Hand spinning -- India; India -- Economic conditions; Manufactures -- India
The writer in the _Indian Social Reformer_ suggests, that an attempt
should be made to produce finer counts on the spinning-wheel. I may
assure him that the process has already begun, but it will be some time
before we arrive at the finish of the Dacca muslin or even twenty
counts. Seeing that hand-spinning was only revived last September, and
India began to believe in it somewhat only in December, the progress it
has made may be regarded as phenomenal.
The writer's complaint that hand-spun yarn is not being woven as fast as
it is spun, is partly true. But the remedy is not so much to increase
the number of looms, as to persuade the existing weavers to use
hand-spun yarn. Weaving is a much more complex process than spinning. It
is not, like spinning, only a supplementary industry, but a complete
means of livelihood. It therefore never died out. There are _enough
weavers and enough looms in India to replace the whole of the foreign
import of cloth_. It should be understood that our looms--thousands of
them in Madras, Maharashtra and Bengal--are engaged in weaving the fine
yarn imported from Japan and Manchester. We _must_ utilize these for
weaving hand-spun yarn. And for that purpose, the nation has to revise
its taste for the thin tawdry and useless muslins. I see no art in
weaving muslins, that do not cover but only expose the body. Our ideas
of art must undergo a change. But even if the universal weaving of thin
fabric be considered desirable in normal conditions, at the present
moment whilst we are making a mighty effort to become free and
self-supporting, we must be content to wear the cloth that our hand-spun
yarn may yield. We have therefore to ask the fashionable on the one hand
to be satisfied with coarser garments; we must educate the spinners on
the other hand to spin finer and more even yarn.
The writer pleads for a reduction in the prices charged by mill-owners
for their manufactures. When lovers of Swadeshi begin to consider it
their duty to wear khaddar, when the required number of spinning-wheels
are working and the weavers are weaving hand-spun yarn, the mill-owners
will be bound to reduce prices. It seems almost hopeless merely to
appeal to the patriotism of those whose chief aim is to increase their
own profits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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