appeared in European discourse surrounding spinning since the sixteenth century; likewise, the description of spinning as a ‘leisure occupation’ taps into the European connection between spinning and a woman’s propriety, particularly among the upper classes. According to Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass in their study of Renaissance clothing, for those in and near the aristocracy, spinning embodied a ‘necessary habitus that produced “woman”’ (2000: 110).14 While spinning meant work and was associated with coarseness and a lack of beauty for the lower classes, spinning for the upper classes in Europe gradually emerged as a marker of good morals, sometimes linked to the material spun: poor women spun wool for money; wealthy women spun flax to build their virtuousness. Foreshadowing later arguments about swadeshi in India, late-sixteenth-century English writers called on women to spin as their patriotic duty, so that England could produce its own locally made woollen products and achieve economic self-sufficiency (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 109–15).15 Taylor, in describing the production of Dhaka muslin, draws on these European tropes to produce an image of the bucolic, virtuous feminine figure spinning at the wheel, with an emphasis on the younger hands, much closer to a status as virginal maidens. Like the sixteenth-century English writers, Taylor’s project in writing about Dhaka cotton carries with it a sense of loss and disappearance – both groups seek to rejuvenate or at least record a vanishing handicraft. Jones and Stallybrass argue that spinning transformed over the course of the Renaissance period from this early focus on producing wool and flax yarn to a later emphasis on the virtuousness of spinning. Linking it with ancient narratives of Arachne and Penelope, the end product of spinning – yarn or cloth – drops away, and spinning becomes a daily activity to keep women’s hands busy, demonstrate their feminine diligence and differentiate them from weavers. The narrative takes on such a force that even the Greek weaver Penelope is refigured as a spinner in seventeenth-century texts in order to accommodate this shift. Weaving, because it took various threads and magically made them into something new, became associated metaphorically with nefarious plots and cunning, and fell out of favour.16 Spinning came


Gender and the modern charkha 93 to embody devotion, humility and a rustic simplicity that offered a cure for the perceived threat of the conniving feminine (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 115). The nineteenth-century inheritance of older European attitudes towards spinning and the woman as spinner emerges in studies of textiles pursued by various colonial actors like Taylor. As seen in the preceding chapters, the imaging of spinning across the nineteenth century bears traces of this feminisation, pastoralisation and sense of loss. Many of these elements appear as well, with crucial differences, in Gandhi’s appropriation of spinning for the nationalist movement. Looking again at that opening image, I find it compelling because it encapsulates several facets of spinning, all gendered, that served the needs of the anticolonial context. Without the connection to women that spinning offered, the symbolism of the wheel would not have had as much power for the movement. The rustic pastoralisation of the Renaissance discourse comes through here, as does the sense of dutiful work and devotion. Spinning, largely divorced from its productive ends in cloth, becomes a daily task that imbues the doer with virtue and, in the case of the Gandhian movement, reconstitutes the spinner as an active participant in the anticolonial struggle. In the Renaissance, the task served to keep women busy, and it was seen as a ritual practice, its repetition crucial to its power to reform and limit women’s bodies and minds. For Jones and Stallybrass, spinning ‘redefines femininity itself in terms of the most basic of textile processes’ (2000: 110). For the nationalist movement in India, the promotion of spinning as daily practice also precipitates a redefinition of the Indian body and self. As I show below, its domesticity, metaphorical links to both production and reproduction, and sacralising of the economic and the patriotic all serve to support the nationalist movement, and all rely on spinning as the purview of women. Domesticity The spinner sits in front of a simple dwelling – we can see a small piece of the roofline at the top of the image, along with a dark shadow of doorway and a simple wall bordering the compound. Where earlier photographs situated women in a bucolic outdoor setting like Frederick Bremner’s Kashmiri spinner of the late nineteenth century (Figure 2.3), imagery from the twentieth century depicts women in village settings, usually by themselves, working at the charkha in front of vernacular architecture. They usually sit out in the sun – a concession to the needs of the camera – so we rarely see them photographed in an interior space. The scenes of spinning, then, emerge from a domestic setting, a particular aspect of the village – not the meetings of the village elders, and not the agricultural base of village life or the marketplace, but the home and the spaces of domestic labour.


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Gandhi’s rhetoric on spinning uses this setting in support of the craft’s rejuvenation. Spinning enables the participation of those who cannot sacrifice their jobs and those who cannot radically alter their daily activities to participate in marches, picket non-swadeshi businesses or move away from their home to play a part in the movement. Spinning allowed everyone in India to participate in the movement almost without leaving their home. They only needed a small amount of equipment, some raw material to spin and a modicum of instruction in spinning and they could begin their participation, perhaps also adding to their family income in the process. These requirements did not represent an insignificant sacrifice of energy and time – swaraj would not come easily, and spinning did not prove to be an easy task – but these needs could be provided at relatively low cost. Once in the hands of people across India, a simple drop spindle, a supply of cotton and basic instructional materials could facilitate daily participation in the anticolonial movement. To encourage this, Gandhi and others published instructions for takli construction and use and guides for spinning, whether one was just starting out or developing more advanced skills that would provide consistent, high-quality yarn (YI 28 Aug. 1924; Gregg and Gandhi 1926). As I discuss in Chapter 3, after its founding in 1925, the primary struggle for the All India Spinners’ Association involved providing the materials and training for those who wished to spin (see Trivedi 2007). The infrastructural success of the AISA varied from region to region across the subcontinent, but its remit involved spreading the knowledge and practice of cloth production, from cleaning and carding the cotton to spinning and weaving. Lisa Trivedi details the means through which the AISA pursued this goal, from helping communities in crisis (famine, flood) to staging Khadi Exhibitions and Khadi Tours across the country that taught techniques, distributed equipment and put on shows of lantern slides (2003, 2007: 28–66). While handloom training, hand carding and cotton ginning represented a large part of the AISA’s mission, spinning occupied a central role because the distribution of this task required less equipment and infrastructure than weaving and because it impacted the domestic space less than the rather messy cotton carding or the bulky loom. Spinning could be done in quick moments between other tasks, in the off-season of the agricultural cycle, and could be taken up even by children. It more easily penetrated the domestic sphere than other elements of cloth production, in part for these practical reasons. Spinning’s domesticity worked in two directions. In Gandhi’s explicit rhetoric, it enabled individuals, and particularly women, to join the nationalist cause. But it also, in a reciprocal relation to that explicit narrative, served to legitimise the project of the anticolonial movement. Spinning, embedded in a village imaginary, unified the subcontinent because of the centrality of women to its imaging. Many scholars have traced the connections between

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the allegorised body of the Indian woman and the nation – whether in the context of maps, Bharatmata or Mother India, widow immolation or sati, or the doubly hidden subaltern woman.17 Here, rather than an elevated goddess or explicit Bharatmata, one finds a construction of the everywoman, doing a daily task and contributing therefore to India’s self-sufficiency and eventual self-rule. Production and reproduction This image of woman spinning also intersected with concerns surrounding production – literally, of goods that could rejuvenate India’s economy – and reproduction – metaphorically and literally, of new children for the nascent Indian nation. The women seen spinning both in amateur photography from the 1930s and 1940s and in images directly associated with the anticolonial movement do not resemble the bejewelled beauties of earlier studio photographs (e.g. Figure 2.2). They embody instead either a renunciant, celibate image of womanhood (e.g. Figure 0.2) or a woman-as-mother model, producing yarn while also participating in the reproductive family economy. The centrality of women to the image of spinning tapped into an existing equation between the good Indian mother and the nation, itself based on the colonial imagery of the bucolic Indian woman as representation of an exoticised India.18 If spinning produced a shared bodily experience for a nascent conception of a unified Indian citizenry, then connecting that image to the idealised, bucolic, village woman/mother carried with it the purity and simplicity already embedded there through a century of iconographic genealogy. The constructed, unified nation could then embrace the same, rather generic, image of the good mother, producing yarn for her country/ children as she kept a close, safe watch over them. The photograph that anchors this chapter illustrates the latter complex of overlapping meanings explicitly – productive woman as mother – by including a baby in the lap of the spinner, intimately linking production and reproduction. She looks down at the child and at her yarn; the child reaches up in an echo of her spinning gesture. This positive valuing of the feminine as it related to spinning imagery and the nation could not be abandoned in Gandhi’s scheme. Rather than a host of images depicting men spinning behind the upright charkha, for the nationalist movement women still centre most of the spinning imagery, appearing in groups at the upright charkha (Figure 3.1), raising their hands to use the takli (Figure 3.2), or leading spinning demonstrations.19 While men are encouraged to spin, and some images from the nationalist movement do feature men spinning at an upright charkha, the visual connection of spinning to women continued during this period, tapping into the positive feminine

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qualities spinning offered. As I discuss in the last section of this chapter, imagery of men spinning within the nationalist movement deviated from the iconographic norm of the previous century through a physical reconstruction of the spinning wheel itself.


Ritual and the spiritual In addition to the spinner-as-mother imagery, one also finds images of groups of women and girls spinning, often wearing undyed khadi and frequently separated from any domestic setting. Women nationalist leaders often project an image of the ascetic renunciant or the ‘masculinised, celibate woman-warrior’ (Banerjee 2005: 73). Earlier nationalist women leaders such as Madam Cama, Sister Nivedita and Sarala Debi Ghosal, all of whom promoted variant versions of the role of women within the anticolonial movement, and sometimes quite violent ones, negotiated their own images carefully, embodying an image of ascetic, non-reproductive, masculinised womanhood. In doing so, they enabled their own participation in the nationalist movement, sometimes stridently calling for aggressive, masculine action, but doing so from the context of a desexualised space outside of the familial reproductive economy (Banerjee 2005: 70–3). These women from the turn of the twentieth century established a pattern such that those working in the non-violent sphere of Gandhian politics could inhabit the same nonreproductive, celibate, desexualised image while pursuing different means to similar ends. Like the image of Gandhi himself (discussed in the following chapter), this ascetic imagery took on spiritual overtones connected with the sacrifice and wanderings of the latter stages of life. In addition to the intimate connection between production of yarn and motherhood seen in the woman spinning with a child in her lap, within explicit images of the nationalist movement one often finds women dissociated from that reproductive familial context, spinning instead in a sacrificial mode, working for the cause of the national family instead of the sanguinuptial one.20 This spirituality operates on a different register than that deployed by the earlier swadeshi movement in Bengal in 1905–11. Bharatmata, or the goddess Mother India, and other, more aggressive female deities like Kali, circulated in imagery and song during that period as a way to articulate both a unified nation and a powerful Hindu identity worthy of toppling British economic power.21 Scholars have begun to analyse the history of Mother India as a figure within anticolonial politics and post-1947 nation building, and this interest is producing a rich literature that explores the varied meanings and contingent histories of the Bharatmata icon.22 But for Gandhian politics, in addition to some use of Bharatmata or the goddess, we see a different


Gender and the modern charkha 97 side of the imaging of woman in relation to the anticolonial movement – an ascetic imagery that echoes the desexualisation of earlier nationalist leaders. These figures lend a monastic aura to the gatherings around Gandhi, reinforced by an extant imagery of religious pilgrimage, forgoing worldly pleasures and, upon fulfilling one’s duties as a householder, dedicating oneself to spiritual and philosophical life. The societally acceptable modes for women to move outside of the familial space require a lack of sexuality, one replaced here by the production of yarn, and by extension, the production of a new Indian state. When it comes to active, everyday bodies spinning, one often finds this distancing from sexuality and reproduction towards a more spiritually inclined, transcendent body.23 The spinner, if situated in the domestic sphere, can retain the connection to the reproductive family economy.24 Outside of that, women drew on a different construction of a political space, one reliant on a tradition of asexual asceticism. Suruchi Thapar-Björkert’s work on women who participated in the national movement in Uttar Pradesh identifies similar political adaptations, in which the domestic becomes refigured as a primary political space while women also produce a new, acceptable image of womanhood that allows them to enter into politics outside of the home (2006: 69–139). Others have argued that the body of woman serves to purify and sacralise, adding a transcendent dimension to imagery that might otherwise fall into a modern embrace of disenchantment and the overvaluing of scientific knowledge: for example, maps of the state (Ramaswamy 2001). While the spinning wheel itself carries with it a sense of ancientness and the cultural roots of Indian handicraft, it also operates as an economic and political symbol, one that has strong elements of instrumentality. Retaining the relationship with the female form, whether a domestic, reproductive one or an asexualised one, meant that the wheel leant itself to enchanted readings – readings outside of the merely instrumentalised economic ends many have focused on and dismissed.25 Spinning’s ability to transform cotton into thread, and its relationship to the body of the sacred female form, meant that it carried a magical weight, not connected with any particular religious tradition, but tapping into the transcendent to underwrite its efficacy. Thus, the symbol of the spinning wheel and the practice of spinning directly engaged with domestic concerns and drew in a wide range of women participants while simultaneously deploying the imagery of women to sacralise and purify the movement.26

Femininity, strength and a new charkha Despite his repeated calls for men to spin, and despite evidence from the AISA that men were participating in the khadi movement, Gandhi remains one of the few men found spinning at the upright charkha in the photographic archive.


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The occasional training image and some group spinning images include men spinning on traditional charkhas, but the vast majority of photographs contain only women at the charkha, or Gandhi himself at the charkha, either alone or with a small group who most often do not themselves spin.27 The call for men to spin does not operate separately from the overarching reworking of masculine and feminine Gandhi attempted to affect (see Alter 2000). That images of Gandhi dominate the visual record reinforces the centrality of Gandhi’s body, his experiments in relation to masculinity and his revaluing of feminine and masculine norms through his own persona. Studies of Gandhi’s politicised body focus most often on his celibacy, dietetics and practices surrounding fasting (Caplan 1987; Alter 1996, 2000). His experimentation as a teenager in Gujarat with meat-eating, meant to strengthen him in the model of a European body, served as a foil for his later vegetarianism and the upending of the predominant colonial equation between meat consumption and strength (Parekh 1997; Roy 2002). Instead, strength inhered for Gandhi in the self-control associated with celibacy, fasting and vegetarianism. Embodied in his refiguring of the Indian conception of brahmacharya, these practices represented a larger commitment to ‘the control in thought, word and action, of all the senses at all times and in all places’.28 While Gandhi’s body suffered disease and appeared emaciated (most obviously during fasts), he sought to equate a steely, strong physique not with an overly muscled, violent body but one borne of self-control, vigour and devotion.29 He occasionally invoked Hanuman, the muscular monkey god who led his army to fight at Rama’s side in the Ramayana, as a model for masculine strength, with the caveat that his strength arises not from physical prowess but from his devotion to Rama (Alter 1996: 312).30 His upturning of gender norms surrounding strength extended also to spinning, which he advocated as a means of promoting self-control for men having difficulty with celibacy (Alter 2000: 314; CW 1958, vol. 35: 414; CW 2000, vol. 41: 58). The use of spinning to occupy the brahmachari’s body echoes the European approach to spinning as a way of occupying and thereby purifying women’s minds (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 115). It also associates the strength of self-control with the gendered labour of the wheel, thereby drawing in the benefits of feminine self-sacrifice and selfless suffering associated by Gandhi with women (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983: 61; Thapar 1993: 86; Kishwar 1985a: 1691).31 The strength of daily sacrifice as embodied in motherhood did not overturn traditional feminine norms – one still speaks of these characteristics as associated with women – but it did serve to enable a rethinking of the meaning of strength in the context of the struggle to achieve self-rule. Gandhi saw a metaphorical relation between the role of women within the patriarchal Indian family and the role of Indians within colonial power relations. Women’s weakness becomes their strength

Gender and the modern charkha 99 just as India’s weakness – economically in the world, for example – should instead be perceived as a strength.32 While this approach relies on a certain essentialism on both counts (gender and national identity), it challenges overarching colonial assumptions and encourages those engaged in an anticolonial struggle to think critically about both arenas.


Discovering a new charkha Despite this rhetorical encouragement to spin, and the refiguring of the feminine as strength, men remained reluctant to take up spinning. Trivedi argues convincingly that the role of women as spinners in the movement, and the call for everyone to spin – not (only) for the economic benefit of their family but for the larger national family – threatened existing familial structures and underlay much of the resistance to spinning from those in the Congress Party (2007: 73–5). In other words, if the practice of spinning, traditionally in women’s hands, expanded to include men, this could threaten the traditionally separate spheres of men and women, potentially eroding their reproductive roles and replacing existing family structures with a new national family.33 On the one hand, as discussed above, Gandhi’s call to spin had the positive effect of bringing spinning into the domestic sphere and the everyday, enabling women and men who had job and family commitments to participate in the movement. On the other hand, that inclusive, positive element of spinning as a political manoeuvre ran up against gender norms and familial relations. The long-standing link between women and spinning therefore potentially undermined Gandhi’s goal to encourage everyone to spin. So, ironically, spinning’s strength as a way of enabling participation within the domestic sphere – bringing the political into the home – also became a weakness. Expanding spinning to include men – making the movement more inclusive – threatened gender and familial norms. Gandhi’s programme gave women, normally subordinate in the political sphere, a crucial role to play in the formation of the nation, as women spin, and spinning held a central role in the anticolonial movement. This politicisation of domestic space and inclusion of women in political action led to explicit and implicit resistance to spinning, as it threatened familial roles. In privileging spinning, the movement gave women a position of authority, and it also potentially feminised men – if men wished to be equal members of the movement, they had to spin. By spinning, women and men practised a new form of belonging, adding the national to an existing group of affiliations to caste, religion, community, region and family. Spinning brought the domestic onto the political stage and replaced familial, paternal authority with a newly forming state authority. Rather than being a good son or daughter for the family, one now became a good citizen for the nation.34


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And because that represented a threat to the familial structure, and because of spinning’s long-standing association with women, men remained reluctant to spin. Not until an alternative to the upright charkha and the takli emerged in the 1930s does the archive begin to include men spinning, with Gandhi and without, in a variety of settings. The peti, or box, charkha, appears in the archive in approximately 1931, concurrent with Gandhi’s trip to Britain for the Round Table Conference of that year. Also known as the modern charkha, and sometimes the Yeravda charkha, this wheel had the major practical advantage of portability, as it folds into an easily carried box fitted with a handle. When open, the charkha lies flat on the ground, its solid wooden disc-wheel parallel to the floor and its spindle protruding from the box slightly. More difficult to master than the upright charkha, it produces high-quality yarn, and its construction, while more complex than the upright charkha, remains simple enough to facilitate repairs and maintenance. The story of the box charkha’s invention remains somewhat obscure. From early on in the movement, experiments to improve the design of the wheel and the quality of its output took place.35 Gandhi’s nephew, Maganlal K. Gandhi, fine-tuned traditional charkha design, judged and worked with proposals for new charkhas, and served as a gatekeeper for the enthusiastic inventions of more elaborate spinning wheels, which generally proved difficult to use and maintain. The AISA staged several competitions for a better charkha, and at khadi exhibitions inventors would submit their new wheels for approval (YI 18 Jan. 1923). Maganlal also answered queries regarding the legitimacy of advertisements for better charkhas, which he invariably denounced, urging the readers of Young India not to fall for offers of improved spinning wheels (YI 15 June 1922; YI 10 Aug. 1922; YI 8 and 15 Nov. 1923). Maganlal and others had improved early designs of the traditional upright charkha, and urged spinners to take up these newer versions, as the early models had discouraged some from spinning because they proved difficult to operate (YI 5 April 1923; YI 8 Nov. 1923). Debates about better modes of spinning, the ease of use of the takli versus the spinning wheel, and whether or not a particular new version in fact improved output often appeared in the pages of Young India and its Gujarati counterpart Navajivan. In addition to Maganlal, Maurice Frydman, a Polish engineer also known as Bharatananda, worked closely with Gandhi and invented a new type of spinning implement called the dhanush takli.36 A simple machine, it employed a bow rather than a wheel to turn the spindle. Gandhi often used this type of takli and is occasionally photographed with it (see Figure 3.3). Bharatananda published a book on his invention that provides detailed information about its construction and use (1943). The box charkha, however, emerges from neither competitions nor the capable hands of Frydman/Bharatananda. Its other designation as the


Gender and the modern charkha 101 Yeravda charkha indicates that perhaps it was invented during the time Gandhi was imprisoned at Yeravda jail in Pune. His stints of imprisonment during the 1920s and 1930s included several in Yeravda, however, and his prison diaries offer no indication of his having had a hand in inventing a new charkha there.37 At midnight on 5 May 1930, almost one month after completing the Salt March to Dandi on 6 April, Gandhi was arrested and taken to Yeravda jail. Based on notes published in Young India and small pieces of information from those surrounding him at the time, Gandhi had shifted to using a takli almost exclusively in Yeravda, and his associate Mirabehn delivered a new charkha there on 18 July 1930.38 It is possible that this was the new box charkha. The photographic evidence confirms that prior to 1930, images of Gandhi spinning involve either a simple takli or the upright charkha. Following his 1930–1 imprisonment at Yeravda, Gandhi met with the viceroy, Lord Irwin, several times in New Delhi in February of 1931. One result of those meetings was that Gandhi would represent the Congress at the Round Table Conference in London later that year. Images of Gandhi on the ship during the passage to Britain show him using the box charkha to spin. The appearance of the box charkha in the visual records indicates it may indeed have been developed while Gandhi was imprisoned in 1930–1. Several images, taken in November 1929, hint at an early version of the box charkha. They depict Gandhi at an upright wheel, but the apparatus sits on a similar frame as later box charkhas (Figure 4.2). The carry-handle for the box appears clearly in the photograph, and the wheel clearly folds down into the case for storage and portability. The box charkha, then, was developed sometime between 1929 and 1931, perhaps while Gandhi was in Yeravda jail. Its development happened without the aid of Maganlal, who had died in April 1928 and therefore no longer served as a gatekeeper for new charkha designs.39 While not discussed directly in the literature, it is likely that the primary reason for the box charkha’s invention and adoption by Gandhi and others in the nationalist movement was its portability and efficiency. While the takli could travel easily, it wasn’t as efficient as a wheel-driven machine for producing yarn. The box charkha suited the peripatetic participants in the anticolonial struggle, whether they travelled to Britain or across the subcontinent. Less practically, however, the box charkha fundamentally changes the visual imagery of spinning. Instead of a prominent wheel form marking the act of spinning, a flat wooden box now lay in front of spinners, identifiable as a spinning wheel only from the gesture of the left arm rising up to pull the cotton into thread. In addition to the practical reason for the introduction of the box charkha, then, another more subtle and not necessarily conscious motivation emerges


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Figure 4.2 Gandhi spinning at the house of the Raja of Kalakankar (near Allahabad), 14 November 1929. Source: © Vithalbhai Jhaveri/Gandhiserve.

for its ready adoption within nationalist contexts. Its deviation from the gendered imagery of the upright charkha meant that it provided an alternative vision of spinning, one that significantly, if still only partially, escaped spinning’s strong connection with the feminine. Its flat, streamlined form distinguishes the user from the history of images this book has traced, going back to the early nineteenth century. Instead, one finds a putatively nongendered figure seated behind a streamlined, sleek flat wooden apparatus, dubbed ‘modern’ by many for its updating of the ‘traditional’ charkha design. This charkha marks the user as forward looking and innovative while still retaining its connection to the bundle of political and economic characteristics embodied by spinning. The flat form also emphasises the user rather than the wheel. We can now see the bodies of people as they spin in groups rather than the whirling of the wheels in front of them, and photographs of groups at the modern charkha emphasise this bodily engagement rather than exoticising the rustic technology that the upright charkha represented (see Figure 3.3). Spinning became something of the now, a modern activity, one that the new Indian body could proudly pursue as part of the emergence of the new Indian nation.


Gender and the modern charkha 103 As a result of all of these factors, the box charkha appears in the visual archive more often than the upright charkha after its introduction in the early 1930s. Women and men spin at the box charkha, and the movement’s leaders, when they are depicted spinning, do so on this machine rather than the upright wheel. For men, the box charkha disassociated spinning from the feminine, allowing them to perform spinning as a part of the nationalist movement and to do so outside of the domestic space. For women, too, a similar effect occurred, as spinning became disconnected from its domestic context such that women’s choice to spin no longer immediately recalled the traditional inheritance of woman-as-spinner but instead brought to the surface the connection between the act of spinning and the anticolonial struggle. However, in addition to the benefits gained from separating the user from the gendered iconography of the upright wheel, this new apparatus also left behind some of the symbolism associated with that wheel. Throughout this period, the traditional charkha form remains as a symbol – on the flag, in posters and in publications of the AISA and other organisations – but while the traditional charkha persists as an important tool for the AISA and others, the imagery of the practice of spinning now shifts to focus on this new box charkha. Both wheels coexisted and both were necessary for the visual rhetoric the movement put forth. Charkha as chakra Symbols only work well if they rely upon already existing iconographies; furthermore, their power and efficacy derive not from their singularity in meaning but their plurality (Barthes 1987 [1966]: 67–8).40 This plurality of meaning (even in a singularity of visual form), allows for a symbol to have, as Roland Barthes calls it, a certain ‘freedom’ in the malleability of its meaning over time and across cultures (68). Its ability to transcend cultural, religious and temporal boundaries makes the wheel, or chakra, a particularly efficacious object in the South Asian context, and explains why, even though the box charkha had practical advantages and overcame some of the gendered heritage of spinning, the upright, traditional charkha with its prominent chakra continued to circulate in visual culture as an abstracted, two-dimensional form. Used extensively in both the Buddhist and Hindu contexts, the chakra carried a variety of meanings. It resonated with the Indic understanding of cycles of time and the cycle of birth and rebirth. It mapped both that temporal idea and a spatial understanding of the universe-as-mandala, deployed in both Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions to articulate different views of the hierarchies of gods, demons and guardians, and to show the devotee the path to enlightenment. The wheel also, in the historical realm, connected to


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a long lineage of wheel symbols and thereby reinforced the idea of India’s antiquity. Indeed, despite over a decade of flags with charkhas in the centre, the final choice for the Indian flag after independence was not the spinning wheel but the wheel alone – specifically the wheel found on a stone capital carved during the reign of Ashoka, the third-century BCE Mauryan emperor who united northern India and was the first ruler to promote Buddhism in the subcontinent.41 As the debate in the Indian Constituent Assembly in July 1947 shows, several symbolic elements of the wheel made it more attractive than the charkha for the flag. Practical considerations of symmetry – producing a flag that looks the same from either side – made the wheel a superior choice. More important, the spinning wheel was linked in the new nation’s imagination with a drive for economic freedom and therefore had a more limited symbolic meaning than the wheel alone, which represented dynamism and motion. The flag was also seen as a locus for the interface between a national and an international identity for the new state, and the wheel could be easily read as an Indian symbol by those in the international community. The specific historic connection to an Ashokan past, one in which India was united and, as Nehru noted in his remarks, ‘… a time when India’s ambassadors went abroad to far countries and went abroad not in the way of an Empire and imperialism but as ambassadors of peace and culture and goodwill’ (Proceedings 1947). The Ashokan connection was therefore one that reinforced the diplomatic role India envisioned for itself on the eve of independence. In the discussion following the motion to accept the new flag, a wide range of speakers added their voices of support for it, many of them citing the multiple meanings of the symbol as one of its strengths, and linking their own community – religious or economic – to the iconography of the flag and the Ashoka chakra (see also Roy 2006). This multivalence rests in the Ashokan wheel itself, one that was deployed both as a political image and as a Buddhist one. Likewise, the shift from the charkha to the chakra moves the symbol from one that resonated specifically with the anticolonial movement, economic freedom and Gandhian politics to one that could embody a range of meanings for the variety of communities represented in the Constituent Assembly. The ancient, international, political, Buddhist, peaceful, dynamic elements of the symbol allowed the chakra to skirt the religious Hindu–Muslim communal problems associated with other symbols. Despite its ostensible link to an ancient Buddhist past, the range of meanings embedded in the Ashokan wheel allowed its use as a national symbol without entering into the political difficulties of Hindu–Muslim conflict that had grown during the decades before independence and continued to expand in the aftermath of partition.42 Clearly, the chakra represents neither a fully religious form nor a fully secular one. As a result, the wheel remains open to multiple readings, allowing


Gender and the modern charkha 105 for a symbolic space imbued with both generalised spirituality and the secular. The upright spinning wheel image draws on this power but works as a much more specific emblem, unable to embody fully the wheel’s rhetorical balance. Nonetheless, the prominence of the wheel within the traditional charkha allows it to resonate with other wheel-forms. Its use as the more static symbol of the nationalist movement, then, relies on the crucial element of the wheel in the body of the charkha, which in its modern, portable incarnation lies hidden, flat on the floor. The introduction of the box charkha in 1930–1 proved revolutionary for its defusing of the gendered qualities of the spinning wheel without completely erasing their positive resonances. The upright charkha carried on (as the following chapter demonstrates) as a symbol of the movement, retaining the important inheritance of the link to the genealogy of spinning imagery from the nineteenth century. It operated as a more static counterpart to the active spinning done on the box charkha, but retained the important symbol of the wheel within the spinning wheel, something that underpinned the success of the spinning wheel symbol in the first place. Meanwhile, the box charkha pushed the movement away from focusing on village archaism towards reconceptualising handicraft as something that participated in the development and even the modernisation of the nascent nation. The photograph of the mother and child at the spinning wheel embodies that inherited iconography of spinning, illustrating the positive qualities of the bucolic village, the productive and reproductive space of the feminine domestic sphere, and the ostensibly pure, sacral body of the woman. Resignifying spinning as an activity serving the nation rather than the family posed a threat to the reproductive order of Indian societies, and Gandhi’s concurrent revaluing of the feminine as a site of strength did much to overcome that threat. The invention of the modern, box charkha became crucial for the incorporation of men into spinning, distancing the visual image from its gendered heritage and making spinning of the ‘now’. Calling for everyone to spin did not achieve an upturning of gender and familial norms, in part because of the crucial retention of feminine elements within spinning that served as positive qualities Gandhi sought to instil in his followers. Rather than seeing spinning’s gendered heritage as wholly negative, as something to be overcome, the charkha’s gendered qualities became central to its new role in Indian self-rule, modified and modernised, but continuing as a palpable presence – the baby’s hand reaching up out of the spinner’s lap – sanctifying the newly emerging nation.

5

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Gandhi and the spinning wheel

On a Monday in late March or April, 1946, Margaret Bourke-White visited Gandhi for the first time.1 Forty-one-year-old Bourke-White had already established herself as a world-renowned photographer: as the first female photojournalist hired by Life magazine, her work had appeared on the cover of the publication several times, including its inaugural issue in 1936. Life sent her to India in 1946 to cover the events unfolding there in the run up to independence. She began by seeking out Gandhi. Gandhi’s peripatetic life at this time meant that he never remained in one place for long, and his entourage of staff, equipment and – for their milk – goats travelled with him in third-class train carriages all over India. He had been in Mumbai in mid-March, but he moved to Uruli-Kanchan on the twenty-second in order to introduce the small village to his approach to ‘nature cures’. These cures incorporated his approach to dietetics, various types of mud poultices and basic advice on health drawn from an amalgamation of Indian and European understandings of the body and how to overcome various ailments.2 He had spoken often that month of wishing to live among the untouchables wherever he travelled, and he did so both at Uruli and at the Bhangi colony in Delhi in April (see e.g. CW 1958 vol. 83: 311; CW 2000, vol. 90: 133). In these contexts, he gave speeches, led prayer meetings, ministered to the sick and performed his daily routine of walks, reading and responding to letters, and spinning. Bourke-White hoped to capture an image of Gandhi spinning (BourkeWhite 1963: 273). She famously recounts in her multiple retellings that Gandhi’s secretary, Pyarelal Nayyar, would not allow her to see Gandhi until she had learned to spin herself. After submitting with some hesitation to a spinning lesson, she entered the room where Gandhi sat, observing his day of silence and reading news clippings. According to her memoir, she had negotiated the use of only three small ‘peanut’ flashbulbs – Gandhi didn’t like the disturbance of flash photography – and she had to combat the darkness of the room along with the window behind Gandhi that threw everything in the


National symbols 107 room into shadow. Her dramatic narrative involves trying to take a picture of him spinning, only to have her equipment fail, then taking another perfect photograph with his arm raised, only to realise she had forgotten to pull the slide on the camera. In her third and final attempt, she recounts: ‘I hazarded the third peanut, and it worked. I threw my arms around the rebellious equipment and stumbled out into the daylight, quite unsold on the machine age. Spinning wheels could take priority over cameras any time’ (275). From her narrative, we expect an image of Gandhi at the spinning wheel, perhaps with his arm raised, in the traditional iconography this book has traced to this point. Instead, the photograph that appears from this encounter represents Gandhi reading news clippings with light streaming in from a window behind him, the wheel in silhouette in the left foreground (Figure 5.1). Bourke-White’s retelling of the photograph’s creation embellishes the drama surrounding the taking of the photograph and suggests that only one image remains from this photo shoot. But, in fact, over a dozen images from that day remain, including pictures showing the preparations of the room for Gandhi, several photographs of him spinning, several more of him reading clippings, and images of the compound where he stayed. BourkeWhite’s dramatisation of the day’s events has found an echo-chamber in photographic histories, biographies and books on Gandhi; these narratives consistently retell her story without looking closely at the actual image in question and without any attention to the surrounding body of photographs taken at the same time. Indeed, the photograph has been repeatedly misread or misrepresented by viewers, caption-writers and scholars as they have used it to illustrate Gandhi’s relationship to spinning. Published repeatedly since its appearance in Life, the photograph’s captions include: ‘The Spinner’, ‘Mohandas Gandhi at his spinning wheel’, ‘Mahatma Gandhi, April 1946, with his charka, or spinning wheel, symbol of India’s struggle for independence’, ‘GANDHI SPINS for an hour every afternoon’, and even ‘The Weaver’.3 Yet the facts of the image are quite to the contrary. Gandhi does not sit ‘at the spinning wheel’ nor does he spin, and he certainly does not weave. He sits in a room, ‘with’ his spinning wheel rather than at it, not spinning but reading. His action is reading; the spinning wheel serves as an icon. The misreadings stem in part from clever manipulation of the composition by Bourke-White. Gandhi’s body sits in iconographically proper relation to the wheel: behind it and to the right. From this compositional relationship, we visually anticipate him spinning, filling in the non-existent connection between Gandhi and the wheel with the action that often links the two objects. The iconic body of Gandhi plus the static icon of the wheel together add up to the active symbol of spinning. This photograph encompasses two primary symbols of the nationalist movement: Gandhi himself, and the upright, traditional spinning wheel or


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Figure 5.1 Margaret Bourke-White, Gandhi and spinning wheel, 1946. Source: Originally published Life magazine. © Margaret Bourke-White/Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images.

charkha. Previous chapters have traced the iconography of spinning, through nineteenth-century Company painting and photography, and have examined the reasons for Gandhi’s appropriation of spinning as well as the way Gandhi resignified and physically reshaped the spinning wheel to accommodate its connection to women. Earlier in the book I looked at spinning as an active practice, investigating imagery of people in the process of spinning. Here, I explore the spinning wheel as icon, focusing on its role as a static symbol. In the Bourke-White photograph, despite later misreadings in captions and later reinterpretations of the image, Gandhi does not spin, and yet this image, precisely in its slippage between spinning and not-spinning, encapsulates the multilayered symbolic power of the nationalist movement as it centred on the dual images of the spinning wheel and Gandhi. In the previous chapter I discussed the flat, compact, modern ‘box’ charkha that lacks the visual clarity found in the upright wheel pictured in Bourke-White’s photograph. The box charkha enabled a distancing from the traditional iconography of a woman seated behind the wheel that had persisted for over a century, producing a space for a resignification of spinning that opened the way for men to spin. But the traditional upright charkha continued in nationalist iconography, particularly in relation to


National symbols 109 Gandhi’s body, here taking the place of the woman-as-spinner and, as discussed in the previous chapter, challenging the hierarchy of traditional gender roles. The wheel operates as an attribute for Gandhi-as-saint, an extension of his body at work spinning, and a symbol on its own for the nationalist movement (see Juergensmeyer 1987). In this final chapter of the book, after probing the ways that the charkha operates as an icon, I ask after its waning relevance as a political symbol after independence, both in popular circulation and in the high art recapitulation of Gandhi as icon.

Spinning and making the nation Popular images of Gandhi and the wheel made before his assassination in 1948 use the wheel as either a pendant symbol to the central icon of Gandhi or as an attribute – an identifying marker and symbolic tool used in political mythmaking surrounding an increasingly deified Mahatma. An early image from c. 1920–1 depicts Gandhi seated on a globe, directing the thread as it moves between the spinner at left and the weaver at right (Figure 5.2). His appearance in the image draws on early photographs of Gandhi before he took up the dhoti or loin cloth, but after he had taken up the Gandhi topi, his adaptation of the Kashmiri cap, which he wore only between 1919 and 1921 (Tarlo 1996: 70).4 The other figures echo established traditional iconography. The spinner sits behind the wheel with one knee up, her left hand raised to pull the thread from the wheel. In keeping with this iconography, she gazes towards her hand and then by extension towards Gandhi in the centre of the image. The thread, which should logically end in her hand where the prepared cotton would be, extends instead to Gandhi’s raised right hand, and then across his body to his lowered left hand, which feeds the thread to the loom and its weaver. This figure, too, is composed in traditional iconography, with the view from behind and at three-quarters to the loom. Here the weaver wears the Gandhi topi or cap and khadi (homespun), and looks slightly upwards towards Gandhi’s figure. Gandhi does not spin or weave in this image, but sits at the apex of the globe, directly over large ‘INDIA’ marked on the subcontinent and in front of the figure of Mother India, floating in the clouds above him. She carries a lotus and a Congress tricolour flag with a spinning wheel in its centre. Her sari and body echo the outline of India, and both her garland and the rays of the halo around her head extend below her body to include Gandhi in their orbit. Two of her four hands direct our gaze to Gandhi’s head, further underscoring her blessing for the leader and sanctifying him as a near-saint. On axis above their merged bodies floats a further benediction: the circular portrait of the late Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who died in 1920 and who had inaugurated swadeshi movements in relation to the Bengal partition of 1905 (Wolpert 1962).


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In earlier chapters, I have argued that late-nineteenth century photography separates spinning from its participation in cloth production, enabling its appropriation as a metonymic symbol for the entirety of Gandhi’s swadeshi programme. This image, in contrast, makes explicit the connection between spinning, weaving and the final production of cloth, linking all three stages and doing so through the body of Gandhi and the hovering presence of Bharatmata. The neatly folded piles of khadi cloth, echoing the images of cloth merchants’ shops in the Company paintings of the early nineteenth century, emanate from the loom to tower over Mumbai, centre of the cotton mill industry. The image maps the traditional regionality of cloth production: spinning in the Punjab (on a Punjabi-style charkha), weaving in Bengal, the historic home of Dhaka muslin, and production in Mumbai, a subtle challenge to the mill-based yarn industry. This image reconnects these dispersed symbolic elements of cloth production, and does so to illustrate the entirety of Gandhi’s programme, from spinning to khadi, via a merged Bharatmata-Gandhi and mapped onto the colonial geography of the subcontinent.5 This image, in other words, encompasses the entire movement in a complex, orchestrated dance of symbolism. This complex orchestration sacrificed the simplicity of a singular symbol, in favour of communicating the multifaceted interactions among historical swadeshi references (Tilak and Bharatmata), the process of cloth production, the mapping of the colonised subcontinent and the sanctified leadership of Gandhi. The multi-layered iconography occurs within the framework of the bazaar or calendar print, which often embraced this kind of visual exegesis of contemporary events, political arguments or religious narratives. Each detail within a print carefully contributes to the whole, referencing earlier imagery for legibility, and clearly tying together a range of vignettes to make clear the subject matter of the image. Readability, for example, dictates that a scene of carding, or a scene of ginning the cotton, does not appear in the image.6 The simplicity of the central axis (Gandhi-Bharatmata-Tilak) and the clockwise circular movement of the thread (spinning-Gandhi-weavingcloth) compositionally eases the reading of the complex iconography. In the context of the image circulation from the bazaar, this image communicates clearly. In the context of photography, newsreels or abstracted symbols, the multiplicity of references loses its efficacy, and the singularity of spinning comes again to the fore.7

Sanctifying Gandhi: the wheel as attribute In addition to seeing spinning as one among a complex of symbols, one also finds the spinning wheel, separated from any spinner, operating as an attribute for Gandhi or other figures, particularly Bharatmata. In these


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Figure 5.2 Gandhi, c. 1920–21. Oleograph, 24 × 33 cm. Source: © Neumayer-Schelberger, Vienna.

instances, Gandhi does not use the wheel to spin, but either simply carries it as he walks or holds it in his hand as a deity would hold an attribute: Vishnu’s conch or Shiva’s axe. Attributes are objects held in figures’ hands; they help viewers identify the deity, allegorical figure or historical personage in the image. In some cases, the wheel-as-attribute overlaps with the refiguring of Gandhi as a god, so that an image of Gandhi as Krishna, defeating the snake Kaliya, lifts the spinning wheel to his face in an echo of Krishna’s traditional gesture with the flute (Neumayer and Schelberger 2008: 109, pl. 132). When imaged as Rama fighting Ravana, his weapons are the spinning wheel and the spindle, not the bow and arrow (Neumayer and Schelberger 2008: 107, pl. 130). When depicted as a multi-armed god saving Mother India from colonialism (in an iconography borrowed from the story of Shiva saving the young boy Markandey from Yama, god of death), he holds the spinning wheel in his lower right hand where Shiva’s axe would go (Pinney 2004:


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114, fig. 83). Bharatmata, for whom no consistent set of attributes emerges, occasionally holds the spinning wheel as well.8 When associated with a deity, attributes often allow for the definitive identification of the figure as a particular god or goddess rather than another. They also distinguish among different aspects of the same deity, sometimes indicating regional distinctions (Shiva’s southern Indian attributes, for example, differ from those he holds in northern India), and sometimes emphasising a particular narrative associated with the deity. For both Bharatmata and Gandhi, the spinning wheel is supplementary. It merely reinforces the existing identification of the central figure – we can identify Gandhi because of the consistency in his image and its relation to photographs of him; we can identify Bharatmata through her pose, the drape and colouration of her sari, or the relationship to the map of India she often embodies. The spinning wheel becomes a secondary identifying element, one that instead directs our attention to cloth production, self-sufficiency and swadeshi. For Gandhi, however, it also bestows upon the central figure a heightened level of sanctity, elevating him to the level of a deity – a figure who ‘normally’ carries an attribute. This deification exists explicitly in images where Gandhi takes over a space in a composition reserved for a deity, and implicitly in images where Gandhi merely carries the wheel or holds it in his lap. While this sort of deification happens with many national leaders, it often takes place primarily after their death rather than during their lifetime, and it rarely takes as explicit a form as we find with Gandhi, in which he wields the wheel. Gods and goddesses often wield weapons in their hands, objects that represent the particular form of power that they can deploy in battle. The charkha therefore takes on this additional aspect of the attribute, as an abstract representation of the form of weapon Gandhi uses. In this guise, the spinning wheel embodies both a static object (something to be held in the hand) and an active tool (a weapon to be used, with the further implications that its use could take the form of spinning itself, and such spinning has the capacity to defeat the enemy). The charkha attribute is a static symbol with the potential for activation at any time. In addition to elevating Gandhi, its bearer, to deity status, it also carries with it a sense of the transcendent or the otherworldly: Vishnu’s mace could destroy the universe; Gandhi’s wheel could free India. The Bourke-White photograph taps into this relationship between Gandhi and the wheel, using both figures as icons, spatially related to one another. The wheel–Gandhi connection appears in a wide variety of contexts outside of bazaar prints, and both the wheel and Gandhi also appear separately as icons. In the post-1947 context, echoes of the wheel–Gandhi relationship remain; however, the wheel begins to fade in favour of a stronger focus on the figure of Gandhi himself. After his death in 1948, Gandhi appears

National symbols 113 on and in a wide range of media, from postage stamps, where he is often depicted in relation to the wheel, to film, advertising, sculpted monuments and contemporary art.


Gandhi’s canonisation in popular culture Two parallel trajectories emerge from these re-imagings of Gandhi from the mid-twentieth century onwards. In addition to the gradual fading of his connection with spinning and the spinning wheel, one also finds a canonisation of particular images – usually taken from photographs – that embody Gandhi and come to form a hagiographic iconography for the historical figure. The Bourke-White image represents one such photograph that has entered into the canon of Gandhi images; another of her photographs in which he sits on a small stool spinning also appears on postage stamps, folk art paintings and advertisements. Sketches of Gandhi, particularly the iconic drawing of him on the 1930 Salt March by Nandalal Bose, have entered the iconographic repertoire and can be found on posters, advertisements, in film promotional materials and in sculpted form. The wheel and Gandhi continue to appear, then, after 1948, but less often, and only repetitively, in the form of those particularly iconic images that circulate of him at the wheel. A 1994 Indian commemorative stamp, marking his 125th birth anniversary, includes an image of him bending down to pick up salt as well as an image of him spinning. Bourke-White’s image of him spinning appears on a 1969 birth centenary stamp from Scotland, and an adaptation of the image of him with the wheel appears on a 1999 stamp from the island of Nevis. Another 1969 centenary stamp from India has him spinning at the box charkha. More often, however, he is depicted on postage in a simple bust portrait. These static images are joined by film adaptations of Bourke-White’s photograph.9 It appears, for example, in a 2004 Telecom Italia advertisement, directed by Spike Lee, which imagines a world in which Gandhi had the communication technology available to the twenty-first century. Instead of reading news clippings, he sits facing us, with the spinning wheel in the foreground, and the camera moving in towards him. It pans around to reveal that he is speaking into a webcam that broadcasts his message to the world. The photograph’s fame meant that Lee could deploy it in this contemporary advertisement, but he does so focusing primarily on the icon of Gandhi himself. The importance of photography for imaging Gandhi finds another popular outlet in its use as both contextual decoration and a foil in the 2006 film Lage Raho Munnabhai. Here, Gandhi appears in a vision to the contemporary scoundrel Munna, who pretends to be a professor of history to impress a


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woman and her family. Photographs of Gandhi decorate the walls of the library in which Munna has his vision, and the camera shows us images from the books he reads (all of which have been reworked to portray an image of the actor playing Gandhi, not Gandhi himself). A spinning wheel sits on a table at the back of the library space. But Bourke-White’s photographs do not appear; the filmmakers base their imagery of Gandhi instead on his appearance in 1930–1, fully enveloped in a khadi shawl, carrying a staff as he did on the Salt March. The narrative of the film then uses images of Gandhi as a foil: we should knock down all statues of Gandhi, take down the pictures of him from our walls, take his image off of the currency – all in order to reinforce his message, not his image, in our hearts. The ‘Gandhigiri’ or ‘Gandhi-ing’ approach of the film represents a watered-down image of Gandhi’s precepts, reworked for a contemporary, cosmopolitan urban audience, but the use of Gandhi imagery in the film points to the continued presence of his iconic figure to such an extent that he becomes mere decoration, fading into the background. Gandhi’s image now stands emptied of its power – only by achieving a hallucinatory, bleary-eyed state through studying books on Gandhi can we hear even a small piece of his message. In all of these instances, the spinning wheel fades in favour of Gandhias-icon. Contemporary art, as well, has addressed Gandhi’s ubiquity and iconic form, asking whether Gandhi remains relevant or investigating how his repeated image cheapens and undermines the overarching message of his politics.10 It, too, focuses on his body instead of the wheel. Jagannath Panda, in his 2008 work, The Icon, has questioned the relevance of Gandhi’s iconic stature by painting him as a darkened photographic statue against an evening cityscape.11 Birds, oddly illuminated and lively, alight on the statue and flit around it while a Magritte-like lamppost sheds no light on either Gandhi or the street around him. The birds build their nests on his figure, in the lamp and in the potted tree in his hand, using string that physically hangs from the canvas, providing a connection to the yarn produced by the wheel. This work acknowledges the interface between iconic photograph and repeated iconic sculpture – Gandhi images, along with statues of the untouchable leader and convert to Buddhism, B. R. Ambedkar, populate cities and towns all over India.12 And Gandhi engages with the viewer, looking out at us but from a dark brown, static silhouette. The image represents Gandhi as a picturesque ruin, with only innocent birds as company, oddly ethereal but also defiling the statue as they land upon it and make their home on his body. Surendran Nair in his 2008 piece Tathaagata Tathagata Thatha Gaatha, posits Gandhi as Krishna lifting Mount Govardhana, with the major religions of India represented on the mountain, and various objects hanging from its base.13 Gandhi stands with his goat and staff, holding an umbrella over his head to support the mountainous weight of the subcontinent and the Himalayas. The


National symbols 115 white of his khadi and the goat are echoed by the snow on the mountains; the darkness of the umbrella reinforced by the black raven at the base of the painting. Both Panda and Nair reference photographs of Gandhi in their paintings; both underscore the tradition of sanctifying him by erecting statues or associating him with deities. Neither, however, includes a spinning wheel in their representation: Gandhi’s iconic stature has separated from the message embodied in the spinning wheel. Atul Dodiya has drawn on Gandhi’s thought and fragments of the imagery surrounding him in a number of painting and installation works. Dodiya painted a series of portraits of Gandhi on steel roller-shutters (2002), and references Gandhi in many of his installations since, including Broken Branches (2002), in which he installed a series of cabinets in the gallery with objects and news clippings inside them, some only distantly referring to Gandhi – his trio of monkey sculptures, his sandals, his spectacles. The museumisation of Gandhi and his iconisation translates here into a distancing of his thought from the contemporary audience, especially as Dodiya positions this cabinet installation in relation to a news clipping of a photograph of Qutbuddin Nasseruddin, a tailor in Ahmedabad, who is pictured pleading for his life in the midst of the 2002 communal violence against Muslims in that city. The juxtaposition of Gandhi’s icons in fragments with the visual artefact of contemporary violence produces a critical commentary on the legacy of Gandhi’s swaraj movement, one that achieved nominal self-rule but only at the cost of rising communal conflict and Gandhi’s death at the hand of an assassin.14 Objects and fragments also centre the work of Manisha Parekh, who produces twisted sculptural shapes with jute rope, echoing the skeins of yarn produced by the khadi workers and by Gandhi, and often displayed in Gandhi museums around India.15 Instead of the spinning wheel, here we see an abstraction of the product itself, short pieces of rope twisted and tied into knots, useless for producing cloth but evidence of some handmade labour. Parekh’s piece critically engages with the Gandhian legacy and communicates a frustration with its product. Self-rule turns back on itself and fails to produce useful, whole cloth.

The fading wheel Each of these artists, alongside others, examines the way in which Gandhi’s legacy speaks to contemporary Indian concerns. These works unpack the iconicity of the repeated images of his body in photographs and sculpture, and investigate the inconsistencies between twenty-first-century conflict and the vision that Gandhi put forth for the new India. The spinning wheel itself has faded from these meditations, perhaps rightly so, as it has also faded


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from popular visual imagery of Gandhi since independence. An abstracted saintly figure representing non-violence, forgiveness and ‘Gandhigiri’ instead circulates today in Indian popular culture, with spinning wheels and simple homespun khadi giving way to a commercialised, elaborated khadi industry that taps into global demand for handmade and fair trade products. This fading legacy of the spinning wheel after independence stems from a shift in what defines India as a nation after 1947. With Nehruvian leadership moving India towards an industrialised future by building dams, factories and modern cities like Chandigarh in the Punjab, Gandhi’s spinning wheel had to move into history, vacating the national flag and moving to the periphery of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, its centrality to Gandhi’s movement and its efficacy in rallying a wide range of participants to swaraj remains crucial for our understanding of nation formation, visual political rhetoric and the role of symbolism in political culture. The established nineteenth-century iconography of the spinning wheel underwrote the foundations of Gandhi’s appropriation, allowing him to draw out the gendered elements of the symbol in order to challenge dominant political norms and encourage his followers to practise their own self-rule in the service of a newly forming nation. That it faded after independence, and that Gandhi’s saintliness recentred on his person and his body, makes sense in this context. The static symbol lost its efficacy once its dynamic performance ceased to anchor a political movement. We retain now only the echo of its circular rhythm.


Notes

Introduction 1 Kühnel and Goetz 1926, pl. 1, dated to 1606. Later images of spinning in Mughal painting include a Shah Jahan era (1628–58) work by Bichitr reproduced in Stchoukine 1929, pl. 44, and a late-seventeenth-century painting reproduced in Martin 1912, pl. 207a. See Habib 1980, 6–7 and n 29, for a discussion of the spinning wheel during the Mughal era. 2 YI 20 September 1928; CW 1958, vol. 37: 288; CW 2000, vol. 43: 34. 3 A growing field focused on visual rhetoric has emerged from within English, Composition, and Rhetoric scholarship, drawing on textual rhetoric studies. See Barthes 1977; Gregg 1984; Hill and Helmers 2004; Hope 2006; Prelli 2006; Olson, Finnegan and Hope 2008. 4 By pursuing this question through the framework of genealogy, I also follow Partha Chatterjee’s (1993: 5–6) call to examine how nationalism might take shape outside of and before the moment of overt political consolidation of the movement. For more on this project’s relation to the scholarly literature on nationalism, see my discussion below. 5 Spinning on a spinning wheel did not appear on the subcontinent until the fourteenth century, when it was probably introduced from China (Ramaswamy 1980a: 228–9). Prior to the fourteenth century, spinning was done on drop spindles, or takli. Both the takli and the wheel were used after the fourteenth century. 6 From a speech delivered at the Calcutta University Institute entitled ‘Satyer Ahvan’ (The Call of Truth) on 29 August 1921 (Dalton 1993: 72; Coward 2003: 113), published in English: Tagore 1921. Reprinted in Tagore et al. 1994: 412–25, quote on 421. 7 These multifaceted demands are reinforced in the image by the presence of Jawaharlal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malaviya seated behind Gandhi, who represent, respectively, the socialist and right wing elements of the Indian National Congress at this time (Neumayer and Schelberger 2008: 105). 8 Kajri Jain’s work has proved a welcome corrective to both art historical contextualisation and the discipline’s sometimes narrow focus on close readings of images to the exclusion of their patterns of circulation (2007). 9 Bayly (1986: 314), characterises Gandhi’s quest for the spinning wheel as a spiritual one but does not address spinning per se. Cohn mentions spinning only once.


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10 See Neumayer and Schelberger 2008; Ramaswamy 2001, 2010; and Chapter 5 of this volume. 11 This imagery was linked to and in some ways overshadowed by poetry and song, particularly the use of the late-nineteenth-century anthem ‘Bande Mataram’ by Bankimchandra Chattophadhyay. Scholarship on the period has largely focused on the textual evidence. A full analysis of the visual elements of the Bengali swadeshi movement has yet to be done. 12 The literature is too vast to offer any sort of comprehensive list. Select examples: for architecture, see Metcalf 1989; Bozdogan 2001. For woman-as-nation, see Baron 2005; Ramaswamy 2010; for literature and the nation, see Pratt 1992; Sethi 1999; for film and nationalism, see Chakravarty 1993. 13 Smith’s discussion of ethno-symbolic nationalism and the literature that it has generated both critical and supportive certainly inform my thinking on nationalism, but my project differs slightly from Smith and his followers, as I elucidate above. See Smith 1999, 2009; Hutchinson and Guiberneau 2004. 14 My approach to nationalism relies on Benedict Anderson’s (1985) and Ernest Gellner’s (1983) assertions (with many others) that the nation is not natural and is constructed. I follow Chatterjee (1993) in his critical engagement with Anderson, noting that the anticolonial context of India’s nationalism meant the colonial introduction of certain forms of modern technology and modernity raised complications for Anderson’s (and Gellner’s) theories. Chatterjee argues that European nationalist forms cannot and were not simply appropriated into the Indian context, which always strove to distinguish Indian from Western while asserting an Indian modernity. See also my own work on post-1947 visual culture in this regard (Brown 2009a). I also, while acknowledging the Gellner–Smith debates, draw from Anthony Smith’s attention to the cultural and mythological roots of national iconographies (1999, 2009). George Mosse’s work informs my thinking, in both his articulation of the import of political symbolism for the efficacy of mass movements and his discussion of the role of gender and sexuality for German and English nationalism (1975, 1985). 15 Pierre Bourdieu insists that the subject does not acknowledge the action as producing meaning (1990: 68–9); in some sense, one might read Gandhi as attempting to produce a new habitus, but I think spinning’s political efficacy required a crucial consciousness on the part of the doer, one that precludes a Bourdieuian habitus in this case. 16 Eric Hobsbawm’s borrowing of Miroslav Hroch’s (1985) three-phase pattern for nationalism informs my approach here: phase A is cultural and folkloric, phase B sees the elites agitating for a nation, and phase C marks the period when nationalist movements have mass support. ‘The transition from phase B to phase C is evidently a crucial moment in the chronology of national movements’ (1990: 12). 17 Bharatmata is the subject of an edited volume (Davis 1999), extensive research by Sumathi Ramaswamy (2001, 2010), and a catalogue of popular prints from the collection of Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger (2008). Partha Mitter has written extensively on nationalism and art, including on Ravi Varma’s work (1994); Guha-Thakurta (1992) traces the relationship of emergent nationalism and visual culture in Bengal. Recent exhibitions on figures like Nandalal Bose, who worked with Gandhi on art and architecture for Congress meetings, have shed light on direct collaborations between visual culture and political movements (Quintanilla et al. 2008). Popular culture and its relation

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to anticolonial movements as well as national identity have been addressed by Kajri Jain (2007), Christopher Pinney (2004) and others. 18 See, e.g. Sundaram et al. 1995; Ramaswamy 2009; Sinha 2009. Contemporary Indian artist Atul Dodiya has regularly incorporated Gandhi in his work since at least 2002; see Chapter 5 and Kapur, forthcoming. 19 I thank Lisa Trivedi for pointing to these senses beyond the visual in conversation with me. 1 Action and identity: colonial representations of spinning 1 Information from museum registrar’s file on the gift: Professor Peter Brock’s gift to the Royal Ontario Museum, undated letter among other material dated 1998. 2 Jones and Stallybrass 2000 discuss a similar nostalgia and sense of loss in the context of European narratives about spinning from the Renaissance period. 3 For more on the Daniells’ Oriental Scenery, see De Almeida and Gilpin 2006: 181–212. 4 For more on ‘late Mughal’ painting, see Binney 1972; Beach 1992. ‘Provincial Mughal’ is a problematic label, sometimes used for otherwise distinct regional styles. The term suggests that works are simply derivative (and lesser than) paintings from the imperial Mughal centre, and ignores the geographical spread of ‘imperial’ Mughal painting outside of the central court. 5 The Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka, for example, houses a group of paintings of the commemorations surrounding Muharram, commissioned by a local ruler in a Bengali Company style (Majlis 1991: 391). 6 For more on Company painting and discussions of the label, see Pal and Dehejia 1986. See below for a further discussion of the scholarship on Company painting. 7 For the early Portuguese painting as well as a brief history of pre-eighteenth century commissions by Europeans, see Archer 1992: 11–14. For discussion of the development of Company painting under the British, see Archer 1972: 7. For a further discussion of Archer’s impact on the field, see Auerbach 1999. 8 See Sharpe 1993: 137–62; Bose 2003: 169–222; Salman Rushdie (1984) coined the term ‘Raj revival’. For more on the Festivals of India, particularly exhibitions related to craft and folklore, see Thomas M. Evans Gallery 1985; Kurin 1997: 141–68. 9 See also Edney 1997 and Barrow 2004 for discussions of the history of mapping and surveys in the subcontinent. 10 This decline varies across the subcontinent, and in some cases an increase in handloomed cloth has been noted by economic historians. See Chandavarkar 1998: 45–6. 11 The literature on the history of cotton production in India is vast. See Ramaswamy 1985; Chaudhury and Morineau 1999; Swarnalata 2005. For printed textiles and the long history of decorated textile in South Asia, see Gittinger 1982. 12 One example of cloth making from the Mughal era is the Akbar-period painting of Idris (c. 1590), a scientist who introduced the use of woven garments and is therefore the patron saint of tailors in the Islamic tradition. Various elements of the cloth-making process are included in the bottom register of the painting, but spinning is absent. British Library shelfmark J.8,5, Johnson Collection. Reproduced in Losty and Leach 1998, pl. 1. See note 1 of my Introduction for more examples of spinning and spinning wheels in Mughal and Rajasthani contexts.


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13 Shiva Lal, ‘Woman spinning’, 1850–60, Patna School, Watercolour, 210 × 171 mm., Archer Collection, British Library, shelfmark Add.Or. 3994. 14 The origin of the label ‘firka set’ is unclear; it is used in the catalogue record for Sona Kumari’s painting: ‘Purchased by Mildred and W. G. Archer at Patna in 1942 from the family collection of Ishwari Prasad who attributed it to a woman, Sona Kumari. He noted that from time to time women members of the family helped to produce “firka” sets’. One also finds it occasionally in discussions of Company painting, but without note as to its provenance. 15 This blank background is common across the Gangetic basin, with some variation in the occasional element of background or setting. Shiva Lal’s 1850s painting includes these elements in a normally quite plain iconography. Lal’s painting is, however, one of the better examples of this iconography, and his work is central to the reputation of the Patna school in the mid-nineteenth century. More commonly one finds these slightly more generic images, lacking specific setting. 16 Examining the index of subject matter in Archer 1972 provides a good overview of the types of subjects found in Company painting. 17 Anon., ‘Fileur’, c. 1780–90, British Library, shelfmark Add.Or.5549, no. 5493. 18 She comes from an album labelled: ‘Costume des peuples du Malabar’, British Library, shelfmark Add.Or.5549. 19 This focus on caste types has earlier support as well. Mildred Archer (1992: 17) quotes Captain Charles Gold at length from his Oriental Drawings of 1806, in which he indicates that one of the plates has been painted by a Thanjavur painter. He states: ‘On the suggestion of the Europeans, some of the country artists have been induced to draw series of the most ordinary casts [sic] or tribes, each picture representing a man and his wife, with the signs or marks of distinction on their foreheads, and not in their common, but holiday clothes’ (Text accompanying Gold 1806, pl. 40). This pattern of representation from the late eighteenth century continues to the mid-nineteenth in the region. 20 The Victoria and Albert Museum collection includes examples of each; an image of multiple parts of cloth making in a single image can be found in ‘Malabar Wiver’ c. 1840–50, IS 1011989, and an example of paintings with two vignettes illustrating portions of the process can be found in ‘Cotton maker cassurar (?) cast’, c. 1840–50, IS 971989. 21 George Chinnery, Album lettered ‘Scenery in Bengal 1825’, British Library, shelfmark WD3385. 22 Chinnery album, ibid., folios 37 and 46. 23 Chinnery album, ibid., folio 43. 24 William Simpson, ‘Small sketchbook’, 1859–60, British Library, shelfmark WD4098, folio 38, verso. 25 Sir Charles D’Oyly, ‘Album of 57 views’, 1820s, British Library, shelfmark WD4044, folio 32. 26 Frances Eden, ‘Album of 37 drawings’, 1838, British Library, shelfmark Mss Eur C130/4, folio 12, verso, dated 22 November 1838. 27 Sir Henry Yule, ‘The headman of Kursali (Himalayas) spinning thread’, 29 May 1849, British Library, shelfmark WD1043, pen and ink, 6.25 × 3.5 in. 28 Anon., ‘Woman spinning by hand’, between 1798 and 1804, Wellesley Albums, British Library, shelfmark Add.Or.1225, watercolour. 29 Studio of Jamini Roy, ‘A woman seated spinning’, c. 1940, Stavridi Collection, British Library, shelfmark Add.Or.5264, pencil and gouache on card, 14 × 20.5 cm.

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30 Timothy Mitchell’s discussion of European travellers to Cairo seeking the perfect spot from which to get a view of the city can be found in his Colonising Egypt (1988) and in Mitchell 1992. For the Taj Mahal see Pal 1989. See also Inden 1990.


2 Capturing the wheel in motion: photography and spinning 1 While Gutman’s work (1982) has been rightly criticised for asserting a fundamental difference between ‘Indian’ ways of seeing and ‘European’ ones, one of the important points made in her work is the recognition that a medium can be used in a range of ways and often continues from earlier image-making patterns. Her work helpfully retrieves photography from its labelling as a ‘Western medium’ and allows for its use in a larger history of Indian image making. It is this element of her scholarship I find valuable here. 2 Several PhD dissertations of the late 1990s and early 2000s focus on South Asian photography, a marked shift in temporal focus within the art historical discipline. 3 Pinney’s work, with others writing on photography, builds from Roland Barthes’ understanding of the image as index (Barthes 1982 [1980]). See also Osborne 2000: 35: ‘The ontological properties of the photographic image follow from its specific indexicality: that is, the optical and chemical processes whereby the light reflected by objects, which allows us to perceive them, is imprinted directly onto light-sensitive surfaces, modelling the field of visual perception in a mechanical mimesis.’ 4 This exhibition travelled to SOAS’s Brunei gallery in London in slightly revised form as India: Pioneering Photographers. 5 Elizabeth Edwards’ work in visual anthropology also supports the move towards examining photographs on the ‘micro’ level, acknowledging their materiality as photographs rather than overly dwelling on their relation to reality (Edwards 2001: 1–22). Her approach involves taking seriously the way in which photographs move from person to person, reconstituting new meanings in each viewing, and continuing to develop even once they find a place within the archive (2001: 107). With Richard Davis and others, Edwards urges us to consider the movement of the object through history, and to acknowledge the importance of the lives of images (Davis 1999; Edwards 2001). 6 These three cities are grouped together as ‘presidency cities’ because they are each the capital of one of the three colonial presidencies, or major administrative units. 7 See Crooke 1896; Thurston 1909; Russell 1916; Enthoven 1920. A slightly less official publication in a similar mode is Waddell 1899. 8 Foucault’s understanding of genealogy includes and indeed requires looking for the gaps and absences in history and narrative. See Foucault 1984. 9 For example, Thomas Metcalf (2000), in reviewing Ryan (1998), describes The People of India as one of the ‘classic works of colonial racial classification’. In a review one doesn’t have the space to elaborate, but references to The People of India as a prime example of typologisation, classification, a colonial encyclopaedic urge, and an organised governmental project abound in the anthropology and history literature. See Ryan 1998; Falconer 2004. Pinney’s work (1990, 1997) reveals some of the complexities within the volumes, and what follows builds on this project; other scholars have criticised the scholarship on colonial era photography for its focus on a ‘meta’ level (Edwards 2001). 10 The preface, published at the beginning of the first volume, states: ‘These sketches do not profess to be more than mere rough notes, suggestive rather

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17 18 19

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Notes than exhaustive, and they make no claim to scientific research or philosophic investigation. But although the work does not aspire to scientific eminence, it is hoped that, in an ethnological point of view, it will not be without interest and value’. Arjun Appadurai (1997) discusses the ambiguity of the colonial backdrop and the various elements that might be included within the category ‘backdrop’ read broadly. The essay also unpacks the multivalence of the term ‘pose’ and articulates a similar distinction to the one I use here between an image that depicts action (he references Mughal paintings in this regard) and one that depicts a pose. Early anthropological studies that used photographs often include this type of image. See Seligmann and Seligmann 1911 and Pinney 1990. Watson and Kaye 1868–75, vol. I, plate 43. Caption reads: ‘Group of Bhotanese/ Chiefly of Tibetan Origin/Bhotan (43)’. Watson 1867 gives the author of this text as James Taylor; library catalogues and the book itself indicate no author other than ‘former resident of Dacca’. These sketches can also be found reproduced in the Archaeological Survey of India Collections, as inventoried in 1900, British Library, Photo 1000/52 (4894). Pinney 1997: 69–70 discusses the eventual disillusionment with the scientific potential for photography, noting that particularly for law and order uses, by the end of the nineteenth century the photograph shifted from a major identification and measurement tool to representing one of many such tools, eventually overtaken in importance by the fingerprint. British Library, shelfmark Photo 332/3. Pinney 1997: 57 dates the introduction of phototype postcards to 1899. With these non-studio photographs the photographer’s identity is often difficult to determine. Even where the album or collection has a stated provenance, the particularities of the person behind the camera are rarely recorded. I designate these photographs as more ‘individual’ because they are not purchased from a catalogue of images, nor are they postcard, commercial images. They also do not fall into the category of official, government-sponsored photography. Papers of Sir Malcom Lyall Darling, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. For more on the relation of caste and occupation within colonial constructions of caste, see Dirks 1994. Not surprisingly perhaps, once film enters the arena as a medium for recording experiences in India, that serial quality found in Company painting returns. As a coda to this discussion of photography, I note here only that the narrative qualities of film reawaken the concern to record processes rather than individual identities or specified vignettes. In tandem with the nationalist focus on cotton and spinning, amateur British films do occasionally focus on the process of making cloth, from harvesting the cotton to weaving. The medium shifts the focus back to a serial narrative, one not seen in the photographs from the same period. A 1932 film in the Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies collection illustrates the process of cloth production in some detail, including a title card of ‘spinning on Mr. Gandhi’s charkha’. Hunter collection, Disc 8, film 7, Meerut, UP, 1932.

3 Discovering spinning: towards Gandhi’s visual rhetoric 1 CW 1958, vol. 37: 289; CW 2000, vol. 43: 36. 2 A search of the Collected Works turns up approximately 100 instances of discussions of spinning, the charkha and related activities.


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3 Bhikhu Parekh notes that Gandhi thought briefly in 1918 about military training as a way to achieve, according to Parekh, ‘courage, manliness, self-discipline and pride’ among Indians (1989b: 60). See correspondence from 4–6 July 1918 (CW 1958, vol. 17: 115 ff; CW 2000, vol. 14: 469 ff.); several of the letters from this period discuss the relation between military training, violence, the ability to kill and Gandhi’s programme. 4 Communal, in the context of South Asian history, refers to societal divisions based on religion, and often refers to the conflict between Hindu and Muslim groups both before and after 1947. 5 In the second half of the 1930s, spinning does wane in importance, as nationalists turn to debates over India’s potential governmental structure, the controversies surrounding India’s participation in the Second World War, and the Quit India movement of 1942–3. 6 See e.g. ‘A Plea for Spinning’, YI 10 November 1921 (CW 1958, vol. 21: 403–5; CW 2000, vol. 25: 65–6). 7 Gandhi makes many statements in support of bamboo drop spindles or taklis, as the tool is easy to make with a small piece of bamboo and a small stone weight (CW 1958, vol. 52: 85; CW 2000, vol. 58: 85). He discusses bamboo charkhas occasionally (e.g. CW 1958, vol. 44: 145; CW 2000, vol. 50: 53), and bamboo examples are found in the photographic record as well as at the Gandhi Museum, New Delhi. 8 Among many examples of Gandhi’s comments on this topic, see CW 1958, vol. 26: 357–9; CW 2000, vol. 31: 3–5 (Navajivan 22 March 1925); CW 1958, vol. 41: 451; CW 2000, vol. 47: 126–7 (speech on 22 September 1929, published summary in YI 3 October 1929). 9 Training curricula included textual work (‘To study Charkha Shastra and Takli Teacher’, YI 14 June 1928; CW 1958, vol. 36: 405; CW 2000, vol. 42: 114), but did not rely on it. See Gregg and Gandhi 1926. 10 See e.g. ‘Ladies and Khaddar Work’ in YI 5 October 1922; and Devdas Gandhi, ‘Eleven Days in Madras’, YI 18 December 1924. 11 Studies of Bharatmata imagery from the early twentieth century indicate that no set iconography developed for the goddess, particularly in regard to attributes, traditionally held in a deity’s multiple hands. After Abanindranath’s painting, Bharatmata took different directions, appearing often in relation to a map of India (Ramaswamy 2001) and including a set of varying elements such as broken chains, the lotus and the severed heads of national martyrs, particularly Bhagat Singh. In some instances she does carry attributes, but usually these do not replicate Abanindranath’s use of cloth. See also Neumayer and Schelberger 2008. 12 See Brown 2009b and Chapter 4 of this volume for discussion of the spinning wheel’s connection to the Ashokan wheel. 13 Imagery from the mid-nineteenth century bears this out, with women collecting raw materials at a central location in order to then spin them into yarn, indicating a division among the different processes leading up to the production of cloth. For an example from the Kashmiri context, see ‘Raw shawl wool being distributed to women for spinning’, c. 1850–60, opaque watercolour painting, Kashmir style, British Library Add.Or.1738. 14 James Forbes Watson provides a list of connections between particular tasks and caste or religious identifiers, claiming that bleachers and dhobis (washermen) are Hindu, noting that the darners and the ironers are Muslim, and that particular named groups arrange the displaced threads of the cloth, remove spots and stains,

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21

22 23

Notes and compress the cloth for transport (1867: 72–3). Much of this information Watson takes from Anon 1851, a text Watson attributes to James Taylor. For more on Gandhi’s relationship with businessmen in India, see Ray 1979: 292–338. As discussed in the introduction, Rabindranath Tagore, among others, felt Gandhi’s approach too simplistic and not economically feasible. See Coward 2003 for discussion of various critiques of Gandhi’s programme, including spinning. Mosse 1985: 52 ff. also discusses the importance of pre-industrial symbolism for the formation of national identity. The use of spinning as a verb, along with weaving, is often associated with telling tales in the northern Atlantic context, often interchangeably, and usually in relation to a woman as narrator. See Rowe 1999. For discussion of the impact of photographs of groups of khadi-clad nationalists, see Tarlo 1996: 101–5; she goes on (105 ff.) to discuss the ways in which individuals and sub-groups manipulated khadi to mark some diversity within the nationalist ranks. See also Bayly 1986; Bean 1996. The Martin film is an English narrated compilation of documentary film gathered by A. K. Chettiar, who produced a two-hour documentary of original Gandhi footage, released in 1940 in Tamil and then Telegu. Fearing colonial government action against him, Chettiar hid the film until the celebrations surrounding independence in 1947. In 1948 a Hindi version was made, and then subsequently Chettiar recrafted the footage for a US audience (the credits list him as a technical advisor, and note that he collected the footage). Edith Martin wrote and produced the new documentary. The Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films have since been lost; a text describing the gathering of the footage remains, along with the portion of footage culled for the US film. For the discussion of the story of its making, see Chettiar 2007. Chettiar recounts that Kovai A. Ayyamuthu’s photograph published in the Hindu in 1939 inspired the staging of the mass spinning in the film, and that Ayyamuthu himself played the primary role in putting together the scene. Approximately 2000 women from three villages volunteered to participate in the mass spinning (2007: 17). In this particular image, Gandhi spins on what appears to be a version of the dhanush takli, as he uses a bow-like instrument to spin. This would corroborate the dating of the early dhanush takli to c. 1936. For the paradigm of salvage ethnography, see Pinney 1997: 45–8. For colonial attitudes towards craft and the art school, see Dewan 2004; Guha-Thakurta 2004: 155–61.

4 Gender and the modern charkha 1 As discussed in the previous chapter, the centrality of spinning for Gandhi’s movement emerged initially in 1910 with his early text Hind Swaraj. Spinning for half an hour each day was later adopted as part of the Congress’ platform in 1920, with the All India Spinners’ Association established in 1925. 2 In some regions of India, upper-caste women count spinning among their caste prohibitions, but these often do not apply in practice (Kumar and Desai 1984: 356). 3 Joseph Alter’s work on masculinity, wrestlers and Gandhi’s body informs my understanding of masculinity and the body in this context (1992, 2000).


Notes

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4 For more on resignification and Butler, see Sparks 1997; Disch 1999; Lloyd 2005; Chambers and Carver 2008; Chambers 2009, ch. 5. 5 Sir Henry Yule sketched an image of a man spinning with a takli in Kasauli, in present-day Himachal Pradesh (British Library, WD46, ‘The Headman of Kursali spinning thread. 29 May 1849’). Another image, a photograph from the 1940s taken in Himachal Pradesh of three children – a boy, a girl and an infant – depicts both the boy and the girl spinning with a takli while seated on a grassy hill. British Library, Photo 523/1(138), ‘Raison. Children Spinning Wool’. 6 Frances Eden, ‘Album of 37 drawings made during a visit to Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) in the Punjab. November and December 1838’. British Library, Mss Eur C130/4, f.21 V 117: Tent-pitcher spinning thread to mend tents. 22 November 1838. 7 Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies, Buchanan Collection, Disc 3, Film 2. BW. 1930–1. Madras (Chennai). From 16 mm original. (Fishermen scenes at 00:23 to 1:14.) 8 British Library, Photo 1000/52(4897) ‘Male prisoners winding cotton on spinning wheels in Karachi Prison’. 9 For more on the exhibition, see Pemsel 1989; Wörner 1999. Research has yet to be done on the British-Indian portion of this exhibition; for contemporaneous sources, see the exhibition catalogue, Watson 1873. This is not an isolated use of images of or the bodily presence of Indian prisoners in international exhibitions. See Corbey 1993; Mathur 2000, 2007. 10 The information regarding the photographer and his participation in the People of India volumes is detailed in the British Library catalogue data for this image, Photo 1000/52(4901). Narayan is not listed among the photographers within The People of India volume preface (Watson and Kaye 1868, vol. 1, np). 11 British Library, Photo 469/3(48). Album dated on the cover II. January 1939, and the front endpaper is signed E. H. Colebrook, Madras, Jan ’39. The album includes a range of small photographs (11.1 × 8.7 cm) usually arranged five-perpage. The image in question appears on folio 8, and is number 48, the central photo on the top row of images. The British Library record description, ‘Man on verandah working loom’ is inaccurate; he is indeed working at a spinning wheel. 12 Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies, Banks Collection, Disc 1, Film 2. BW. Punjab. 1929. From 16 mm original. (Spinning scene at 7:14 to 7:53.) 13 This case is a painting from the 1850s painted in the same style as the Fraser Album; see Archer and Falk 1989. British Library Add. Or 5366, ‘An old man spinning’, watercolour, 15 × 20.5 cm. The same woman appears in two other images published in Archer and Falk 1989: 101 and 119. She is identified by E. S. Fraser as Munnoo, aged 70. As these two paintings are dated by Archer and Falk to c. 1816, it is also likely that the image of her spinning also conforms to that date. 14 The term habitus refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualisation (as it drew on earlier theorists’ understanding of the term) of the role of repeated rituals (sacred and otherwise) in constituting the subject’s relation to, participation in and production of society and culture, and in instilling certain beliefs and behaviours within the subject. See Bourdieu 1990. 15 For the use of Arachne in Renaissance Europe, see Jones and Stallybrass 2000, ch. 4. I could find no evidence to show that Gandhi knew of spinning’s specific English history in terms of its use as a rallying cry for self-sufficiency. 16 Weaving, and the making of cloth, including sometimes the process of spinning, often takes on magical qualities that carry potential dangers with them, either to

126

17


18 19 20

21

22 23

24 25 26

27

Notes the creator or the user of the cloth. For a southern Asian example distant from the current discussion, see the Himalayan production of the cotton cloth (pata) to be painted with images of deities. The cloth’s sacred status is indicated by the extreme measures taken to ensure its purity, with texts prescribing a higher caste virgin for gathering and spinning the cotton (Kapstein 1995: 247; Woodward 2001: 29). See Spivak 1988; Devi 1994: 19–95; Mani 1998; Ramaswamy 2001, 2009, 2010; Pinney 2004: 105–44; Jain 2007: 1–31; Trivedi 2007: 38–66. For the use of the good Hindu mother in the context of later Hindu nationalism, see Banerjee 2005. See Martin and Reynolds 1953, at approximately 10:30, for several shots of women gathered around a platform on which a small Punjabi charkha sits, listening to a speech by a woman standing on the dais. For a definition of the sanguinuptial family, see Chambers 2009. While his formulation operates in the context of a northern Atlantic construction of the nuclear family, this term also suits the so-called ‘extended’ family common in South Asian contexts, as it perhaps even more thoroughly includes both blood and marriage relations. For discussion of Kali’s role in the Bengali swadeshi movement, and the deployment of images of Kali by the militant side of the anticolonial activists, see Sarkar 1987: 2012; Parekh 1989a: 148–54; Parekh 1989b: 19; G. Sen 2002; Pinney 2004: 120–2. Sarkar 1987; Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992; Partha Chatterjee 1993 [1989]; Sinha 2000; Ramaswamy 2010. For Bharatmata’s role in later Hindu nationalism, see McKean 1996; Banerjee 2005. Kajri Jain’s examination of calendar art demonstrates that depictions of bodies – particularly deities’ bodies, but also non-sacred bodies – tended towards the transcendent rather than the sensual, muscled or reproductive body, so that the power of bodies lies not in their instrumentality but in their transcendent power (2007: 244). This involved tensions as well, as the stress to keep up with familial duties while simultaneously participating in the nationalist movement shaped who could and could not participate (Thapar 1993). For more on finding enchantment in modernity, see Bennett 2001. The Indian nationalist movement therefore involves women directly while simultaneously deploying the abstracted figure of woman as a symbolic element of political discourse. By doing both, the Gandhian anticolonial movement eschewed the common linkage between national citizenship, nationalism and men, without leaving behind the power of the allegorical feminine for the movement. See McClintock 1993; Yuval-Davis 1997 for a discussion of the nationalist literature and its focus on the male citizen. AISA publications sometimes include a wide range of images of people spinning, whether in training or demonstration situations, or working in various contexts related to the AISA infrastructure. These images supported the AISA programme of spreading khadi production across the subcontinent, normalising the idea that anyone could spin by illustrating, for example, people of different classes spinning in a wide range of regions. In Khadi Guide (1929), the photographs include replications of existing iconographies of the woman behind the wheel, the standard group portrait (with implements such as the charkha or carding equipment in the foreground), and the workshop image, all found within earlier photographic contexts, here adapted for the AISA. In addition, groups of students

Notes


28

29

30 31

32

33 34 35 36

37 38

127

behind the wheel or performing the varied tasks of cloth production together round out the imagery in this volume. More work needs to be done on the visual rhetoric of the AISA in the context of the nationalist movement, putting these images in the context of the other promotional activities AISA pursued, such as khadi exhibitions and the lantern shows. Until examples of the latter have surfaced we have only a partial understanding of this programme. See Trivedi 2003 for a discussion of these touring programmes. CW 1958, vol. 24: 116; CW 2000, vol. 28: 22–3, from Navajivan 25 May 1924; quoted in Lal 2000: 105. Gandhi’s practice and philosophy of brahmacharya has been addressed by many scholars and the details of this aspect of his thought are beyond the scope of my study. See Alter 2000; Gandhi 1928, 1957 [1927]. Mosse’s work (1985), while focusing on Germany and Britain, details similar moves in the development of national identity for both countries, noting the validation of vegetarianism (53), the equation of manliness with avoidance of sex, discipline, self-control and mental cleanliness (83, 118). In post-1947 imagery, Hanuman takes up this role more clearly, becoming the muscled counterpart to the softer curves of Rama and other deities (Jain 2007: 326–8). For example: ‘Woman is the embodiment of sacrifice and suffering, and her advent to public life should therefore result in purifying it, in restraining unbridled ambition and accumulation of property’. CW 1958, vol. 42: 5; CW 2000, vol. 47: 263; YI 17 October 1929. Gandhi also used Sita as an example of selfless suffering: Kishwar 1985a, 1985b; Patel 1988; for more on the ways Sita has been deployed culturally and politically, see Bose 2004. Patel (1988: 381) argues that this use of the ‘women’s question’ as a metaphor for the colonial question limits Gandhi’s politics on both counts, because Gandhi understands neither the varied positions of women within Indian society nor the gendered operation of power in the domestic sphere. In other words, Gandhi’s assertion of essentialised genders, women’s place in the home, and stereotypical tropes surrounding motherhood and the virtuous woman mean that he likewise reifies essentialised Indian identity, India’s peripheral place in the world, and stereotypes of Indian spirituality. Lynn Hunt has analysed the revolutionary reconfiguration of the family for the French Revolution and found similar familial threats to the political order. See Hunt 1992; I thank Lisa Trivedi for directing me to Hunt’s scholarship. Kajri Jain (2007: 285–91) examines the figuring of the Indian citizen as a child in relation to the paternal state, noting that very few images of everyday men and women appear in calendar or bazaar prints both before and after 1947. See the previous chapter for the ‘discovery’ of the wheel. Frydman came to Wardha to meet Gandhi in 1936, and indicated an interest in the spinning wheel (Harijan 29 August 1936; CW 1958, vol. 63: 240–1; CW 2000, vol. 69: 320). It is unclear exactly when he invented the dhanush takli, but by 1940 articles were written about it and it appears in the Collected Works regularly thereafter (Harijan 22 September 1940; CW 1958, vol. 72: 453–54; CW 2000, vol. 79: 197). Gandhi was in Yeravda jail in 1922, 1930–1 and 1932–3. YI 24 July 1930, ‘From the Prison Cell’, by Mirabehn. She notes: ‘I left a new spinning wheel at the Yerowada [sic] Jail on Friday, and the authorities said that Gandhiji was in good health’. As 24 July was a Thursday, she likely left the wheel on 18 July 1930.


128

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39 The Magan charkha was developed in 1932 and named in his honour. It included a foot pedal and was used by Gandhi in prison that year when he experienced pain in his left elbow and hand. CW 1958, vol. 49: 339; CW 2000, vol. 55: 272 (22 April 1932), and later brief mentions in the Collected Works from April and May of 1932. 40 ‘The variety of meanings is not a matter of a relativist approach to human mores; it designates not the tendency that society has to err but a disposition towards openness; the work holds several meanings simultaneously, by its very structure, and not as a result of some infirmity in those who read it. Therein lies its symbolic nature: the symbol is not the image but the very plurality of meanings’ (Barthes 1987: 68–9). 41 Dr B. R. Ambedkar was instrumental in many of the symbolic choices of the new Indian nation; his affinity for Buddhism, deployment of it as a political lever to enable untouchables in South Asia, and his own conversion late in life are supported by his actions on the national stage in favour of Buddhist holidays and symbols. Indeed, his movement is in part responsible for the revival of Buddhism in South Asia. See Jaffrelot 2005: 132; citing Keer 1971 [1954]: 394–5. See Junghare 1988 for discussion of Ambedkar’s heroic status, in part for his role in putting the Ashokan wheel on the flag; see also Tartakov 1990. 42 For more on the role of Buddhist symbolism in India’s national identity, and on the ways in which it at least partially eludes Hindu–Muslim communal tensions, see Brown 2009b. For the history of Buddhism’s role in nineteenthcentury colonial discourse, see Leoshko 2003. For discussion of Buddhism’s tension with other religions in India at Bodhgaya, see Guha-Thakurta 2004; Asher 2008. 5 National symbols: Gandhi and the spinning wheel 1 The date for this encounter is unclear, as in 1963 she refers to it as taking place near Pune (Poona), in the village of Uruli-Kanchan, 30 kilometres east of the city in present-day Maharashtra. This would mean a date of 25 March 1946, derived from the triangulation of Gandhi’s position at the time, Bourke-White’s statements about the meeting in question, specifically that it was near Pune and it was on Gandhi’s day of silence, a Monday. Gandhi left Uruli-Kanchan for Delhi on 31 March 1946, spending all of April there until 2 May, when he moves again to Simla. 25 March represents the only Monday between his arrival in Uruli and his departure. However, in other publications (1949, 1950), she places the meeting in Delhi in April. The meeting is not noted in Gandhi’s collected works. 2 See Alter 1996, 2000; Gandhi 1997 [1910]: 62–5; Roy 2002. His efforts in UruliKanchan would result in a nature clinic and ashram, still operating in the small town over 60 years later. 3 Citations for these captions or titles, in the order I list them: Gollust 2006 and Callahan 1998: 174; Callahan 1998, caption online; Bourke-White 1963: 275; Sherrod 1946: 17; Mathur 2007: 47. 4 Tarlo narrates the debates surrounding his decision to wear the loincloth, leading up to his first public appearance in a short dhoti on 23 September 1921 (1996: 71–4). These dates surrounding Gandhi’s sartorial transformations and experimentations between 1917 and 1921 suggest an early-1920s date for the image, after Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s death on 1 August 1920, but before September 1921. Of course, an image produced later in the 1920s could draw on this earlier

Notes

5 6


7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

129

Gandhian sartorial style, but it seems unlikely that a post-1921 image would not take advantage of the new iconic image of Gandhi in a loincloth. For more on imagery of Bharatmata, her relation to the map of India, and the appearance of the globe in imagery from this period, see Ramaswamy 2001, 2009, 2010; Neumayer and Schelberger 2008. Other images include this range of tasks, but also sacrifice some readability to do so. See ‘The Path to Swaraj’, c. 1930, by Ghasi Ram Sharma, reproduced Jain 2007: 40, fig. 66; Neumayer and Schelberger 2008: 86, pl. 99. I owe my understanding of the circulation of imagery within and from the bazaar to Kajri Jain’s work on the multilayered and intertwined economies of production and consumption of these calendar or bazaar prints (2007). Pinney 2004: 138, fig. 194, where she holds the wheel towards Gandhi, the sword towards Subas Chandra Bose, and the flag of independent India towards Nehru (late 1940s). In this case, Gandhi and the other figures operate as subsidiary deities or perhaps even personified attributes. See also Ramaswamy 2009: 245, fig. 9, in which she holds a flag and the spinning wheel in the cover of a 1930 pamphlet. In Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), Bourke-White herself appears, played by Candice Bergen. The staging of the photograph is not replicated in the film, but the directive that she must learn to spin centres the first scene between the two characters. See ‘Bapu’, an exhibition curated by Gayatri Sinha examining Gandhi’s relevance for contemporary art (2009). The Icon, 2008, acrylic and fabric on canvas, 102 × 56 in, 259.1 × 142.2 cm. For more on Ambedkar statues, see Tartakov 1990. Tathaagata Tathagata Thatha Gaatha – The Wounded Majesty, or, the Anatomy of Fate Cuckoonebulopolis, 2008, oil on canvas, 118 × 88 in, 299.7 × 223.5 cm. For a reading of Dodiya’s work in this context, see Kapur, forthcoming. Manisha Parekh, Spinning Time, 2008, five pieces of jute rope, mounted on a painted wall.


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——. (1873) Vienna Universal Exhibition, 1873: a classified and descriptive catalogue of the Indian Department, London. Watson, J. Forbes and John William Kaye, eds. (1868–75) The People of India. A Series of Photographic Illustrations with Descriptive Letterpress of The Races and Tribes of Hindustan, 8 vols. London: India Museum. Wickramasinghe, Nira. (2004) Dressing the Colonised Body: politics, clothing and identity in colonial Sri Lanka, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Wolcott, Susan. (1991) ‘British Myopia and the Collapse of Indian Textile Demand’, Journal of Economic History, 51(2) (June): 367–84. Wolpert, Stanley A. (1962) Tilak and Gokhale: revolution and reform in the making of modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Woodward, Hiram. (2001) ‘Artistic Production, Religious Practice: material and ideological constraints’. In Desire and Devotion: art from India, Nepal, and Tibet in the John and Berthe Ford collection, by Pratapaditya Pal and Hiram Woodward, 25–42. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum. Wörner, Martin. (1999) Vergnügung und Belehrung: Volkskultur auf den Weltausstellungen, 1851–1900, New York: Waxmann. Worswick, Clark and Ainslie Embree. (1976) The Last Empire: photography in British India, 1855–1911. London: Fraser. Yang, Anand A. (1999) Bazaar India: markets, society, and the colonial state in Bihar, Berkeley: University of California Press. Yule, Henry, Sir. (1903) Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, ed. William Crooke. London: J. Murray. Yuval-Davis, Nira. (1997) Gender & Nation, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.


Index

advertisement 100, 113 Africa 45 agriculture 21, 24, 60, 64–65, 74–75, 93–94 Ahmedabad 6, 70, 115 Akbar 120n12 album 19, 21, 32–33; of photographs 45–46, 53, 55–56, 58, 90 All India Spinners’ Association (AISA) 13, 67, 72, 82, 94, 97, 100, 103 Alter, Joseph 16 Ambala 57–58 Ambedkar, Dr. B. R. 114, 129n41 anatomy 35 Andaman islands 46 anthropology 15–16, 42–43, 45, 50; salvage 50, 52 anticolonial movement see nationalist movement Arachne 91–92 archaeology 14, 42, 83 Archer, Mildred 23, 28, 42 Archer, William 23, 28 art schools: colonial 25 artist: amateur 22, 24, 28, 35–36; professional 24, 21–22, 35–36; women as 22, 28, 121n14 Arts and Crafts movement 25, 78 ascetic 4, 11, 96–97 Ashoka 74, 104 ashram 6, 70–72, 82; at Uruli-Kanchan 129n2 Assam 27 Attenborough, Richard 130n9

attribute 7, 34, 38, 48–49, 53, 64; of Bharatmata 5, 12, 73; of Gandhi 109–12 authenticity 25, 47, 57–58, 65, 78 axe 111 Ayyamuthu, Kovai A. 125n21 backdrop 41, 48, 54–55, 63, 74, 123n11 Bande Mataram 119n11 Banerjea, S. N. 11 Bangladesh National Museum, Dhaka 120n5 barber 19, 31 Barthes, Roland 43, 103 Bayly, C. A. 73 bazaar 18, 22 bazaar prints 24, 110, 112 Bean, Susan 11 Bengal 18; 1905 partition of 10–13, 26, 73, 96, 109; Bay of 21; Diwan of 21; weaving in 110 Bengali 10 Bhangi colony, Delhi 106 Bharatananda see Frydman, Maurice Bharatmata (Mother India) 5, 12–15, 95–96, 109–12, 124n11; painting by Abanindranath Tagore 73 Bodhgaya 129n42 Bose, Nandalal 119n17 Bose, Subas Chandra 130n8 Bourdieu, Pierre 43 Bourke-White, Margaret 9, 106–8, 112–14, 129n1 Bourne, Samuel 45 brahmacharya 98

146

Index


Bremner, Frederick 54–56, 93 Britain 10–11, 20, 25–26, 35, 37, 68, 78, 100–101 Buchanan, Francis 24 butcher 19, 31 Butler, Judith 88 Cama, Madam 96 camera 44–49, 56–64, 86, 90–93, 123n19; of Bourke-White 107; posing for the 2, 4, 41 cartoons 6, 67 caste 1, 34–35, 37–41, 48–49, 75–76, 84, 86–87, 99; as label 53, 63–65; and occupation 8, 20 celibacy 95–98 chakra 74, 103–5 Chandigarh, Punjab 116 charkha 1–2, 71–74, 89–91; as attribute 112; bamboo 124n7; box or peti 3, 9, 82, 89, 100–103, 105, 108, 113; and chakra 103–5; in Company painting 36; different types of 27; drawing of 6–7; in film 80; on flag 74, 104; as icon 109; Magan 129n39; men spinning at the 90, 95, 98; in photography 93; Punjabi 110, 127n19; sound of the 4; Yeravda 100–101 Charkha Sangh see All India Spinners’ Association (AISA) Chattophadhyay, Bankimchandra 119n11 Chennai (Madras) 2–3, 8, 22–23, 25, 32, 44, 46 Chettiar, A. K. 79–82, 125n20 children 51, 61, 86, 105; spinning 27, 94–95, 126n5 Chinnery, George 35 Choa Saidon Shah, Pakistan 90 chumar (shoemaker) 31 circulation of images 8, 21, 34, 38, 45, 109–10 citizen: of India 9, 14, 95, 100, 128n34 civil disobedience 80 class 1, 8–9, 70, 84, 92, 128n27; and khadi 13; lower 51–52, 65; middle and upper 21, 45, 78; restricting spinning 75–76, 87

cloth production 62–70, 112, 128n27; depiction of 17, 18–20, 32–34, 38, 41, 77, 86, 91, 110, 123n22; elements of 2–5, 8–9, 94;as family business 75; history of 25–27, 50; in mills 10; purity of 127n16; training in 13 clothing see dress Colebrook, Edward Hilder 90 colonial cities 21 colonial desire 84–85 colonial photography see photography colonialism 5, 9, 19, 32, 53, 76–78, 98; after 1857 40; and Bharatmata 110–11; historiography of 23–25, 42–43, 45 communalism 6, 25, 115, 124n4, 129n42; symbols of 12–13, 68, 104 Company painting 3, 18–19, 27–28, 32, 36–40, 46–47, 69, 108; collecting of 18–24, 28, 30, 34, 36; historiography of 21–24, 42; and nostalgia 8, 78, 86; and photography 53–54, 64; sets of 8–9, 19–20, 28–33, 35–38, 54, 61, 86; from Thanjavur 34, 49, 63 composition 2–3, 37, 89–91, 107, 110, 112; consistency of 5, 20, 28–29, 32–34, 53; in photography 57–59, 61; in The People of India 47–49 conch 111 Congress, Indian National 67–68, 72–76, 84, 99, 101, 109, 126n1; images of 79 Constituent Assembly 104 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 25–26 cottage industry 1, 4–5, 20, 25–26, 52, 69, 86, 90 cotton trade 5, 8, 11, 26; carding of 32, 37–38, 41, 66, 72, 75, 86, 94, 110; cleaning of 31, 72, 94; ginning of 31, 41, 72, 75, 94, 110; raw 17, 18, 20, 71–72, 94 courtesan 54, 56, 86 craft: loss of 5, 8, 50, 68–69, 78, 86; see also handicraft Curzon, Lord 10 D’Oyly, Sir Charles 22, 36 dam building 116 Dandi see Salt March


Index 147 Daniells, William and Thomas 21, 38 Dayal, Prabhu 6 Dayal, Raja Deen 45 Dehejia, Vidya 43 Desmond, Ray 42 Dhaka 10, 22, 26, 51–52, 67, 91–92, 110 dhoti 71, 109, 130n4 dhuniya 31–32, 71 dietetics 98, 106 disenchantment 97 Dodiya, Atul 115 domestic sphere 9, 75–78, 88–89, 93–94, 96–97, 99, 103, 105, 128n32 dress 54, 77; occupational 38; politics of 4, 9, 11–13, 73, 79; Renaissance 92; use of handloom cloth for 51–52; see also dhoti, khadi Durga 12 East India Company 18, 20–22, 24, 26, 30, 36; see also Company painting Eden, Frances 36, 89 Egypt 37 England 10, 26, 68, 92 enlightenment 104 essentialism 37, 43, 49, 66, 99, 128n32 ethnicity 1–2, 8, 43, 49; see also caste, occupation exhibition 16, 24, 42–45, 48, 53, 90, 94, 100 Exhibition, 1862 London 48; Vienna World 90 fairytale 77 fakir 7, 49 Falconer, John 42 family 9, 25–26, 75, 87; of artists 22–23, 29, 37; depiction of 45; and the nation 99–100; and the reproductive economy 95–97; 105; of weavers 31, 52, 62, 64 famine 6, 44, 94 fasting 98 femininity 88–89, 95, 102–3, 105; of India 78; and nationalist movement 4–5, 76, 127n26; in the Renaissance 92–93; as strength 9, 98–99 Ferryman, Julia 19 Festivals of India 23, 42

film: amateur 47, 123n22 firka sets see Company painting fishermen 89 flag: as attribute 109; charkha on the 9, 18, 67, 73–75, 79, 103–4; early Indian nationalist 13; Indian 116, 129n41, 130n8; Nazi 14 flashbulbs 106 flax 92 Foucault, Michel 5 Frydman, Maurice (Bharatananda) 100–101 Gandhi topi (cap) 81, 109 Gandhi, Kasturba 1, 3–4, 9 Gandhi, Maganlal K. 70, 72, 100–101 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand: assassination of 109, 115; autobiography of 70–71; body of 98; epiphany in 1909 1, 4, 8, 67–68; hagiography of 9, 16, 113; statues of 113–14 Gandhigiri 114 Gangabehn 70 Ganges 18, 22 Gangetic plain 21, 27, 32–35, 37–38, 40, 63, 121n15; regional centres in the 29 gender 45, 109, 116, 128n32; representation of 63, 66, 91; and spinning 68, 87; see also femininity, masculinity genealogy 15–16, 18, 20, 76, 86, 88, 95, 105; of Company painter’s family 23; definition of 4–5 Germany 14 Ghosal, Sarala Debi 96 globe: image of 73, 109 goddess 12–13, 48, 73, 89, 95–96, 112, 124n11 gold 27; spinning straw into 77 Goswami, Manu 11 gouache 22 Govardhana, Mt. 114 Gujarat 98; see also Ahmedabad Gujarati 76, 100 Gutman, Judith Mara 42 habitus 15, 92, 119n15, 126n14 handicraft 14, 25, 31, 47, 75, 86, 97, 105; revival of 5, 78, 84, 91–92; see


148

Index

also craft handloom industry 8, 26, 52, 70–71, 68, 94, 120n10 Hanuman 98 Havell, E. B. 25–26 Himalayan region 27, 36, 56, 74, 89, 91, 115, 127n16 Hindi 7, 76, 125n20 Hindu-Muslim conflict see communalism Hinduism see communalism; identity, religious; symbolism, Hindu history: architectural 42; economic 5, 11, 26 homespun see khadi householder stage 11, 97 hybridity 18, 23 iconography: of Bharatmata 12–13, 73, 124n11; of cloth production 21; of flag 104; Gandhian appropriation of 84–85, 116; gendered 9, 66, 91, 103; hagiographic 113; religious 48, 111; repetition of 8, 27–29, 31–33, 35–38, 63–64, 95–96, 128n27; of spinning 5–6, 16, 20, 27, 40–41, 53–59, 61, 64, 105, 107–10; transformations of 17 identity: national 14, 43, 78, 99, 104; religious 10, 14, 35, 64, 68, 75, 92, 96, 125n14 Idris 120n12 India Office Library 22, 42 India: construction of 25, 37, 61, 65; unification of 13, 15, 40, 66, 76, 78, 84, 104 Indianness 21, 25, 43 industrialisation 5, 14, 20, 35, 50, 76, 78, 116 Irwin, Lord 6–7, 101 Jahangir 1 Jaipur (Jeypore) 54–55 jewellery 1, 4, 54, 95 Jones, Ann 92–93 jute 27, 74–75, 115, 130n15 Kali 12, 96, 127n21 Kaliya 111 Karachi Jail 90

Kashmir 87, 54–55, 93, 109, 124n13 Kesari Singh Bahadur, Maharao of Sirohi State 55 khadi (homespun cloth) 4–5, 8, 15, 70–71, 96–97, 109–10; as clothing 73, 79, 81, 125n19; and Gandhi 114–16; institutional support for 128n27; symbol of the nationalist movement 11–13, 66 Khadi Board 80 Khadi Exhibitions 94, 100 Khan, Abdul Ghaffar 76 kilt 14 knowledge: colonial production of 40, 43–45, 47, 53, 60, 66; scientific 48, 58, 97, 123n10; transmission of 72–73, 94 Kolkata 10–11, 22, 25, 28–29, 33–34, 36–37, 46, 48 Kripalani, J. B. 82 Krishna 111, 114 Kursali 36 labelling 34, 37–38, 43, 54, 58 Lage Raho Munnabhai 113–14 Lahore 25, 54 Lal, Shiva 28 Lancashire 10–11, 68 landscape 30, 42, 45, 53, 55–56, 63; picturesque 8, 21–22, 36, 38 lantern slides 94 Lee, Spike 113 Life magazine 9, 106, 108 lithography 22 loom see handloom industry, weaving Lucknow 29, 36 Madonna 35 Madras see Chennai Magritte, René 114 Malabar see Thanjavur Malaviya, Madan Mohan 118n7 mandala 103 manuscript, palm-leaf 73 Markandey 111 masculinity 4, 9, 76, 88–89, 96, 98 mass production 36, 56 Mathur, Saloni 56 Mauryan Empire 104 metalwork 27, 31


Index 149 Michelangelo 35 migration: urban 76 military 21, 45, 53, 124n3 mills 10, 26, 68, 70, 76, 110 Mirabehn 101 Mitter, Partha 25 modern 4–5, 9, 14, 43, 97, 108, 119n14; type of charkha 100–103, 105 modernism: in painting 36 monkey 98, 115 monument 8, 56, 113 Moorli Dhur and Sons 57–58 Mosse, George 13 Mother India see Bharatmata mother: image of 59, 61, 86, 96, 98, 105; see also Bharatmata movements: mass 11, 15, 78–84, 119n14, 125n21 Mughal empire 1, 11, 21–24 Mughal painting 28, 118n1, 120n4, 120n12 Muharram 120n5 Mumbai 10, 25, 46, 53, 76, 106, 110 Murshidabad 22, 34, 36 muslin 10, 26, 67, 92, 110 Nagda, Madhya Pradesh 43 Nair, Surendran 114 Narayan, Shivashankar 90 Nasseruddin, Qutbuddin 115 National Socialism (Nazism) 14 nationalism, ethno-symbolic 119n13 nationalist movement 1–16, 25, 35, 38–41, 58, 63–90, 93–97, 99–109, 128n27; symbols of 18, 20, 47 Navajivan 100 nawabi court 22 Nehru, Jawaharlal 76, 104, 116, 118n7, 130n8 Nivedita, Sister 96 non-cooperation 7, 76 nostalgia 16, 36, 50–51, 66, 78, 120n2; for pre-industrial era 8, 20, 84–86; for Raj era 24, 42, 44 occupation (job): attributes of 38; depiction of 2, 8, 20, 34–36, 42–45, 51, 56–57, 62–65, 69; labelling of 48–49, 53; leisure 92; relation to

gender 86; relation to spinning 75; see also caste, ethnicity opium 22 Orissa 21 Pakistan 90 Panda, Jagannath 114 Parekh, Manisha 115 Parel, Anthony 16 partition: of India and Pakistan 104; see also Bengal Patel, Vallabhbhai 82 Patna 18–19, 22–23, 28, 30, 33, 35–37 patronage 11, 21–23, 27, 32, 52 Penelope 92 People of India, The 8, 45–53, 56–57, 63–65, 90, 122n9, 126n10 periphery 36, 38, 90, 116 photography 3, 36, 39–47, 58, 63, 66–68, 95, 108, 110, 113, 123n9, 123n16, 123n19, 123n22; amateur 8, 39, 45–46, 53, 55–56, 58, 69, 87, 90, 95; candid 56–59, 63; collecting of 40–49, collecting of 55–56, 64; disappearance of spinning in 69, 86; ethnographic 16, 52; flash 106; as high art 56; historiography of 13, 42–45, 122n1, 122n2, 122n3; history of 1; in situ 40, 58–59, 61, 64–65; as indexical 43–45 47; manipulation of 46; materiality of 122n5; painted 24; staging of 48, 52, 59, 79–82, 90; studio 8–9, 54 picketing 94 picturesque 8, 21, 24, 36, 38, 44, 114 pinjari 31, 71, 75 Pinney, Christopher 43–45 poetry 15, 73 portraiture 22, 46, 49, 61–63, 128n27; of Gandhi, Kasturba 1, 3–4; of Gandhi, M. K. 113, 115; of the elite 8, 18, 42–43; studio 55–56; of Tilak, B. G. 109 pose 52, 64, 91, 112, 123n11; in photography 40–41, 48–49; static 48–49, 57–60; traditional spinning 3, 20, 66 postcards 29, 56–58, 65 potter 31–32

150

Index


printing: woodblock 22 prison 7, 90–91, 101 profession 31, 40–41, 66; cloth-related 31–32; see also occupation protest 10, 12, 73, 76, 79–81, 84 Pune, Maharashtra 129n1 Punjab 36, 60, 74, 89–90, 110, 116 Pyarelal Nayyar 106 Quit India movement 124n5 race 14, 47; see also ethnicity Raj revival 23 Rama 98, 111 Ramayana 98 Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Punjab 89 Ravana 111 Rennell, James 24 reproductive economy 4, 95–97, 105 resignification 4, 9, 14, 20–21, 60, 65, 88–89, 105, 108 rhetoric, visual 12, 18, 20, 66–68, 78, 116; of AISA 128n27; of the charkha 103, 105; difficulty of 83–84; diversity of 10; and gender 88–89; and nationalism 14–16; and verbal rhetoric 4, 8 rhythm 16, 27, 79, 86, 89, 91, 116 rosary beads 73 Round Table Conference 100–101 Roy, Jamini 36 Royal Ontario Museum 17, 18 ruin 8, 21, 114 Sabarmati see ashram saint 48; Gandhi as 109, 116 Salt March 6–7, 68, 80–81, 84, 101, 113–14 sandals 115 Sanskrit 11 sati 95 Scotland 14, 113 secularism 105 self-rule see swaraj self-sacrifice 11, 94–98, 128n31 setting 32, 54–55, 61, 96, 100; generic 8, 29–30, 34–35, 37, 48; outdoor 48; village 59, 80, 87, 93–94 Shah Jahan 118n1 Shepherd and Robertson studio 53

Shiva 111–12 silk 13, 27 Simla, Himachal Pradesh 129n1 Simpson, William 35 Singh, Bhagat 124n11 Sirohi, Rajasthan 55 Sita 128n31 Smith, Anthony 13 Sobani, Umar 70 song 15, 73, 96 South Africa 69 spectacles 115 spindle 27, 30–31, 57, 100; as attribute 6–7, 34, 111; as symbol 6–7; mechanics of 51; pricking one’s finger on 77; ; simplicity of 71, 94; sound of 2; used by men 36, 89–91; see also takli spinning: in a group 17, 51–52, 78–84, 98; manuals for 72, 94; as metonym 5, 31–32, 13, 27, 110; as moral activity 92; origin of 118n5; as patriotic 92–93; as political and economic activity 1, 11, 13, 26, 78, 97, 99, 102, 104; straw into gold 77; as transformative 20, 73, 76–78, 97 spinning wheel: as icon 1, 5–7, 9, 14, 65, 74–75, 84, 107–9, 113–14 spirituality 25, 73, 96–97, 105, 128n32 Stallybrass, Peter 92–93 storytelling 4, 77 Surat, Gujarat 80–82, 84 surveys: colonial 24–25, 67, 83 swadeshi 5, 70–73, 75, 84, 89, 92, 94, 109–10, 112; in Bengal 10–13, 66–67, 96, 119n11, 127n21 swaraj 1, 78, 98, 105; for the British 14; call to spin for 58; difficulty of 94–95; history of 10–11; legacy of 115–16; publications supporting 76; spinning and 4–5, 41, 66–68, 71–73, 84–85, 87–89 swastika 14 symbolism 71, 110, 116; Buddhist 103–4, 114, 129n42; Christian 12; Hindu 12–13, 96, 103; Islamic 12; national 1, 10–17, 74–76; resignification of 88; of spinning wheel 93–96, 103 Tagg, John 43


Index 151 Tagore, Abanindranath 12, 73, 124n11 Tagore, Rabindranath 5, 125n16 Taj Mahal 37 takli (drop spindle) 94–95, 100–101; depiction of 6–7, 36, 74, 80–81, 89; dhanush 100, 125n22, 129n36; simplicity of 27, 71–72; see also spindle taluk 29 Tamil 125n20 tassels 27 Telecom Italia 113 Telugu 125n20 textiles 5, 8, 10–11, 20, 26, 66, 93 Thanjavur 27, 32–35, 37–38, 40, 49, 63 Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi 97 Tibet 27 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 10, 109–10, 130n4 Tiruppur, Tamilnadu 80 tradition 59, 74; Brahmanical 103; invented 14; religious 97, 103, 115 travellers: European 9, 19, 21, 37–38, 40, 56, 64 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 14 tribal people: representation of 8, 38–47, 56, 63–64, 86 Trivedi, Lisa 72, 94, 99 typologisation 8, 20, 34–35, 40, 42–43, 45, 65, 122n9 umbrella 114–15 United States 78 untouchables 106, 114, 129n41 uprising of 1857–8 40, 48 Uruli-Kanchan, Maharashtra 106, 129n1 Uttar Pradesh 97 Varanasi 21–22, 34, 36 Varma, Raja Ravi 15, 119n17 vegetarianism 98

vernacular architecture 64, 93 vernacular language see Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu viceroy of India 6–7, 10, 101 Victoria and Albert Museum 34 village economy 5, 69 village: idealised 8, 20, 59, 65–66, 69, 76, 78, 87, 93, 95, 105 violence 6–7, 115–16, 124n3 virgin 92, 127n16 Vishnu 111–12 Wardha, Maharashtra 82 warp 2, 18, 28, 31–32, 34, 37, 49, 61 watercolour 22, 32 Watson, James Forbes 52, 125n14 weaving 47, 62, 68, 91–92, 94; confused with spinning 8, 14, 69–70, 83, 87; depictions of 34, 37–38, 49, 110, 123n22; historiography of 26–27; magical properties of 127n16; and mills 10; as step in cloth production 5, 18, 31–32, 41, 66, 71–72, 84, 86 woman: bearded 91; as nation (see Bharatmata) women: and the box charkha 103; as artists (see artist: women as); as ascetics 96–97; depictions of 2, 27, 35–36, 56–58, 60–66, 79–82, 84, 93, 95, 124n13; and domesticity 128n32; in the nationalist movement 94, 96–97, 99, 127n26; as prisoners 90; as spinners 4, 9, 32, 40, 50–53, 78, 86–89, 91, 100, 108; as spinners in Europe 92–93; strength of 98–99; upper caste 126n2, 27, 74, 89, 92 Yama 111 Yeravda prison 100–101 Young India 69, 71–72, 100–101 Yule, Sir Henry 36

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