Recently, while seriously ill in hospital and on painkillers and other medicines, I found my mind wandering all over my past life and remembering things which I have never recorded in writing.
I remembered a day in October 1980 when, based in India, I worked for Oxfam Trading and I was responsible for sourcing utility handicrafts made by producer cooperatives and NGOs which were sold in the UK by Oxfam.
I had just returned from leave in the UK with the knowledge that the beautifully embroidered women's coordinate sets (skirt and blouse), made by St Mary's Mahila Shikshan Kendra in Ahmedabad, were proving to be extremely popular and that even after placing repeat orders, Oxfam Trading was going to be very short of these items.
After immediately visiting Ahmedabad, I was in Bombay and contacted two organizations which could have made 2,000 sets in very good time. The problem was, however, the procurement of the base cloth, the handloom “dosooti” (two strands warp and two strands weft) cloth.
For two days we scoured the Bombay market and later in Calcutta with absolutely no joy at all except promises of “delivery in 10 weeks.” I was, therefore, a few days later back in Bombay trying to find out if we could do anything at all. I then remembered that some 12 years earlier, when coming from Bihar looking for dairy cattle to purchase with which to start a dairy farm in Bihar, I had met a truly dedicated down to earth Gandhian worker who had been involved with the procurement of “khadi” cloth.
I could not remember the name of this man nor could I remember exactly where I had met him. I could, however, picture him with his very clean white khadi dress and his Gandhi cap and also that he, in those days, used to visit very early each morning at about 5 or 5:30am a sacred temple on the top of a hill about 20 miles out of Bombay.
I asked around to see if there was any famous temple which could be described as being “on top of a hill.” I was told, yes there was one, and was given instructions how to get there.
The following morning, I got out of my hotel bed at 3:30am and, with a pre-arranged taxi, drove out to this rather strange place. I reached the base of the hill where this temple is located and by the time I had climbed the few hundred steps to the actual temple, having left my shoes at the bottom of the climb, it was just after 5 am.
Already, devotees were arriving at the temple and the Brahmin priest was very busy with them. I sat down on a boulder outside the temple and a number of well-educated devotees stopped and asked me in very good English if there was anything they could do for me as they were rather worried as to why I should be sitting there early on an October morning.
After waiting for quite some time, I was starting to lose hope and was thinking what an expensive idea this had been to come all this way out there paying a vast sum to the taxi on really a wild goose chase. Then a stooping figure of a man in white khadi with a Gandhi cap walked past me and went into the temple.
I studied him carefully and decided there was no harm in asking him when he came out whether he was in fact involved in the making and sale of khadi and handloom cloth. When I saw him emerge, he also noticed me and presumably wondered what I was doing there at that time of the morning. I asked him in English whether he knew a man called Dwarko Sundrani of Samanvaya Ashram in Bodh Gaya with whom I had worked many years ago in Bihar.
He stood there for a few moments and then said that he did, and launching into clear Hindi he asked me what I wanted and why I had come there. We then had an extraordinary conversation in Hindi and he told me that his name was Labhashankar Joshi and that he worked for the Khadi & Village Industries movement all his life and he was also working with an organization called Khadi Dyers & Printers and certainly he hoped he could help me and he kept muttering that God had guided me to that hill on that day.
We climbed down the long staircase together. Midway he asked me if I had a sample of the cloth I wanted. I took it out of my pocket and I also pulled out my eyeglass which has a strong enough magnification to count the strands and the twists in both directions of a one square centimetre of cloth.
A vital piece of equipment in my strange and varied work in those days. He said cheerfully, “Oh, well, that's only “dosooti” and I am sure we can get some quite quickly.” “If you had come two or three days earlier I could have given you 10,000 metres of cloth but sadly most of that has gone to the dyers only the other day.” The long and short of this rather strange tale is that by evening he had located the quantity of cloth that was required in Hubli in Karnataka and within a few days by road it reached Ahmedabad.
This, then, was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life and certainly of my work with Oxfam in India, and a lot of that cloth duly stitched and embroidered into coordinate sets by St Mary's reached Oxfam in Bicester in the UK in time to be sold in Oxfam shops and through the Oxfam mail order catalogue in time for Christmas in 1980!
Julian Francis has been associated with relief and development activities of Bangladesh since the War of Liberation. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh awarded him the ‘Friends of Liberation War Honour' in recognition of his work among the refugees in India in 1971 and in 2018 honoured him with full Bangladesh citizenship.