Gandhi... valores para una propuesta de futuro

24 gandhi... valores para una propuesta de futuro indentured laborer might wear, looking as though in mourning, and said: Here is Mr. Gandhi. I stooped at once instinctively and touched his feet, and he said in a low tone ‘Pray do not do that, it is a humiliation to me ’ (C.F. Andrews, quoted from Modern Review Letter from Natal March 1914 in Tinker 1979: 84). Finally he established his first ashrams, abroad. These were Tolstoy and Phoenix farms where people practiced their belief in self-discipline, satyagraha, ahimsa, and tried out tactics. His famous nonviolence and satyagraha were established here. I take the example of an idea that was spiritual, economic and diasporic. Gandhi’s economic model, symbolized by his concept of ‘khadi.’26 I do not remember to have seen a handloom or a spinning wheel when in 1908 I described it in Hind Swaraj as the as the panacea for the growing pauperism of India. In that book I took it as understood that anything that helped India to get rid of the grinding poverty of her masses would in the same process also establish Swaraj. Even in 1915, when I returned to India from South Africa, I had not actually seen a spinning wheel. (Gandhi 1927: 407) Khadi is here acknowledged as having a diasporic origin, one imagined when Gandhi has neither seen it, cannot evaluate his own and others’ ability to use it and had not met a weaving expert who could. But his exposure to world economics has led him to want to imagine it. When he returns to India: When the Satyagraha Ashram was founded at Sabarmati, we introduced a few handlooms there. But no sooner had we done this than we found ourselves up against a difficulty. All of us belonged either to the liberal professions or to business; not one of us was an artisan. We needed a weaving expert to teach us to weave before we could work the looms. One of us at last procured from Palanpur, but he did not communicate to us the whole of his art. (407) And khadi does not distance from the world, in fact it brings a ‘world of experience’.