The spinning wheel was women's work and it was done in company. Groups gathered in a courtyard through the winter, spun, and sang, and the songs of the trinjan, the spinning gathering, are a whole genre of Punjabi folk music.
The cotton was local, ginned and carded in the village, spun at home, and woven by the julaha, the village weaver, into khaddar for the household's own clothes.
The Sufi poets used the charkha constantly: the thread, the wheel, the woman waiting, the work that must be done before the in-laws' house. Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain and Baba Farid Ji all use it, and so does the Guru Granth Sahib Ji.
The trinjan was also the only regular institution in a village that belonged to women, where a bride learned who her neighbours were and what could be said.
Mill cloth ended it. The Khadi movement revived it politically for a period and did not restore it as a village practice. The trinjan songs survived it by about two generations and are now sung mostly at weddings by people who never spun.
The wheel was worked by women in the courtyard and at the trinjan, and the thread it spun became the khaddar the household wore.
The songs sung at it are a body of Punjabi women's verse tied to a working rhythm, and they went when the rhythm went.
The mill thread ended domestic spinning before the national movement made the wheel a symbol. By the time the charkha meant something politically it had already stopped meaning anything economically in most Punjabi houses.