What would Gandhi think of a world where a single family's wedding runs for the better part of a year and costs, by estimates no one will confirm, hundreds of millions of dollars — staged in his own country, on the same stretch of Gujarat coast that bore him, and reckoned to the last rupee in currency that carries his face?

He'd spent two decades building a movement and managing its image before he ever took off his shirt. In Madurai, in 1921, he put down all but a strip of hand-spun cotton, and a half-naked man in a loincloth went on to break an empire's claim to rule a fifth of the human race. His weapon was cloth. He asked every Indian to spin their own — coarse, cheap, made by the hand that would wear it — and set the spinning wheel at the heart of the movement's flag. He was funded the whole time by the richest men in the country, and he died in the garden of one of their mansions. His power was never the poverty. It was that the maker and the wearer were the same person.

So he put the cloth back in the hands that made it. The wedding took it as far from them as cloth can go.

This episode puts the man who made a length of homespun cotton the most powerful image of the century in front of the most expensive image his country has ever staged. From the charkha to the couture — from cloth made to free people to cloth made to crown them. He has opinions. On a guest list that reads like a market dressed as a sacrament. On a fortune that began, two generations back, as another length of Gujarati cloth. On the most beautiful garments in India, sewn by some of its poorest hands.

The apostle of renunciation meets the apex of display. Turns out both understood the same thing — that what you wear is an argument, that whoever owns the image owns the room. Only one was arguing for less.

Dead saints. Modern fortunes. Fully AI.Episode 14.What Would They Think?