I shall be active and vigorous even from the tomb.

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

To serve our villages is to establish Swaraj. Everything else is but an idle dream. … Exploitation of villages is itself an organized violence. If we want Swaraj to be built on non-violence, we will have to give the villages their proper place.

The true Indian civilization is in the Indian villages. The modern city civilization you find in Europe and America, and in a handful of our cities which are copies of the Western cities and which were built for the foreigner, and by him. But they cannot last. It is only the handicraft civilization that will endure and stand the test of time. But it can do so only if we can correlate the intellect with the hand.

If some of you see the villages, you will not be fascinated by the sight. You will have to scratch below the dung heap. I do not say that they ever were heavenly places. Today they are really dung-heaps. They were not like that before. What I say is not from history but from what I have seen myself. I have travelled from one end of India to the other and have seen the miserable specimen of humanity with lustreless eyes. They are India. In these humble cottages, in the midst of these dung-heaps, are to be found the humble Bhangis in whom you find the concentrated essence of wisdom.

The spinning-wheel has almost been forgotten. There is all this talk of militarization and industrialization. But it is my conviction that a day will come when they will all see for themselves that for India there is no way other than that of village industries and non-violence. We shall not find a way out unless we develop these. But I am still optimistic.

Take the village people and slum-dwellers in your hands and give them the benefit of your knowledge, skill, insight, constructive work and patriotic spirit. Give the people this true education through the example of your own lives. Let all your activities be directed to the welfare of the people. If that is not done and if the people lose patience, our plight will be much worse than the present slavery. Before the people take to the path of destruction, see that they are given constructive, life-giving training.

Return to the villages means a definite, voluntary recognition of the duty of bread labour and all its connotes.

If we want to impart education best suited to the needs of the villagers, we should take the vidyapith to the villages.

Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village