Mahatma Gandhi's inimical robes were as much a political statement as they were a symbol of an aesthetic of non-violence. They represented, as has been described, a 'zero-degree of caste'. It is an irony of history that many Indians today loathe the ethos of his politics, where they read treachery in his pre-loading the national post-Raj national identity with a Hindu subtext, and Partition itself as the creature of a dominant caste.
In 1790, in rural Norfolk, Edmund Nelson, father of Horatio, Lord Nelson, described himself dryly as, 'an odd, whimsicall old man, who knows nothing of the present time and very little of any other'. Kind, modest, and generous, Edmund Nelson would willingly reach into his pocket to help those in need. He also had a love of personification, which shone through his painfully cramped writing style. Winter was 'a blooming Dowager... ashamed to come forth, half-naked in tattered clothes, exposed to the ridicule of every dirty boy'.
Robes and rags, pockets and politics, thusly, the world turns.
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