Exploitation of Villages by Cities |
"The
half a dozen modem cities are an excrescence and serve at the present moment
the evil purpose of draining the life-blood of the villages. Khaddar is an
attempt to revise and reverse the process and establish a better
relationship between the cities and the villages. The cities with their
insolent torts (sic) are a constant menace to the life and liberty of the
villagers.
"Khaddar has the greatest organizing power in it because it has itself to be
organized and because it affects all India. If khaddar rained from heaven it
would be a calamity. But as it can only be manufactured by the willing
co-operation of starving millions and thousands of middle-class men and
women, its success means the best organization conceivable along peaceful
lines."
(Young India,
17-3-1927; 33:166.)
"I
have believed and repeated times without number that India is to be found
not in its few cities but in its 7,00,000 villages. But we who have gathered
here are not villagers. We are town-dwellers. We town-dwellers have believed
that India is to be found in its towns and that the villages were created to
minister to our needs. We have hardly ever paused to inquire if those poor
folks get sufficient to eat and clothe themselves with and whether they have
a roof to shelter themselves from sun and rain. Now I do not think any
Congress worker has travelled through the length and breadth of India as
much as I have done during the past twenty years. That in itself is hardly a
thing to be proud of. I, however, humbly claim, as a result of those
peregrinations, to know the Indian villages more than any other Congress
worker or leader. I have found that the town-dweller has generally exploited
the villager, in fact he has lived on the poor villager's substance. Many a
British official has written about the conditions of the people of India. No
one has, to my knowledge, said that the Indian villager has enough to keep
body and soul together. On the contrary they have admitted that the bulk of
the population live on the verge of starvation and ten per cent are
semi-starved, and that millions have to rest content with a pinch of dirty
salt and chillies and polished rice or parched grain. You may be sure that
if any of us were to be asked to live on that diet, we should not expect to
survive it longer than a month or should be afraid of losing our mental
faculties. And yet our villagers go through that state from day to day. The
Village Industries Association was formed last year in order to study the
conditions in which they lived and the state of their handicrafts, and to
revive such village arts and crafts as may be revived."
(Harijan,
4-4-1936; 62:298.)
"Today our villages have become a mere appendage to the cities. They exist,
as it were, to be exploited by the latter and depend on the latter's
sufference. This is unnatural. It is only when the cities realize the duty
of making an adequate return to the villages for the strength and sustenance
which they derive from them, instead of selfishly exploiting them, that a
healthy and moral relationship between the two will spring up, and if the
city children are to play their part in this great and noble work of social
reconstruction, the vocations through which they are to receive their
education ought to be directly related to the requirements of the villages.
So far as I can see, the various processes of cotton manufacture from
ginning and cleaning of cotton to the spinning of yarn answer this test as
nothing else does. Even today cotton is grown in the villages and is ginned
and spun and converted into cloth in the cities. But the chain of processes
which cotton undergoes in the mills from the beginning to the end
constitutes a huge tragedy of waste in men, materials and mechanical power.
"My
plan to impart primary education through the medium of village handicrafts
like spinning and carding, etc., is thus conceived as the spearhead of a
silent social revolution fraught with the most far-reaching consequence. It
will provide a healthy and moral basis of relationship between the city and
the village and thus go a long way towards eradicating some of the worst
evils of the present social insecurity and poisoned relationship between the
classes. It will check the progressive decay of our villages and lay the
foundation of a juster social order in which there is no unnatural division
between the 'haves' and 'have- nots' and everybody is assured of a living
wage and the right to freedom. And all this would be accomplished without
the horrors of a bloody class war or a colossal capital expenditure such as
would be involved in the mechanization of a vast continent like India. Nor
would it entail a helpless dependence on foreign imported machinery or
technical skill. Lastly, by obviating the necessity for highly specialized
talent, it would place the destiny of the masses, as it were, in their own
hands."
(Harijan,
9-10-1937; 66:169-70.)
"The
cities are not only draining the villages of their wealth but talent also."
(Harijan,
31-3-1946; 82:365.)
"I
will have no regrets if the money invested in these machines is reduced to
dust. True India lies in its seven lakh villages. Do you know that big
cities like London have exploited India and the big cities of India in turn
have exploited its villages? That is how palatial mansions have come up in
big cities and villages have become impoverished. I want to infuse new life
into these villages. I do not say that all the mills in cities should be
demolished. But we should be vigilant and start afresh wherever we happen to
make a mistake. We should stop exploiting the villages and should closely
examine the injustice done to the villages and strengthen their economic
structure."
(Talk
with Manu Gandhi, 18-4-1947; 87:303.)
"In
the scheme of reconstruction for Free India, its villages should no longer
depend, as they are now doing, on its cities, but cities should exist only
for and in the interest of the villages. Therefore, the spinning-wheel
should occupy the proud position of the centre round which all the
life-giving village industries would revolve."
(Harijan,
30-8-1947; 89:82.)
"But
for the last 150 years the trend has been for cities to exist only to
squeeze wealth out of the villages. They took raw material from the
villages, carried on trade with foreign countries and made crores of rupees.
This money did not go to the villagers, or only a very small fraction of it
did. The bulk of it went to millionaires and the mill-owners. Towns exist to
exploit the villages. The city culture does not therefore fit into the
framework of villages. A woman worker from a town should not carry to the
villages the atmosphere and the ways of towns. May be she has a lot of money
and articles of luxury. May be she has a motor car, cosmetics, dresses of
velvet and toothpastes, foreign or indigenous, tooth brushes, dainty shoes
and sandals. If she takes all these things along with her, how can she serve
the villages? If with these things she sets the standard for the villagers
they will devour the villages. The cities should be for increasing the
prosperity of the villages, for making money available to them for
developing the village culture."
(Prarthana pravachan II pp. 185-8; New Delhi, 9-12-1947; 90:201.)
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