D eriving its name from charkh, a Persian word meaning ‘wheel’ or ‘circle’, the charkha is a hand-driven spinning wheel used for spinning fibre into yarn, which can later be woven into fabric. It was designed to mechanise the earlier, slower method of hand-twisting fibre onto a spindle. Typically made of wood and used for small-scale, domestic production of yarn, the charkha became a prominent symbol of the Indian freedom struggle in the twentieth century.
The charkha — and the more generic motif of the chakra, the flat spoked wheel with which it is often conflated — has historically been imbued with great symbolic significance in South Asia. In Buddhist iconography, the wheel of the law, or dharmachakra, represents the initiation of reformative and revolutionary actions, and features in the story of the Buddha’s first sermon. With material evidence sparse for such perishable objects, the spinning wheel’s origin is a matter of speculation.
Specimens of twisted cotton thread found from Indus Valley sites in the early twentieth century were initially used as evidence to date the charkha to the third millennium BCE. Contemporary scholars, however, consider this inconclusive as such a twist could also have been achieved with a handheld spindle instead. This, taken with the lack of specific visual representation of the spinning wheel in textile documents or literary sources before the thirteenth century, has been used to make the case that the spinning wheel may ha.
