The Khadi Paradox

Post-Independence India, circa 1995. Whats the height of patriotism? Using khadi condoms. How do we square the contradictory pulls that shape an era? Emma Tarlo tries in her curatorial effort, From Empire to Emporium: Khadi and the Robes of Independence, 1947-1997. The show forms the concluding part of an eight-part retrospective on textile art called The Canvas is Cloth at Eicher Gallery, and is on till the end of the month.

Is khadi a link to our tangible past or just a drab piece of cloth? How many khadi clothes hang in our wardrobes? How often do we ponder over the charka, the symbol in our flag? Are we just a nation gone nasty, ungrateful to our history? Is khadi just the garb of bloated politicians trying to gain popularity? Or closer still, is this just another show timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Independence hoopla?

 

Tarlo, a British-born social anthropologist now turned curator and author of the widely acclaimed book Clothing Matters says: It is a gesture in celebration of 50 years of Indian independence. The importance of khadi has not been examined so far. There is a tendency to reject it. My idea is to give a sense of the discrepancy between the past and the present.

Her route to the past is signposted with manuscripts. They run through the exhibition, though the central focus is on the recreated scenes of the Swadeshi bonfire (voices of national leaders asking the masses not to patronise foreign clothes rise from the heap of cloth on the floor). To its left, under the title Heady Dilemma, snippets relating to the evolution of the Gandhi cap are recorded. Most of the incidents that come under the ambit of the exhibition took place between 1921 and 1930. She provides a few interesting flashes with her depictions of British soldiers using hooked sticks to whip Gandhi caps off peoples heads ( in Sholapur 1930) and the Lahore Municipality making the Gandhi cap the uniform of all municipality cab drivers (1921). Khadi was a symbol to fight imperialists on one hand, on the other, it challenged Indian traditions, Tarlo explains.

In those heady days in the twenties, when our national leaders were attempting to throw off the yoke of colonialism, another topic engaged their time. What should be our national dress? Jyotindra Nath Tagore was given the task of designing a national dress that would hopefully find the golden mean between the unbusiness-like dhoti and the foreign trouser. The fearsome thing has been recreated by Manjula Padmanabhan especially for the show, with the help of Rabindranaths diary on his brothers progress. So he hit upon a compromise which considerably detracted from the dhoti while failing to improve the trousers. That is to say, the trousers were decorated with the addition of a false dhoti-fold in front and behind..... There may be many a brave Indian ready to die for his country, but there are but few, I am sure, who even for the good of the nation, would face the public streets in such pan-Indian garb.

The rest of the show, however, is a trifle passe, with little new to offer even the casual observer of Indian history of that period. We know about Sarojini Naidus predilection for wearing plain khadi only for political meetings and about Indiras attachment to khadi (on display very prominently in the form of the brides sari at the most recent wedding in the Gandhi family). Kasturbas refusal to wear it in the beginning, Rabindranath Tagores accusation of Gandhi pandering to crowd psychology with his purification fires, Babasaheb Ambedkars back to nakedness, back to squalor and ignorance remark are all equally well documented. We also have a fairly clear idea of what the charka was battling against: the abysmal state of the khadi industry, which represents only .four per cent of the cloth produced in India.

What is missing is a fresh perspective. Although the show is on Indian robes between 1947 and 1997, it throws no new light on why khadi has come to such a pass. It does not answer the question of what technological bottlenecks the khadi industry faced during the last 50 years. It is also surprising that Tarlo, given her background, chose not to comment on the emergence of poly-khadi or dwell on why the khadi emporiums set up by the government are monuments of dusty neglect.

But perhaps the most disturbing omission was that of the ordinary farmer of the period, who was initially confused about the call to burn machine cloth. To them, khadi was a luxury. It was not easy to understand why they should give up the cheaper machine cloth and opt for the far more expensive khadi.

Instead, we see the same run-of-the-mill photographs of Gandhi and other freedom fighters we watched many years ago on DAVP news reels screened in the interests of democracy before the main feature came on.

Tarlo says that she could not find any pictures of ordinary people wearing khadi, which in its way is an indication of what went wrong with the khadi movement. So whats new about this particular exhibition, in that case?

Did you know that letters poured into Gandhijis lap from around the country after Independence, asking whether now that the goal has been achieved, we should continue wearing khadi? Did you know about the national clothes debate? Did you know about Jyotindras involvement in designing the national costume? Tarlo counters. Granted. But I still wonder why a serious exhibition has so many holes and was obviously put together in such a hurry. The period of the exhibition, as Tarlo herself admitted should not have been 1947 but dated from much before. There are also minor, but nagging errors Jabbalpore going as Jabbapore in one section, for instance.

The last section of the exhibition makes a giant leap from khadi drapes hugging the wall to denim drapes. The cloth that was discovered by that Bavarian peddler Levi Strauss, who convinced practically all the participants in the Californian gold rush to slip into them, finally reached India to outstrip our sartorial sensibilities.

The cloth of urban use, Tarlo reasons. The fact that it is also 100 per cent cotton and mechanically produced makes it the complete antithesis to khadi.

She makes a brave attempt to capture just what went wrong with our national dress. A collage of photos with credits that belt out raps and jingles like Movie, movie, Yucatan and Blue, show Madhu Sapre posing in a designer khadi outfit, topi donning tiffin-wallahs carting food to meet Mumbais lunch-hour rush, the baniyas of Kutch posing outside a street in kurta-pajama. On the last count, she comments, Khadi, in a sense, was a symbol to unite the rich and poor, but today it has become the uniform of rich businessmen. And with that, the show comes to a grinding halt.

The robes of independence look a trifle threadbare at Emma Tarlos exhibition on khadi, says Maitreyee Handique

The central focus is on a recreation of the Swadeshi bonfires: the voices of national leaders asking the masses not to patronise foreign clothes rise from the heap of cloth on the floor.