Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi were among the two most influential Indian figures during the freedom struggle of the Indian nation against the colonial rule of the British. Tagore became the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and was instrumental in reshaping Bengali literature and music. He was considered widely as a colossus of the Indian intelligentsia. Gandhi on the other hand emerged as the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement. He was a mobilizer of the masses and respected and venerated across India as the ‘Mahatma’ (or Great Soul). Incidentally, Tagore is said to have accorded and popularized this title for Gandhi. The two men had great mutual respect for each other but often differed significantly on some issues. One such issue was Gandhi's call for spinning the charkha as an activity which was to be the locus of the Swadeshi and Non-cooperation movement. Tagore did not view this as a beneficial exercise and wrote the essay "The Cult of the Charkha" as a critique against it. In the Indian context, this text is of immense value as it offers a dialogue on the role of machinery, nature of labor and its role in rejuvenating the intellectual life of the nation. Tagore begins by stating that in the Indian society through the processes of the caste system there has been a "leveling down" of the masses over the ages. Every individual of every caste has his function assigned to him, together with the obsession into which he has been hypnotized, that, since he is bound by some divine mandate, accepted by his first ancestor, it would be sinful for him to seek relief therefrom. This imitation of the social scheme of ant-life makes very easy the performance of petty routine duties, but specially difficult the attainment of manhood’s estate. It imparts skill to the limbs of the man who is a bondsman, whose labor is drudgery; but it kills the mind of a man who is a doer, whose work is creation. So in India, during long ages past, we have the spectacle of only a repetition of that which has gone before. -Rabindranath Tagore, "The Cult of the Charkha" He claims this problem of repetition cuts at the very soul of human spirit and is contrary to the work of God evidenced by the infusion of the human ‘mind’ which is independent and free.