Winston Churchill described Mahatma Gandhi as a ‘seditious Middle Temple Lawyer’ now “posing is a half naked fakir. What provoked such a comment and what does it tell you about the symbolic strength of Mahatma Gandhi’s dress?

(a) Mahatma Gandhi made various experiment with clothing He wore a shirt with a
dhoti or payjma ( Gujarati boys), Western suit (law student in London). Lungi and kurta (in Johannesburg) Kathiawadi peasant (in 1915 India) and short dhoti (1921), the form of dress He wore until his death. Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer by profession who was fighting for the freedom of India against British Empire by using the weapons of non-violence and Sotyagraha. He wore the short dhoti without a shirt when he went to England for the Round Table Conference in 1931. As Mahatma Gandhi wore short dhoti, Winston Churchill was provoked to pass such a comment.
(b) Mahatma Gandhi consciously rejected the well-known clothes of the Indian ascetic and adapted the dress of the perfect Indian. Khadi, white and coarse, was to him a sign of purity, of simplicity, and of poverty. Wearing it became also a symbol of nationalism, a rejection of Western mill-made cloth.