The Wheel of Fortune/Chapter 11
"HANDLOOMS OR POWERMILLS?"
Whenever an attempt has been made, as it is being made to-day, to encourage the use and production of hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, many have looked askance whether it is intended in this age of mechanical industrialism to supplant the latter by medieval handlooms. The issue is placed between the hand power and the power mill. A correspondent of the Janmabhhumi falls into this common error. Apparently agitated at the idea of reviving the home industries, he exclaims, "The real question for consideration with us or with any people to-day is not whether the handloom will or will not be able to hold its own against the power loom, or whether it cannot feed millions of families or clothe millions more in home-made-dress; but which will contribute to the economic and political power of a nation or country, whether it is the handloom or the power-mill? Handicrafts or machine industries—that is the real issue."
It is not quite clear from the above what the notions of the correspondent are about the economic and political power of this country. We cannot imagine him to seriously believe—though his argument runs as if he does—that that power can be achieved without feeding and clothing the millions of our half-starving and half-naked men, women and children. The political and economic power of a nation depends even, in this "age of mechanical industrialism," not on its powerful machines but on its powerful men. Germany was equipped with the best and most powerful and modern machinery, but it failed because at the last moment the power of its nation failed. We want to organise our national power. This can be done not by adopting the best methods of production only but by the best method of both the production and the distribution. Production that is the manufacture of cloth in this particular instance can be brought about in two ways; (1) by establishing new mills and increasing the output or producing capacity of each mill and (2) by increasing the number of hand-looms and improving them. All these activities can go together. The notion of a competition between the hand-loom and the power mill has been shown by such an eminent economist as Prof. Radha Kamal Mukerjea to be "altogether wrong." Says Mr. Mukerjea in his Foundations of Indian Economics:
"The hand-loom does not compete with the mill, it supplements it in the following way:
- (1) It produces special kinds of goods which cannot be woven in the mills.
- (2) It utilizes yarn below and above certain counts which cannot at present be used on the power-mill.
- (3) It will consume the surplus stock of Indian spinning mills which need not then be sent out of the country.
- (4) Being mainly a village-industry, it supplies the local demand, at the same time gives employment to small capitalists, weavers and other village workmen and
- (5) lastly it will supply the long-felt want of, and honest field of, work and livelihood for educated Indians."
But even this is not all that can be said in, favour of hand-loom industry. Mill industry no doubt can be a powerful aid to the promotion of Swadeshi. But apart from the bitter struggle, strife and demoralisation of the capitalist and the workman (as explained by the eminent scholar, administrator and economist, the late Mr. Romesh Chundra Dutt) it has led to, the question is: Can it solve the problem which pure Swadeshi is designed and sought to do and which arises only because of its abandonment? Every writer of note on the industries of India, whatever his ideas and conclusions about the future of Indian Industrialism may be, has shown that there was a time and that was even till the Early British Rule in India—where spinning and weaving, only next to agriculture, were the great national industries of India, when all the cotton was spun by hand and every portion of, the work was done by the farming population which augmented its resources by spinning and weaving. Mr. Dutt has given extracts from the statistical observations of Dr. Francis Buchanan's economic enquiries in Southern and Northern India, conducted between 1798 and 1814. They show how many hundreds of thousands of our men, women and children worked on this industry—mostly in their leisure time—each day and earned crores of rupees annually.
How our home-industries came to the sad plight they are in to-day is an open secret, admitted by all authorities and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that the problem to-day is not to bring about that political and economic re-organisation of our country, which disturbs the West to-day—an organisation which has led to the breaking up of the society by ceaseless struggles, bitterness and rupture between Capital and Labour. We want to work out the real political and economic regeneration of the country by Swadeshi. And the problem of the Swadeshi is the problem of 80 per cent, of our population who spend more than six months of the year in enforced idleness, eking, throughout the year, a miserable, half-starving and half-naked existence. We must find out suitable work for them during their idle hours. We must make them, a real asset and power to the nation. Pure Swadeshi alone can do it. Y. I.— 28th July 1920.