Nearly 88 years ago, Winston Churchill was overwhelmed to see Mahatma Gandhi’s attire. In a moment of anger, he called Gandhi, a ‘half-naked seditious fakir’!
‘Fakir’ is a term derived from the Arabic word ‘faqr’ which means poverty and depicts a person who has renounced his worldly possessions for a humble, spiritual life. Mahatma Gandhi’s life also took such a turn during his South India tour in September 1921.
While crusading for the civil disobedience movement by boycotting British goods and promoting Khadi, he was suddenly hit with a practical reality when someone asked- “If the labourers burn their foreign clothing, where are they to get khadi from?”
He wrote, “On the way (from Madras – now Chennai – to Madurai by train) I saw in our compartment crowds that were wholly unconcerned with what had happened. Almost without exception, they were bedecked in foreign fineries. I entered into conversation with some of them and pleaded for Khadi. They shook their heads as they said, ‘We are too poor to buy Khadi and it is so dear.’ I realised the substratum of truth behind the remark. I had my vest, cap and full dhoti on. When these uttered only partial truth, the millions of compulsorily naked men, save for their langoti four inches wide and nearly as many feet long, gave through their limbs the naked truth. What effective answer could I give them, if it was not to divest myself of every inch of clothing I decently could and thus to a still greater extent bring myself in line with ill-clad masses? And this I did the very next morning after the Madurai meeting.”
He arrived in silence, with a cloud of doubt about his head, the silent indication of the storm of revolution awaiting the nation.
On September 22, 1921, he had abandoned his usual attire of a shirt and hat, donning just a simple white loincloth.
From a simple piece of cloth to a mass movement, he directed the nation to a path of freedom, not just from the British, but from its innermost evils that separated its people from one another.
Much like the khadi cloth weaved into existence with numerous strands of thread, his journey embraced the nation into unison!
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