of strikes in factories throughout India, particularly in the main industrial
centres; and again, throughout 1921, strikes were widespread. The
wartime boom in industries such as jute had ended, and the subsequent
recession had resulted in production cuts, reduction of the working week,
and attempts to keep wages down. Union leadership at the time was still
predominantly in the philanthropist rather than in the radical tradition,
and the middle-class leadership at the inaugural session of the All-India
Trade Union Congress in Bombay in 1920 appealed for ‘partnership’
between workers and capitalists. (This was to change by the end of the
1920s.) In some regions, local Congress leaders helped organise strikes –
but Gandhi specifically rejected the idea that strikes could be part of the
movement. ‘We want to harness capital to our side,’ he wrote in his paper,
Young India. To this end the Congress ‘must gain control over all the
unruly and disturbing elements’.^16
Indian capitalists, meanwhile, had to be told not to panic in response
to Gandhi’s emphasis on hand-woven cloth, made from yarn hand-spun
on the charkha, and his proclaimed hostility to machines: all he intended,
at least for the present, was to ‘supplement’ mill-production of cloth.^17
Indian capitalists naturally wished to take advantage of the boycott of
Manchester goods. But Gandhi’s assurances notwithstanding, what was to
be considered swadeshicloth? This was in part a problem of definition –
mill-made cloth could be endorsed as swadeshi, although strictly Gandhian
principles appeared to rule this out. Some mills, however, used yarn made
in Manchester. This was not considered acceptable and the Congress was
drawn into bargaining with businessmen to ensure that swadeshicloth
was not made with foreign yarn that was merely woven in Indian mills.
Eventually, a deal was made between some capitalists and the Congress,
which set a maximum permissible percentage of foreign yarn in Congress-
endorsed ‘swadeshi’ cloth. But mill owners had also to be rebuked for
weaving coarse cloth on their machines and passing it off as hand-woven
khadi– the latter was still a few rungs higher up the moral ladder in the
Gandhian scheme of things.
DISCOVERING THE PEASANTRY
For Jawaharlal, this was a period of emergence from the narrow limits of
his social spaces. In 1920, he was totally ignorant of working conditions
in factories, and had only second-hand knowledge of the conditions in
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 47