IN March 1922, M.K. Gandhi was arrested along with his co-worker and publisher of Young India, Shankerlal Banker and charged with sedition and spreading disaffection for the Crown and its rule. Fifty three year old Gandhi, in his statement in the judicial proceedings, made no mention that he had qualified for the Bar and gave his occupation as ‘farmer and weaver’.

It was in April 1916 that forty six year old Gandhi had applied to become a life member of the Gujarat Vernacular Society, wherein he had described himself as ‘a teacher living on my own labour.’ He had also mentioned that he had been called to the Bar. This transition from a self-sustaining teacher to a farmer and a weaver was not only about self-perception or a political gesture, it was a profoundly philosophical one. The change was about a category, a practice that had come to occupy a central place in Gandhi’s life, thought and practice.

The garden is magical, the distant hilly sky crimson, the two faces aglow with light, almost beatific light; the younger man clad in a translucent dhoti sits pressing the legs of an older man in a diaphanous lower garment which is undone. In the distance an undecipherable image, like God, who shall not be captured by the human eye. Three figures, one of them unmistakably of a woman, in meditative silence or in a conversation so deeply intuitive that words become superfluous. This is Bhupen Khakhar’s 1986 oil on canvas ‘Seva’, one of the most evocative paintings of modern India.

The painting captures the entire gamut of meanings – the said and unsaid, the uttered and inarticulate – of the act called seva, translated all too often as ‘service’. Seva is derived from saha and eva meaning ‘together with’. It is suggestive of a mode of being in a world, with nature and with fellow beings, as also with the divine who refuses to reveal her true nature. Understood thus, seva is the epitome of fellowship, of a state of communion with the self, with other beings and the divine.

Seva by its very root meaning is an act performed with others and also for others. Seva cannot be self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-seeking. Even the search of the self in seva is through this act of communion. It is the act of being with others, being non-acquisitive, being to seek only to serve to ensure that pain is alleviated, suffering made bearable, joy experienced and the divine made immanent. This makes seva the preferred mode to be free from sin, and if one cannot be free from sin, for atonement. Seva creates a fellowship based on shared pain and care of those in pain. To care is to perform seva.

Such a mode of being in the world has been described in the Bhagvad Gita as a state of yajna, as sacrifice not of the others but of the self, through unattached service. Thus seva and yajna are used interchangeably to coin the term sevayajna. Herein lies the attraction to the life of seva. Seva is both a vocation of freedom and a paean to it. It is a mode of freedom where freedom is sought and experienced not as an assertion but by a process where the self is surrendered to others in and through service. The greater the surrender, the deeper the freedom. And yet, or perhaps for that very reason, seva is an act of self-volition. In this sense seva is the complete opposite of servitude and slavery, where both self and self-volition are denied.

 

It was Gandhi who brought seva from the personal, religious, ethical universe to the realm of the political. Gandhi did this by interweaving a Christian notion with that of seva and making it integral to the life of an ashramite as also a satyagrahi. Seva found a different embodiment in the life of Charles Freer Andrews, who sought to combine a Christian dedication to the poor, the dispossessed, with an impulse of seva, such that he became a ‘deen bandhu’ (a brethren of the poor, literally but more beautifully, ‘a poor brother’ as well). The idea was that of obligatory bodily labour, called ‘bread labour’. This ‘law’ as Gandhi called it, that every human must perform bodily labour, came to him through the writings of Tolstoy on bread labour. Both Tolstoy and Gandhi acknowledge the debt of T.M. Bonderef as among the first to propagate the idea. Gandhi had also become aware of the principle through the writings of Ruskin.

 

Gandhi combined his reading of two traditions to create his own notion of bodily labour. ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread’, says the Bible. Gandhi felt that the same principle had been set forth in the Gita. Gandhi read verses 10, 13 and 14 of the third discourse of the Gita as an injunction to sacrifice that is seva done unto others in a selfless manner. Verse 10 says, ‘Together with sacrifice did the Lord of beings create’; verse 13 says that only the wicked cook for themselves and eat in sin, the righteous are those who eat after performing a sacrifice; while verse 14 says that nature herself is sustained by sacrifice, as ‘from sacrifice comes rain.’

Bodily labour became a compulsory ashram observance and had to be read and practised alongside other observances. Gandhi linked bread labour, yajna, to asteya or non-stealing. His idea of non-stealing of course included the notion of aparigraha, of non-acquisition and voluntary poverty, including acquisition and accumulation through one’s own labour. Gandhi expanded the notion to include in asteya even that consumption which was not necessary for sustenance of the body. He said to the fellow ashramites that ‘whoever eats more than is enough for sustaining the body is a thief.’ Despite the fact of a rule bound life, Gandhi found the ashram community wanting in its capacity for service; seva. Any sacrifice uniformed by the spirit of service would remain incomplete.

‘The ashram ideal is to live to serve… If it were actually the case, the ashram ministry would be more faithful than it is.’ Seva or yajna had to be performed in the spirit of renunciation. Renunciation does not imply cessation of action or withdrawal from activities but actions performed without coveting the fruits of one’s actions; a truly disinterested action when one is detached not only from the fruits of the action but from the action itself. This is what renunciation meant for Gandhi. The capacity for renunciation makes us human. ‘The duty of renunciation differentiates mankind from the beast’, said Gandhi. This capacity for renunciation creates the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice, of life itself in the service of others.

 

Gandhi included in his conception of yajna the imperative that as duty, dharma, yajna could and should be appropriate to one’s times and context. This yuga dharma had to be performed by all. The yuga dharma for his times was the vow of swadeshi. He said, ‘Swadeshi is the law of laws enjoined by the present age.’ As a law of laws, as supreme duty, swadeshi should have been like nature’s self-acting law, but given the fact that it has ‘sunk into oblivion’ it had to be made a vow, an obligatory observance. But does the idea of swadeshi involve exclusion or violation of the sacrifice of the rest, especially the foreigner? Swadeshi had to be separated from the notion of the idea of ‘mine-ness’ (of mama-bhava). Mine-ness is opposite of any service or performance of duty, it is the sense of mine-ness that gives rise to and produces hatred for the foreigner. Swadeshi should not be a cult of hatred. It has to have its roots, if it aspires to be seva, in ahimsa.

Khadi came to Gandhi as the most important corollary of the principle of swadeshi. Gandhi recalled in his letters from prison to the fellow ashramites: ‘ "what is the kind of service," I asked myself, "that the teeming millions of India most need at the present time, that can be easily understood and appreciated by all, that is easy to perform and will at the same time enable the crores of our semi-starved countrymen to live?" and the reply came that it is the universality of khadi or the spinning wheel alone, that can fulfil these conditions.’

 

Gandhi first wrote about the charkha in 1909 in his philosophical tract, the Hind Swaraj. When he wrote about it, he had not only never seen a spinning wheel, he could not even distinguish between a spinning wheel and a handloom. He therefore, consistently wrote of the spinning wheel as the handloom. For Gandhi the charkha, the loom, and the cloth that it produced, came to signify the possibilities of a civilization where machines were not the measure of men, where human worth was not located outside the human person. Gandhi was captivated and moved not only by its civilizational possibilities but its redemptive potential. A potential to free us from poverty, hunger, debt, lack of productive work, nakedness, bondage and the need and necessity to deny others the dignity of freedom. Khadi in that sense was the true ‘livery of freedom’ as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of it.

If the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had the freedom and perhaps the responsibility to make and break at will in a never-ending search for creativity and through that of human calling, saw the charkha with its repetitive movement and the coarse yarn it produced as unaesthetic and hence an anaesthetic that would hold the masses of India in perpetual bondage, Gandhi saw it as the only true dharma, duty, available to him. The creativity of the charkha was enough for him. Not that he was satisfied with its design. He, like a bricoleur that he was, constantly innovated on its design, its materials, making it portable, prison friendly. (The Yeravada Charkha is Gandhi’s reminder to us that at certain moments, the prison is the only truly free space.)

Gandhi announced modern India’s first ever design competition to devise a new charkha that was productive and easy to operate. He sought to organize its production and distribution and make it economically viable. The All-India Spinners’ Association and All-India Weavers’ Association were his attempts to institutionalize the activity, not for its semiotic resonance but for its capacity to deliver us from poverty and nakedness.

 

Khadi and the bare nakedness that it could barely hide, became for Gandhi a symbol imbued with freedom, not only from Manchester or from the ubiquitous chimneys of Ahmedabad’s textile mills, but liberating people from the shame of nakedness. He could, therefore, speak of the King-Emperor wearing enough clothes for both of them, suggesting not only the abundance of livery but also of shame. It was the Emperor’s ‘double-shame’.

Khadi as sutrayajna, as seva, as ashramic observance, was the perfect opposite of violence. Seva as service, as care, as non-acquisitive selflessness is a necessary condition for ahimsa. Violence unto others occurs when they are pushed outside the realm of care and of seva. Violence is the denial of self, seva is the affirmation of self, living together with others of sahaeva.

Gandhi’s khadi was his mode of being in communion with the self and others, it was his Sahaeva.