jects this reasoning. She wants the British out first, and then the Indians will solve their own problems. “We want to be alone,” Kurshed said. “It is like a housewife who has had guests staying with her for too long, and she is impatient to see them leave, and can think of nothing else but the pleasure of the moment when she sees them going out through the front door.”
Kurshed took me visiting to several members of the Gandhi “ashram,” or community. They are all Congress field-workers or Gandhi’s secretaries, or just people who arrive and stay for a while to sit at the naked feet of the master. They come from various parts of India, and sometimes speak different Indian languages, so that they must communicate with one another in English. The children are very beautiful. I stopped in at Mahadev Desai’s hut. I found him, bald and paunchy, dressed only in a loincloth, sitting on a floor mat spinning on a primitive “charka.” His wife was in the next room, clothed in a much-twisted sari, doing likewise. Desai spins five hundred yards a day. The charka is a very simple machine which any peasant could make or buy cheaply. Desai said he travels a good deal and spins on trains. But he had never noticed anybody else doing it. Thanks to Gandhi’s propaganda and personal example, hundreds of thousands of Indian peasants had taken up home spinning in order to develop village industry and pro-
