4 - Gandhi and the Undignified Loincloth

Summary

In this chapter, the second of the book’s mini-studies of dignity, we turn to early twentieth-century India. Here the object is cloth, and the focus is on Gandhi’s campaign for the manufacture and use of homespun cloth (khadi). The language of dignity was a striking feature of that campaign; Gandhi appealed to Indians to ‘realise their dignity’ by discarding their foreign cloth and renewing their home textile industry. Yet while he made that appeal, the great Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar insisted that dignity could not be achieved for all Indians without social transformation, including the dismantling of the Hindu system of caste.