INDIA: Loin Cloth Logic

"Mr. Winston Churchill has denounced me as 'a half-naked, seditious fakir,' " observed Mahandas Karamchand Gandhi, nine-tenths-naked at Calcutta last week. "It has become the fashion to laugh at my loin cloth. I would like to explain what it means to me and why I wear it.

"Ten years ago I was working in Madura urging some of my countrymen to clothe themselves in khadder [native homespun]. But these people, who were sympathetic, all replied: 'We are too poor to buy khadder; it is too dear.' Then for the first time I seemed to...

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