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ART & LITERATURE
AN UNUSUAL MATCH
In her path-breaking book, Mira Kamdar discovers the major influence of Mahatma Gandhi on her grandfather
Muljibhai Khara heard that Bhagwanjibhai and Ambaben Kamdar were looking for a match for their son. He was impressed by the reports he had about the family and the boy. He had become quite an ardent supporter of Gandhi himself, and the boy's reputation as a supporter of Satyagraha pleased him. This might be the right young man for his daughter Jayakunver. Muljibhai went to Jetpur and met Bhagwanjibhai. The Kharas were by now quite wealthy people. Bhagwanjibhai made it clear that his family had little to offer in terms of material comfort, but Muljibhai protested that his daughter would bring a substantial dowry and that his foremost criterion in a son-inlaw was quality of character. The match was agreed upon. Motiba, who was all of fifteen years old, was not told about her impending marriage until the week before the ceremony.
Naturally, the Kharas wanted to put on a wedding for their eldest daughter that reflected their now substantial wealth. Hundreds of people were invited. Special foods were ordered from caterers as far away as Bombay and Calcutta. Multiple sets of jewellery in twenty-two-karat gold set with diamonds, Burmese rubies and pearls were ordered from the family jewellers. In all, Motiba was given eighteen tolas of gold by her father. (A tola is equal to 11.66 grams.) A trousseau of sixty saris in the finest silks imported from China, Japan and Europe was collected.
Alas, Motiba would never get to wear any of the silks in her magnificent trousseau.
Gandhi had made the wearing of khadi, crude cotton cloth hand woven in India, central to his independence movement. In his 1909 Hind Swaraj, he attributed India's impoverishment under British rule to the economics of cloth, and he applauded the voluntary return to the wearing of Indian dress - something theretofore thought terribly backward by the educated Indian elite - by members of the Bangali swadeshi or self-rule movement. When he returned to India in 1915 from South Africa, he did so in the dress of a Kathiawari peasant, and he made spinning cotton and weaving cloth a centrepiece of life at Sabarmati Ashram. All through the early 1920s, Gandhi exhorted India's people to wear khadi as a patriotic act. Gandhi described the 'khadi spirit' as one of 'self-sacrifice' and 'fellow feeling with every human being on earth'. According to Gandhi, it was a national and even a religious duty to wear khadi. Foreign cloth was synonymous with temptation, evil, luxury and sin. To wear imported, machine-made cloth was to sell out your (Indian) self.
Gandhiji and Kasturba THEN MOTIBA MARRIED HIM IN 1924,
Prabhudas Kamdar was a headstrong youth of nineteen
who had as fully as possible embraced the teachings of the guru his family had not allowed him to join: Mahatma Gandhi. Born in 1905, Bapuji was ten years old when Gandhi returned to India from South Africa to begin his movement for India's independence from British rule. A Gujarati by birth, Gandhi published his fiery tracts in both the English and Gujarati language versions of his magazine, Young India. Bapuji, who attended the first English-medium school in his native town of Jetpur, read Gandhi both in English and Gujarati during his formative teenage years and was extremely aware of the Mahatma and his movement. By the time he reached young adulthood, my grandfather had become a full-fledged supporter of Gandhi's cause.
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Jain Spirit . December 2002 - February 2003
Education International 2010_03
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