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The story of Mahatma Gandhi's promotion of the charkha and khadi is a part of the bigger story of Indian nationalism. It tells how two ordinary material artifacts--the spinning wheel and the homespun--contributed so much to the psychological transformation of a people. It also tells us about the debates that followed their introduction, the most famous being those between Gandhi and Tagore. Gandhi's key insight here was that industrialization though necessary was not sufficient for the economic development of India. Industrialization did not (and perhaps could not) solve the problem of poverty in rural India. In addition to industrialization, India needed a form of economic activity motivated more by the desire to meet basic human needs than by the desire to amass a huge trade surplus. Khadi in Gandhi's view was one small way of meeting this need. Those engaged in its production and distribution, especially the poor, acquired as a bonus the basic economic skills that they lacked but were necessary for their overall economic development. Such skills, he strongly believed, were transferable to many other areas of rural economic activities. Khadi , in other words, was part of...