Khadi Ashram

PROPOSAL FOR THE PROJECT – KHADI ASHRAM

Project: Khadi Ashram

Inspired by Khadi (handspun and woven cloth) and charkha (spinning wheel) ideology of Mahatma Gandhi, I am creating a Khadi ashram here in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India. In order to realize this dream, I need the support, cooperation, involvement, encouragement and help of interested communities and individuals around the world.

Gandhi-ji established many ashrams in his life and did many works through them. One of those works was ‘Khadi’. To spin cotton on charkha, and the cloth woven on a handloom, with the cotton spun by this way is called “Khaddar” or “Khadi” in Hindi language.

Project Breakdown

The Ashram

This will be an ashram in the open space of Thar desert, outside village Raiser, away from city crowd but not very far from Bikaner. It will have big open premises for more activities to be added later, because Khadi is a big idea and will hopefully expand into other projects. One of the first steps is to purchase this land.

The ashram will be built using the heritage architecture of traditional mud huts of villages in the Thar desert. It will be like a small village with mud huts. This is less expensive and more practical than modern concrete structures, and will support the traditional building style.

Inside the Ashram

The main activities of the ashram will be spinning, as well as providing raw materials and work orders to the weavers in the villages. The ashram will provide training to the weavers for new designs and techniques. There used to be more than 50 handlooms and hundreds of charkhas in each village. This is all wiped out now because of big industries. The ashram will restart one handloom and two charkhas in each village at the beginning and aims to increase them with time.

The Ashram will provide new designs and natural dying techniques to the weavers. It will have its own boutique to make clothing out of Khadi fabrics and will have its own showroom to sell Khadi.

The Ashram will take wholesale orders for khadi fabrics, shawls, stoles, towels, yoga mats, rugs, home décor and home furnishings, clothing and accessories from the ethical importers from around the world and get them made with the weavers around the villages in order to provide them employment opportunities and foster cultural traditions of crafts.

We hope to add other village industries like traditional furniture making, clay pot making, grinding spices, making pickles, preparing dry vegetables, henna, and soap-making later in the ashram. In this way more employment opportunities could be created for the villagers to get nutritious food products from the ashram, in place of impure and unhealthy food from the market.

Tourism and in the Villages

The second most important activity of the ashram will be village tourism. Travelers will be able to come and stay in the ashram in order to experience Khadi ideology and village culture. Khadi workshops, Khadi tours, village tours, cultural concerts will be organized by the ashram. There will be opportunity for international volunteers to come to learn and work in the ashram as well.

The village culture has great traditions of folk music and dance, and spiritual evenings called “Satsang”. Local artists and performers shall be invited in the ashram in its concerts.

The Ashram will support the use and preservation of camels by encouraging camel breeding, organizing camel safaris and desert camel camps. In this way the camel will stay in its natural habitat of sand dunes and will not have to compete with machines on hard roads of the city. Camels are backbone of Rajasthan’s culture, but they are suffering and falling into obscurity because they are no longer necessary with the advent of modern machines.

Education

Along with all above, starting and running a Hindi medium primary school in the ashram will be its long term target, because there is no such school currently available here. All schools are English medium which is not the mother tongue of the most of the children here. This makes it difficult for local children to learn basic things, whereas a school with classes taught in Hindi will help these children preserve their culture and move forward in their educations.

Students of various schools, colleges and universities will have opportunities to come and learn about Khadi and charkha ideology of Mahatma Gandhi, learn about village culture, and benefit from the spiritual and cultural heritage of India.



Why this project?

When machines are not used for the good of small community, when they are deliberately used by man’s greed to dominant over millions, they make peace impossible. Dominance and peace can not live together. We can not talk of peace and at the same time support dominators by buying their products. To oppose the violent power of ‘dominating through machines’, we need an opposite power: nonviolence. If we could successfully find a way to provide an alternate, we will have infinite fruits of peace, culture, nature and love. This is was Mahatma Gandhi’s goal and inspiration in creating the philosophy around Khadi in communities.

Today, because of machines and greed, the ‘production’ is centralized into the hands of few and common people are forced to be dependent on the wealthy for employment.

Gandhi-ji suggested an alternate and worked so passionately on it in his life. He envisioned Khadi as a way of decentralization of the production and distribution of life’s necessary things. His idea was that those humble producers who are producing at home with simple tools should be supported in the stead of big industries, and that they should not be allowed to wipe out these lovely traditional cottage industries in the villages. Because the more decentralized is the ‘production’ the more justified distribution of wealth and the simpler the machines and tools are. Besides, Khadi and other handicrafts being produced by this way will make our world more beautiful. That is what the Charkha ideology is.

Before Gandhi-ji’s arrival, the charkha in India had been seen as a symbol of wretchedness and weakness, But Gandhi-ji observed the charkha as a symbol of wealth and had a ‘darshan’, or sacred vision, of nonviolence about it. It is a symbol of wealth, because ‘labor is wealth’. The wealth earned by the labor of spinning on the charkha is earned by all, not by a few powerful. In this way the Charkha became the symbol of decentralization of “production”, because “production” is the means of making wealth.

‘Khadi Ashram” will be an ashram based on this “Tatva” (principle), in which we will use and live by the ideology of Khadi and the Charkha of Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi and Khadi

Gandhi was staunchly against industrialization because he saw that it was making masses of Indians workless. But it was more then that for Gandhi ji. For him, it was equally important to see why India had not industrialized before, why India was continuing with its ancient “village civilization” until modern times. ‘Why this was so’ in India when the western world was highly industrialized?

Gandhi came to the conclusion that it was simply because “India did not need this”. It was not that India did not have a scientific mind to make machines; therefore, there must be some other reason. He concluded that India inherently had an opposite way of life. It can be summarized in Gandhi-ji’s words- “India has a message for the world, and that is its village culture. If India lost its villages, the world will loose its last hope for peace.”

The Story of Charkha

In the village civilization, millions of women in the villages of India used to spin cotton on the charkha. Spinning cotton on the charkha was very interesting and special because it was work that transcended cast, unlike most other work in India. In the every house of every cast, there was a charkha and the women of the house used to spin cotton on it. The weaving of fabrics by hand used to be done by a particular cast called Meghwals. The women spinners would give their hand spun cotton to Meghwal weavers to get the fabrics woven out of it. In exchange for this, they would give some extra cotton or cash to the weavers. The articles made by hand and simple tools were used to be of high quality and extremely beautiful. They had innate art and craftsmanship in them. But it would be very interesting for you to know that in India, all these casts doing these crafts, used to be considered lower casts, and that is so till today. The highest casts would do agriculture, business and governance.

My Inspiration: Gandhi Ji

Year 1908, I was in London. I had the idea of Charkha for the first time. I started to work on it in 1918 though. The first oath of Khadi was taken in 1919. In the year of 1921, the Charkha got its place in the Congress program.
Mahatma Gandhi

Everyone in the world knows Mahatma Gandhi well. Gandhi-ji said ‘By his own suffering does a brave man observe nonviolence’. We don’t know by how much suffering he achieved this state of mind, but Gandhi’s example proves one thing: what the possibilities of one person’s life can be.

It is my hope to carry on this amazing man’s philosophies and work for non-violence through khadi, community strengthening, and the celebration of local heritage and traditions.