The story of Mahatma Gandhi's promotion of the charkha and khadi is a part of the bigger story of Indian nationalism. It tells how two ordinary material artifacts—the spinning wheel and the homespun—contributed so much to the psychological transformation of a people. It also tells us about the debates that followed their introduction, the most famous being those between Gandhi and Tagore. Gandhi's key insight here was that industrialization though necessary was not sufficient for the economic development of India. Industrialization did not (and perhaps could not) solve the problem of poverty in rural India. In addition to industrialization, India needed a form of economic activity motivated more by the desire to meet basic human needs than by the desire to amass a huge trade surplus. Khadi in Gandhi's view was one small way of meeting this need. Those engaged in its production and distribution, especially the poor, acquired as a bonus the basic economic skills that they lacked but were necessary for their overall economic development. Such skills, he strongly believed, were transferable to many other areas of rural economic activities. Khadi, in other words, was part of the larger program of the economic transformation of India. The textile mills and the charkha had to coexist and complement each other.

This book begins with the startling claim that it is “a study of a Gandhian movement without Gandhi” (p. xxiv). It deliberately refuses to study the movement within the framework of Gandhi's philosophy—dismissed derisively as being the product of just another “cottage industry.” Instead, it situates the movement within the highly partisan neo-Marxist framework borrowed from “the Subaltern Studies Collective” (p. xxiv). The emphasis of the book is not so much on Gandhi and his purposes in introducing the charkha and khadi as on what others did with them, often in ways not intended or approved by him (p. 155). There is a subtle attempt here to cut Gandhi down to size and to make visible “the limitations of a nationalist historiography invested in Gandhi” (p. xxiv).

Khadi and the charkha are treated from two different perspectives: as commodities and as visual symbols. From the first perspective, Lisa Trivedi explores the ways in which khadi workers were recruited, trained, and organized and how the finished product was marketed and popularized in different parts of India. We get valuable data on the activities of the two bodies engaged in these tasks: the All-India Khaddar Board, and the All-India Spinners' Association that succeeded it, both closely associated with the Indian National Congress. Khadi became an integral part of the swadeshi program of the Congress Party. Producing a stipulated quantity of khadi yarn—“the spinning franchise”—became one of the ways of acquiring membership in the Congress Party.

The book's second interest is the visual impact that charkha and khadi had on the nationalists, the ordinary people, and the colonial bureaucracy. Here Trivedi makes a valuable addition to the existing literature. Wearing khadi became mandatory for all officeholders in the Congress Party. The “Gandhi cap,” designed by Gandhi himself, became a symbol of defiance of the colonial rule. Trivedi gives interesting accounts of the headache that these symbols caused for the authorities. For a period, the charkha contended for a place in the national flag. The attempt failed, however, as the majority decided in favor of the more prestigious dharma chakra of Asoka. Cartoons, posters, and other visual materials depicting these national symbols proliferated in both the English and the vernacular media. The inclusion of some of these pleasing visual materials adds to the value of this book.

Clothing Gandhi's Nation raises the important issue of how best to explain Gandhi and Gandhian movements. Is a neo-Marxist framework better suited for this than the Gandhian one? Which of these frameworks should have the primary role and which the secondary? There is a tendency nowadays to explain Gandhi primarily within a Western intellectual framework. Not surprisingly, this book shows this tendency, and throws in Michel Foucault (pp. 69, 76, 181 n. 9), Jürgen Habermas (p. 120), and others for good measure.

A few infelicities mar this book. There is the astonishing claim, made twice, that Hind Swaraj was a collection of articles that Gandhi had written in 1908 for Indian Opinion, which in 1909 he put together as a pamphlet (pp. 6, 170 n. 130). This is a bit too much to take, especially in the centenary year of this famous work. A wrong date is assigned to the founding of Sabarmati Ashram (p. 6), and two different dates to the founding of the All-India Spinners' Association (pp. 12, 28). Richard B. Gregg is referred to as a “Harvard economist” (p. 34).