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 see the difference between them and me.

"I had on my cap, vest and full dhoti [three-foot-wide loin cloth]. My hearers wore only a strip of cloth about four inches wide. I saw that where my clothing uttered only a partial truth of the poverty of India, these millions, compulsorily naked save for their narrow langotis, gave through their bare limbs the starkest truth.

"What effective answer could I give them unless I too divested myself of every bit of clothing with which I could decently dispense and put myself to a still greater extent in harmony with the ill-clad masses? I adopted the small dhoti [two-foot-wide loin cloth] then and there, and I have worn it ever since.

"Millions of Indians," concluded Mr. Gandhi sternly, "own nothing in the world but that little strip of cloth which preserves them from disgrace. I am not leading a 'back to the loin cloth' movement. We have been in these straits ever since the British have ruled India.

"In London, if I am invited to visit His Majesty the King Emperor, I will wear nothing more than that which is the symbol of India's distress--the loin cloth."

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