The charkha teacher

Bimbrahw’s students first learn to work with the small spindle and are then taught the workings of the charkha. Sitting on mats,Bimbrahw and her adopted daughter,Seema Rani,teach the kids how to work the ‘Yervada charkha’,an efficient,portable model of the charkha that Gandhi and his associates devised during the time he spent in the Yervada prison. Unlike the big Amber charkha,the Yervada model is compact and folds into a wooden box.

“It makes me so happy to see them learn to spin. They’re very dedicated,” the teacher says of her students. For Bimbrahw,spinning the charkha is her only defence against a world that has become increasingly incomprehensible and is filled with purposeless activities,TV being prime among them . “I have never owned a TV. Even when Doordarshan people came and filmed me for a documentary I didn’t bother. Charkha is a productive activity,television has ruined our children,” she says.

Bimbrahw learned to spin watching her mother. “She used to spin the charkha at home but never taught me. I learned on my own,by taking her place whenever she would get up to do housework. My parents thought it was useless; the family was full of doctors and other professionals,” Bimbrahw says.

Then in 1957 while she was still a student,Bimbrahw met Baba Lal Singh,a Gandhian and freedom fighter from Sialkot whose disciple she has been since then and whose dream of self-reliance through charkha she has been trying to keep alive all her life.

“After the first meeting,I saw him again once I joined Kamala Nehru College as a Hindi teacher. He was living in a house in Chawri Bazar that he had moved to after the Partition. Mill-made clothes were banned in that house. Following Gandhi,he believed that charkha was the way to self-reliance. And that is the truth,” Bimbrahw says.

The thread that is spun out is taken to the Khadi Bhandar,where in exchange one gets cloth of the same amount,Bimbrahw says. “Five to six thousand ‘thar’ of thread is equally to a metre of cloth. This cloth I stitch for my use. But things have changed since the old days when I used to be able to get cloth made from the same thread I gave. There was a time when Khadi staff used to spin the charkha compulsorily for an hour every day. All that is gone,” she says.

Bimbrahw now teaches charkha spinning at the Delhi University Gandhi Bhavan every Thursday between 3 and 5 pm. “This is the first time I am doing something like this but classes will go on even if I am left with one student. They tell me some college principals have said they want to learn. Anyone can come and learn,” she says.