Gandhi cap

The current Indian election – the counting is on May 16th after staggered voting which began on April 7th – has seen a re-invention of the country’s most politically iconic headwear. The old Gandhi cap, a symbol of India’s non-violent pursuit of self-reliance and independence, has been revived – not, as Andrew Whitehead explains, by the Congress party with which Gandhi was once associated but by a new, insurgent political party. In the back streets of East Delhi the other week, I witnessed a curious sight. As scores of people waited patiently late into the evening for a Parliamentary candidate to come and address them, party workers handed out dozens of cheaply made hats. Gandhi caps. Youngsters pushed and jostled to get one, and by the time the main speaker arrived, the small but enthusiastic crowd was a sea of white headgear. Each cap bore the name of the wildcard party in India’s elections, the Aam Aadmi (it means ‘common man’ in Hindi) Party, and its election symbol, the jharoo, the traditional dried grass broom. Why a broom? Well, the AAP is a single issue party which wants to sweep away corruption … and it has recently proved its popularity by sweeping to power (albeit briefly) at state level in Delhi. The reference back to M.K. Gandhi, the Indian political leader with arguably more moral authority than any other, is not accidental. The AAP has revived one of Gandhi’s most renowned political props to seek to benefit from the respect accorded to ‘Bapu’, the father of the nation. In East Delhi, one of the best Parliamentary prospects for the AAP, the Gandhi association is even more explicit – the party’s candidate here is Gandhi’s grandson. The origins of the Gandhi cap are not entirely clear. They appear to lie in Gandhi’s initial excursions into non-violent protest in South Africa in the years before the First World War. Nagindas Sanghvi (in The Agony of Arrival: Gandhi, the South African Years , New Delhi, 2006) has suggested that Gandhi and other Indian protestors confined to South African jails at this time were obliged to follow the dress code of black prisoners, which included the cap that Gandhi was to make his own. It’s a simple white side cap, pointed at front and back, with a wide band which gives it almost a military aspect. From 1917 onwards, Gandhi’s campaign of non-cooperation with Imperial power in India became associated with the wearing of ‘khadi’, made out of homespun cloth. Simple, coarse white clothing became the informal uniform of the Gandhi’s campaign for swaraj or self-reliance, something rather more than simply political independence. The Gandhi cap in particular became an important symbol of opposition to British rule. During the non-cooperation movement, says the historian Lata Singh, ( Popular Translations of Nationalism : Bihar, 1920-1922, Delhi, 2012), it was sold at all major political meetings and on street corners. By 1922, a substantial proportion of the Indian male population was wearing the Gandhi cap – and Lata Singh argues that its significance was created as much by British responses to it as by Gandhi’s personal attempts to promote it. ‘The British had for long been trying to control Indian headwear and they now began to clamp down on Gandhi cap-wearers by dismissing them from government jobs, fining them and at times physically beating them. The government employees were forbidden to wear the Gandhi caps in the office and risked dismissal if they wore khadi dress and caps.’ The dress code which Gandhi promulgated became indelibly linked with the nationalist movement, and – by association – with Congress. Gandhi’s assassination within months of India achieving independence added still greater force to the emulation of his style of dress. To this day, Indian politicians when at Parliament or on official duty normally wear khadi-style simple white clothing. As for the Gandhi cap, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Harrow-educated politician who was India’s Prime Minister for its first seven