# Young India, Viking Press, 1924-1926/The Poet and the Wheel

See also The Poet and the Charkha by the author (Young India, November 1925)
11th March, 1926
THE POET AND THE WHEEL
BY M. K. GANDHI
In spite of the weakness of body to which the Poet himself referred in his address at the Abhoy Ashram, it was a good thing for Dr. Suresh Banerji, the manager of the Abhoy Ashram, at Comila to have drawn Dr. Tagore there. The reader knows that the Abhoy Ashram was established for the purpose of khaddar development. The Poet’s acceptance of the address and such association as it may imply on his part with the khaddar movement, dispels if any dispeller was necessary, the superstition that the Poet is against the spinning wheel and the khaddar movement in every shape or form. In the epitome of his address published in the ‘Servant’, I find the following reference to the movements:
“The country is not one’s own by mere accident of birth but becomes so by one’s life’s contribution. An animal has got its fur but man has got to spin and weave because what the animal has got, it has got once for all and ready-made. It is for man to rearrange and reshuffle for his purposes materials he finds placed before him.”
But there are other pregnant facts in the address which are helpful to workers for Swaraj, this is what the Poet has to say:
“That we were so long kept from realising India in her true self is due to the fact that we have not by daily endeavour created her by moment and momemaking her healthful and fruitful.”
Thus he adjures us each one individually to make daily ​endeavour if we are to gain Swaraj. In the very next sentence he asks us “not to cherish the dream that Swaraj can be ours by some extraneous happening.” “It can be ours” the Poet adds “in so far as we succeed in permeating our consciousness throughout the country by service”.
He tells us also how to attain unity. “We could attain unity only through work.” That is what the inmates of the Abhoy Ashram are actually doing. For through their spinning they are helping Hindus, Mussalmans, in fact everybody, who needs help through that source. They are teaching untouchable boys and girls through their school and through it teach them to spin also. Through their Dispensary they are giving relief to the ailing irrespective of race or religion. They need to preach no sermon on unity. They live it. This work inspires the Poet and he therefore proceeds to say:
“Life is an organic whole. It is the spirit that after all matters. It is not a fact that there is lack of strength in our arms. The fact is that our mind has not been awakened. Our greatest fight here therefore is that against mental lethargy. The village is a living entity. You cannot neglect any one department of its life without injuring the other. We are to realise today the soul of our country as a great indivisible whole and likewise all our disabilities and miseries as one inter-related whole.”
Referring to our failure, the Poet truly says: “Man’s creation can be beautiful in so far as he has given himself to his work. The reason why our enterprises in this country fail so often is that we give only a portion of ourselves to the cause dear to our heart. We give with the right hand to steal back with the left.”