Gandhi is a complex figure, by any account. One needs to look beyond his quirks to see the genius of his ideas, and the way they transformed India. Think of the salt satyagraha – where a basic need, a simple commodity that could be picked up from the beaches, could give rise to a political formation of millions rising up in civil disobedience!

It was the spark that generated the fire that pushed out the imperial power. There were other ideas such as wearing handspun, handwoven cloth. But creating a mass movement took much more than that. The Quit India movement was so uncontrollable, widespread and genuine that it shook the British empire and gave us the first wedge to open the door to freedom.

The swadeshi movement, the rejection and boycott of “manufactured in Britain” goods, where people demonstrated in front of shops selling these goods, was another brilliant idea. Accessible, simple, it needed no guns or other support. Millions of women were able to engage in this venture.

One of those women was my mother-in-law, Chameli Devi Jain. Her husband Phool Chand had joined the Bhagat Singh resistance movement, making home-made bombs. He was jailed in the Lal Qila, with iron fetters around his ankles. When released, he turned towards Gandhi’s ideas of peaceful resistance. He brought out the Congress newspaper ‘Arjun’ for years.

One day his 22-year-old wife, fed up of his leaving for months and years, challenged him and said she was going out with him. He bought her a khadi sari, instead of her usual Rajasthani lehanga, ghoonghat and heavy jewellery. That’s all it took for an orthodox daughter-in-law to become a freedom fighter. When Chameli Devi walked out of the house with her husband, and touched her mother-in-law’s feet to take her blessings, she was asked, “where are you going?” She replied, simply: “to jail.”

Chameli Devi joined a demonstration in the nearest chowk, where women were shaming the shopkeeper for selling made-in-England goods. The police picked up the demonstrators and she was sent to a jail in Lahore. Many months later, she came back in a khadi sari, having shed the traditional dress forever. She influenced the entire household to follow the swadeshi movement. She spun and wove khadi for the rest of her life.

Much about Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle were unique. The image of a national leader dressed in a loincloth boggled the mind of observers. He dressed like a mendicant, or a poor peasant – no rifles, no soldiers to defend him – just a big toothless smile. Many of his adversaries said: what do you do with this man?

But in fact, there was a clear economic vision embedded within all this symbolism. His starting point was providing a regular income to every person in a household. To achieve this he put forward his khadi programme. A spinning wheel in every household, where women, and may be men, could spin thread which later would go to looms for weaving cloth. There were backward and forward linkages, cotton distributed and yarn picked up, and a daily wage for the spool of yarn.

Looking back it looks freakish and absurd. But in the context of those decades, it was a soothing respite for many households. It also held another idea: a bubbling-up theory of growth, to replace conventional trickle-down theories of economics. Here, a widespread arena of households would have incomes, which they would use to purchase goods and fire the engine of the economy.

Their demand would be for essentials in the first instance, so there would be a stimulus for the production of food and so on. This economic programme could then branch out to the bigger programmes for industries and markets, but would start with the poor.

Restrained consumption, non-violence in personal relationships, and a levelling approach that begins with the least fortunate: these are not just ideas, they are morals in political economy.  The ethic of simplicity has a special power in visibly poor, unequal societies like India. It not only provides a demonstrative identification with the poor, but also allows a more even spread of scarce resources. As Gandhi saw it, it was also ahimsa – when a few did not aggrandise themselves with scarce resources, there would be less aggression.

A century and a half after he was born, this approach remains only too relevant.