ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Mahatma Gandhi's approach presumed a radical equality prior to taking up spinning. Building on the pedagogical theories of Jacques And, despite slight regional variations in style in painting and photography through the nineteenth century, one usually sees spinning depicted people rarely see spinning from behind, and the figure almost always gazes at her raised left hand. Gandhi's wife Kasturba's image is carefully choreographed in concert with other political performances. With photography and the rise of late nineteenth-century ethnographic projects to record the castes, tribes, and professions of the people of the subcontinent, spinning faded as a subject matter primarily because its practitioners ranged across religion, caste, class, and region and spinners were usually women. Followers of Gandhi's spinning programmes were constantly encouraged to produce good quality, high count, well-twisted, uniform yarn and do to so in an efficient manner, adding their ideas to the larger pool of expertise developing across the All India Students Association (AISA).
