London : Over 60 of Mahatma Gandhi’s most prized possess-ions, including a ‘charkha’ he used in Yerwada Jail during the ‘Quit India Movement’, will go under the hammer at a leading British auction house on November 5.
Gandhi gifted the charkha, which has a minimum bid of 60,000 pounds, to American Free Methodist missionary Revd Floyd A. Puffer.
Puffer was a pioneer in Indian educational and industrial cooperatives. He invented a bamboo plough that was later adopted by Gandhi.
Gandhi presented the charkha to Puffer for his work in colonial India.
Under the British Raj, cotton grown in India was shipped to the UK for making garments, which were then shipped back to India and sold at a price that the people could not afford. In order to resist the British, Gandhi encouraged Indians to spin and weave their own cloth.
Gandhi often mentioned that daily spinning was a form of meditation for him.
At numerous Gandhi auctions around the world over the past decade, the Indian government has insisted it should have the right of first refusal because the artefacts are a national treasure. Earlier, his shawl, hand-woven by thread that Gandhi had spun, and his sandals too have come under the hammer.
Even a sample of blood purportedly from the father of the nation was put up for auction.
