Spinning the 'nation': Swadeshi politics, material culture and the making of the Indian nation, 1915-1930

Between 1915 and 1930, the multi-lingual, largely pre-literate population of colonial India imagined themselves as a new national community. Using the material objects produced by the swadeshi, or indigenous goods, movement, ordinary people publicly enacted the boundaries of their nation. Khadi, the main product of this movement, was a homespun, home woven cloth revived by Mohandas K. Gandhi. Used in public rituals, processions, and demonstrations, khadi became a key component in a visual vocabulary of nationhood. By 1930, ordinary people had transformed the geography of Britain's Indian Empire.;In the early nineteen-twenties two institutions organized the production, sale and distribution of swadeshi goods. The Congress' All-India Khaddar Board and the All India Spinners' Association employed a variety of strategies to popularize their products. Using newspapers, political pamphlets, lantern slides and exhibitions, swadeshi proponents introduced a distinct national narrative and geography to the populations of India's cities, towns and villages. While the institutional strategies of the organizations are important to understanding how khadi became a central vocabulary in thinking the nation, the swadeshi movement found important support at a grass-roots level as well.;Swadeshi politics transfigured the Indian landscape, creating a new sense of national time, space and bodies. Over the course of the twenties, ordinary people in North India adopted a flag, made of khadi and depicting a spinning wheel at its center, that they displayed in local celebrations and protests. Eventually, this flag was used to inaugurate a new national calendar. Khadi was also used to claim the spaces of the colonial regime such as courtrooms, official buildings, town halls and public thoroughfares. Finally, khadi was used to transform the colonized body. Wearing khadi not only signaled the rejection of Western norms of comportment, it was also a repudiation of 'traditional' Indian dress, which confirmed caste, class, religious and regional identities. The khadi-clad body provided a visual evidence of the emergence of a national subject-citizen.