Spinning Wheels and Summer Research

 Anne Jones, now a second-year student in our MA program, earned a Summer Research Fellowship for the summer of 2020. These are competitive stipends in the amount of $3000 to support scholarly efforts conducted during June, July, and August. During a normal summer, recipients would often travel to archives relevant to their work. Of course, this has not been a normal summer! 

Anne shared some information and reflections about her project with the YAWP:

M. K. Gandhi’s writings have been crucial to the ideologies that informed the Indian independence movement. In works like Hind Swaraj, he outlined his belief that political self-rule for India had to be bound with economic independence and civil disobedience. For Gandhi, these tenets materialized through the use of a crucial object: the charkha or spinning wheel. Spinning one’s own cotton/cloth, he argued, would mobilize India’s rural population and assist India’s economic independence by rejecting imported British cloth. What he did not anticipate was the adverse effect that a nation taking to weaving its own fabric would cause to the people of Lancashire in England. Because 97% of India’s cotton import at the time was from Lancashire’s famed cotton operatives, Gandhi’s injunction to favor the spinning wheel was the death knell for this hitherto thriving industry. In fact, part of the agenda for the Round Table Conference of 1931 held between Indian and British leaders in England was to persuade Gandhi to withdraw the boycott.

Using the hermeneutics of Actor-Network Theory, my research traced how the spinning wheel gained anticolonial agency and created a network that connected the colony to the metropole. Unintended by Gandhi but made especially visible through his visit to the Lancashire mills in 1931, this connection reveals how a nonhuman actor wielded immense influence, extending its reach and power beyond the nation, and taking on a life of its own. Scholarship on the nationalist movement and on the spinning wheel have largely ignored this materialist effect that played a role in the eventual deconstruction of the Empire. What we see, then, is how the enmeshing of Hind Swaraj (a text), the spinning wheel (an object), and a plethora of humans eventually contributed to not only the Indian independence—Gandhi’s original goal—but also the demise of the Lancashire textile industry by 1960. None of these agential “nodes” intersected to magically produce an immediate result; instead, over decades, their steady interactions led to massive changes. While COVID (another nonhuman actor, incidentally) affected my original proposal to examine the archival materials of the 1931 Conference housed at The National Archives, London, the research was still fruitful. A material analysis of this sort makes visible the inextricable role objects play in creating social reality.