The Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan has invited some serious mocking retorts which need to be answered. People are mocking charkha. "Send charkha to Afghanistan, Taliban would get scared and run away". In such times it is important to tell for what charkha really stood.

Gandhiji was convinced that India's Road to freedom had also to be the road to the rural population's freedom from poverty and unemployment. His main aim was not just political independence from British rule but also India's civilisational renaissance with each individual's moral elevation.

Gandhi's civilisational distinction between the west and the rest is clear - one a giddy materialistic civilisation built upon the weaker races of the earth and another that seeks to peacefully transform the world into a commonwealth of cooperative nations.

How to ensure mass employment to the rural poor, whose livelihoods had been destroyed courtesy by the colonial exploitation by the British in a self-reliant, dignified and spiritually satisfying manner? This was the question Gandhi faced when he was touring India after his return from South Africa on the advice of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He found the answer in the Charkha which he proclaimed is a symbol of 'sharir-yajna'!

Gandhi wanted a symbol which the unarmed, weaker sections of India could use to defeat the mightiest power on the Earth. Charkha seemed perfect.

Charkha gave three messages :

1. Economic message

2. Cultural message

3. Spiritual message

Let's discuss them in detail :

• Economic message -

Charkha's economic message was that it gave poor Indian villagers a cheap, honest, easy and self-reliant industry. It was also an alternative to the agricultural industry which was quite exploitative at that time. Earlier the unskilled poor labourers of India didn't had many employment options. Most of them had to enroll themselves as labourers in the fields. It invited oppression and exploitation. The landowners or job givers were cruel zamindars and in some cases Britishers. How Britishers exploited them with hard contracts and taxation policies is well known. Britishers also levied heavy taxes from zamindars and in order to pay zamindars used to exploit them by not paying their due salaries at time etc. etc..

Thus Gandhi provided charkha as a supplementary industry to the agriculture industry. This easily filled the employment problem. They could now spin and sell their cloth. How Gandhi promoted Khadi and created a market on a very huge scale is also well known. Thus Khadi and charkha became a symbol of self-help, self-sufficiency and freedom. Since it involved no exploitation unlike other machines and industries it also became a symbol of peace and non-violence which was linked to the greater mass non-violent resistance.

• Cultural and social message :

The charkha was also a symbol of sacrifice and generosity. The sacrifice was made by the urban people as they happily burned the foreign cloth and willingly accepted swadeshi cloth which was spun by a poor villager. By this, they were also able to connect themselves to the poor villagers. They thanked them for the cloth they were wearing. This also helped in improving their conditions socially and economically as well. We have already discussed the economic point.

It also helped in bridging the class, religion and caste divides. It bridged the class divide as the rich felt that they were spinning for our sakes. It invited a feeling of generosity and kindness. It also defied the caste and religious distinctions since the customer didn't know who was the spinner of this. People wore it happily despite knowing the fact that its spinner might belong to a socially low considered community.

• Spiritual message :

The spiritual message flowed from Gandhi's belief in the inseparable nexus between economics and religion. Gandhi would repeat the spiritual message of the spinning wheel with an ascetic and saintly zeal emphasising that the charkha inculcated in its practitioner the virtue of non-violence and self-realization. The charkha stood for the simple life and high thinking. It was a standing rebuke against the mad rush for material comfort and wealth which was built upon the ruins of poor races of the world. He promoted the concept of Patanjali's 'YAMA' - the first limb of the 'ashtanga yoga' by the charkha.

The charkha created an economic, political, emotional, social, cultural, spiritual, moral bond between the masses and the classes thus imparting to India's freedom movement the much needed national and mass character which was missing before Gandhiji's leadership.

Thus Gandhi through all these attendant outcomes strengthened national unity by just using a mere machine. The same machine which became a symbol of India, its people and Indic renaissance is being mocked today by ignorant people. How sad!