The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905-19 019092067X, 9780190920678

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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

DAVID HARDIMAN

The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom 1905–19

A

A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford  New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © David Hardiman 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available David Hardiman. The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905–19. ISBN: 9780190920678

Printed in India on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii Glossary ix Introduction 1 1. ‘Passive Resistance’ in India, 1905–09 21 2. ‘Passive Resistance’ in South Africa, 1906–14 79 3. Building a Nationalist Base in Rural India: Peasant Struggles in Bijoliya, Champaran and Kheda 109 4. Nonviolence 159 5. Exposing State Terror: The Rowlatt Satyagraha, 1919 171 Conclusion 207 Notes 215 Bibliography 241 Index 253



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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book combines a longstanding interest of mine, the Indian nationalist movement and Gandhi’s role in it, with a more recent engagement with the theory and practice of nonviolent resistance. I became interested in this latter topic after a meeting with Mary King, the US civil rights activist and writer on nonviolence in the USA, Palestine and India. After talking with her, I decided to put on a final-year course at Warwick University on the global history of this form of political action and I would like to thank her for inspiring me in this. She has also alerted me to the issue of the spelling of the term—which can be either ‘non-violence’ or ‘nonviolence’—arguing that hyphenating the word ‘accentuates a negative connotation; without a hyphen, the word becomes a more straightforward affirmation’. It is, in fact, common for those who now research and write on this form of resistance to avoid the hyphen, and I follow this practice here.   I would like also to acknowledge the many excellent students on my course on ‘Nonviolent Resistance: A Global History 1830–2000’, whose input helped me over the years to broaden and strengthen my grasp of the subject. They often found important examples that I had overlooked, enriching our mutual understanding. This all helped me to better situate the way this method had developed in critical ways through the experience of Indian people under imperial rule during the early years of the twentieth century—which is the subject of this volume.   For reading the manuscript and for their helpful comments, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, and Parita Mukta and Sumit Sarkar.

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GLOSSARY

Indigenous people who were described as ‘tribal’ by the British and are now classed as ‘scheduled tribes’ by the modern Indian state Ahimsa Nonviolence ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ ‘God is the Greatest’; an Islamic refrain Atmashakti Self-empowerment Babu Originally a title of respect used in Bengal, but later applied pejoratively for an anglicised elite ‘Bande Mataram’ ‘Praise to the Mother’—that is, the Indian Mother­ land; a nationalist refrain Begar Free labour extracted from subordinates by those in power Bhadralok The ‘respectable people’; in Bengal, the three upper Hindu castes of Brahman, Baidya and Kayashta Bhagavad Gita Literally: ‘The Song of the Lord’; a section of the great Hindu epic, Mahabharata, in which the deity Krishna lays down the principle of righteous action for humans engaged in conflict Bhajan Devotional song, hymn Bharat India Brahman The highest, or priestly, caste among Hindus Chothai A fine for those in tax-arrears of one-quarter the value of the tax Dargah A Muslim shrine built over the grave of a saintly figure and a place of pilgrimage, often associated in South Asia with the Sufis Adivasi



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GLOSSARY

Darshan Dhandak Dharma Dharna

Dharamsala Dhoti Ghazal Goonda Hartal Hijrat Himsa Insaf Jagirdar Jat Khalsa ‘Ki jai!’ Kshatriya Kurta Lathi Ma-bap Mahatma

Auspicious viewing of a deity or person of exceptional power A form of protest found in Himalayan region in which aggrieved people march to the capital and demand an audience with the ruler Moral duty, law; more broadly, religion A form of protest that involved sitting without eating before the door of someone against whom one had a grievance, the aim being to shame the person into submission Rest-house Male garment, a cloth, tied at the waist and wrapped and folded around the legs Form of love poetry popular in India Gangster or hoodlum Form of protest that takes the form of a collective refusal to work or carry on trade Form of protest in which aggrieved subjects march en masse to a different area, where they remain— often camped outside—until the ruler capitulates Violence Justice Holder of the estate that is known as a jagir Caste of respectable peasants found in northern India Government-controlled land in which the occupier pays tax direct to the state Cry of ‘long live!’ The second caste, of rulers and warriors A long shirt-like garment A staff, often metal-tipped, used as a weapon Parents A revered person—the honorific bestowed on M.K. Gandhi An official in charge of a district sub-division Hindu or Jain merchants of the Baniya caste originating in Marwar region of Rajasthan, but found all over India in modern times  

Mamlatdar Marwari

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GLOSSARY

Mela Mitra Mandal Patel Patidar Panchayat Rajput Rakshasa Rishi Ryotwari Sadhu Sahib Sahukar Sanyasi Sarkar Satya Satyagraha

Fair Friends’ Association Village headman The holder of a pati, or share, in the land of a village, and by extension a caste of respectable cultivators An assembly of elders or representatives of village, town, caste or community Caste associated with rulers and warriors that falls within the wider Kshatriya category Demons A Hindu sage of antiquity who gained knowledge of eternal truth through intense meditation The system of land-tax collection in which the occupier pays the tax direct to the state A holy man who has renounced worldly life Gentleman; often used in India as an honorific term for British men Trader-cum-moneylender of a respectable class Holy man, ascetic Government Truth ‘Truth-force’; a method of conflict-resolution advocated by M.K. Gandhi—most typically involving nonviolent resistance A person who engages in satyagraha Service offered as an act of devotion to a deity or cause Divine power and energy Hindu scriptures Self-help, self-production; a process of opting out of the imperial system and establishing parallel national economic and political structures Self-rule A village accountant; under the British an official position Sub-division of a district Festival  

Satyagrahi Seva Shakti Shastras Swadeshi Swaraj Talati Taluka Tamasha

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GLOSSARY

Tinkathiya Vedas Veth Yajna Zamindar Zulum

xii

A form of contract found in Bihar in which peasants agreed to grow indigo on a portion of their land Ancient Hindu scriptures; Vedantism is the philosophy inspired by them Free labour extracted from subordinates by those in power—the Gujarati equivalent of begar A ritual offering Landlord Oppression, terror

INTRODUCTION

Ever since I started taking a serious interest in the study of history over half a century ago, I have been fascinated by the study of mass movements. In my final year of school, 1965–66, my special subject in advanced-level history was the British Chartist Movement of the 1830s and 1840s, a movement that combined the diligent activism of highminded proponents of ‘moral force’ with the more turbulent protest of the advocates of ‘physical force’.1 This tension, I later discovered, was found in many other mass movements, and I have continued to try to elucidate how it has played out in different circumstances and situations. As an undergraduate studying British and European History at the London School of Economics, I read the work of the great English social historians of the day, such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton. The allure of this radical history of social and political conflict—read at a time when student activism was shaking the LSE to its core—was not always shared by my somewhat conservative teachers. At the same time, I became drawn towards the study of the nationalist movements of nineteenth-century Europe, as in Italy and Ireland. I extended this latter interest in my final year, taking my special subject on the history of Indian nationalism, which was taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (historydegree students could at that time choose to do a special subject at any of the then colleges of London University). The focus of this course was on British policy in India and the response by Indian leaders, who came mainly from middle-class backgrounds. Moderate Indian nationalists who had sought to work the constitutional reforms of 1909, 1919  



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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

and 1937 were viewed in a generally positive light. Radical nationalists were often depicted as middle-class outsiders who worked up mass agitations to build an alternative base. In doing so, they were seen to disrupt the smooth transfer of power.2   Though my interest had been stirred by the subject of Indian nationalism, I was not happy with the way it was taught at SOAS. I thus decided in 1970 to continue my postgraduate studies at Sussex University, under the guidance of D.A. Low. I found that Indian freedom fighters such as Gandhi and Nehru were viewed there in an altogether more positive light. Low believed that the way forward lay in studies of the movement at a provincial level, which included trying to understand how regional leaders had managed to mobilise support in their area. Each student was advised to choose one such region. I decided on Gujarat, which was the home area of M.K. Gandhi and several other leading Indian nationalists, such as Vallabhbhai Patel. It had also seen some of the most intense agitations, including being the locale of the most iconic nationalist protest of them all, the salt ­satyagraha of 1930.   The task of writing such a history was a challenging one. Although it was generally agreed that the Indian nationalist movement had developed in the early years of the twentieth century into a mass campaign supported by many different social groups, there was, in the available histories, little convincing analysis of how this transformation had been brought about. Nationalist historians tended to emphasise the ways in which public-spirited leaders had called for a meaningful devolution of constitutional power and how they had to resort to agitation when these just demands were denied by the British. These leaders carried out the historic task of ‘awakening’ and educating the masses, and then mobilising them in a united struggle.3 They were seen to embody the interests of the people. Many works in this genre were either biographical or autobiographical, focussing on such leaders. Some setbacks were seen to have occurred when the masses failed to grasp the directions of the leaders—indulging, for example, in acts of violence that could only be counter-productive. In general, however, the movement was seen to have swelled like a great river on its course to the sea.4   The shortcomings of such writing were pointed out most succinctly by Ravinder Kumar, a former student of Low’s, in 1971:  

 

 

2

INTRODUCTION …we know very little of the changes in popular consciousness, if any, which were inspired by nationalist agitators and nationalist propaganda. What was the complexion of the social groups which participated in the anti-British struggle? What were their motivations and their objectives in doing so? Did participation in nationalist agitations change the political horizons of the social groups concerned? And if so, what was the direction of this change? To such questions the historian of modern India has no answers.5

  Kumar set about rectifying this with great skill and insight in his own research and writing. Notable was a collection of essays that he edited on the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919—the first all-India movement led by M.K. Gandhi. By focusing on one protest, he and other contributors could explore, in depth, the popular dimensions to the protest in different cities and regions of India. While this investigation brought out the great diversity of such protest, it also showed how it was all bound together by an overarching nationalism.6 D.A. Low, a contributor to that volume, subsequently brought together a number of younger historians who developed these insights for the period 1917–47. This was published as Congress and the Raj.7 At that time working for my doctorate under Low, I was a part of this project, my contribution being an in-depth study of the movement amongst the peasants of one district in Gujarat, that of Kheda.8 In this, I sought to link the social history of the people of one district of Gujarat to their strong political engagements in the period after 1917.   Ranajit Guha, a colleague of Low—first at the University of Sussex and then the Australian National University—subsequently began working with some younger scholars on this issue. Three of us—David Arnold, Gyanendra Pandey and myself—had contributed to Congress and the Raj. Our first meeting in 1977 was under the rubric of ‘a new look at Indian nationalism.’ Over the next three years, we thrashed out what we believed to be a new understanding of this history. It led to the publication of the first volume of Subaltern Studies in 1982. In his introduction to this collection of essays, Guha wrote of how the study of Indian nationalism had focussed largely on elites, whether British imperial rulers or middle-class nationalists. British-oriented histories had emphasised the achievements of the imperial rulers and the response by Indians, while Indian elite-oriented histories had valorised the role of those elites, who were depicted as ‘awakening’, educating,  

 

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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

morally improving, and mobilising a passive majority and leading them firmly towards a golden future. The masses were not seen to have a valid political will of their own, being merely guided and led towards this ‘freedom’ by the nationalist elite. The movement became ‘a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite.’ Neither approach provided a convincing explanation for the phenomenon, for they failed to acknowledge ‘the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independent of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism’. Hundreds of thousands, at times millions, of peasants and workers had participated in the movement, and they had done so on their own terms. Guha thus called for a focus on ‘the politics of the people’, whom he characterised as being marked by their subordination. Taking a term from Antonio Gramsci, he defined this as the ‘subaltern.’ The subaltern domain of politics operated relatively independently of elite politics, with its own rules and trajectories. It could be characterised by, among other things, the way that the subaltern organised itself along lines of community, territory and work-place, and by its methods of protest and insurgency. It was infused with the experience of various forms of exploitation by both the imperial and Indian elites, and represented a strong rejection of such oppression. Although the Indian elites led the nationalist movement, they spoke for the masses only partially, and often failed to either address or rectify their many grievances. While they managed to mobilise the subaltern in support of some of the great agitations, producing some ‘some splendid results’, they often ended by compromising with the British in ways that betrayed the interests of the masses. In this, the elites failed to ‘speak for the nation.’9   Subaltern Studies sought to trace the history of subordinated groups in South Asia in all of its fullness, and in this respect went beyond merely the study of Indian nationalism. Here, however, I shall focus on what it said about Indian nationalism. There were several main themes that were developed in both the early volumes and in the separate writings of members of the collective. These were as follows: 1. Different objectives of the elite and subaltern. The elite sought above all to win constitutional power, and deployed agitation to this end. Elite nationalists were not committed to giving the subaltern any real power, often withdrawing protests when they were seen to pose 4

INTRODUCTION

a challenge to Indian elite groups, such as landlords, the business classes, industrialists, and other vested interests. The elites wanted only limited social transformation. Campaigns were thus halted, even if many of the demands of the subaltern classes had not been conceded. A contrast was drawn up between this liberal–constitutional approach in which agitation was deployed to gain concessions from the British, and the more radical objectives of the masses, who were fighting above all for their own social and political self-determination. In this they sought to overturn oppressive structures of power and bring into being a very different type of society. 2. This led to the elites stressing nonviolence, as it posed less threat to their power. The masses, on the other hand, were prepared to use violence where necessary to destroy elite power. 3. The political nature of subaltern protest. While elitist histories generally depicted subaltern protest as ‘pre-political’—in that it was not concerned directly with winning political power at a constitutional level—it had its own distinct politics, and this was as ‘political’ as elite forms of protest, only different. 4. Subaltern mobilisation. This was generally based on horizontal linkages, typically those of community. Community could be conceived in terms of class, caste, territory, or religion, and the boundaries could shift dramatically at different junctures. 5. Subaltern consciousness. This was typically rooted in a subaltern mind-set that blended understanding of their material life with a belief in supernatural powers; Gandhi was often perceived to possess miraculous powers. While from one perspective this represented a form of ‘false consciousness’, their faith in such higher realities allowed them to resist with great courage. 6. Braiding. The nationalist elite sought to link themselves with such subaltern mobilisation, and the subaltern classes in turn sought elite support and leadership in their struggles, which gave rise to a series of temporary alliances between the two. This tendency was characterised as the ‘braiding’ of the two streams. This coming-together was strongest during protests, tending to unravel thereafter. Classes that had supported nationalist protest at one juncture might become disillusioned by the failure of the nationalist-elites to redress their grievances and refuse to participate in future protests. 5

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

7. The fragments. The masses had their own histories, but these were only mentioned in elitist-nationalist narratives when they braided, for these limited periods, with the elite-led movement. As these histories were not accorded any coherence in the writing of nationalist-elite historians, we learn only about ‘fragments’ of subaltern history from such texts. Subaltern history, by contrast, sought to understand the agendas, consciousness, and history of the masses. 8. Phases of movement. The Indian nationalist movement went through three main phases: the moments of departure, manoeuvre and arrival. The first was the period of mild reformist demands, with minimal mass engagement. The second, which was synonymous with the emergence of Gandhi, saw the nationalist elites embracing a populist politics that gave the impression that they were champions of the people. In the third phase, as it became clear after about 1937 that the British would soon yield power, the nationalist elites developed agendas that would allow them to consolidate their class power in an independent India. The populism of the middle period was abandoned (except briefly during the upsurge of 1942) in favour of plans that did little to address the deep structural causes of mass poverty and deprivation.10   Much writing of varying degrees of quality was produced in the years after the first volume of Subaltern Studies appeared, either in direct response to this agenda or in the context of a more general interest in ‘history from below’. There was also much criticism, which in some cases was based on misunderstandings or partial readings. For example, Rajnarayan Chandavarker claimed that historians of the Subaltern Studies group sought to delineate an entirely autonomous subaltern mentality and politics that was based on—it was asserted—stereotypes about the lower classes of India. He saw this as a fundamental fault in the whole Subaltern Studies project.11 This critique ignored the fact that elite/subaltern is a relationship of power (so that there was never any complete autonomy), as well as the idea of the braiding of elite and subaltern streams. As Shail Mayaram, a member of the group, stressed: ‘…the subaltern world is hardly an autonomous realm, but is permeated by representations and categories of colonial history and ethnography; by national and other statist histories and taxonomies; and by hierarchies and pedagogies of religious networks.’12 6

INTRODUCTION

  I have provided some of my own responses to the various criticisms of Subaltern Studies elsewhere, and I do not intend to repeat them here.13 I gradually, however, developed doubts about one aspect of the project, namely its valorisation of a type of popular insurrection that was often violent. In this, the project was influenced by a rhetoric of violence popular in radical circles in the late 1960s and 1970s. As Hannah Arendt noted, this went far beyond anything advocated by Karl Marx. For Marx, the contradictions in a system brought about its end, not violence as such. He regarded the state as an instrument of violence in the command of the ruling class, but the actual power of that class did not consist of or rely on violence. It was defined by the role that the ruling class played in society, or, more exactly, its role in the process of production. It was Frantz Fanon, and his valorisation by leading western intellectuals, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, that changed attitudes on the left in this respect. Indeed, Sartre, in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, goes further than Fanon himself, stating that ‘irrepressible violence … is man recreating himself,’ and that it is through ‘mad fury’ that ‘the wretched of the earth’ can ‘become men.’ He claimed that: ‘Violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.’ As Arendt comments in her book OnViolence: ‘If this were true, then revenge would be the cure-all for most of our ills.’14 This was all reinforced by the apparent successes of the Chinese Revolution (with Mao’s famous dictum that ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’), the Vietnam resistance to at first the French and then the US military, and the Cuban Revolution. US students who opposed the Vietnam War were met by excessive violence on the part of the police, which led some to call for a violent response. The whole climate was stoked at that time also by the violent rhetoric of the Black Power movement.   India then had its own student radicals, who provided a powerful critique of the reactionary politicians who controlled the nominally democratic political system of India, with their contradictory and generally hypocritical appeals to ‘socialism’ laced with authoritarian demands for ‘discipline’ as ‘the need of the hour.’ Some intellectuals began to valorise the ‘exemplary’ and ‘cathartic’ violence deployed by the peasant rebels of north Bengal, the Naxalites. This spirit came to inform the corpus of work associated with Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha, for example, held that the modern Indian state had inherited 7

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

from the British a police apparatus that it continued to use ruthlessly to crush any dissent.15 If this was the case, then the only effective counter appeared to be revolutionary violence.   Following this, in his important book Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Ranajit Guha had legitimised the violence of peasant revolt as a necessary counter ‘in the last resort’ to the violence of semi-feudal oppression.16 Subaltern Studies itself became known for its critique of M.K. Gandhi’s stress on nonviolence, the argument being that he sought to channel the discontent of the poor and oppressed into movements that posed no real challenge to the India elites. This was the subject of Ranajit Guha’s chapter in Volume 7, ‘Discipline and Mobilise’. Gandhi, he argued, had a contempt and fear for the masses, labelling them a violence-prone ‘mob’. In 1921, the Mahatma had railed against what he called ‘mobocracy’, which he claimed was undermining the Noncooperation Movement of that year. In a memorable phrase, Guha described this as ‘an ugly word greased with loathing, a sign of craving for control and its frustration, [that] is lifted directly out of the lexicon of elitist usage…’17  The Subaltern Studies evaluation of Gandhian nonviolence was rooted in the critique of Gandhian politics by the Marxist activist and historian, Rajani Palme Dutt. Following a longstanding Marxian line of thought, Palme Dutt saw such political engagement as essentially reformist and in the interests of the elites.18 He described Gandhian ‘nonviolence’ as a ‘seemingly innocent humanitarian or expedient term [that] contained concealed within it, not only the refusal of the final struggle, but the thwarting also of the immediate struggle by the attempt to conciliate the interests of the masses with the big bourgeoisie and landlord interests which were inevitably opposed to any decisive struggle.’19   At the time, I largely endorsed this position, even though my own research and writings in the 1970s and 1980s were on nonviolent engagements—namely by peasant nationalists in Gujarat and in a social movement by adivasis (indigenous peoples) in South Gujarat.20 This was at a time when peasant insurrection was seen widely as an emancipatory force in the world. During the 1980s this optimism began to fade, in part as it became apparent that the Naxalite movement had either been crushed or driven into pockets in adivasi areas, in part because it  

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INTRODUCTION

became clear that peasant wars in places such as China and Vietnam had not liberated the masses in ways that had been claimed, and in part because of the emergence in India of an ominous new politics of dissent. This latter force grew from the discontent of a squeezed middle class that resented the reservations in education and employment provided by the state for certain subaltern communities, and drove a politics that created solidarities by whipping up hatred against such groups. These new politics found their expression first in Gujarat—in 1981 and 1985—where I was living and working at that time. They assumed a national presence from 1990 onwards, with the launch of an explosive national-level anti-reservation movement that led to considerable violence. The fundamentalist Hindus of the so-called Sangh Parivar responded to this conflict between high and low caste Hindus by launching a movement that had the aim of destroying the historic Babri Masjid (mosque) in the northern Indian town of Ajodhya and replacing it with a Ram temple. In this way, tensions between classes were dissipated through a campaign of attrition against the Muslim minority in India. This largely succeeded in its aims, with large numbers of Hindus being mobilised. The campaign culminated in the violent destruction of the mosque in December 1992 while state forces stood by watching, which was followed immediately by murderous attacks on Muslims throughout India.   Subaltern Studies was now faced with a very different political climate in India. Some held that such religious violence—however deplorable—appeared to reflect genuinely popular sentiments. Sumit Sarkar, a highly-respected historian who had been associated with Subaltern Studies in the previous decade, argued that this revealed the pitfalls of the celebration of popular militancy; this showed the danger of the project being taken to justify such a politics of hatred.21 It could not be assumed that mass protest would always be a liberating force.   My own personal response was to turn back to Gandhi, and revisit the comments he had made about ‘mobocracy’. Although I would never use such a term—or indeed the word ‘mob’—I felt that we needed to place Gandhi’s feelings in the context of his lifelong campaign against all politics of attrition and hatred, and particularly communal violence. He used this term in the context of his first-hand experience of the venom that came to the fore in violent street-fight 9

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

ing. He could see nothing constructive or redeeming in such animosity, and made it one of his life-long missions to provide an alternative. This was indeed the most difficult of his missions in India. Despite many failures, he continued to struggle for his vision to the end. In his final year of life in 1947–8, he managed, through his personal influence, to subdue the post-Partition violence in Calcutta and then championed the human rights of the Muslims of Delhi—which led directly to his assassination on 30 January 1948.22 My feelings in these respects informed the book I wrote on Gandhi and his legacy in India and the world, published in 2004 as Gandhi in His Time and Ours.23 I was further inspired by some remarks made to me by Mary King, the US civil rights activist and scholar, on the neglect by historians of the study of nonviolence as against warfare, which led me to develop a course at Warwick University on ‘Nonviolent Resistance: A Global History 1830–2000’. This course, which I taught up until my retirement in 2013, sought to trace the world-wide history of the development of a form of political engagement that refuses to meet the violence of the state or local elites with any counter-violence.   Research for all this revealed a field of scholarship that I had not paid much attention to previously: that of the study of the role of nonviolent dissent and conflict resolution in the creation of strong civil societies with democratic cultures.24 Many of the writers in this tradition have focused on the techniques and strategies deployed in a range of nonviolent movements throughout the world, bringing out how successful they have often been. Most notable in this respect has been Gene Sharp, who has argued that nonviolence deployed in a strategic manner has provided a powerful and practical means to overcome even the most autocratic of regimes and most entrenched forms of social injustice, as seen in movements ranging from the Civil Rights movement in the USA; the movement against the Shah of Iran in the 1970s; the Polish Solidarity movement; the movement that brought the downfall of Marcos in the Philippines; and Milossevicc in Serbia, to name but a few notable examples.25 Sharp’s insights have been reinforced and given greater credence in a range of other studies.26 Others have described the potential for nonviolent intervention between conflicting parties, and for mediation and conflict resolution.27 These various studies have all brought out the many positive and important successes  

 

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INTRODUCTION

achieved by nonviolent interventions during the second half of the twentieth century.   These studies generally emphasise the practical rather than ethical advantages of the nonviolent method. John Rawls, for example, holds that it appeals to a common sense of justice: Being an appeal to the moral basis of public life, civil disobedience is a political and not primarily a religious act. It addresses itself to the common principles of justice which men can require one another to follow and not to the aspirations of love which they cannot. Moreover by taking part in civilly disobedient acts one does not foreswear indefinitely the idea of forcible resistance; for if the appeal against injustice is repeatedly denied, then the majority has declared its intention to invite submission or resistance and the latter may conceivably be justified even in a democratic regime.28

  Sharp emphasises that most participants in nonviolent struggles are not believers in nonviolence as an ethical principle, but agree merely to act under nonviolent discipline for the duration of the conflict.29   One of the most compelling arguments of these scholars—one that stemmed from arguments put forward originally by Gandhi—was that means determine ends. Unleashing violence is like letting a genie out of a bottle; once released, it is not easy to put back. Violent revolutions must often be maintained by the continuing application of violence by the new rulers. Revolutionaries who have learned to settle matters using violence frequently find it hard to adapt to more peaceable means after a change of power has occurred. Violent forms of insurrection have, as a rule, involved mainly the able-bodied and males, with women, the elderly and children having marginal roles. The need for arms and training similarly excludes many. Violence is either the method preferred by small and secretive cells that can ignore the need for mass mobilisation in its politics of terror, or it is the method of relatively isolated groups such as the adivasis of central India, who may create liberated zones in their forest and mountain tracts, but have little or no capacity for extending such a politics into the wider society beyond unless there is a breakdown in the coercive machinery of the state. Nonviolence also encourages dialogue and negotiation, and does not alienate potential allies. It is thus a far more effective force for building a future democracy.30 11

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

  What the literature on nonviolent resistance revealed, moreover, was that this method has proved effective time and again, at a purely pragmatic level, all over the world in the twentieth century and beyond. A recent survey within this tradition of writing has examined 323 major campaigns that occurred between 1900 and 2006 that have sought regime change, the end to foreign occupation, or secession. Of these, 217 were mainly violent, while 106 were predominantly nonviolent. It should be noted that in most movements there was a mix of violence and nonviolence—what mattered was how a movement categorised itself and the predominance of one strategy over the other in practice. The authors found that the frequency of movements that have been generally nonviolent has increased and that their success rate has improved over time. By contrast, the success rate of insurgencies that have been mostly violent has declined. In fact, during this period, nonviolent movements were twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.31 This is a significant finding, and one that gives, I believe, grounds for hope.   One problem that I encountered in looking at this literature, was the lack of any consistent dialogue between authors writing in this tradition and historians and social scientists who had studied movements by workers and peasants—the tradition in which my own history-writing had been forged. While the latter drew strongly on Marxist theory and radical-socialist traditions of history-writing, the former were mainly from a background in nonviolent and peace activism; they engaged with Gandhian theory and its offshoots, and their work was published in a distinct field of studies. A theorist of nonviolent strategy like Gene Sharp used terms in different ways to social scientists. For example, when he talked of ‘power’ he meant the power of the masses to refuse to consent to their own oppression, not the coercive force used by oppressors to command obedience, or—in the Gramscian and Foucauldian senses—of the ideological or hegemonic forms of control that permeate society. Sharp held that a government’s control over its subjects is based on their obedience and cooperation. Power is thus derived from resources within society, rather than imposed on people from above through sanctions, repression, or ideology. Rulers depend on obedience by subjects, rather than in any central way by state violence, and if this obedience is withdrawn, a state cannot survive in a viable way. In contrast to Marxian beliefs that the state apparatus must 12

INTRODUCTION

be captured by any means possible, or guerrilla warfare theory that argues the state must be worn down over time through a long ‘people’s war’, the nonviolent approach holds that revolutionary change is best brought about through nonviolent means.32   For a historian, a further problem with this literature is that it tends to treat the history of nonviolent and civil forms of dissent in a very cursory way. Thus, in Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp provides a brief history of nonviolent resistance that starts with a glance at the ‘preGandhian’ development of the method from the eighteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century, and then goes on to make a few very general observations about Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement.33 Some of the studies that have attempted a more historical perspective have been somewhat ahistorical in their approach, wrenching past protests out of context to make them exemplars of nonviolence. Reading a work like Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence:The History of a Dangerous Idea, one could be excused for thinking that this form of political engagement had been around for two millennia or more.34 As it is, as I shall seek to show in this book, the term ‘nonviolent resistance’ was unknown before the twentieth century. Being a historian, I prefer a more genealogical method, in which we trace elements that have over time fed into the development of this form of protest. My quest for such genealogies was one of the tasks set in developing my course at Warwick on the history of nonviolent resistance. This became as much a learning process for me as for my students.   As a historian of modern India, I could hardly be satisfied by the way that the history of nonviolent protest in the sub-continent was depicted in most of these studies. In Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power and The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp provided case studies of Gandhi’s campaign in Champaran in 1917, Vaikom in 1924–25, of Civil Disobedience in 1930–31, and his fast in Delhi in January 1948. The 1930–31 movement dominated the book, with four of the seven chapters of GandhiWields theWeapon of Moral Power being on this—two of the other struggles given one chapter each. In The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp provides brief sketches of two Gandhian satyagrahas: Vaikom in 1924–25 and the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930– 31. In the latter section, he analyses only that element of the protest that involved breaking the salt laws, namely the Salt Satyagraha of 13

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

1930.35 Sharp made no attempt to analyse the way in which the Indian national movement developed under Gandhi’s leadership over three decades in the way a historian would have done.   This set the pattern for much subsequent writing in the field. Particular campaigns were described and analysed, but not situated in any adequate historical context. Thus, when referring to the Indian nationalist movement led by Gandhi, such studies have tended to focus on his most notable and successful campaigns while marginalising or ignoring others. The Salt Satyagraha of 1930 is cited time and again as, in the words of Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, it is ‘of particular interest to those interested in strategic nonviolent conflict.’36 It is taken to be exemplary because it involved a clear-cut strategy that had well-defined goals. The two authors claim that it mobilised more Indians in the struggle for independence than any other single campaign.37 They argue that it, above all, revealed Gandhi’s strategic acumen, and that it was this, rather than either his charisma or the supposed benevolence of British rule—or even an assumed propensity of Indians towards nonviolence—that provided the conditions for all that this campaign achieved.38 They assert that this satyagraha, and the wider Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930–31, laid ‘the groundwork for subsequent struggles for independence that ended in success.’39 They say nothing about the history of the 1932–47 period, leaving an impression that freedom came entirely as a result of Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle. This is not a view that would be endorsed by any credible Indian historian.40   This general approach continues to be seen in the burgeoning literature on nonviolent resistance over the past two decades. The only study in this field to provide a full-length study of one movement led by Gandhi has been by Mary King, in her book on the Vykom Satyagraha of 1924–25, published in 2015.41 Otherwise, the movement is generally referred to in the introduction or in an early chapter on the evolution of the method, with the focus being on Gandhi’s particular techniques.42 Stephen Zunes, Lester Kurtz, and Sarah Asher thus emphasise the strategic importance of Gandhi’s work, arguing: ‘While his nonviolence was rooted in his deep religious faith, Gandhi was also a sophisticated political strategist who greatly advanced nonviolence as a successful method of struggle even by those who did not share his entire 14

INTRODUCTION

moral framework.’43 For Sharon Nepstad, Gandhi’s importance lies in his provision to his followers of (what she defines as) the six strategies for withdrawing consent from authoritarian regimes in a way that could bring about their downfall.44   A critique of this approach was developed first in Britain, coming from a rather different radical nonviolent tradition, that of the peace activism focussed initially around the monthly paper Peace News and then the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). A notable figure in this respect was Michael Randle, who was a leading proponent of CND direct action who served two spells in prison due to his principled stands on this and other issues. He went on to carry out postgraduate research at the Department for Peace Studies at Bradford University, a centre that has been associated with several notable scholars in this field such as Howard Clark and Andrew Rigby. In his writing on what he calls ‘civil resistance’, Randle has tried to situate the method in a clear historical context, namely in the social and political changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.45 Perhaps the most detailed critical analysis of the American approach was provided by Bob Overy, who wrote an excellent Ph.D. thesis at Bradford in 1982, which remains unpublished.46 It was completed before the real explosion occurred in the literature on nonviolent strategy, and its focus was on the pioneer thinkers in this field. It is nonetheless a substantial critique that can be applied to much of the more recent writing in this field, and one, moreover, that has not been seriously engaged with—except by those associated, in often overlapping ways, with Peace News and the Bradford department.47   Overy argues that while the authors in this field have focussed on a set of oppositional techniques that they attribute to Gandhi, they fail to contextualise the strategies that Gandhi adopted in their time and place in Indian history. In his detailed analysis of the protests that Gandhi led in India between 1915 and 1922, Overy shows how Gandhi was constantly adapting and modifying his methods in reaction to changing political circumstances, thus bringing out the dynamism and sheer flexibility of Gandhi’s approach in a way that the nonviolent resistance theorists fail to do. Such theorists tend to focus on what they regard as exemplary campaigns that typified the Gandhian method; most notably the Salt Satyagraha of 1930. The emphasis is on acts of national-level  

15

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

mass civil disobedience—something that Gandhi was, in practice, reluctant to sanction. Indeed, he did so only on two main occasions: during the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, which, for Gandhi, proved a disaster, and the successive Civil Disobedience Movements of 1930–31 and 1932–33. During the other two main mass movements— Noncooperation in 1920–22 and Quit India in 1942—Gandhi adopted very different strategies. These two protests are generally absent from the literature on nonviolent strategy. Overy concludes that nationallevel campaigns of carefully-choreographed civil disobedience can hardly be taken as typifying Gandhi’s approach. What we require, he argues, are studies that bring out the subtlety and adaptability of Gandhi’s method. He does this in his thesis by studying Gandhi as an organiser taking decisions in particular historical situations and in reaction to ongoing events. He also emphasises the importance of the scale of different protest campaigns, whether they were local and thus more easily directed and controlled, or national-level, and thus very difficult to co-ordinate in a way that conformed to Gandhi’s intentions.48   In addition, Overy argues, they fail to appreciate the importance in nonviolent strategy of what Gandhi called the ‘constructive programme’—that is, educational and developmental activities designed to relieve poverty and build self-reliance that are organised by committed activists. Gene Sharp, for example, almost entirely ignores the role of constructive work in his magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.49 For Gandhi, success in nonviolent struggles could be achieved only through intense constructive work at the heart of every campaign. This was carried out by local-level activists organising a range of projects such as hand-spinning and weaving of cotton cloth, running nationalist schools, holding local arbitration courts, fighting untouchability and religious antagonisms, promoting village sanitation and agricultural improvements, improving the living and working conditions of industrial workers in the cities, and so on. Classically, such work would be centred on local ashrams where Gandhians lived and worked amongst the people. Such activities could be carried out by anyone, however poor and marginalised, and thus linked the middleclass leaders with the people. It allowed a firm network of local leaders to be forged, who could lead protests at this level that fed into either local or national-level campaigns. Gandhi saw this as building swaraj 16

INTRODUCTION

from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down methods used hitherto by elite politicians. Overy argues that the literature in this field has an unrelenting emphasis on nonviolent conflicts, and particularly campaigns of civil disobedience. With such a focus, it becomes hard to understand how Gandhi’s campaigns were built up and sustained. A crucial element in mobilising people before any conflict was, he held, missed in all this.50   As it is, almost no specialists in the study of Indian history have paid any regard to either this whole field of study or the debates within it. In the present study, I shall attempt to provide a more rounded and contextualised history of such struggle by Indian nationalists. While doing this, I shall make use of the literature on nonviolent action to inform my analysis. The study will be in two volumes. In this, the first, I begin by examining the development of civil forms of protest in India under the rubric of ‘passive resistance’. The technique was devised initially in India by nationalist activists who were impressed by the success of campaigns known then as ‘passive resistance’ in Europe. The focus in these campaigns was on efficacy rather than ethics. This tradition continued in India into the Gandhian period, and it will be one of the tasks of this book to show how this created tensions within the movement. The method of ‘passive resistance’ was taken up and expanded by Gandhi during his years in South Africa. As this provides a critical element of the history, the second chapter focuses on this movement against racial discrimination, bringing out how it gave rise to Gandhi’s novel notion of ‘satyagraha’. In the third chapter, I shall go on to show how these methods were applied in practice in three movements in rural India that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century. The chapter starts with a struggle in princely India that had nothing to do with Gandhi initially. This brings out how such resistance was already being developed in popular local campaigns, showing how in time they linked up with Gandhi and began to apply a more strict and principled form of nonviolence. The other two struggles—in Champaran and Kheda—were led directly by Gandhi. Although I have written already on the Kheda Satyagraha of 1918 in my book Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, I shall treat the topic in a new way here, focussing on its importance in the history of nonviolent struggle. In the fourth chapter, I examine the way Gandhi began to focus on the cen 17

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

trality of ‘nonviolence’ to his technique only after his return to India from South Africa in 1915. In this, he came into conflict with Hindu nationalists who held that a supposed Indian civilisational emphasis on ahimsa (nonviolence) had weakened the country, leaving it open to conquest by outsiders. In the fifth chapter, I examine the first major all-India campaign led by Gandhi, the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919. This was in reaction to oppressive legislation being introduced by the British to counter a supposed threat from violent extremist nationalists. The nonviolent protest met with a draconian reaction in Punjab, creating—what is called in the literature on nonviolent resistance— ‘backfire’, where terror by the state serves to alienate moderates and thus create the conditions for even more powerful resistance. This led into the major anti-British campaign of 1920–22, the Noncooperation Movement, which is the subject of the next volume.   In all this, I shall seek to show how nonviolent strategy was always contested in India, and that thought and action along such lines was by no means the sole preserve of Gandhi and his followers. Some of the campaigns that are examined here were confined to single localities and very particular issues. Others were for all of India, with ambitious demands. Their relative success or failure was often determined by this. I shall also engage with something that is relatively ignored in the literature on nonviolent resistance, namely constructive activity designed to create alternative institutions to those of the imperial rulers. I shall also seek to show how the masses responded to and perceived such forms of political action. It will be my argument that the poor and marginalised brought their own perspectives to bear on this, and created their own distinct approaches, which were often in tension with those adopted by the nationalist leaders. In this, I shall draw on what I have learnt from social historians writing in the radical tradition, including those in Subaltern Studies. One of the most important of these is the understanding that there were profound tensions and differences between the politics of the elites and masses, and that mass action was driven by a strong political consciousness.51   To be able to appreciate how these contested strategies were situated in actual struggles and periods and elucidate exactly how the notion of ‘nonviolent resistance’ was forged from this history, it is necessary to go into considerable historical depth. Because of this, I am not 18

INTRODUCTION

in these two volumes attempting to provide an account from the time the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885 to the winning of independence from British rule in 1947. I am, rather, focussing on the formative years for nonviolent nationalism, that is from 1905–1922. In this, the next volume will be devoted to the first prolonged all-India struggle led by Gandhi—the Noncooperation Movement of 1920–22. This campaign brought huge numbers of Indians of all social classes into the movement. Though hitherto largely ignored in the literature on nonviolent resistance, its careful study sheds, I believe, much light on the whole issue. It reveals how contested and shifting the category of ‘nonviolence’ was in the Indian context. Those involved at every level learnt lessons from this history, some of which were positive for the future of nonviolent struggle, others negative.   The two volumes will make extensive use of the many scholarly studies that have been carried out on the Indian nationalist movement in the past fifty years or so. There has, in particular, been much excellent writing on the movement in individual provinces and in certain localities. I shall utilise these alongside other sources, such as the collected works of Gandhi and other leading nationalists, and material that I have collected in my own archival and other research over the years—which has been focussed primarily on western India and particularly Gujarat—to attempt a history that is sensitive to local particularities whilst also illuminating the movement at the all-India level. It will, I trust, provide a useful intervention in the literature on nonviolent resistance. It will also, I hope, provide a fresh perspective on the history of Indian nationalism.

19

1

‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN INDIA, 1905–09

The nonviolent campaigns that form the subject of this book were directed primarily against the British and their Indian allies. British rule over India was multi-dimensional, and opposition could be directed against a range of imperial authorities as well as British businessmen and tea and indigo-planters. There were protests directed at the imperial government demanding devolution of power to Indians, and local struggles against oppressive rule by British tax officials, forest officers or liquor licence administrators, as well as against landlords, moneylenders and religious authorities, whose repressive authority was backed by either the imperial or princely states.   The British Indian Empire was, in the words of Sumit Sarkar, ‘an autocracy veiled thinly by an ideology of paternalistic benevolence…’1 It was headed by the Viceroy, or representative of the British monarch in India, who though responsible to the British Cabinet and Parliament, was, in practice, left to rule with few checks. India was divided into a series of provinces under Governors or Lieutenant Governors who ran their regions with considerable autonomy. White officials of the provincial bureaucracies were the effective rulers throughout large swathes of the sub-continent, and they combined executive with judicial power. There were, from 1861, legislative councils at both the all-India and provincial levels, but they consisted predominantly of British officials, along with a minority of nominated Indian members. They were consultative bodies with limited authority.2

21

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

  The British maintained their control through a combination of coercion, persuasion and divide-and-rule. They had conquered India initially through force, and then maintained a large and mobile army to quell any attempt at rebellion—most notably that of 1857–58. This insurrection was suppressed with extreme brutality, with large numbers of summary executions of anyone suspected of disloyalty to the British. In Delhi, the British troops who captured the city launched, in the words of Kathyrn Tidrick, ‘an orgy of killing and looting’ while the authorities looked on. ‘Blind vengeance was the order of the day.’3 The British employed a large police force that was known for its casual brutality, as well as local officials who had few qualms about the methods they used to collect taxes. They believed in the application of quick and ‘firm’ forms of corporal punishment—such as whippings—as a deterrent against misbehaviour, and indeed claimed moral virtue for such punishment.4 They relied on loyalist landlords and other local elites turning a blind eye while they coerced their tenants and dependents pitilessly. The British deployed a penal code that made much dissidence a criminal offence. They also forged alliances with the princes who continued to rule large areas of the subcontinent, helping them to maintain ‘peace’ in their realms.   As for persuasion, the British maintained an intricate social hierarchy—placing themselves at the apex—which was bound together by ceremonies, rituals and titles that rewarded loyal subjects. Around themselves they created an aura of power and invincibility, which in its most extreme form could lead to certain officers becoming objects of worship.5 They created a meritocratic bureaucracy, claiming that it governed with honesty and a paternalistic concern for the masses. They established a rule of codified law to which—in theory at least—all had to submit regardless of status and ethnic background. They produced a large corpus of scholarly knowledge, especially histories, which sought to portray the British as more advanced and civilised than those over whom they ruled. They supported certain social reforms, such the better treatment of women and the education of so-called ‘depressed classes’, such as the untouchables. They maintained that once Indians advanced to the exalted social and political levels that prevailed in Britain they would gradually be able to withdraw, allowing the ‘natives’ to rule themselves as a self-governing dominion at some future stage. 22

‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN INDIA, 1905–09

  Notions of ‘improvement’ had their attractions for western-­educated Indians, and Indian nationalists initially endorsed this imperial agenda in important ways. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, largely represented in its early years the interests of a middle class that had benefitted from British rule, and which now claimed it had reached that stage of civilised development that fitted them for a limited degree of representation within the hallowed realms of imperial power. Theirs was a politics of petitioning and respectful requests for the British to honour their liberal promises.6 While British liberals generally agreed that some small concessions should be made, British conservatives mostly responded with a mixture of racist belittling of the educated Indians who made such demands and executive measures designed to marginalise them as much as possible.7 Here, the tactic of divide-andrule came into play. In some cases, peasants were set against the middle classes through legislation that was meant to favour the former against the latter, as in the legislation of 1901 directed against middle-class Hindu moneylenders in Punjab. In others, Muslims were encouraged to organise themselves as a distinct bloc against what the British depicted as a Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress.   One notorious measure of this sort was imposed by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, a conservative imperialist who had little time for educated middle-class Indians. He declared in 1905 that the province of Bengal would henceforth be divided into an eastern and a western section. The scheme had been under development since 1903. It was claimed that it was a matter of administrative convenience, as the province had become too large and unwieldy. The real motive was otherwise, namely to undermine the power of a class that had played a leading role in the early Congress, that of the well-educated high-caste Bengalis of Calcutta, many of whom owned estates in the Muslimmajority eastern part of the province. By strengthening the hand of the Muslim majority, it was believed that the vocal minority could be put in their place. The British saw that in Bengal, as well as in other parts of India such as the Marathi-speaking regions of western India, local nationalist sentiments gained their strength from groups that shared a common language and culture. In Bengal, these were the Bengalispeaking Hindu gentry, who were known as ‘Babus’ or the bhadralok. In Maharashtra, they were the Marathi-speaking Brahmans who had ruled 23

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

the region during the eighteenth century and up to the time they were defeated by the British in 1818. They still keenly resented being conquered and subjugated by these foreigners, and they were at the fore in Congress politics in western India. To combat the latter ‘threat’, the British placed the Marathi-speaking region of Berar with the Central Provinces rather than Bombay Presidency, where the large majority of Marathi-speakers resided.   In dividing Bengal in 1905, the British included other regions in the two new provinces, in a way that was designed to minimise the power of the Bengali-speaking elites. East Bengal and Assam were lumped together, while West Bengalis were now overwhelmed, population-wise, by the peoples of Bihar and Orissa. When announcing the partition of Bengal, Lord Curzon arrogantly declared that the best argument in favour of it was that the Indian National Congress opposed it.8 It was this measure that gave rise to the first major nationalist campaign of protest in India, that of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. In this campaign, nonviolent forms of resistance were deployed for the first time in a significant way, under the rubric of ‘passive resistance’. This mode of confrontation forms the subject of this first chapter. We shall start with the movement in Bengal, examining the way in which such a method was both theorised and applied in the years 1905–08. We shall also say something about the history of ‘passive resistance’ in other contexts, with the aim of showing the connections between the Indian upsurge and a much wider and more global politics of protest at that time. The following chapter will go on to look at the ways in which this method was developed in new ways amongst Indians, in a very different context but in the same period, namely by M.K. Gandhi in South Africa.  

The Swadeshi Movement—initial phase As Sumit Sarkar has shown in his important history of the Swadeshi Movement, Curzon and his colleagues viewed the Bengali ‘Babus’ as windbags, who would no doubt make a lot of noise about the new administrative measure, but whose clamour would soon fade away. This was a bad miscalculation. Bengal had for many centuries—and long before British rule—formed a single administrative unit. Despite its religious divides, there was a strong linguistic and cultural unity. This 24

‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN INDIA, 1905–09

had been greatly strengthened during the nineteenth century, during the so-called ‘Bengal Renaissance’, with a thriving literary culture focused on Calcutta, then the capital city of British India.Young people came to Calcutta for their education, and returned to their localities for work. The outburst in 1905 reflected a strong patriotism that existed throughout the Bengali-speaking world. In it, there was much wounded pride; Bengalis had long endured the arrogance and racial discrimination of the British, being reminded constantly of their supposed moral inferiority to Europeans. Smarting from such insults, the Bengali Hindu elites shared a perceived subordination with the mass of the people of the province, though they had the misplaced conceit that they could act as spokesmen representing the best interests of the lower classes. They depicted the partition as a vivisection of the great ‘Motherland’—beautiful Bengal. Inspiration for their resistance was found in a range of sources, notably the nationalist movements of subjugated people in Europe, in particular, that of the Irish; the revolt of the Boers in South Africa against the British; the growing ascendency of an Asian power, Japan, that at that very moment was taking on and defeating Tsarist Russia in battle; and the ongoing boycott of American goods by the Chinese in protest at US immigration laws. A new confidence that the Indian people could resist in similar ways grew during the first decade of the twentieth century.9   The partition of Bengal was announced for 16 October 1905, triggering what Anindita Ghose has described as ‘the first ever concentrated and sustained mass protest in the sub-continent.’10 The great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, suggested that 16 October be observed as a day of mourning, with people tying threads around each other’s wrists as a sign of the unbreakable bond between East and West. In Calcutta, there was a huge procession, people walking barefoot as a sign of mourning and ending with an immersion in the Ganga. The inauguration ceremony of the new governor of East Bengal, Bampfylde Fuller, was largely boycotted. Volunteers helped enforce the boycott, sometimes physically. This led to some clashes, particularly with Muslims who did not support the protest. Fuller asked for extraordinary powers to handle this, and the Viceroy obliged, allowing him to rule by ordinance. Public assemblies and processions were banned, and the cry ‘Bande Mataram!’ (‘Praise to the Mother!’—that is, the Motherland)  

 

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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

outlawed. Non-Bengali policemen were brought in to suppress the movement, launching a reign of terror in which anyone suspected of supporting the protest was attacked and women allegedly raped.11   In Calcutta, protests were staged initially in the ‘Indian areas’, thus avoiding an out-and-out challenge to the British in their sphere of the city. Anindita Ghose has noted how the great open space surrounding Fort William, that was known as the Maidan, had been established originally to protect the fort, as it permitted a clear line of fire in case of disturbance. Such park-like spaces were not seen as spheres for the ‘public’ so much expressions of imperial power. Europeans used the Maidan for their evening rides and walks. Rather than challenge this segregation in an overtly confrontational way, the nationalists held their first meetings in halls, theatres, temples, community grounds, the large mansions of the bhadralok aristocracy, and in smaller private residences. Students met in their schools and colleges. Oaths of support were sworn in temples, notably at the greatest of all, Kalighat. Soon, the protests were spilling into the streets of north Calcutta—away from the areas associated most obviously with imperial power—with mass processions and singing of patriotic songs. The town hall, which lay on the border between the northern and southern zones, also became a site for mass meetings. The imperial zone was breached for the first time on 22 September 1905, when students who had come for a meeting at the town hall spilled over into the Maidan and held their own break-away demonstration there. They abused European passers-by, and incidents of stone-throwing were alleged. The police commissioner threatened that if the Maidan was used in this way again, the protestors would be dispersed by force. Soon after, he issued a formal ban on all meetings in the Maidan. The fact that this had not hitherto been considered necessary revealed just how much the atmosphere in Calcutta had been transformed by late 1905.12   The call emerged for a general boycott of all British merchandise, and its replacement with Indian-made, or swadeshi, goods. This reflected the widespread nationalist belief that India had been impoverished under British rule; Indian-manufactured goods had been replaced with expensive imports from Europe, leaving the mass of the Indian people dependent on agriculture and being paid depressed prices for their produce at the same time as being grossly overtaxed. This was known  

26

‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN INDIA, 1905–09

as ‘the drain of wealth’ from India to Britain, and swadeshi was conceived as the remedy for it. Sarkar has defined swadeshi as the ‘sentiment … that indigenous goods should be preferred by consumers even if they were more expensive than and of inferior quality to their imported substitutes, and that it was the patriotic duty of men with capital to pioneer such industries even if profits initially might be minimal or nonexistent.’13 Although this idea had been around for some time, it only became taken up as a solid political programme in reaction to the partition decision of 1905. It was popularised in newspapers and pamphlets, in speeches, songs and popular plays. Shops and markets selling foreign products were picketed. Such goods were said to be not only an economic evil, but also a threat to the caste purity of the Indian people, as they were allegedly contaminated with ritually impure substances. There was a lot of optimism, often naïve, that the boycott would, in itself, generate indigenous industry, with swadeshi depicted as a kind of panacea for all India’s ills. The more realistic leaders understood, however, that little could be achieved economically without political freedom, and for them boycott was merely one element within the wider campaign.14   Another important element in the movement was the project to establish a system of national education, in order to provide a substitute to the education available in government-sponsored schools and colleges. Many young people attending such institutions took part in the initial protests, and the government issued a circular on 22 October 1905 that forbade students from attending political rallies. A second circular threatened heads of schools and colleges that grants would be withdrawn if they failed to stop such activities. The response was a call for a national education programme.15 For many years, nationalists had criticised official education for its focus on the arts rather than science subjects. It was claimed that the British wanted only subordinate clerics who would serve its rule, rather than technically-skilled people who might develop industries that threatened British economic dominance. There was also a feeling that with English as the sole medium of higher education, students whose grasp of the language was poor got by through parrot-learning and cramming rather than by developing their critical facilities. It created a small elite of those able to master the language, with Bengali-speakers becoming second-class subjects. The  

27

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19

call was therefore for a system of education that was rooted in Bengali, producing intellectuals who could operate within vernacular idioms, developing a flourishing modern Bengali culture.16   Leadership of the Swadeshi Movement came initially from longstanding Congress stalwarts, who were often employed in the liberal professions. They had campaigned in the press, petitioned the authorities, and held protest meetings when the partition was being discussed by the British from 1903 onwards. Many hitherto loyalist landlords joined them in this, as many had their estates in East Bengal. The leaders had pleaded the case like lawyers, arguing that the proposal made no administrative sense and that Bengal would be undermined as an economic unit. The British ignored their pleas, revealing such mild methods as useless. Once partition became a settled fact, the leaders adopted a more aggressive stance. They now advocated boycott and swadeshi. At the forefront was Surendranath Banerji, who toured the province making impassioned speeches, encouraging people to take a vow before a Hindu deity to support swadeshi and the boycott.17 Matters came to a head at the Bengal Provincial Congress that was held at Barisal town in East Bengal in April 1906. There was a procession with cries of the banned slogan ‘Bande Mataram’. It was lathi-charged, with several being injured. Banerji was arrested, and fined 400 rupees. At this, one of the leaders declared: ‘This is the end, the beginning of the end of the British rule in India.’ The sessions then began, but on the first afternoon the local police superintendent, F.E. Kemp, came and presented an order to stop further proceedings. Everyone quietly dispersed. Some defied the ban by holding another meeting nearby. The radical leader Bipinchandra Pal toured the area holding further meetings—with another upcoming radical in his entourage, Aurobindo Ghose—giving dozens of passionate speeches. Closed-door meetings were held with local nationalists in which Ghose came over as the most uncompromising of the leaders. When a local magistrate banned one meeting, several said that they should just give their speeches elsewhere, but Ghose insisted that they had to meet just there to defy the ban. Pal spoke at the meeting, and the police did not interfere. After the Barisal events, protest meetings were held all over Bengal and beyond, so that the campaign was now extending into other provinces of India. The nationalist stalwart from Maharashtra, Bal Gangadhar  

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Tilak, came to Calcutta in May 1906, and thousands flocked to hear him speak. Ghose met him; he saw Tilak as the ablest leader for the radical nationalists. The forthcoming annual session of the Indian National Congress was due to be held in Calcutta at the end of that year, and the Bengal radicals put forward Tilak’s name as President.18   A clear divide was now opening up between the old-school Congress leaders and the radicals. In Bengal, Banerji was the leader of the former, Pal the latter. On the other side of India, in Bombay Presidency, a similar divide emerged between the liberal reformers Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, and Tilak. The two parties became known in that year as the ‘Moderates’ and the ‘Extremists’. The Punjab leader, Lala Lajpat Rai, was the other leading Extremist of this period. The Moderates sought above all a liberal-democratic transformation for an India in which divides of religion and caste were subsumed by a new national identity within the British Empire. They placed much faith in the claim of the British that the long-term aim of the imperial project was to build constitutional institutions and gradually devolve power to ‘native’ peoples, so that in time they could advance towards being selfgoverning states within the British Empire, along the lines of white colonies such as Australia and Canada. This became known as the demand for ‘dominion status’. To achieve this, they believed that they had to work with liberals in Britain, and they now had high hopes of the new Liberal Government there, and especially the well-known radical liberal, John Morley, who in 1905 had been appointed Secretary of State for India. Unfortunately for them, Morley declared in public in 1906 that the partition of Bengal was now a ‘settled fact’. The Moderates had rather reluctantly agreed to support the boycott of foreign goods and swadeshi, but as a way of putting pressure on the British rather than as a means for building greater Indian self-reliance. While in principle Moderates supported the establishment of national schools and colleges, they refused to advocate any boycott of government-funded institutions, arguing that young people needed the qualifications that they provided. They managed to dissuade students from boycotting the exams. The Extremists, by contrast, saw their aim as one of complete independence from Britain, taking as their inspiration the similar demand of Irish nationalists. Bipinchandra Pal stated at this time: ‘… our ideal is freedom, which means absence of all foreign control.’ To achieve this, they 29

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advocated a sustained campaign of non-cooperation with the British through boycott, national education, publicity, and confrontational meetings and processions. As a whole, this programme became known as ‘passive resistance’. The Moderates were firmly opposed to any talk of ‘passive resistance’, believing that it would be more effective if they kept up their dialogue with the British.19   To counter the Extremist demand for Tilak to be Congress President, the Moderates proposed Dadabhai Naoroji as their preferred candidate. Known as the author of the ‘drain of wealth’ theory of Indian impoverishment under British rule, Naoroji was widely respected as the Grand Old Man of Indian politics, and nobody wanted to oppose him. The Moderates thus got their way. The Extremists, however, managed to get Pal, Ghose, and some other emerging radicals, such as Chittaranjan Das, appointed to the Subjects Committee of the Congress. This was a crucial body, as it decided the topics to be debated at the session. The Extremists demanded a programme of political autonomy, boycott, swadeshi and national education. On 13 December 1906, Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai addressed a mammoth meeting in Calcutta, putting forward the Extremist demands. The Congress began on 26 December, starting with a bad-tempered debate in the Subjects Committee. Pherozeshah Mehta was shouted down, while Gokhale responded in a fussy, complaining way. Pal called for an all-India campaign of boycott and swadeshi, while the Moderates wanted to restrict the protests to Bengal and the Partition issue. The Moderates were in the majority, and most of the Extremists walked out. Tilak, who was a seasoned strategist, remained behind. He managed to work out a compromise. In his speech at the Congress, Naoroji declared that the aim of the Congress was to secure swaraj. The battle now became over whether swaraj meant self-government within the empire, or complete independence. Although the Moderates generally carried the day at the Congress, there was a feeling that the Extremists had made their presence felt very strongly, and had now to be reckoned with. They were now seen as having the momentum, and being the force for the future.20   With the divide now clear, the Extremists put forward their programme and strategy with greater clarity in the early months of 1907. The leading figure in this was Aurobindo Ghose, who was the editor of the English-language Calcutta-based nationalist paper Bande Mataram.  

 

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  In an article of 28 February, he argued that it was ‘madness without method’ to demand that India be merely a self-governing section of the British Empire. By contrast, ‘to talk of absolute independence and autonomy—though this is madness, yet there is method in it.’ This may have been the first time in Indian politics that the word ‘independence’ had been used in a published article. From then on, it became the primary theme of Ghose’s writing during the movement.21 His younger brother, Barindra Ghose, was a leading contributor to the Bengali-language Calcutta-based paper Jugantar, and he and some colleagues published an anonymous three-part article Principles of Revolution. In it, they considered ways of moulding opinion, through newspapers, songs, literature, theatre, and secret meetings. They even discussed how to obtain weapons to fight the British, either through self-manufacture, theft, or smuggling. They suggested that funds could be obtained either through donations or robberies. One article stated: ‘The number of Englishmen in the entire country is not more than a lakh and a half [150,000]. And what is the number of English officials in each district? With a firm resolve you can bring English rule to an end in a single day.’22   Aurobindo Ghose, writing in English, was more cautious in his language. He wrote a series of articles titled ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’ that discussed the nonviolent and largely legal strategies through which British rule could be removed. This was a very important intervention, and it can be argued that it set the agenda for the next forty years of nationalist struggle in India. Certainly, the Gandhian Congress later adopted many elements of the programme set out by Ghose in 1907. We shall therefore examine this series of articles in some detail.  

Aurobindo Ghose and the ‘Doctrine of Passive Resistance’ Aurobindo, like Gandhi, was a maverick figure within mainstream Indian nationalism. Both spent important formative years away from India, and in consequence they brought to bear a different and original perspective on the nationalist cause. Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. His father had received medical training in Scotland, and served as a civil surgeon under the British. An Anglophile,  

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he was determined that his three sons should receive the best education in England, and sent them there in 1879, when Aurobindo—the youngest—was only seven years old. He proved an outstanding student, being educated in Manchester; at St Paul’s School, London; and then Cambridge University. His father’s great ambition was for him to pass the exam for the elite Indian Civil Service and become a top official in British India.23 He had, however, been developing increasingly nationalistic beliefs during these years. His initial doubts about the predominant values of the British ruling class were stoked by his immersion, while at school, in the poetry of the English Romantics. He read them avidly, along with other nineteenth-century critics of Victorian culture. The Romantics had challenged the idea that high culture rested in the classic texts of European civilisation, in particular that of the Greeks and Romans. Instead, they valorised regional, vernacular cultures. Herder and other nineteenth-century intellectuals argued that each nation or region had its own soul or spirit, its Volksgeist, which found expression in its poetry, art and so forth. The French intellectual Ernest Renan stated in 1882: ‘A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. A heroic past, great men, glory (I mean real glory), that is the social capital on which is founded a national idea.’ Aurobindo knew Renan’s writings well, felt strong sympathy for the Irish nationalists of the day, and wrote poems on Ireland and Parnell, whose dramatic rise and fall occurred when he was at Cambridge. He believed that India should be freed from British rule, and that a violent revolution along the lines of the USA and France was required. The poets he loved—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley—had celebrated individuals and nations that struggled against oppression. Aurobindo claimed that he became a revolutionary of this sort after the repeated reading of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam: ‘an allegorical presentation of the ideals of the French Revolution.’ In this, he differed from most other Indian nationalists of the day, who regarded the British presence as generally beneficent and who accepted their promise that self-rule would gradually devolve down. He was contemptuous of this belief, seeing it as both deluded and inadequate.24   With such convictions, Aurobindo became increasing detached from his father’s cherished ambition; in 1892, he deliberately failed to turn up for a crucial horse-riding test and was thus rejected as a candidate 32

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for the Indian Civil Service. Instead, he took up a position with the independent-minded Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaikwad. With his excellent stylistic grasp of English, he could produce the well-written and eloquent documents and letters that the maharaja required in his dealings with the British, and he became a significant figure on the ruler’s staff. Baroda was located in Gujarat, in western India, and was far from Aurobindo’s ancestral home in Bengal. Baroda State was founded in the eighteenth century by Maharashtrian warlords, and Sayajirao was himself a Maharashtrian who, replacing a predecessor considered to be both seditious and incompetent, had been made ruler by the British in 1875.25   Aurobindo took up his employment in the state in 1893. He was in contact with K.G. Deshpande, a Maharashtrian who had been a friend when both were at Cambridge and who now edited an Englishlanguage Bombay weekly called Indu Prakash. Aurobindo agreed to write for the paper. His first piece criticised the British Parliament, an institution that was often idolised by middle class Indians. He followed with a series of essays titled New Lamps for Old, examining the Indian National Congress of the day. Aurobindo contended that it had failed to achieve anything of substance, and that it was time Indians shed their illusions on the matter. He argued that the real problem was the weakness, cowardice, selfishness and hypocrisy of Indians, believing that nationalists would have to reach out for mass support. The model they should aspire to was that of the French revolution, not the gradual evolution over many centuries of parliamentary democracy. This was incendiary stuff in India, and the leading nationalist M.G. Ranade warned the owner of the weekly that it could land him in jail. Deshpande persuaded Aurobindo to tone down the articles as a compromise. He soon stopped contributing. The articles attracted very little interest at the time, and had no direct impact on Indian political discourse. Their importance lies solely in their foretaste of what was to come from Aurobindo.26   Aurobindo worked for Sayajirao Gaikwad for the next decade. His heart was not in his work, but he used the time to read voraciously and eclectically. Much of his salary went on ordering books from Bombay and Calcutta. The topics ranged from current affairs to the Hindu classics. He visited Bengal during his holidays, and on one of those trips, in  

 

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1901, aged 28, married a 14-year old, Mrinalini. He was not a particularly warm or loving husband, and hardly changed his scholarly way of life when she came to live with him in Baroda. As she knew little English, they could not communicate with fluency. They never had any children. Aurobindo’s closest friends in Baroda were Madhavrao Jadhav, a young officer in the Baroda army, and K.G. Deshpande’s older elder brother Khaserao, a top official of the state. These men were all Maharashtrians, in touch with the more radical strands of nationalism being propagated in Maharashtra at that time, and Aurobindo was exposed to this in ways that none of his Bengali contemporaries were.27 Foremost of the radicals was B.G. Tilak, who developed the nationalistic Ganapati and Shivaji festivals in the mid-1890s. In this, he propagated a Hindu identity to the Indian nation in a way that was anathema to the predominantly secular Congress leaders of the day, who condemned the divisive nature of such an approach.28 Tilak worked among the peasants of western Maharashtra during the famine of 1896, encouraging them to refuse to pay their taxes to the British. This initiative alarmed the imperial rulers, with a top official writing to Lord Curzon later in 1905: ‘In Bombay alone, so far, in all India, has the political agitator attempted an agrarian agitation among the masses.’ Tilak also launched a boycott against a new excise on Indian cotton. The protests that he supported against oppressive measures taken during the bubonic plague outbreak of 1896–97 led to the assassination of the Plague Commissioner in Pune by young nationalists—the first political killing associated with movement. Tilak was suspected of complicity and charged with indirect incitement through his published writings, being imprisoned for eighteen months.29  K.G. Deshpande acted as a member of Tilak’s defence team during the trial in 1897. He, Aurobindo and the two Jadhav brothers were at this time discussing how the British could be expelled from India. They considered active resistance, even armed rebellion, but knew that the time was not yet ripe. Subsequently, Aurobindo observed the resistance of the Boers to the British in South Africa, and wrote a poem praising them at the time of the war. Inspired by the fact that they were prepared to die for what they believed in, he argued that India could do the same, with a similar spirit. A radical change of mentality was, however, required. Pondering all this, Aurobindo conceived a three-part  

 

 

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programme. First, there needed to be secret revolutionary propaganda and organisation that sought to build an armed struggle. Second, there should be public propaganda to gain mass support for the nationalist cause and a belief that independence was a realistic possibility. Third, the organisation of public resistance through noncooperation and passive resistance was required. Aurobindo was not a grassroots leader himself, but in 1899, a man with these abilities turned up in Baroda— Jatindranath Banerji.   Banerji wanted to acquire military skills so that he could lead the fight against British rule. He met Aurobindo and Madhavrao Jhadav in Baroda, and Jhadav got him admitted into the Baroda army, where he received the training he wanted. It was decided in 1901–2 that the time was ripe for him to return to Bengal, set up a gymnasium, and try to attract young men for training. They did not expect quick results; Aurobindo thought, indeed, that it might take thirty years to build the necessary capacity for such action. Banerji had a shorter time-frame in mind. He linked up with nationalists in Bengal who believed in physical force and who were in touch with Russian and Japanese revolutionaries. The Anushilan Samiti, or Cultural Society, was founded in Calcutta in 1902 as a front for such work. Jatindranath Banerji associated himself with this group. Aurobindo visited Bengal at this time, and is likely to have met them all. Jatindranath toured Bengal making extravagant claims about revolutionary activity, and recruiting people who were that way inclined. He asserted that such work was already welladvanced in western India, with Aurobindo as a leader. This was not in fact the case.30   During this period, Aurobindo found that there was very little support for his brand of radical nationalism in Bengal. Revolutionaries were few and far between. It was only when the Swadeshi Movement took off in 1905 that he saw the time had come for him to return to Bengal and assume a leading role. He resigned his Baroda post in 1906, and rapidly became the leading nationalist writer and theorist in the province, as well as principle of the new national college. It was at this juncture that he wrote his series of seven articles under the heading ‘The New Thought: The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’. They were published in Bande Mataram between 11 and 23 April 1907.   The series began by setting out the three strategies that had been adopted to gain self-government for India. The first was that of peti 

35

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tioning, but this had got nowhere. The second was that of self-development and self-help. This was unlikely to succeed while the British continued to dominate India and ensured that imperial interests always trumped those of the Indian people. Aurobindo asserted that: Political freedom is the life-breath of a nation; to attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming first and foremost at political freedom, is the very height of ignorance and futility.31

  The third was that of organised resistance, either ‘forcible or peaceful’. For this to work there had to exist a strong centralised political organisation that was able to compel ‘general allegiance and obedience.’ Aurobindo noted that Japan had managed to forge ahead as a nation because it had a strong, centralised authority, with a clear sense of direction, allowing it within thirty years to take on Europe as an equal. India had no such authority, and less had been achieved in seventy years than in one year in Japan. In India, there was merely ‘national confusion and weakness.’ Only when there was a strong central authority under nationalist leadership would India be able to tackle its multiple problems adequately. This would have to exist side-by-side and in rivalry with the foreign bureaucracy. In India there was the necessary space for such a parallel authority, as the British were not outand-out despots, but rulers who had established their hegemony in every area of Indian existence in a ‘quiet, pervasive and subtle’ way. It was, as a result, necessary to dispute every area of national life, and success was uncertain: It demands in the first place a country for its field of action in which the people are more powerfully swayed by the fear of social excommunication and the general censure of their fellows than by the written law. It demands a country where the capacity for extreme self-denial is part of the national character or for centuries has taken a prominent place in the national discipline. These conditions exist in India. But it requires also an iron endurance, tenacity, doggedness far above anything that is needed for the more usual military revolt or sanguinary revolution. These qualities we have not as yet developed at least in Bengal; but they are easily generated by suffering and necessity and hardened into permanence by a prolonged struggle with superior power.32

  Aurobindo went on to note that the potential downside to this was that the British might try to stifle the movement by using ‘Russian 36

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methods’. If this happened—and it was not unlikely—they had to have some means ready to meet it.33   There were three possible strategies in this respect. First, there was concerted and organised passive resistance that was designed to make administration impossible. This was the policy adopted in Ireland by Parnell when he organised a campaign of rent refusal and persistent obstruction of all Irish business in Westminster. Second, there was that of a widespread and chaotic upsurge with ‘a campaign of assassination and a confused welter of riots, strikes and agrarian risings all over the country.’ This is what had happened in Russia in 1905, with a despotic regime being beaten to its knees. It was wrong to characterise this as ‘passive resistance’, although a series of strikes on a gigantic scale certainly played its part in gaining the summoning of the Duma. More important was ‘the widespread, desperate and unappeasable anarchy’ throughout Russia. Suppression in such circumstances became impossible for the government; concession and compromise was its only choice. The third course was that of armed revolt that swept the existing system away. ‘This is the old time-honoured method which the oppressed or enslaved have always adopted by preference in the past and will always adopt in the future if they see any chance of success; for it is the readiest and swiftest, the most thorough in its results, and demands the least powers of endurance and suffering and the smallest and briefest sacrifices.’34   The choice of strategy depended on circumstance, and ‘the present circumstances in India seem to point to passive resistance as our most natural and suitable weapon.’ As yet, the bureaucracy was not as oppressive as in countries such as Russia, despite the occasional outrage, and passive resistance was therefore possible: …where the oppression is legal and subtle in its methods and respects life, liberty and property and there is still breathing time, the circumstances demand that we should make the experiment of a method of resolute but peaceful resistance which while less bold and aggressive than other methods, calls for perhaps as much heroism of a kind and certainly more universal endurance and suffering. In other methods, a daring minority purchase with their blood the freedom of the millions; but for passive resistance it is necessary that all should share in the struggle and the privation.35

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  In general, radical nationalists in India favoured this method, as it promoted a spirit of national unity and independence that they believed had, in the case of the nation, atrophied. This would be of great advantage once freedom was gained. ‘Passive resistance affords the best training for these qualities.’ It would also show that India was fit for selfrule, something that at present even strong British liberals such as John Morley doubted. Nationalists had to hold the British to their old promise of transferring power once the people of India were fit to exercise it. It was, however, important to engage in passive resistance strongly from then on, lest the Indian people sink further into degradation and weakness—a path that, if left unchecked, would leave armed revolt as the only resort. Passive resistance provides India with ‘its last chance of escaping the necessity of extremism.’36   Aurobindo was quick to point out that in advocating passive resistance, he was not in any way condemning the use of violence if the circumstances demanded it. The government might brand all use of violence by a subject people as criminal and immoral, but, coming from a power that used violence to enforce its will the whole time, this was sheer hypocrisy: Under certain circumstances a civil struggle becomes in reality a battle and the morality of war is different from the morality of peace. To shrink from bloodshed and violence under such circumstances is a weakness deserving as severe a rebuke as Srikrishna addressed to Arjuna when he shrank from the colossal civil slaughter on the field of Kurukshetra. Liberty is the life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable—just as it is lawful for a man who is being strangled to rid himself of the pressure on his throat by any means in his power.37

  India was not, however, comparable to Ireland or Russia, where such violent revolt was ‘justified and inevitable’. ‘The passive method is especially suitable to countries where the Government depends mainly for the continuance of its administration on the voluntary help and acquiescence of the subject people.’38   ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’ progresses to elaborate on the areas of national life in which such passive resistance would be applied. As a whole, the method could be summed up in one word, and one already widely in circulation in Bengal: ‘boycott’. Indians should carry 38

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on such a boycott as consumers, refusing to purchase foreign and especially British goods. They should refuse to participate in the system of education run by the government, so that control over the youth was lost to the British; refrain from using British courts, and thus make the alien system of justice unworkable; make a point of never asking for any help, advice or protection from the bureaucracy; and never serve as government officials or in the police force. Instead, they could produce their own goods through swadeshi industries, establish nationalist arbitration courts and national schools. They should develop their own forms of self-protection, with a ‘league of mutual defence’. Passive resistance had to continue, even when the government granted concessions, for reforms could be easily rescinded, and often had been. Such resistance would end only when there was a free, constitutional and democratic government.39   Aurobindo noted that in Europe, passive resistance had been most effective when it involved tax-refusal. This provided the most telling blow against a government, as it hit the administration in its most vulnerable area: To refuse payment is at once the most emphatic protest possible short of taking up arms and the sort of attack which the administration will feel immediately and keenly and must therefore parry at once either by conciliation or by methods of repression which will give greater vitality and intensity to the opposition.40

  The state paid for education through taxation, and tax-refusal undermined it more effectively. This was the form of resistance offered by the Dissenters in England to the Education Act of the last Conservative Government, and the refusal to pay rents was the backbone of the Irish Plan of Campaign. ‘The Doctrine’ paid close attention to this method: The refusal to pay taxes levied by an Imperial Government in which they had no voice or share, was the last form of resistance offered by the American colonists previous to taking up arms. Ultimately, in case of the persistent refusal of the administration to listen to reason, the refusal to pay taxes is the strongest and final form of passive resistance.41

  The Extremist nationalists had not at that juncture advocated tax refusal. As yet the conditions for this were not present. In Ireland, it took the form of refusing rent to the landlord class who were 39

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extremely unpopular; in India, the British had usurped the function of the landlord—except in Bengal, where rent-refusal would hit landlords who were themselves oppressed by the bureaucracy, and who for the most part supported the nationalist movement. Elsewhere in India, where the peasants paid their land-tax direct to the state, they could refuse their taxes. Unlike boycott and non-cooperation, tax-refusal meant breaking the law, and the administration would certainly react harshly, probably using the police and military to crush the movement violently. It was therefore a last and desperate resort, being ‘an ultimatum from the people to the Government.’ The case of the English dissenters also differed from that of Indian nationalists. Their object was not to bring the government to its knees, but to generate such a feeling that the Conservative Government would lose the next election. Without the vote, no such strategy was possible in India. The resistance of the American colonies, who had applied a boycott of British goods only, provided a better parallel. They were not so dependent on Britain, as they had their own legislatures already, and there was a much greater degree of self-development in general. They then refused to pay taxes imposed on them against their will, ultimately declaring independence and launching an armed revolt. Such conditions did not as yet exist in India. It was no good declaring a no-tax campaign when India lacked a strong and united pan-Indian nationalist organisation that could organise it in a way that was effective province-by-province and district-bydistrict throughout its vast territory. The time was not yet ripe in India for a national campaign of tax refusal. In the meantime, the focus had to be on boycott.42   As it was, the only form of law-breaking that Indian nationalists were commonly involved in was that of breaking the law on sedition. This was such a vaguely-worded law that it was easy to fall foul of it, even inadvertently. For example, if anyone criticised the way that the courts favoured British people as against Indians they were in danger of being prosecuted under this law. Yet it was a fact that racist crimes by British people in India were often treated very leniently. It was the duty of nationalists to point this injustice out, even if it meant violating the ‘law’. This rule held for many other criticisms that they had to make of the government and its system of rule. If sentenced to prison in consequence, they had to do their duty and go willingly, and indeed rejoice 40

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at being so punished. Those who led the country had an obligation ‘of high truthfulness and unflinching courage’ in such situations. The British had the power to use the law in whatever way they liked against them, and the only thing that might hold them back somewhat was fear of public reprobation outside India and nationalist resistance within India. At present, they anticipated that granting a few minor concessions would smother the nationalist movement, but this hope was bound to be dissipated as passive resistance became more widespread. They would then be tempted to use the law in more draconian ways, Aurobindo warned; passive resisters would have to be prepared to suffer for their actions. It might become illegal to teach in a school without a government license, and the teachers in national schools would then fall foul of the law. The same might happen with arbitration courts, and indeed in all spheres in which nationalists were creating a separate space for themselves. Although such laws would be considered illegitimate by the people, the state had the power to enforce obedience through to coercion. ‘It is therefore the first canon of passive resistance that to break an unjust coercive law is not only justifiable but, under given circumstances, a duty.’43   Nonetheless, Aurobindo pointed out, the bureaucracy had other weapons besides legislation. They could always deem an action illegal through an executive order. During the Swadeshi Movement, the perfectly legal act of picketing foreign cloth shops was made into an offence by the police, who prosecuted picketers for using compulsion against shopkeepers. People were being prosecuted in the same way for uttering ‘Bande Mataram’ in the streets, or gathering to protest. A District Magistrate could, with a stroke of a pen, declare a nationalist meeting illegal, and then get the police to disperse it with their cudgels, in this way treating revered nationalist as riotous hooligans. The District Magistrate was justified always by the assertion that he was ‘preserving the peace’. This had happened in Barisal, when a procession crying ‘Bande Mataram’, and led by Surendranath Banerji, was dispersed by the police.44   One major problem, in Aurobindo’s view, was that they were oppressed not only by the British in India, but also by the many ‘selfseeking and treacherous’ Indians who served them as officials and policemen. Rigorous sanctions had to be applied against such collaborators. 41

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19 It is therefore necessary to mete out the heaviest penalty open to us in such cases—the penalty of social excommunication. We are not in favour of this weapon being lightly used; but its employment, where the national will in a vital matter is deliberately disregarded, becomes essential. Such disregard amounts to siding in matters of life and death against your own country and people and helping in their destruction or enslavement—a crime which in Free States is punished with the extreme penalty due to treason.

  In Bengal, those who had purchased foreign goods had suffered social boycott: For without this boycott of persons the boycott of things cannot be effective; without the social boycott no national authority depending purely on moral pressure can get its decrees effectively executed; and without effective boycott enforced by a strong national authority the new policy cannot succeed. But the only possible alternatives to the new policy are either despotism tempered by petitions or aggressive resistance. We must therefore admit a third canon of the doctrine of passive resistance, that social boycott is legitimate and indispensable as against persons guilty of treason to the nation. … Men in the mass are strong and capable of wonder-working enthusiasms and irresistible movements; but the individual average man is apt to be weak or selfish and, unless he sees that the mass are in deadly earnest and will not tolerate individual treachery, he will usually after the first enthusiasm indulge his weakness or selfishness to the detriment of the community. We have seen this happening almost everywhere where the boycott of foreign goods was not enforced by the boycott of persons buying foreign goods. This is one important reason why the boycott which has maintained itself in East Bengal, is in the West becoming more and more of a failure.45

  Once the three major measures of self-production—boycott of foreign goods and government, and social boycott of Indians who refused to participate—were generalised, the struggle would enter a whole new phase. The bureaucracy would almost certainly resort to extralegal coercion, using the police or hired thugs to try to crush the movement. Once the authorities ceased to be guardians of the law and became peace-breakers and rioters, they then had a right to active self-defence. In this, they would be merely repelling attack, rather than carrying out acts of aggression. 42

‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN INDIA, 1905–09 The students of Mymensingh, charged by the police while picketing, kept well within the right of self-defence when they drove the rioters off the field of operations; the gentlemen of Comilla kept well within the rights of self-defence if they attacked either rioters or inciters of riot who either offered, or threatened, or tried to provoke assault.

  Advocating passive resistance did not therefore rule out the need at times for more active resistance.46   As it was, heads were going to be cracked by police lathis. Such suffering was to be expected, Aurobindo asserted, and they must learn to accept a bit of bloodshed quietly, rather than making theatrical claims of being a great martyr. They had to be prepared for ‘imprisonment, worldly ruin, death itself.’ ‘Passive resistance cannot build up a strong and great nation unless it is masculine, bold and ardent in its spirit and ready at any moment and at the slightest notice to supplement itself with active resistance. We do not want to develop a nation of women who know only how to suffer and not how to strike.’ In some cases, an outrage could be so great or a tyranny so unendurable that they needed to hit back and ‘vindicate one’s manhood.’ There were human limits to how much could be suffered without retaliation. The movement might then escalate and become violent. In all this, passive resistance was not ‘an inelastic dogma’, but flexible in its methods. ‘We recognize no political object of worship except the divinity in our motherland, no present object of political endeavour except liberty and no method or action as politically good or evil except as it truly helps or hinders our progress towards national emancipation.’47   Aurobindo went on to advocate ‘the creation of a strong central authority to carry out the will of the nation’. This would involve political organisation at village, town, district and provincial levels. There needed to be a constitution for the Congress to this effect. At present, the Moderates were refusing to countenance this, and if they continued to block such a necessary measure, the Extremists would have to break with them and create a separate more militant organisation. This would demand not merely self-government as it existed in the colonies, but full self-rule of the sort that the United Kingdom enjoyed. If they were to inspire the nation, they had to assert this; anything else was pitiful. Once this was done, they needed to extend self-development projects into fresh spheres of life, such as national defence, sanitation, and pro 43

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tection from famine. Whatever was needed, they must carry out, aiming to create a parallel system of rule at every level. All of this would require a willingness for considerable self-sacrifice on the part of the people of India.48   Aurobindo concluded his series of articles with a bloodthirsty appeal to Hindu ritual that was laced with a threat of possible future violence: Liberty is the fruit we seek from the sacrifice and the Motherland the goddess to whom we offer it; into the seven leaping tongues of the fire of the yajna [ritual offering] we must offer all that we are and all that we have, feeding the fire even with our blood and the lives and happiness of our nearest and dearest; for the Motherland is a goddess who loves not a maimed and imperfect sacrifice, and freedom was never won from the gods by a grudging giver. But every great yajna has its Rakshasas [demons] who strive to baffle the sacrifice, to bespatter it with their own dirt or by guile or violence put out the flame. Passive resistance is an attempt to meet such disturbers by peaceful and self-contained brahmatej [the glory or lustre that surround a righteous Brahman]; but even the greatest Rishis [sages] of old could not, when the Rakshasas were fierce and determined, keep up the sacrifice without calling in the bow of the Kshatriya [warrior caste]. We should have the bow of the Kshatriya ready for use, though in the background. Politics is especially the business of the Kshatriya, and without Kshatriya strength at its back all political struggle is unavailing. Vedantism [the philosophy of the ancient Vedas] accepts no distinction of true or false religions, but considers only what will lead more or less surely, more or less quickly to moksha, spiritual emancipation and the realization of the Divinity within. Our attitude is a political Vedantism. India, free, one and indivisible, is the divine realization to which we move—emancipation our aim; to that end each nation must practise the political creed which is the most suited to its temperament and circumstances; for that is the best for it which leads most surely and completely to national liberty and national self-realization. But whatever leads only to continued subjection must be spewed out as mere vileness and impurity. Passive resistance may be the final method of salvation in our case or it may be only the preparation for the final sadhan [means of accompanying a goal]. In either case, the sooner we put it into full and perfect practice, the nearer we shall be to national liberty.49

  As is apparent from this final exhortation, Aurobindo was trying to forge a form of passive resistance that would be in tune with what he 44

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understood as Indian culture. In fact, his ‘Indian culture’ was very Hindu, ignoring the culture of the large Muslim minority, who made up a quarter of the population of the subcontinent, and well over a half of the population of Bengal itself. It was also a very masculine agenda, praising a form of male sacrifice in battle that was associated in India with the values of the Rajput warriors and rulers. The combatants would in this case try to avoid violence, except in retaliation, but the blood sacrifice for national honour that was called for had similar qualities. Courage was to be built through training in the gymnasiums and physical education clubs that were being established in large numbers in the closing years of the nineteenth century in Bengal, which typically trained young men in the use of arms.50 Despite this parochialism, Aurobindo’s articles also had a very wide vision, demanding that Indian nationalists apply the strategies of civil resistance that had proved effective elsewhere in the world, from Europe to the USA, and using what was known at that time as ‘passive resistance’.   To start with, we may take a closer look at the emerging tradition of Hindu nationalism. This was associated in its most focused form with B.G. Tilak in Maharashtra. Aurobindo, who was based in a state ruled by a Maharashtrian and which employed many talented young Maharashtrians of often radical views, had been in touch with this strand of Indian nationalism in a way that no other Bengali of his time was. Tilak was a member of the caste that had formerly provided the rulers of the region, and who had been dethroned by the British in the early nineteenth century, the Chitpavan Brahmans. There was a strong culture of resentment amongst this elite group at their displacement, which time and again came to the fore during the course of that century. The British generally considered them a ‘disloyal’ group that harked back constantly to a glorious past in which they had been the rightful rulers. This was an exaggeration, as some of the leading moderate nationalists who accepted the progressive nature of British rule were also of this community, notably Gokhale. Tilak did, however, seek inspiration in what he deemed to be a nobler past. He looked to the Hindu scriptures, and in particular the Bhagavad Gita, which provides a powerful call to action in this world, allowing the use of violence to suppress evil, even if it means killing opponents with whom one has no individual enmity. His other great inspiration was that of the seven 

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teenth-century Maratha ruler, Shivaji. He raised funds to repair the grave of Shivaji, so that it could become the focus for an annual ceremony celebrating a figure considered by many to be a Hindu hero who had fought long and valiantly against Muslim domination of the region. This reading of history has often been challenged, but this made little difference to popular beliefs about Shivaji in Maharashtra. Tilak portrayed Shivaji as a person who was prepared to suspend normal standards of morality when engaged in a struggle with an ethical purpose, namely the freedom of the nation-people. Historians had often recounted Shivaji’s alleged treachery when he murdered his rival, the Mughal general Afzal Khan, when ostensibly meeting him in friendship. Embracing the general, he had stabbed him in the back with a set of metal ‘tiger-claws’ that he had concealed in his hand. Tilak argued that an act that transcended normal standards of morality and honour was justified in such circumstances. ‘Great men’, he argued, ‘are above the common principles of morality.’51   Although Aurobindo argued that passive resistance was a strategically more appropriate tactic for Indian nationalists in the particular circumstances that they found themselves in 1907, like Tilak he was not prepared to rule out the use of extreme forms of violence if the moment was appropriate. When he referred to the ‘bow of the Kshatriya’ that should always be ready and prepared for action when the time was ripe, he was reflecting this sort of argument, for in violent battle there is little time for fine moral scruples. As it was, he believed that armed struggle was a necessary component of any successful revolutionary movement, and this he made very clear in his writings. Passive resistance, as in the case of the American colonies in the 1770s, merely provided a building-block for the eventual uprising in which freedom would be wrested through an often brutal and uncompromising military conflict.   The martial values that Aurobindo espoused were those of Hindu warriors. In Maharashtra, Hindu nationalists were able to appeal to the legacy of a real-life warrior of this sort, Shivaji. In Bengal, by contrast, the inspiration came from the poetry and fiction of the great Bengali writer Bankimcandra Chatterji, whose Anandamath (1882) tells of a rising by a brotherhood of militarised sadhus against Muslim rule. They had fought for their sacred Motherland under the slogan Bande 46

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Mataram!—‘Praise to the Mother’. Bankimcandra had already composed a verse under this title as a potential national anthem, popularising it by quoting it in his novel. Bhabananda, who sings the verse, states in clarification that the Mother and their land of birth were the primary objects of his devotion: ‘One’s mother and birthland are greater than heaven itself.’52 After placing its homage to the Mother/Motherland in the fertile rural idyll of Bengal, it switches to an exhortation for the defence of the Mother by her devotees: Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands, When the swords flash out in twice seventy million hands And seventy million voices roar Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?

 She was urged in their name to drive their mutual foes ‘back from plain and sea’, and free the Motherland. The Mother was then named as Durga, the supreme Mother Goddess, who embodies shakti or infinite power and energy—‘with her hands that strike and her swords of sheen.’ She is both the Mother who nurtures, and the avenger who slays demons. The poem ends by returning to an evocation of the bountiful nature that she protects. This was set to music soon afterwards, and then propagated widely by Rabindranath Tagore as a national anthem. Aurobindo later provided an English translation of this poem that became regarded as a standard one.53   Any act of resistance to tyranny requires the overcoming of fear and the forging of a new courage. This quality was seen as lacking amongst the Bengali elites of the day, and it was through rousing and emotional appeals such as this, rooted in their religion and sense of place, that such valour was to be instilled—albeit, in this case, with a secular end: that of freedom for India from imperial rule. Right at the start of the Swadeshi Movement in 1905, Aurobindo, still working in Baroda, had published a pamphlet tilted Bhawani Mandir that set out such an agenda. Bhawani was the Maharashtrian form of the Mother Goddess, known as Durga or Kali in Bengal. Shivaji had been a devotee of Bhawani. In this, Aurobindo called for a new order of renouncers who would serve this deity. In reviving the spirit of shakti, as embodied in the Mother Goddess, India would regain her lost strength. There were obvious parallels here with the agenda of Bankimchandra’s Anandamath, as both called for a band of renouncers who dedicate themselves to service to 47

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the country. However, while Bankimchandra’s heroes engaged in military operations, Aurobindo’s were to engage in educational and health work, industrial development and national uplift. As it was, Aurobindo never tried to implement his scheme in any practical form, and indeed soon lost interest in it. His pamphlet nonetheless voiced the idea of nationalism as a form of secular religion. The British later accused Aurobindo of using religion instrumentally to whip up hatred against them. This misunderstood the spirit of his aspiration, for Aurobindo was appealing above all to a romantic patriotism rooted in a mystical sense of sacred place. It was this that he envisaged as the supreme driver of Indian nationalism, rather than any rational but dry considerations about economic decline or constitutional requirements. He himself was certainly never a narrow-minded Hindu bigot.54   Nevertheless, the tone of his exhortations was rooted in a Hindu idiom in a way that not only ignored the sensibility of the large Muslim population of Bengal, but could only actively alienate them from the particular nationalist project that he was propounding. In this, Aurobindo was not unique; the opposition to Partition had tended to divide Hindus and Muslims in the province, creating a new sense of separatism in what had in the past been a largely integrated—through very unequal—society. Although several leaders of the movement sought to counter this tendency by actively encouraging Muslim support, and although quite a few Muslims did take part in protests, many more supported the Partition and actively opposed the Swadeshi Movement. Muslim revivalism had emerged during the latter years of the nineteenth century, stoked by increasingly fundamentalist priests who played on resentments about the loss of power of the Muslim ruling class to a Hindu landlord elite that was engaged in its own project of assertive and often intolerant religious revivalism. A new antilandlord demagogy emerged that was directed entirely at these Hindu ‘oppressors’. The British added fuel to the fire through their deliberate tactics of divide and rule. This created an explosive atmosphere that led to Hindu–Muslim riots in East Bengal from 1906 onwards—the violence being most intense in 1907. The growing divide between the two communities and the riots saw thoughtful nationalists like Rabindranath Tagore becoming more aware of the perils of using Hindu religious idioms to instil Indian patriotism. Most Hindu nationalists, however, 48

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merely blamed Muslim ‘ignorance’ and ‘intractability’ that allowed Muslim goondas (hoodlums) a free rein to go on the rampage against respectable Hindus.55 There was here a fault-line within Indian nationalism that Aurobindo’s particular enunciation of passive resistance had no answer for.   The patriotism that Aurobindo sought to foster was very male in content. It extolled supposedly ‘masculine’ values, and condemned those who showed ‘feminine’ traits. The intention was to counter British racist slurs about the supposedly weak and effeminate qualities of Indian culture. The answer was seen to lie in physical training and body-building, and courageous acts of derring-do by nationalists. Though it is notable that Aurobindo was highly attuned to many contemporary developments in Europe and elsewhere in the world, the suffragette movement in Britain seems to have lain well beyond his ken. There was no appreciation that women could be particularly dogged and daring protestors, or that excluding them from the Indian struggle would mean ignoring half the population. Unlike Gandhi, Aurobindo was never challenged by any women in his family. He hardly knew his mother, who suffered a mental breakdown when he was very young and was then confined away from her sons. His wife was not an assertive person, and never forced Aurobindo to examine his patriarchal mind-set, as, for example, the feistier Kasturba did of Gandhi. While Kasturba Gandhi was of exactly the same age as her husband, Aurobindo’s wife Mrinalini was half her husband’s age at the time of their marriage, compounding her subordination. They were never in any way companions. While Gandhi had to suppress his strong sexuality with a difficult vow of celibacy, Aurobindo appears to have had a weak sexual drive. After Mrinalini’s sudden death from influenza during the great epidemic of 1918—and having not seen her husband at all for a decade—Aurobindo wrote: ‘Marriage means usually any amount of trouble, heavy burdens, a bondage to the worldly life and great difficulties in the way of a single-minded spiritual endeavour.’56 In other words, women were seen as obstacles to male action; rather than possible companions in a joint project.   Aurobindo refers in his text to strong and sometimes successful passive resistance campaigns elsewhere in the world, and exhorts Indian nationalists here to adopt such a form of protest. The term ‘pas 49

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sive resistance’ can be dated back to the upsurge in Europe of 1848. Initially it was used to describe the way in which the members of the Prussian bourgeoisie who gained nominal power in 1848 sought to protect their position by passively resisting the revolution of the lower classes. This was known as passiver widerstand. With the failure of this tactic, this hitherto-militant class allied with the Prussian monarchy and aristocracy to actively smash the movement from below.57 Because of this particular history, Karl Marx defined such ‘passive resistance’ as, essentially, a counter-revolutionary strategy of the bourgeoisie. He wrote about it in the very specific context of Prussia, rather than as a form of resistance used by the middle classes of Britain or France, who were less compromising in their opposition to the old ruling classes.58 In 1849, the German socialist and disciple of Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, denounced passive resistance particularly strongly in a speech in Düsseldorf on 3 May 1849, delivered during his trial on charges of revolutionary incitement. He stated that passiver widerstand was an absurd invention and a betrayal. It was a contradiction, being resistance that was no resistance, and, while it arose from the bourgeoisie’s fear of resistance, at the same time they acknowledged its necessity.59   Initially, therefore, passive resistance was associated with a relatively privileged class. Over the course of the next decades, however, it was extended to include other groups struggling in different ways. The next major movement of this sort was one for national self-rule by Hungarians. During the early nineteenth century, a vigorous nationalist movement had emerged in Hapsburg-ruled Hungary. This found expression in a powerful national revolt led by Lajos Kossuth in 1848– 49 that led to the creation of the April Laws that laid the basis for national autonomy and broad internal reform. The victory was, however, short-lived, with Austria ruthlessly crushing the revolution by August 1849. From then on, up until 1867, the majority of the Hungarian nation, including the peasantry, opposed the more authoritarian system that the Austrians now sought to impose. Most ruled out armed struggle and even the exiled Kossuth advised his followers to refrain from violent resistance until international conditions became more favourable. The opposition—now led by Ferenc Deák, a member of the landowning gentry—demanded the old rights of Hungarians as well as the April Laws of 1848 be respected by Austria. The resistance  

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took many forms. Most of the gentry followed Deák in refusing to take part in public life, withdrawing from official positions and making no effort to fulfil Austrian orders. They boycotted Austrian officials and soldiers, as well as the Czech officials employed by the Austrians; obstructed or refused to pay taxes; and Hungarian youth refused to serve in the Austrian army. The press was deployed to spread information about the Hungarian situation and to educate the people concerning national culture and history. People were encouraged to use the Hungarian language as the language of communication in everyday life, literature and science, and make an effort not to use German. People dressed in national clothing, forbidden colours, and sang seditious songs. Those who displayed favour for things Austrian were derided. There were demonstrations at key junctures, and frequent national celebrations, balls, lectures and banquets.   After its defeat in Italy in 1859, Austria was forced to adopt a more conciliatory policy. The Hungarian county councils were restored, and the Hungarian parliament convoked in 1861. The Hungarians still demanded that their full constitutional demands be respected. The county councils proposed to stop paying taxes not approved by the Hungarian Parliament. The Hapsburg emperor dissolved the Parliament in reaction to this, and tried to impose a new version of absolutism. In the following years, however, international events forced the Austrians towards concession. Many Hungarians came to doubt whether a fully independent Hungary could survive wedged between Russia and Germany, and moved towards a compromise. The Prussian defeat of Austria, along with the Hungarian refusal to provide military support, provided the basis for the eventual settlement in 1867. However, there was one more confrontation before this, when at the start of 1867, an imperial decree made military service compulsory for Hungarians. The Parliament sent an ultimatum to the Emperor known as ‘Hungary’s Last Word’ that demanded the restoration of the constitution. After complicated negotiations, Hungary’s constitutional law was restored, providing the basis for the Ausgleich, or agreement, of 1867 that established the dual monarchies of Austria–Hungary.60   The Hungarian movement was very different to the resistance movements against the Hapsburgs in other parts of the empire, which were characterised by violence, as in Italy. Although Deák deployed passive 51

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resistance as a political tactic suited to Hungary’s particular predicament at that historical juncture, he did not try to promote it as a thoughtthrough alternative theory of resistance. The Hungarian example did, however, show that passive resistance could be deployed successfully in movements for national self-determination, a lesson that was to be applied again in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   Those who fought for Home Rule in Ireland in the 1870s and 1880s were well aware of what had happened in Hungary. After the failed Fenian rising of 1867, Isaac Butt founded the Home Rule League to fight for Irish self-rule by peaceful means, which for him meant exploiting the institutions of British governance. He was a Member of Parliament, leading the Home Rule Party in the House of Commons. In 1875, he was joined there by Charles Stewart Parnell, and together they were to lead a campaign of parliamentary obstruction. The Irish Home Rule members sent their group condolences to Hungary when Deák died in 1876, revealing their appreciation of the passive resistance campaign that he had waged. The Home Rulers exploited the loose procedural rules and conventions of the House of Commons to their advantage. They filibustered for hours on end, and used a welter of Private Members’ Bills to clog its business. Parnell adopted methods in the late 1870s that Butt was not prepared to countenance, and by so doing became a hero in Ireland; at that time this was his main aim, for he knew that Home Rule could not be won by parliamentary obstruction alone. Such a tactic became harder to carry through after 1882, when the rules of the House of Commons were altered substantially to prevent it. Influenced by the outcome of the Hungarian struggle, one of the objectives of the Irish Home Rulers was at that time to force the British to establish a comparable system of dual monarchy in which Britain and Ireland would be equal partners. This remained on the agenda for many years, later being a core demand of Sinn Féin, the party founded by Arthur Griffiths in 1905.61   The Home Rule movement was, however, best known at this time for the campaign that it conducted against landlords in Ireland. This was co-ordinated by the Land League, under the leadership of Michael Davitt. The tactics adopted by this organisation were inspired by the writings of James Fintan Lawler, who had in the late 1840s called for a mass no-rent campaign. Davitt set about organising this in the late 52

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1870s and early 1880s, with Parnell supporting it. He called for the ‘three Fs’ of Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale. When landlords tried to evict tenants who refused their rents, the League provided help for those who were being victimised and coordinated nonviolent resistance. The actions of the landlords caused some violence in response, but the League denounced this as being against the spirit of the movement and above all counter-productive. One of the most famous initiatives the League took during this period was the campaign of ostracism against the land agent Captain Charles Boycott in 1880. Boycott soon quit Ireland, his name giving rise to a term that would be core in almost all future campaigns of passive resistance. The protests led to the Lands Act of 1881 that granted the ‘three Fs’. In 1885, the process was taken further, with legislation that allowed tenants the chance to purchase their land with a loan from the government on easy terms. Large areas of land were purchased by the state and sold it to the tenants in this way.62 This campaign of passive resistance was at its height when Aurobindo Ghose was studying in England, and it had a powerful impact on his imagination. In his writings of the first decade of the twentieth century, he often referred to it as exemplary for Indian nationalists.   Despite all this, no Irish nationalist formulated a clear theory or system of passive resistance at that time. Arthur Griffith was only to do this in the first decade of the twentieth century. Methods such as boycott were forged through action and not reflected on; the first real elaboration of a firm strategy and practice of passive resistance was expounded by the Finns in their struggle for self-determination within Tsarist Russia. The Finnish statesman and political philosopher Johan Vihel Snellman (1806–1881) had already argued that the Finns should resist by means other than violence. Like Marx, he argued that change comes from deeper social forces, but rejected the use of violence to bring this about, as social relations change only gradually and through long-term effort. In particular, he called on nations to strengthen their culture, holding that the capacity of a people to withstand foreign aggression or undergo transformation is not dependent on its military strength or on revolutionary violence, but on its cultural power, development and unity. He did not, however, argue in favour of all-out passive resistance (in Finnish, passiivinen vastarinta).63 This occurred as a 53

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result of the decision taken by the Tsarist regime in the late 1890s to abolish the independent institutions of governance in Finland, and rule it as just another Russian province. The Finnish Diet, or parliament, was to be turned into a body that merely rubber-stamped Russian orders, and Finnish law was to be brought in line with Russian law. Russian was to be the language of administration and education, and all textbooks would be scrutinised; there was to be an official Russian newspaper and greater control over the Finnish press in general; Finland’s separate customs and monetary institutions were to be abolished; and compulsory conscription for the Russian army was to be introduced. In other words, this was a programme for a thorough Russification of Finnish administration and culture. In early 1899, a petition organised in protest against these proposals was signed by well over half a million people. A delegation of 500 concerned Finnish citizens attempted to deliver this to the Tsar in St. Petersburg, but he refused to receive it. Articles were written for European papers to publicise what was happening in Finland, and leading figures throughout Europe were persuaded to send messages of concern to the Tsar. As a result, the Finnish movement gained a lot of publicity and support throughout Europe. The protest was maintained during the first five years of the twentieth century.64   The most comprehensive statement of the practical principles of passive resistance was set out by the prominent activist Viktor Theodor Homén (1858–1923). His clear and precise pamphlet of 1900 was titled Passive Resistance, and became one of the best-known statements on the subject. He argued that passive resistance provided a means by which a militarily weaker people could defend itself against a stronger oppressor. It required just as much perseverance, manliness and commitment as armed struggle and consisted of the three principles of noncooperation, disobedience, and nonrecognition. By nonrecognition, he meant a consistent refusal to cooperate with any illegal or violent act committed by the stronger party. Nobody was to assist the Russians in enforcing decrees that violated the Finnish constitution: their acts must never be allowed to appear legal. Russian orders were not to be obeyed or assisted in any way, they should rather be hindered by all legitimate means. This was the most difficult and extensive of the principles to implement, as it required action by large numbers to be 54

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effective. He also called for the nonrecognition of the enforced system of violence, as seen in particular in conscription. Homén argued that the use of such tactics would expose the violence of the opponent, revealing it for what it was and thus promoting greater resistance. In his essay, Homén offered only two concrete applications for resistance. He said that the restrictions on the right of public assembly should be ignored outright. If necessary, to avoid direct confrontation, the assembly could be held in private—the Russians would not be able to enforce this restriction. He also referred to a Russian government decree of 2 July 1900 that gave Russian peddlers and other tradesmen the right to work in Finland in violation of Finnish legislation that restricted foreigners in such work. It was widely believed that the Russians sought to use the peddlers to undermine Lutheran religion, education and Finnish culture by spreading rumours. Homén demanded a strong boycott of all such peddlers, who were to be given no food or shelter. No business was to be done with them and their movement was to be hindered. People should use only domestic products. Russian peddlers became an obsession amongst those advocating passive resistance in the latter part of 1900. They provided a convenient target for resistance, depicted as a deadly poison within Finnish society. Xenophobia was stoked; peddlers were accused of spreading diseases and propagating doctrines that undermined the society. They were not however to be resisted violently, unless they instigated violence.65   Homén’s tract was followed over the next five years by a spate of writing on passive resistance in the underground press. It was depicted as a powerful weapon that required special preparation and know-how for its application. Passive resistance, it was emphasised, was not in fact ‘passive’, but required an active effort. It involved defying and disobeying illegal orders and decrees, and thus involved both non-cooperation and civil disobedience. People had to be prepared to suffer severe consequences, such as loss of jobs and punishment. But victory—they assured their readers—was, in the end, inevitable. It was argued that if there was solidarity, the Russians could not crush the resistance through deportations, as far too many people would have to be deported. Concrete ways of waging passive resistance were discussed, one of which was boycott (boykott, boikottaus) of all things Russian. People were urged to avoid all use of the Russian language and pur 

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chase of Russian goods. The replacement of Finnish postal stamps by Russian stamps could be resisted by sticking protest stamps on letters next to the Russian stamp. This measure was subsequently carried out on a wide scale.66   The attempt to impose conscription in Finland proved particularly contentious, and it meant that many young Finns were strongly behind the protest. A co-ordinating body was created that became known as ‘Kagal’. This was a term that Russians had previously used derisively to denote separatist groups in Poland and Finland (it came from the Hebrew name for a body of persecuted Russian Jews). Based in Helsinki, it had forty-five departments throughout Finland. There were special sections such as the priest’s Kagal, the women’s Kagal, the physician’s Kagal, and so on. They sought to resist the operation of the new Conscription Act. Priests could refuse to promulgate the measure from the pulpit, as required; doctors could refuse to carry out the mandatory examination of conscripts. The women’s Kagal specialised in smuggling women’s literature. Other groups such as temperance societies, farmers’ and teachers’ associations, and cooperatives were also involved. It was financed by the mass collections of funds. The well-todo made some larger donations, but there were also widescale donations of small amounts. People volunteered to work without pay. The protest was publicised through a highly effective underground resistance press; newspapers, pamphlets and leaflets were distributed by the thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands. This played a major part of the struggle and required a widespread network of secret distribution and smuggling. The conceptual and theoretical work on resistance was carried out by this means, all in defiance of Russian censorship laws. The Russian Governor Bobrikov shut down twenty-two newspapers between 1899 and 1901, and tightened controls over the remaining, to no avail.67   The movement did not initially embrace all of society, being strongest amongst the elites and middle classes. The Finnish Diet had been elected on a restricted franchise, and calls for the reassertion of its power were in essence calls for the restoration of the rights of the more privileged groups. There were a considerable number of Finns of all classes who complied with Russia, and the passive resisters had to decide how to deal with them. The idea of subjecting such people to 56

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strong social boycotts proved contentious. There were calls in some quarters for them to be socially outlawed, with firm pressure put on them to stop siding with the Russians. One underground publication entitled The Black Book, provided a list of compliant higher officials, with photographs of those so identified, and with each section ending with a picture of a hangman’s noose or some other threatening symbol. This was considered by many activists to go beyond the standards of decency that were the general hallmark of the campaign and it was, accordingly, strongly condemned. Homén even claimed that the pamphlets that called for such violence may have been produced as a means to discredit the movement in general.68   The crisis of 1905 in Russia provided a great opportunity for the movement in Finland; one that was seized with alacrity. Once the revolution got under way in Russia, the rhetoric of the Finnish passive resisters became increasingly radical. Embattled on all fronts, the Tsar agreed to reverse the whole policy of Russification in Finland. The powers of the Finnish Diet were restored and conscription was abolished. Until then, few peasants or workers had been involved in the campaign, though attempts to broaden the protest had been made before 1905 by the largely middle-class activists. This process only really took off in 1905, with up to 35,000 people participating in demonstrations in Finland demanding universal suffrage. This challenged the elites who had hitherto controlled the Diet and the movement. It was, however, realised that a fundamental democratisation of Finnish society was inevitable. Without this, there could not be strong national resistance to any later attempt by Russia to reassert its lost powers. The final blow against Russian control was administered through a General Strike in Finland of October–November 1905 that was supported by the whole nation. It was projected as a ‘Great Strike’ against Russian autocracy. The Russian administration in Finland was paralysed and the police disarmed, some joining the strike, while others were ousted from the force. Many Russian administrators and policemen fled back to Russia. The Russian military garrisons were isolated from each other due to a railway strike. A Finnish national Civil Guard was formed to maintain law and order. There was extensive solidarity at this time, with all sections of society united against Russia. The Tsar was forced to allow for a truly representative Diet for Finland, which came into effect in 1906. 57

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In this way, the Finns gained their effective independence and a new democracy through their campaign of passive resistance.69   The movement in Finland represented one of the most successful cases of passive resistance. It was helped by the fact that Russia, though an often vicious autocracy, was also a highly inefficient state that had to work, to some extent, in cooperation with its numerous nationalities. It could not afford to counter nationalist assertions through widespread oppression or mass deportation. Its main method was that of gradually transforming the various societies of its empire through a programme of cultural Russification, leading in time to administrative integration. It was this process that the campaign of passive resistance attacked with such success in Finland. Even then, it took a crisis of the empire as a whole—that of 1905—to win the battle. The Finnish success had depended very much on particular favourable conditions that the protestors had worked to their advantage.70   Successes such as these greatly boosted the credibility of passive resistance as an effective strategy. One impact was felt in Ireland, where Arthur Griffiths, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, formulated the principles of such resistance for the Irish cause. He studied the example of Deák’s movement in Hungary, and popularised it through a book titled The Resurrection of Hungary, published first in 1904. This went through many editions, and in a later one Griffith published his own writing on the subject in an appendix titled ‘The Sinn Féin Policy’. This had been written originally in 1905. It should be noted that ‘Sinn Féin’ meant ‘ourselves’, and thus has clear parallels with the Indian concept of swadeshi, in that it stressed opting out of the imperial system and establishing parallel structures of power. He called for the establishment of matching forms of governance at all levels of society that would operate entirely free from British control, and in particular a free Irish Council. There should be alternative courts of law and an independent diplomatic service that would send Irish ambassadors and consuls to other countries. National economic institutions would be created, such as an independent Irish bank and stock exchange, and Irish industry would be promoted. Griffith emphasised the need for an Irish system of education free from imperial control using an argument that was identical to that used by Indian nationalists—namely that the British-controlled structure was designed 58

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primarily to train young men as its civil servants and that it inculcated a slavish obedience to the British. In this work, Griffith also cited the case of Finland as an exemplary case of passive resistance.71 He was fully aware of developments in India at that time, in contact with Indian nationalists, and was particularly impressed by Bipinchandra Pal. Indian nationalists in their turn characterised Sinn Féin and swadeshi as similar projects. The Pune paper Maharatta stated in 1907 that ‘Swadeshi’ was an exact translation of ‘Sinn Féin’. Aurobindo praised Sinn Féin in Bande Mataram in the same year. At the same time, Sinn Féin was said to be similar to Extremist nationalism in India. Both, it was said, stood for ignoring the British, for boycott, and quietly assuming the administration of their own affairs.72   Both Griffith and the leaders of Kagal in Finland regarded passive resistance as a strategy, and they never ruled out the possibility of using violence if it became appropriate or necessary. Griffith insisted that it was a basic right of a citizen to bear arms, and scorned those who held all violence to be immoral.73 Aurobindo, for his part, stated that although passive resistance was most appropriate for India at that juncture, he would not condemn other methods in all circumstances. He was not, of course, able to state in print that he was at that time also encouraging young nationalists to train themselves secretly for a future armed struggle. He believed that in the end guerrilla warfare accompanied by wide-scale passive resistance would make India ungovernable for the British and envisaged this process as taking two or three decades. The young nationalists who established the secret societies. Aurobindo was in touch with at this time were, however, impatient for spectacular action, which meant in practice the assassination of leading officials. Aurobindo was frustrated by this, arguing that ‘Bengalis are too emotional’ and wanted ‘quick results’. He did not believe that assassination was a good strategy, as it would never in itself remove the British. However, he did not stand in the way of such plots, as it was not possible to know what might come out of them. Such actions would at least popularise the revolutionaries’ ideals. They would inspire a fighting spirit.74   In all of this, Aurobindo Ghose’s ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’ was very much a product of its time. Aurobindo’s importance lies in the way that he—more than any other Indian nationalist of those 59

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years—understood the development of such a method elsewhere in the world, and sought to adapt it for India. As he stated of Russia in 1905 in ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’: ‘We have seen the most absolute autocrat and the most powerful and ruthless bureaucracy in the world still in unimpaired possession of all the most effective means of repression, yet beaten to the knees by the determined resistance of an unarmed nation.’75 Although perhaps overestimating the power of the Tsarist regime throughout its scattered empire, Aurobindo wanted to emphasise how potent nonviolent means could be when applied against it en masse. In another article written at this time he placed the Bengal upsurge within a much wider global context: …there have been three currents—insurgent nationalism starting from South Africa, Asiatic revival starting from Japan, Eastern democracy starting from Russia; and the centre of disturbance covers a huge zone, all Eastern, Southern and Western Asia, Northern or Asiaticised Africa and Russia which form the semi-Asiatic element in Europe. As the pace of the revolution grows swifter, each new year becomes more eventful than the last and marks a large advance to the final consummation. No year of the new century has been more full of events than 1906–07…76

The Swadeshi Movement—later phase In Bengal, the campaign of passive resistance was strongest in Calcutta and in the east of the province. In Calcutta, the authorities had struggled to deal with what was, for them, a novel situation. Previously, the police had been able to crush unruly assembles by the lower classes with few scruples, with no adverse consequences for them. Now, they found it hard to know how to respond to protest by the ‘respectable’ classes in a way that would not bring hostile publicity and greater alienation. They tried to regulate political meetings with repressive ordinances that, for example, ruled that all mass gatherings must end half an hour before sunset. Some of the main leaders and pro-Swadeshi journalists were charged with sedition. None of this had any impact on the movement. Things came to a head on 2 October 1907, when the police rampaged a peaceful meeting held in Beadon Square, in the north of the city. Protestors and passers-by were beaten with lathis, shops were looted, and people even dragged out of tramcars and thrashed. Sweepers and other lower-class people were given a green  

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light by the police to carry on attacking and looting anyone perceived to be sympathetic towards the Swadeshi Movement. This continued until 4 October. The government then set about covering up the culpability of the police in this one-sided act of state-induced violence against the passive resisters. Some concerned citizens of the city undertook their own investigations, finding that that the police had acted with great brutality—one person had even been killed by them. Witnesses described how the police had hurled abuse at their victims, shouting that ‘The Bengali Salas (bastards) had to be taught a lesson.’ None of this did any good for the, by now, very shaky moral authority of the imperial rulers.77   In East Bengal, there was a particularly militant group in Barisal town of Bakarganj District, led by Aswinikumar Dutta, a militant schoolteacher who had for many years mobilised student volunteers in an organisation called the Brojomohan Vidyalaya to carry out social work in the area. He put a petition to the Congress in 1887, with 40,000 signatures demanding elective legislatures, condemning the 1897 session of the Congress as a ‘three day’s tamasha (festival).’ Bipanchandra Pal said in 1909 that he was: ‘The only person, who has a large and devoted following among the masses.’ The Brojomohan Vidyalaya provided aid for the sick and needy, worked for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and fought fires, alongside more political activity, such as organising meetings and street lectures, publishing pamphlets, and running a local newspaper, a swadeshi store, a weaving school and a gymnasium. It sent swadeshi preachers into the countryside, who persuaded many poor people to take collective swadeshi vows. An all-out attempt was made to gain the support of the Muslim masses for the movement. The association thus developed an impressive network of village branches, with groups of volunteers. It was envisaged that these village branches would carry out arbitration, obtain swadeshi vows, enforce boycott, and carry out welfare work such as sanitary reform, physical and moral training, prohibition and education. Attempts were made to set up national primary schools in the rural areas. Some villagers stopped paying certain taxes. During the second half of 1906, the association was involved in famine work, which it conducted with great skill and energy, gaining much sympathy from the poorer classes. By August 1906, all but one of the fifty-six  

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shops selling liquor in the district had closed down, and by April 1907 imports of British goods had fallen there by 38 per cent. Those who opposed this activity were subjected to what was termed in a report of the association as ‘social discipline and punishment.’ Indigenous crafts flourished, such as handloom weaving, and arbitration committees settled legal cases outside the courts.   This movement was remarkably peaceful. According to a police report, the association never preached the use of force. There were no underground revolutionaries active in the district at that time and, in the summer of 1906, when one such group came from Calcutta to Barisal with the intent of assassinating a local official, Aswinikumar Datta sent them packing. There was a widespread feeling of hostility towards the government and hatred of Europeans that was strongest amongst Hindus, but was spreading also to Muslims. The authorities stated that the activists were stirring up ‘the ignorant and turbulent Mahomedan peasantry, by appealing to their fanaticism and lawlessness.’ They were particularly worried by the way in which Datta was associating himself with low class Muslims of the rural areas. This all led to mounting repression, which was more intense in the district than anywhere else in East Bengal. Gurka soldiers terrorised Barisal town and punitive police were stationed in various places. Meetings were banned under the Seditious Meetings Ordinance and when activists gathered to try to defy this order, they were subjected to brutal beatings by the police. Members of the Samiti were harassed in ongoing court cases. Sedition charges were brought against four leading activists, two of whom were Muslim. Aswinikumar Datta and another leader were deported and the Samiti banned. The two Muslims were charged with distributing an Urdu pamphlet that declared that no good Muslim could be loyal to a Christian government. This appeal to Muslim religious sentiment had particularly alarmed the British, and one of these Muslim leaders, Liakat Husain, was sentenced to three years for sedition. This repression began to have an impact on the movement by late 1907, and the tempo slackened. A social boycott of those who defied the movement continued strongly, however.78   There were parallel, though less intense and well-organised movements in the East Bengal districts of Faridpur, Madaripur, Mymensingh and Dacca. Village-contact work proved extremely difficult in these  

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areas. In Faridpur, for example, attempts to win support from a group considered to be untouchable, the Namasudras (who represented over half of the nominally Hindu population of the district) had little success. They had their own tradition of solidarity against the upper castes. In consequence, the movement there was largely confined to the Hindu gentry and landlord classes. They revealed the class bias of their activity when they strongly opposed government attempts in November 1906 to record the rights of tenant farmers. Similar limitations were seen in Mymensingh District, where much of the land was controlled by a few big Hindu landlords. Some of them supported the movement initially, with donations for national education and support for the boycott. Many members of the local bhadralok had to earn a living as officials working for the zamindars, and could hardly act independently. The Muslim peasantry, for their part, opposed the movement, causing religious tensions that led to serious rioting in 1906 and 1907. Their main grievances were agrarian. The big landlords developed cold feet after the riots, and made their peace with the authorities. Moreover, the boycott failed to have an impact on foreign cloth and salt imports.   Such exclusivism saw many young activists in these districts turning increasingly towards revolutionary secret societies that were composed almost entirely of small groups of young bhadralok men. The Dacca Anusilan Samiti became the leading organisation of this sort. It was particularly remarkable for its relatively large membership, iron discipline and capacity for silent yet effective work. The goal from the start was ‘to effect a revolution and overthrow the British government’, and it argued that until the British were expelled forcibly, there could be no effective swadeshi. Its training book, the Anushilan Regulations and Drill-book began with by stating: ‘Come together who is ready to die.’ It included an elaborate system of graduated oaths that enjoined absolute obedience to the leaders of the organisation. Other writings that were later uncovered by the police revealed a belief in strong leadership, with a view that a small number of great individuals were the real movers of history. Unity behind such leaders was an imperative—the Narodniks in Russia had, it was claimed, failed because of a lack of such unity. Members of such groups focussed on preparation for an envisaged future armed insurrection, with training in the use of country weapons, such as the long sticks known as lathis, swords and unlicensed 63

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pistols. No attempt was made to win Muslim recruits, and indeed members provided defence for Hindus when there were communal riots in Dacca in 1907. Although some moderates in Dacca initially supported the group, they backed away by mid-1908 when it became clear that the group was involved in armed robbery to fund itself. The British began a crack-down on the Anushilan Samiti in late 1908, forcing many to take refuge in Calcutta.79   In East Bengal, therefore, passive resistance met its strategic limits by failing in almost all areas—except Bakarganj—to gain a mass following. Rabindranath Tagore commented scathingly in 1907 that the lower classes were being told to buy inferior and costly swadeshi goods and face Gurkha lathis into the bargain for the sake of a cause that offered little to them, and they were being asked to do this by the ‘babus’ who had treated them so contemptuously up until then. One nationalist leader remarked, after a long tour of the rural areas, that over nine-tenths of the lower orders were utterly indifferent to swadeshi. The move towards revolutionary armed struggle conducted by a small elite was a direct consequence of this failure. The bhadralok were unable to transcend their narrow class interests in this respect.80   This was not the case in the canal tracts of Punjab, where urban nationalists managed to make common cause with the peasantry in an agitation of 1907. The protest was against new regulations that took away some of the existing rights of the peasants, as well as a steep enhancement of the tax on water. There was also great irritation against corrupt local officials who extracted bribes at every turn, and whom the peasants knew would take advantage of the new rules to demand even more.81 The government had sought to implement these measures at a time when there was a spate of allegations against it. A severe outbreak of bubonic plague in 1906–7 had killed 3 per cent of the population of the province, and it was rumoured that the deaths were caused by the poisoning of wells by officials. At the same time, there were attacks by locusts, hailstorms, unusually hot winds, and cropblight, and many believed that the time was out of joint.82 Such beliefs—which had a compelling logic of their own—were common in peasant movements of that time.83 There was a chasm between this world and that of the middle and upper-class nationalists, who sought to purvey rationality and logic in their demands for self-determination. 64

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It was this sort of divide that the nationalist elites would somehow have to bridge if peasant resistance was to become central to the movement. The nationalists of Bengal largely failed in this, as we have seen.   In Punjab, however, the extremist nationalists fared better. The nationalist movement in this province had been sustained largely by middle-class urban Hindus who were members of the Arya Samaj—a Hindu religious revivalist movement that had been started in the late nineteenth century and which had proved particularly popular in that province. It preached Hindu nationalism, and many Arya Samajists supported the Extremist wing of the Indian National Congress. Lala Lajpat Rai was the foremost leader of the group. He had for a long time advocated a policy of self-help for nationalists, and had from the start been a strong and vocal supporter of the Swadeshi and boycott movement in Bengal. He quickly supported the peasant protest, and attended and spoke at a series of mass meetings of the peasants in early 1907.84   The protest in the canal colonies was spearheaded by larger landowners, working with local members of the middle class. Mass support came from peasants of all three of the major religions of the province: Sikh, Muslim and Hindu. Many were from families who had members serving in the army, and it was reported that there was growing disaffection in the ranks on this issue—an alarming development for the British, as their rule depended on the loyalty of the Indian Army. In a mass meeting attended by 10,000 canal colonists at Lyallpur in February 1907, a resolution was passed that called for cooperation between all religious groups against ‘British zalum’ (oppression). Lajpat Rai was at this meeting, and the British seized on this to claim that urban nationalists were ‘stirring up’ the supposedly contented masses. In this, they failed to grasp the depths of discontent amongst the peasantry. At further huge meetings Lajpat Rai exhorted the peasants to refuse to accept the tyranny of local officials, give up using British courts of law, support the development of Indian industry, and take vows of unity, thus linking the protest to the agendas of the wider Swadeshi Movement. There was a strong emphasis on self-respect, and the whole movement became popularly known by the opening line of a poem that was first recited at a mass meeting in Lyallpur in March 1907: ‘Pagri Sambhal O Jatta’ (‘O peasant, protect your self-respect’). A Sikh family of Lyallpur District that had connections with the Arya 65

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Samaj played a prominent role in the protest, and one of its younger members, a revolutionary called Ajit Singh, toured the region giving fiery speeches that demanded bloody sacrifice, a boycott of all officials, and general tax refusal. His aim was to inspire a general uprising against British rule. After one such meeting, on 6 April 1907, the canal colonists passed a resolution supporting the boycott of British goods and threatened anyone paying their water rates with social ostracism by the offender’s caste and a fine of 500 rupees.85   This all led the Governor of the Punjab, Denzil Ibbetson, to the conclusion that the Punjab agitation was part of a sinister plot to foment a violent revolution against British rule. He was a close friend of Fuller, the highly oppressive Lieutenant Governor of East Bengal, and shared his belief about a network of secret societies actively working throughout India to overthrow imperial rule by force. Although there were indeed some revolutionary cells in Bengal and elsewhere with grandiose aims of this sort, the idea that they represented any serious threat to the power of the British at that time was both alarmist and absurd. Spurred by such a fantasy, Ibbetson asked the Government of India for power to ban public meetings, close down hostile newspapers, and arrest anyone inciting peasants to refuse their taxes. He also demanded that Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh be deported. As it was, Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh did not see eye-to-eye; Rai did not encourage any use of violence, and the tone of his speeches was far more moderate than those of Singh. The Government of India, alarmed by a rumour that there was to be a general uprising on the anniversary of the fiftieth outbreak of the revolt of 1857—which happened to be 10 May 1907— agreed to Ibbetson’s request, and Rai and Singh were promptly arrested and deported without trial to Burma in that month. With the protest refusing to die down, and without the expected general uprising, the Government of India decided to review its hitherto unquestioning support for the Punjab authorities, and carried out investigations of its own. This revealed that the grievances of the peasants were genuine and that the movement enjoyed mass support. The actions of the Punjab government were overturned, and enhanced land rights were granted to the peasants. Rai and Singh were released from their imprisonment in November 1907. The victory was remarkable—though it was made possible only because the Punjab peasantry occupied a spe 

 

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cial position in British India as the source of recruitment for a third of the Indian Army. It was this more than anything else that caused the central government to intervene to provide the concessions that brought a quick halt to the protest.86   Considerable damage had however been done to the government in Punjab. The peasants had seen that they could protest against harsh government demands with success, if well-organised and committed to the cause. They were introduced to nationalist ideas, and were impressed by the willingness of nationalist agitators to suffer in their interest. Ajit Singh, above all, came to be considered as the popular hero of the movement, providing a continuing inspiration in the ongoing struggle of the Punjabi people against British oppression.87   In Bengal, meanwhile, the authorities had been ratcheting up their measures to counter extremist nationalism. They were becoming increasingly alarmed in particular by the tone of the English-language Bande Mataram and the Bengali-language Jugantar. Neither had a declared editor, though Aurobindo effectively occupied this position for the former paper, while his younger brother Barindra Ghose did the same for the latter. After publishing ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’ in April 1907, Aurobindo started another series in Bande Mataram titled ‘Shall India be Free?’. He argued here that a sound and vigorous nation had to be free to flourish. Foreign domination was an ‘unnatural condition … only the resistance to foreign rule can weld the discordant elements of a people into an indivisible unity…’ Aurobindo demanded ‘national independence’ for India. By the standards of the time, this was very radical language. The only others talking of such a programme were Tilak with his cry of ‘Swarajya is my birthright’, and Bipinchandra Pal with his demand for ‘national autonomy’. Few others had dared to express this demand so clearly previously, one that was considered by the British to be seditious. It struck a chord with large numbers all over India. Many of the people who were to become leading nationalists in the period after 1916 were inspired by Bande Mataram. Gandhi commented on the paper’s influence in South Africa, Jawaharlal Nehru felt its influence while a student in England, and it was appreciated by expatriate revolutionaries such as Shayamji Krishnavarma and Bhikhaiji Cama.88   In May 1907, public assemblies were banned in East Bengal and the two papers were warned to moderate their tone, or become liable to 67

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prosecution. This was no empty threat, as earlier in 1907, editors in Bombay and Punjab had been convicted of sedition and sentenced to one or more years in prison. Those producing Jugantar refused to listen, continuing in the same vein, and on 1 July the police raided its office and seized a load of documents. Four days later they arrested Bhupendranath Dutt, who claimed during the raid to be the editor, and was charged with sedition. At his subsequent trial he stated that he was solely responsible for the articles. This bold stand caused a sensation. It was the first instance of noncooperation with the courts, a tactic that Gandhi and his followers would later refine. On 24 July he was sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment. He went to jail as a hero, and the prestige of Jugantar soared.89   The offices of Bande Mataram were raided on 30 July, and piles of documents were carried away. The police tried to find proof that Aurobindo was the editor, and intended to arrest him once they had the evidence. They found little, but decided to arrest him on 16 August in any case. He surrendered himself to the police, and was released on surety. It had been rumoured that Bipinchandra Pal had been responsible for the astonishingly radical and inspiring articles in the paper, but now the true person appeared to have been revealed. Relatively obscure until then within the nationalist movement, Aurobindo became an instant celebrity in India. He refused however to acknowledge his authorship of the articles, for if sedition were proved, he could be punished with transportation for life. By ‘sedition’ was meant anything that was ‘calculated to bring the Government into hatred and contempt.’ As it was, he had worded his articles carefully so as to avoid such a charge. The government decided to prosecute him not for the articles original to Bande Mataram, but for translations of less-cautious articles from Jugantar that had appeared in it. The case began on 26 August 1907. Bipinchandra Pal was ordered to appear as a witness in the court to testify that Aurobindo was the editor. He refused to appear, charged with contempt, and sentenced tp six months simple imprisonment. Aurobindo stated that he was not and had never been the editor. The government was unable to find anyone who could provide adequate evidence to prove otherwise. Although the paper had printed seditious material, only the printer could be held responsible, and Aurobindo was acquitted on 23 September.90  

 

 

 

 

 

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  With Pal in jail, Aurobindo became the effective Extremist leader in Bengal. He led the Extremist delegation from Bengal to the Congress session in Surat at the end of 1907, pointedly travelling third class, while the Moderates leaders occupied the first class compartments. Crowds flocked to see him as he stopped at each station, and he gave impromptu speeches. Reaching Bombay, he addressed a huge crowd on the beach. In Surat, the Moderates stayed at a camp with luxurious tents and servants waiting on them, while the Extremists crammed into dharamsalas and houses near the centre of the town. The acknowledged leader of the Extremists was Tilak, and he addressed a meeting of this party to plan their strategy that Aurobindo chaired. They decided to try to get the Moderate President-elect, Rashbehari Ghose, to step down in favour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and agreed to move resolutions on swaraj, swadeshi, and national education, and propose amendments to any resolutions that did not satisfy them. Next day, Tilak went to the Moderate’s camp to negotiate with their leaders Pherozeshah Mehta and Gokhale, but they refused to compromise. When Lajpat Rai arrived in Surat later that day, he refused to accept being proposed for president and tried to act the peacemaker. He proposed setting up a committee consisting of five members from each party. The Extremists agreed, and selected Tilak, Aurobindo and three others. Gokhale however refused to accept this idea. The Extremists continued to press for some compromise, and although Surendranath Banerji supported them in this, the other leading Moderates refused to bend. Mehta and Gokhale were in a strong position, as they enjoyed support from a firm majority of delegates from all of the provinces of India except Bengal— about half of its delegates sided with the Extremists.91   The first session began on 26 December. Every one of the 10,000 seats in the pavilion was taken, and of the 1600 delegates, about 500 were estimated to be Extremists. When the Chairman of the reception Committee made his speech, it was clear that the Moderates were not going to allow any Extremist demands in the resolutions to be discussed. The Extremists objected, preventing the speakers from being heard, and the session was suspended in chaos. Attempts to patch things up were made that evening. The Moderate Bengali leader Surendranath Banerji invited the Bengal Extremists to his tent. Aurobindo came with the younger Extremists. Banerji scolded them  

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for weakening Bengali solidarity, and offered a compromise agreement. Satyen Bose tore it up, and the Extremists walked out. The next session resumed in the same vein on 27 December. Aurobindo and Tilak sat at the front with the delegates, rather than on the platform. When Rashbehari Ghose was declared elected and began his speech, Tilak rose and demanded to move an amendment. Some hired strongmen intervened to try to stop him forcibly, whereupon the Maharashtrian Extremists came to his defence. A Mahratta shoe was thrown, hitting Banerji and rebounding on Pherozeshah Mehta. There was pandemonium, with chairs being thrown and heads broken. The Bengali Extremists provided an escort for Aurobindo as he left, and as he walked out a Moderate spat on him from above. Next day, the Moderates held a separate meeting in the pavilion under police guard. All who entered had first to sign a Moderate declaration. Some Extremists tried to get in by signing, so that they could disrupt the session, but were turned away. That evening, the Extremists held their own meeting, with Aurobindo in the chair. Tilak spoke for ninety minutes. They held a further meeting next day, with Tilak again speaking. On 30 December, Tilak and Aurobindo issued a statement that blamed the split on the Moderates reneging on the Calcutta resolutions. In this way, the Indian National Congress fractured, leaving the Moderates in control, with the Extremists in opposition.92   The British could now exploit this divide by limiting their provision of constitutional concession for the Moderates, while suppressing the Extremists. In Bengal, a bungled assassination attempt by revolutionary nationalists gave them the justification for such measures. This act was carried out by a group that had gathered around Barindra Ghose in Calcutta. He and his young associates believed that passive resistance was futile, and that only bold and inspiring leadership and the blood of martyrs would inspire the uneducated masses. They projected such a death as being comparable to that of a blood offering to the Mother Goddess, and believed that their sacrifice would inspire a mass uprising, with the British being eliminated in a single day. Sarkar has characterised this as the theory of ‘maximum sacrifice by minimum men’, in which the elite few rouse the masses through their heroic martyrdom.93   Barindra Ghose’s group was, however, careless and lacking in discipline. Although they attempted ten actions between 1906 and 1908,  

 

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they failed to achieve their aims in every case. Their endeavours included five planned assassinations, two robberies, and three attempted train derailments. These failures went largely unnoticed. It was only when they managed in May 1908 to throw a bomb at a carriage in which they believed a notorious British judge was travelling, inadvertently killing the two British women who in fact occupied it, that the seriousness of their aims became apparent to the authorities. Barinda Ghose and his associates were quickly rounded up as their security had been very lax.94 Of the two young men who carried out the act, one committed suicide on the point of being arrested, while the other was caught and later hanged for the murder. The others were arrested, along with Aurobindo, and tried for the subversion of British rule, a charge that carried a possible death penalty. The assassination had caused a wave of alarm amongst the British in India. There were calls for stricter censorship of the press, the prohibition of meetings, harsher arms laws, and deportation without trial. Otherwise, they were risking—so it was said—a second ‘mutiny’. The Viceroy, Lord Minto, believed that the revolutionaries might conceivably link up with the rebellious tribes of the north-west frontier and the Amir of Afghanistan, opening up the possibility of a Russian invasion. This, it was said, could only be averted if ‘anarchists and anarchy’ in India were crushed mercilessly.95   The trial began in October 1908, with the thirty-seven who were charged pleading not guilty. Unlike Barindra and his young comrades, Aurobindo had been very cautious, and no incriminating evidence could be found to show that he was anything but an Extremist nationalist—something that was not punishable under the law. The trial proved very complex, and it dragged on into 1909, with the judgement being delivered only in May of that year. Barindra and eighteen others were found guilty, and he and one associate were sentenced to death, with the rest being condemned to transportation for life or prison sentences of varying lengths. All the rest were acquitted, including Aurobindo. The police and government were unhappy at the verdict; they had expected more to be found guilty, and the acquittal of Aurobindo was the biggest blow of all. The nineteen who had been convicted appealed, and were defended with great skill by the nationalist lawyer and politician, Chittaranjan Das. As a result of this, the two death sentences were 71

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lifted, and replaced with transportation for life, and others had their sentences reduced.96   Tilak sought to contextualise the actions of these revolutionaries in his paper Kesari as a reaction to extreme oppression, but despite his cautious language he was arrested and tried for sedition. He was found guilty on flimsy grounds, and sentenced to transportation for six years. He was imprisoned in Burma, being released only in 1914.97 Coming out of jail in May 1909, Aurobindo found that the Extremists were now leaderless and inactive. Tilak was now in prison, and Lajpat Rai and Bipinchandra Pal were in self-imposed exile in the west. The Moderates were enjoying government approval. The Morley–Minto constitutional reforms were announced in December 1908, and were praised fulsomely by the Moderates. They soon found however that the measure would bring hardly any real shift in power. Minto denied that representative government was applicable to India, as it was ‘uncongenial to the traditions of Eastern populations.’98 Morley argued that nothing like a parliament was being established in India. In fact, the measure was regressive, as it institutionalised communal electorates, dividing Hindus and Muslims.   Alongside the reforms there was also repressive legislation, such as the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act that made it difficult to publish anything slightly ‘seditious’. The India Press Act was passed in 1910, requiring printers and publishers to deposit a security that could be seized if they printed ‘obnoxious matter’, the nature of which could be determined by the government. The Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, allowing for summary trails and the prohibition of ‘associations dangerous to the public peace’. Known revolutionary associations, and in particular the Dacca Anushilan, were outlawed under this measure. While it survived underground, it had to cut back on its activities. Bande Mataram had already been closed in November 1908, leaving the Extremists with no organ of their own. A proposed National Extremist Conference was banned by executive order. Aurobindo attempted some revival with public speeches, and by launching a new weekly newspaper Karmayogin in June 1909. Although the government watched him carefully, ready to prosecute him if he said anything ‘seditious’, he was careful not to allow them any such opportunity. All he did was state that Indians should be prepared to go  

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to jail for a ‘righteous cause.’ Suffering in this way was bearable if the cause was just. In one such speech he stated: ‘On their fidelity to Swadeshi, to Boycott, to passive resistance, rested the hope of a peaceful and spiritual salvation. On that it depended whether India would give the example, unprecedented in history, of a revolution worked out by moral force and peaceful pressure.’ None of this could be considered illegal as such.99 The Government of Bengal nonetheless decided to deport fifty-three ‘leading agitators’, of whom Aurobindo was one, and to prosecute Karmayogin for sedition. In March 1910, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but he was forewarned and had already fled to French territory in India, first Chandernagore, and from there to Pondicherry. He intended to stay there a year or two at most but, in fact, remained for the rest of his life. Aurobindo Ghose never again played an active role in the Indian Nationalist Movement.100

Self-help There was one feature of the Swadeshi Movement that we find also at that time with Sinn Féin in Ireland—namely, a stress on self-help through active work to build alternative institutions of civil society and self-governance, with the aim of bridging the divide between the elites and the masses. It aimed to inculcate a culture of self-respect, dignity and moral strength amongst the people, and thus create worthy citizens for the future nation. Later, this became known during the Gandhian period as ‘constructive work’, or the ‘constructive programme’. It became a distinctive feature of nonviolent strategy in India, being central to the whole process of such struggle. It is, as I have pointed out in the introduction, a feature that is either ignored or marginalised in much of the modern literature on nonviolent strategies of resistance. It was, however, extremely important, as it provided the means to forge the civil society that was required to underpin any vibrant mass democracy. Scholarship on strategic nonviolent resistance that fails to bring out the importance of such work and focuses only on the process of active resistance is missing a crucial element in the creation of the sort of society that it claims to be striving for.   In this, the Swadeshi Movement built on the social work of the Ramakrishna Mission, a humanitarian organisation founded in 1897 by 73

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Swami Vivekananda. This, in turn, grew from a longstanding social and religious reform movement in nineteenth-century India that has been studied in detail by historians.101 The monks of the Mission and lay sympathisers who volunteered their service carried out educational, cultural, welfare, and relief work throughout the region. There was a strong emphasis on inculcating a spirit of ‘cleanliness’ in society that was informed by a mix of religious and sanitary concerns.102 Their work was based on the idea of seva, or service. Originally this was conceived as service to a deity, but in the course of the nineteenth century this had come to be conceived as the duty to serve society, and particularly the poor, through welfare activities. This was in general an elitist project, in which people of a high caste background carried out work to ‘uplift’ and ‘improve’ members of the lower castes and untouchables. Whereas in the past the elites had generally regarded the lower castes as nongra lok—or ‘dirty people’—worthy only of contempt, they now began to see them as reformable and as potential citizens of a future Indian nation. The Ramakrishna Mission declared itself to be a strictly non-political organisation, and it was recognised and appreciated by the British for this. With the Swadeshi Movement, such work took on a new dimension, with service to the poor becoming a means for political outreach and the building of mass support for the nationalist movement. Informed by a rhetoric of atmashakti or ‘selfempowerment’, it became central to the nation-building project of twentieth-century India.   A leading figure in this movement for self-help and service to the poor was Rabindranath Tagore. In the 1890s, he had attacked government policies and white arrogance and racial discrimination and pleaded for atmashakti, which he had contrasted with the degrading mendacity of the leading Congress politicians of the day. He called for economic self-development and educational work. He demanded the use of the vernacular in education and political meetings as a means of bridging the gap between the elites and the masses. He also started a rural ashram in 1901 that carried out educational work in the surrounding areas, and called for folk institutions such as melas, or fairs, to be used to spread the message of atmashakti. In his famous ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ speech of 1904, Tagore had called for a turning-away from the old-style politics, and instead asked for volunteers to go from village74

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to-village to spread social and political enlightenment. He believed that an older more vibrant village society could be revived and social and economic work channelled through it. In this, as Sarkar has argued, Tagore was romanticising the traditional village society.103   The Swadeshi Movement saw a blossoming of such efforts throughout Bengal. Swadeshi shops sprang up all over the place selling textiles, soap, matches, earthenware and leather goods made in new Indianowned factories. A Bengal National College and School was opened in 1906, and national schools established throughout the province. Aswinikumar Dutta’s work in Barisal was notable for its firm focus on such work. He made Barisal into a strong base of the Swadeshi Movement from 1905 onwards, with the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti constituting 159 branches that reached deep into the interior of the district. Disputes were settled through the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti; by August 1906 its 89 arbitration committees were said to have settled 523 disputes. The Extremist politicians supported such work strongly, but argued that it could not in itself bring independence—active political agitation and resistance was required for that. Aurobindo, in his articles on passive resistance, called for social, economic and educational work as a building-block towards the paralysing of the foreign administration through a total boycott. Nonetheless, Atmashakti in itself would not bring political independence, and without political freedom real moral and social regeneration was not possible.104   This debate led to a growing divide at that time between those who felt that the main focus should be on social improvement activity, and those who wanted to emphasise the primacy of the political work. The former were led by Rabrindranth Tagore who became concerned that the political agitation was leading to the growth of a potentially irreversible divide between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal society. He believed that the only way to effectively counter this was to backpedal on the political work and focus firmly on social and educational programmes that would link the Hindu elites with for the poor and marginalised of all religious backgrounds. Tagore demanded patient, sustained and unostentatious constructive work in the villages. This would involve organising associations, introducing cooperative techniques in agriculture and handicrafts, and encouraging a sense of self-reliance among the peasantry. In this, the masses would gain a national con 75

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sciousness. Welfare work, he argued, provided a much more potent means for mass contact than the political meetings, patriotic songs and propaganda at festivals that were favoured by the Extremist leaders. From mid-1906 onwards, he focused on such activity in his central Bengal estates and educational experiments at Santiniketan, in the process distancing himself from active political work.105   This posed a direct challenge to the whole approach of the Extremists. Bipinchandra Pal condemned it as a dilution of patriotism, and Aurobindo wrote scathingly of Tagore’s unworldly desire for ‘sweetness and love’. The dispute came to a head when Tagore gave a speech at Chittagong on 17 June 1907 where he pointed out that neither the old nor the new parties were doing real mass contact work. Soon after, on 21 June 1907, another leading nationalist, Asutosh Chaudhuri, spoke at Pabna, repeating a call he had made in 1904 for social work as the priority for nationalists rather than political agitation. An editorial in Bande Mataram of 22 June 1907 provided a rejoinder to this. The reaction against mendacity, it was stated, took two forms. One was that nationalists should focus on developing social resources at village and township level in a peaceful way, through form of ‘peaceful ashrams and swadeshism and self help.’ Though this was a noble idea, it failed to take into account that the British would interfere at some stage to undermine such efforts. The second was to focus on political opposition, the belief being that it was subjection that caused the main social and economic problems, and the priority should be to fight for freedom. As it was, the rousing political appeals of the Extremist leaders were more inspiring for the educated youth than the calls for patient social and educational development work. Tagore’s demand seemed by comparison timid and anaemic. The Extremists proved, however, to lack the resilience in depth that might have allowed them to weather the repression that was unleashed in the second half of 1908. This broke the political agitation with surprising ease. The reality was that the elites lacked any mass base, and that the lower classes were largely apathetic about the movement, or in some cases even actively hostile to it. Disenchanted by their lack of mass support, many young high caste nationalists then turned to armed struggle, in which it was held that the few might inspire the masses through their dramatic self-sacrifice.106 As it was, it was only through Gandhi’s inter 

 

 

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vention a decade later that this gap between the social and political campaign was eventually bridged in a significant and constructive way.   Sarkar has pointed out that a remarkable feature of the Swadeshi Movement was that it anticipated many of the strategies of the subsequent movement led by Gandhi, but in a partial and often inadequate form. For the first time, a concerted demand was being voiced for national independence, and various methods were proposed and implemented to a greater or lesser degree that were designed to achieve this. Sarkar goes on to argue that the failure of the movement at that time was due more to internal weakness than British oppression. The class base of the movement was restricted, being rooted in Bengal in a pettybourgeoisie with a family background in small landlordism. Large landlords gave some support at the start, but soon dropped away when they realised that the protest could cause severe social disruption. Indian capitalists—the bankers, traders, professional moneylenders and manufacturers—failed to provide much dynamic input, and often remained loyal to the British at this time. The agrarian capitalist class— that is, in the Indian context, a class of landowning richer peasants farming for the market—was then weak in Bengal and not involved in the struggle to any important degree. This was in contrast to Punjab, where the brief involvement of this class in 1907 and its linking-up with urban nationalists gave a severe fright to the British.107   We may add to this that the movement at that time lacked any strong central leadership and direction. The Extremists did not control the Indian National Congress, and could not use this institution for their purpose. The movement was strongest in Bengal, with one important upsurge in Punjab that Lala Lajpat Rai became involved with, and with scattered support elsewhere, as amongst the petty-bourgeois Brahmans of Maharashtra who made up Tilak’s main regional support-base. In Bengal itself the organisation was dispersed, with a welter of local associations that sometimes worked loosely together, but which often disagreed about tactics, as seen in the argument between advocates of passive resistance, self-help activities, and armed struggle. Passive resistance was just one part of this mix—it was a strategy with great potential, but one that failed at that juncture to achieve its promise.

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‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1906–14

We may now turn to M.K. Gandhi, who was at this same time leading his own campaign of ‘passive resistance’ in South Africa. Although this was not strictly speaking a part of the Indian nationalist movement, it was celebrated in India by both Moderates and Extremists as an exemplary case of Indians standing up for themselves within the British Empire. The rhetoric employed in the campaign often appealed to Indian nationalist sentiments. Here, Gandhi set out some of the important principles of engagement that he was later to apply in India, and, in this respect, it is important for Indian history too.   Gandhi had arrived in South Africa in 1893, working as a lawyer in Durban, largely representing Indians in immigration cases and other disputes that involved the authorities. In this, he dealt with the three main classes of Indian in the colony: the business class, the educated white-collar workers, and the poor indentured labourers working on sugar plantations and in mines. He also acted as a political organiser, defending Indian merchants who were being discriminated against by white settlers who resented having to compete with them in business. The discrimination was worst in the Transvaal, where Indians were denied citizenship rights and allowed to own property only in specially designated zones. The community had been already expelled from the Orange Free State and calls were being made constantly by white politicians for the same policy to be applied in the Transvaal. The Indian mer 



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chants appealed to London against the white settlers, arguing that liberal values and rights should prevail throughout the Empire, and they also sought backing from the Government of India and the Indian National Congress. In this strategy that focussed on petitioning, they were replicating the methods of the Indian National Congress at that time.1 Gandhi had moved to Johannesburg, the main city of the Transvaal, in 1903, to place himself at the head of this movement. It was a new settlement established only in 1886 and, as Jonathan Hyslop has shown so evocatively, it was a place of uncertainty and disintegration, but also holding the possibility of freedom. It provided a forum for ideas, with notions ‘of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice’ being explored energetically. It also allowed a space in which people could reshape their lives in fresh ways, in contact with new peoples and influences. Gandhi grasped this opportunity wholeheartedly, becoming a part of a social circle that he would never have had access to in India and which allowed him to explore new ways of being in the world. Notably, he mixed with a group of Jewish intellectuals who were fascinated by both Eastern religion and Western critiques of contemporary society. The most important of them were Henry Polak from England, Hermann Kallenbach from Germany, and the young woman who was to become his secretary, Sonia Schlesin. They introduced him to Western alternative thinkers, and, also, a new understanding of Hindu philosophy.2

The Transvaal, 1906–11 In launching his first passive resistance campaign in the Transvaal, Gandhi followed the militant lead of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, which by then was in full swing and being watched closely by him. The target was the Asiatic ordinance of 1906, that required all Indians and Chinese of both sexes over the age of eight to register—a process that involved giving all ten fingerprints—and then carry a pass at all times. Failure to do so could lead to arrest and imprisonment. This was seen as a degrading and humiliating measure, and in the case of Asian women, a violation of their modesty. A meeting was held in Johannesburg on 11 September 1906 to discuss ways of fighting the ordinance—this is the date normally given for the launching of the campaign, though the tactic agreed upon in the first instance was the  

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old one of lobbying London. They resolved that if this failed, they should defy the ordinance and be prepared to go to jail. This was the first time that extra-legal action had been threatened by Indians in South Africa, the model for this being the Extremists in India. In one of the speeches at the meeting, a Muslim merchant of Pretoria declared that there was no disgrace in going to jail in such a cause—it was rather an honour—and that while only a few people had heard of Tilak before he was jailed, now the whole world knew of him. In his speech, Gandhi claimed the responsibility of advising protestors to go to prison, arguing it showed that the time had come to go beyond petitions. He also talked of using the tactic of hartal, meaning a collective refusal to work or carry on trade until a grievance was redressed.3   The delegation, which consisted of Gandhi and a Muslim businessman, travelled to London in late 1906 and lobbied the authorities. Despite sympathetic noises from the Colonial Office, the British government were at that very moment handing over key powers to white South Africans, and it failed to put any effective pressure on the new hard-line Transvaal government that was elected by a white-only male franchise in March 1907. This meant that lobbying London was henceforth a far less effective strategy, as Westminster’s control over the white settlers was now limited. One of the first measures that the new Transvaal government took was to turn the 1906 ordinance into formal law as the Registration Act of 1907. Permit offices were opened from July 1907 onwards, and all Asians ordered to register. Passive resistance now started, with many refusing to do this. By the end of November, only 8 per cent of those required to register had done so. The arrests began in late December, and those found guilty ordered to leave the Transvaal. When they returned and courted arrest once more, they were jailed for two months. By the end of January about 2,000 had been imprisoned.4   For the first time, Gandhi was leading all sorts of Asians, not just the more prosperous businessmen that he had lobbied for previously. The poorer Indians and Chinese—many of whom were small traders and hawkers—were also threatened by the measure, and they joined the protest in large numbers. Rather than place any stress on sectional economic hardship, Gandhi astutely decided to transcend such concerns by making the issue one of pride. Writing in his weekly paper  

 

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Indian Opinion on 6 July 1907, he argued that submission meant a loss of honour and that those who capitulated would suffer ‘the curse of all India.’ The Act was an insult to their manhood, and that to register would be an act of cowardice. Those who protested and went to jail would be revered, and jail would be like a palace. He invoked their religious sensibilities, stating that those who registered were forsaking their God—whether Hindu or Muslim—and that they must put their trust in God to protect them. Prayers for the repeal of the Act were subsequently held in mosques, and orthodox Brahman priests pledged their support.5   Gandhi had never before led a campaign of passive resistance, and his approach had not yet attained its subsequent clarity. The protest drew in groups that he had not worked with hitherto, notably the hawkers, many of whom were Tamils, and he had not initially anticipated this. He suddenly found himself the leader of a mass movement. For Gandhi, this was all unchartered territory. Passive resistance was organised in a somewhat ad hoc manner. There was no one over-arching body coordinating the protest; only a collection of associations acting together, such as the British Indian Association, the Natal Indian Congress, the Hamidia Islamic Society, and the Sanatan Veda Dharma Sabha. Funding was haphazard. Gandhi, rather than any association, held the funds personally, and he relied on constant donations from rich Indians. The British Indian Association had no standing fund, and costs often had to be covered through special collections. The grounds of the Hamidia mosque in Johannesburg were provided free of charge for regular meetings, which helped offset the lack of any regular funding. This all caused problems when people were arrested and their families required financial assistance. Gandhi did what he could to help out where there was a need in this respect, but there was a limit to what he could do, and if families suffered, morale could be undermined.6   Mobilisation was carried out in various ways. There were public meetings at which the movement’s ideology was expounded, tactics reviewed and commitment reaffirmed. Meetings were held when support was wavering, to try to restore moral, and a lot of energy was put into encouraging people to turn out. This included the calling of ­hartals, or stoppages of work for that day. In Johannesburg, there were weekly meetings organised by the Hamidia Islamic Society that were  

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well attended. Elsewhere, people might be brought in from other areas to create a sense of solidarity for small and isolated Indian communities. For example, 600 Indians travelled from Johannesburg to Pretoria on a train chartered by the British Indian Association to attend a meeting. There was a formal procession from the station to the meeting place, with banners in front and a bicycle escort alongside. The turnout was 2,000—more than the entire 1,500-strong Indian population of Pretoria.Yet, there was no ongoing organisation in Pretoria, and a third of its Indians subsequently gave in and registered for permits. Picketing of permit offices played a prominent role in the movement, with ‘picket brigades’ and picketers wearing badges of identification. They patrolled the vicinity of a permit office, appealing to would-be applicants not to register. In smaller places, the entire community might perform this function, as at Germiston, where the picketing continued for two days. There were only two instances reported of violence caused by picketing. Most of those who registered did so secretly to avoid the pickets.   Caste and community leaders played an important role in mobilising their members, and they organised social boycotts of those who registered. For example, when one prominent passive resister capitulated, he was denounced in a meeting of the Hamidia Islamic Society. The suggestion that he be boycotted was hailed by the meeting as a whole. It was ordered that ‘all contacts with Mr. Haloo should be cut off, his employees should give notice and quit his service, and that other Indians should have no business dealings with him.’ When one prominent passive resister fled the Transvaal rather than spent a second spell in jail, Gandhi denounced him as a ‘bad coin’, adding: ‘So far as the community is concerned, Ram Sundar is dead henceforth. We are to forget him.’7   Gandhi’s weekly paper Indian Opinion played an important role in coordinating passive resistance. It provided instructions on how to carry on the protest and what to do if arrested. People posted questions, and Gandhi answered them in print. The questions often revealed ignorance of the tactics, lack of commitment to the movement’s ideology, and most of all—as Gandhi pointed out—they revealed fear of going to jail and suffering pecuniary loss. Gandhi sought to boost their morale in this respect. He gave emotive labels to the opposition, such  

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as ‘the Plague Office’ for the Permit Office, and he compared the Registration Act to ‘the god of destruction’ who was ‘fond of Indian blood.’ The names of supporters were published in the paper, and people were encouraged to send in their names. Meetings of support in Durban or Cape Town were publicised. While the ‘heroes’ of the movement were celebrated, ‘blacklegs’ were condemned shrilly, being listed by name and community. It should be nonetheless noted that only 100 copies of Indian Opinion were being sent regularly to Johannesburg in 1907, and it was in English, Gujarati, and Hindi, with no Tamil—still less, Chinese—sections. Clearly, many of the participants lacked access to it.8   Poems and songs played a significant role in mobilisation and in strengthening the morale of the protestors. Many verses were printed in Indian Opinion, and they reveal the way in which the struggle was rooted in the existing cultural idioms and traditions of the participants. They were often in the language of Indian devotional poetry and song, which upholds love for both God and fellow devotees as a supreme value, or the ghazal, which was originally a form of Arabic love poetry that was very popular in the nineteenth century. These tropes were deployed to assert continuity, stability and cultural pride of the Indians in an alien milieu, that of South Africa. They depicted truthfulness, generosity, bravery and self-sacrifice as ‘Indian’ values that could be contrasted with the inferior ‘modern’ values of their white rulers. India’s history was depicted as one of a series of glorious achievements, and the deeds of mythical and historical characters were extolled. They celebrated those who had suffered for the cause, usually by going to jail, as great heroes whose courage was comparable to such exemplary figures from India’s past. All of this sought to give a sense of pride to those who were being stigmatized on racist grounds. They exclaimed the power of truth that could defeat the greatest tyranny, and thus imparted a spiritual quality to the protest.   Communal harmony was another recurring theme. Although Gandhi claimed that religious tolerance was a feature of Indian culture, he, in fact, had to fight incipient communal tensions within the movement in South Africa. The poems carried on this task, exhorting those of different religions to pull together for the sake of Indian pride. In the words of one such work: ‘Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Parsi, we are broth84

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ers. By birth, caste, and relationship, we are all Indians’, and in another: ‘Sing the songs of Bande Mataram and Allah Akbar [Hindu and Muslim exhortations respectively] … pick up the arrow of unity and shoot disunity down.’9 The power of these verses lay in their performance, as they were intended to be recited or sung to an audience. They reveal the spirit that informed this campaign in South Africa, revealing how the supposedly ‘timid’ Indians overcame their fears and courted police beatings and jail. It also shows how many of the values that Gandhi later brought to the struggle in India were first forged and expressed in an emotive and inspiring vernacular form in this movement.   By January 1908, the authorities were becoming concerned that imprisonment was not having the desired effect. The jails, moreover, were unable to accommodate all those who were defying the law. Liberals in Johannesburg and the Cape Province, as well as the Viceroy of India, were putting pressure on the Transvaal government to compromise. On 30 January, Gandhi was taken from prison to meet Jan Christian Smuts in Pretoria. Smuts was the Colonial and Education Secretary for the Transvaal, and acted as the cerebral deputy to the earthier Afrikaner Prime Minister Louis Botha. The meeting went well, with the two men (who were of the same age) talking in an amiable way. Smuts said he had no ill feelings against Asians; all that he wanted was that the Indians should not crow over their victory. On his own initiative, Gandhi decided to accept a compromise, in which Asians would register voluntarily rather than under compulsion, after which the law would be repealed. He came out of the meeting believing that Smuts had assented to this without reserve, and called on all Asians to register voluntarily. Next day, all the jail-goers were released—about 220 in total. Although most of the Indians accepted the compromise, some felt betrayed, for it was the humiliation of giving fingerprints as if they were criminals that was most resented. Gandhi was accused of agreeing to this without consulting the community through a mass meeting. This was at that time the only forum for popular decisionmaking. Gandhi responded that leaders had to be given a certain freedom of action. When on his way to register, Gandhi was attacked in the street by an enraged Pathan wielding an iron rod. Hit down and with blows to the head, he could have been killed but for the quick intervention of a colleague with an umbrella to ward off further blows. A sym 

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pathetic American clergyman, Joseph Doke, intervened and insisted that Gandhi be taken to his house, where he was slowly nursed back to health over the following weeks. As it was, the attack on Gandhi enhanced his standing amongst the Indian majority, as it revealed that he was prepared to risk his life for his convictions. He now had a reputation as a fearless political leader negotiating on equal terms with Smuts, rather than—as previously—a lawyer taking briefs for Indians who had trouble with their immigration status. Almost all Indians registered voluntarily between February and May 1908.10   Within months, it became clear that Smut’s offer had conditions attached. The main one was that there would be no future immigration of educated Indians into the Transvaal. The Asiatic Registration Act was to be repealed only if an alternative Immigration Restrictions Act was accepted. In this way, Smuts sought to deprive the Asian community of future leadership.11 When this became clear in May 1908, Gandhi had further negotiations with Smuts, to no avail. The Registration Act was not now going to be repealed. On 24 June 1908, a meeting of Indians was held in Johannesburg that resolved that they should withdraw all registrations and resume the struggle. Dramatic public burnings of the registration documents began to be staged from July onwards.   By now, Gandhi was articulating the morality of his stance more clearly. He had read Tolstoy, Ruskin, the Gita, the Koran, Plato’s Dialogues, the Bible, and Bacon’s essays on civil and moral counsel when in jail, and began talking of ‘Truth’ as the sacred object of the struggle. Writing in Indian Opinion at this time, he stated that: ‘Truth is God, or God is nothing but the Truth … it is a divine law that he who serves that Truth—that God—will never suffer defeat.’ They were no longer fighting for their narrow commercial interests, but ‘Truth’. A series on Socrates, supposedly the perfect passive resister, was published in Indian Opinion between April and May 1908 under the title ‘Story of a Soldier of Truth’. There was a similar series on Ruskin’s Unto this Last, in which Gandhi translated Ruskin’s ‘Roots of Honour’ as ‘Roots of Truth’ in Gujarati. ‘Truth’ was seen to be right action carried out by a fearless person of conscience without regard to consequences. It was during this time that Gandhi devised the word satyagraha, meaning literally ‘adherence to Truth’. He disliked the term ‘passive resistance’, as it implied passivity rather than active and courageous engagement. The  

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new term was formed from the Sanskrit words satya (truth), and agraha (seizing or laying hold of). As with the concept of satya, agraha had connotations of divine force. The classic early Sanskrit text of the Uttarakhanda of the Susruta Samhita, which dates to the first five centuries CE, had for example recognised nine grahas that were understood as ‘a kind of intangible but conscious agent.’12 Satyagraha thus suggested a process of possession by a greater moral force.   Gandhi wrote an article of 22 February 1908 in Indian Opinion entitled ‘Secret of Satyagraha’ that elaborated on what the term meant. He demanded that a satyagrahi (a person who practiced satyagraha) rid his mind of fear and refuse to be a slave to others. Satyagraha could be practiced against both governments and within society. It meant freedom and independence. It was an attitude of mind, and anyone who acted in this spirit would be victorious. Swaraj would be of no value unless it embraced this principle. By early 1908, Gandhi had thus elaborated some of the key themes of his mature philosophy. There was nonetheless a striking omission, namely a lack of emphasis on the idea of ‘nonviolence’. Although it was assumed that passive resistance would reject any recourse to violence, Gandhi made no attempt at this stage to elaborate nonviolence as an integral part of his approach. The way in which this became a central principle of his approach will be discussed in Chapter 4. As it was, the term ‘passive resistance’ continued to be applied generally to the struggle of the Asians in South Africa during these years.13   Besides the public burning of passes, Indians defied the law by carrying on illegal hawking without the required license. Activists came from Natal to join their Transvaal colleagues, and many were arrested either for lacking the required documentation to enter the province, or for illegal hawking. Gandhi’s son, Harilal, was one of those who did this, and he was jailed in consequence. The picketing of registration offices was also resumed. The government reacted by arrests, and by closing the shops of dissidents and confiscating their goods. The police did not, at this juncture, use much violence against the protestors. Gandhi found himself in jail once more in October 1908, this time for two months. In February 1909, he was back in jail again, this time having to endure much harsher conditions that were designed to break his spirit. He was released in late May, after protests by white sym 

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pathisers. A meeting was held each Sunday at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg to welcome the latest batch of ‘heroes’ released from jail and to salute those who were now about to court arrest. Despite being poorly fed in jail, and often having to carry out hard labour that was damaging to the health, morale continued to be high.14   In June 1909, Gandhi led a delegation to London to plead their case. On the day that he arrived in London, an Indian student called Madanlal Dhingra assassinated a retired Indian civil servant, Sir Curzon Wyllie, when he came to speak to a group of young Indians. The assassin had been inspired by Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857–1930), a radical nationalist who founded a hostel for Indian students known as India House and who ran an extremist nationalist paper called Indian Sociologist. Although Krishnavarma had moved to Paris in 1907 to avoid arrest in Britain, his influence continued to pervade India House. Dhingra was associated with this place. One of his student comrades in London, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, championed Dhingra by arguing that he was acting as a Hindu patriot. Dhingra was subsequently executed for murder. Gandhi was horrified by all this; he felt that it had undermined the efforts of his delegation. He stated that Dhingra acted in a cowardly manner, and that he had been ‘egged on by this illdigested reading of worthless writing.’ Wyllie had gone as a guest of the Indian students, and had been betrayed. If the British left India because of such acts, murderers would become rulers. Despite this strong repudiation, Gandhi found that many members of the British establishment believed there to be a connection between an extremist nationalism in India that gave rise to such acts of violence and the struggle by the Indians in South Africa. Gandhi argued that he was firmly against such ‘sedition’, that they had received no money at all from the ‘party of sedition’ in India, and would refuse it if offered. ‘Passive resistance’ was very different, as it did not inflict suffering on others. All of this blighted his efforts to plead his case in Britain, and on 3 November 1909, the Colonial Office informed him that they were unable to influence the Transvaal government. Declaring that the campaign would continue, Gandhi left for South Africa soon after, frustrated with what he saw as the duplicity of British political leaders.15   Before leaving London, Gandhi had met with some of the young ‘Extremists’ who were studying there and found to his distress that they believed that the British could be removed only through violence.  

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Gandhi argued that they were wrong in this, and that ‘passive resistance’ would provide the far more effective way. He was appalled by the way they preached hatred of all Britishers, and tried to convince them that this would be counter-productive, as they had to reach out to sympathetic members of the British ruling class. The students were particularly scathing of Gokhale, who for them represented all the supposed weakness and pusillanimity of the Moderates. Gandhi was a great admirer of Gokhale, and defended him strongly. He was, however, worried about Gokhale’s reputation amongst young nationalists, and wrote to him on 11 November arguing that this could be altered profoundly if he demonstrated his firm support for passive resistance in South Africa, even courting arrest. The letter is very revealing about Gandhi’s ambitions for his methods. He asserted:  

I claim that the Transvaal struggle is national in every sense of the term. It deserves the highest encouragement. I have considered it to be the greatest struggle of modern time [sic.]. That it will succeed in the end I have not the slightest doubt. But an early success will break up the violence movement in India. I have moved very freely among our countrymen here and I notice extreme bitterness against you. Most consider that violence is the only method for securing any reform. In the Transvaal, we are trying to show that violence is futile and that the proper method is self-suffering, i.e., passive resistance. If, therefore, you came to the Transvaal, publicly declaring that it was your intention to share our sorrows and, therefore, to cross the Transvaal border as a citizen of the Empire, you would give it a world-wide significance, the struggle will soon end and your countrymen will know you better. … Feeling so strongly, I would be pardoned for suggesting that the Transvaal question should have a prominent place on the Congress platform and nothing can be so effective as for you to say that you would join the struggle.

  This letter revealed how much Gandhi was now pinning on his campaign in the Transvaal; it had become a means to demonstrate the efficacy and strength of the sort of political engagement that he advocated for both an Indian and world audience. He was clearly trying to shift the main nationalist divide in India away from that of the constitutionalists versus advocates of direct action—whether ‘passive’ or violent— to one between advocates of ‘passive resistance’ as against violent forms of armed struggle.16 89

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  On the voyage back to South Africa, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, the pamphlet that was to become known as his manifesto. (This shall be examined in the next section). While Gandhi had been away, his close friend and colleague Henry Polak was touring India publicising the struggle in South Africa. He sought out leading nationalists, newspaper editors, influential lawyers, and big businessmen and gave them detailed information on their campaign. He addressed meetings all over India, getting enthusiastic support and funding for the movement. The fact that rich and poor, Gujaratis and Tamils, Hindus and Muslims were fighting together with great solidarity appeared to provide a lesson for all Indian nationalists. Gokhale, by this time a firm champion of Gandhi, helped facilitate all this, and addressed in person a big meeting in Bombay at which he praised Gandhi fulsomely as a ‘saint and patriot’ who was fighting for the honour of all Indians. Later, Gokhale confided in Polak that he wished Gandhi was working alongside him in India. Polak published a pamphlet that set out the issues and argued their case, and was encouraged to follow this up with a short life of Gandhi that brought out his strong morality, sense of public duty and willingness to suffer any hardship for the cause. He claimed: ‘…perhaps, in this generation, India has not produced such a noble man—saint, patriot, statesman in one.’ In this way Polak ensured that for the first time Gandhi became a well-known figure in India.17 Most important, the new moral and financial support coming from outside South Africa meant that the Transvaal authorities now had to pay greater regard for their international reputation—something that is an important consideration for all governments faced by civil protest.18   Arriving back in Johannesburg, Gandhi resumed his leadership of the campaign. With generous donations now flowing from India, they could finance the protest far more effectively. Protestors and their families could be housed and fed on ‘Tolstoy Farm’, a thousand-acre plot outside the city, that was established by Gandhi and his close associates. The Transvaal authorities reacted by putting many of the prisoners of conscience in solitary confinement, hoping to break their spirits, and by deporting many others to India. Received as heroes in India, and put back immediately on ships bound for South Africa, this measure backfired against the Transvaal authorities. The movement continued through 1910, into1911, with no breakthroughs for either side. Some 90

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3,000 Indians courted arrest, which represented 35 per cent of Indians in the province. Outside Johannesburg, the courts tended to fine Indians for not registering, rather than send them to jail. If they refused to pay, their goods were seized and auctioned. This was a severe blow to small traders. Gandhi advised them to sell their shops nominally to sympathetic whites and then go out hawking. The fact that Gandhi could so inspire them was a great achievement—some had predicted that the Indians were not made of such stuff. Many were merchants, who had a reputation for caution and a reluctance to take political risks or confront authority. They, and the professionals, hawkers, and workers all risked their livelihood in the struggle. Negotia­ tions continued while this was going on, and Smuts eventually agreed in April 1911 to move for the repeal of the Registration Act in the next session of parliament. The protest was then withdrawn for the time being. Smuts now had a battle on his hands to persuade the white members of parliament to vote for this—which led to stalemate throughout 1912, and into 1913.19  

 

Hind Swaraj Hind Swaraj was shaped by Gandhi’s experience in London in 1909. It was written originally in Gujarati, and published initially in that language. Gandhi produced his own English translation two months later. Both versions were printed by his press in Durban.20   The short book was set out in the form of a dialogue in which a ‘reader’ posed various questions, and an ‘editor’ (Gandhi) provided answers. The reader began by referring to the chasm that had opened up between Moderates and Extremists in India, doubting that the two could ever meet. Gandhi had been exposed strongly to this argument in London, and he took the chance to firmly defend Moderates, such as Dababhai Naoroji and Gokhale. He held that although we may not always agree with them, we should at least respect them for their patriotism—all should be working together for the good of the nation.21   Gandhi went on to examine the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. The importance of this lay not so much in this issue as such—for the British had perpetrated many injustices in India—but in the fact that large numbers of Indians had gone beyond petitioning and taken direct action to redress a wrong. He argued: 91

THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19 After the Partition, people saw that petitions must be backed up by force, and that they must be capable of suffering. This new spirit must be considered to be the chief result of the Partition. That spirit was seen in the outspoken writings in the Press. That which the people said tremblingly and in secret began to be said and to be written publicly. The Swadeshi movement was inaugurated. People, young and old, used to run away at the sight of an English face; it now no longer awes them. They do not fear even a row, or being imprisoned. Some of the best sons of India are at present in banishment. This is something different from mere petitioning. Thus are the people moved. The spirit generated in Bengal has spread in the north to the Punjab, and in the south to Cape Comorin.22

 Here, Gandhi underlined how important it was for people to overcome their fear of the power of an authoritarian state, and he had no illusions as to how difficult it was to create and maintain a climate in which people would willingly and courageously take direct action and be prepared to suffer the consequences. After all, he had had to carry on this task in South Africa for the past three years, constantly cajoling, supporting, and at times disciplining his supporters. Nonetheless, despite this admirable mental change, there had been one very significant stumbling block—namely that the Swadeshi Movement had led to a divide in the Congress between the Moderates and the Extremists. ‘I think that this division is not a good thing for the country, but I think also that such divisions will not last long. It all depends upon the leaders how long they will last.’23 Here, Gandhi was trying to go beyond the divide between Moderates and Extremists, and he clearly regarded himself as a leader who could facilitate this.   Gandhi went on to examine the sort of ‘swaraj’ that Indian nationalists were demanding. While in London, he had read a strong attack on Indian nationalism published in September 1909 by the famous author G.K. Chesterton. In this article, Chesterton argued that it was an imitative ideology, with Indians merely demanding European-style institutions. They were not striving for a different system rooted in Indian tradition.24 Gandhi had much sympathy for this argument, stating in Hind Swaraj that ‘we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj that I want.’25 Gandhi set  

 

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out at some length numerous shortcomings of the sort of ‘civilisation’ propagated by the British, taking many of his arguments from various critiques by western alternative thinkers, such as Henry Thoreau, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, and Edward Carpenter. He also quoted some western Orientalists who had provided fulsome praise for Indian civilisation.26 The question then arose as to why such a great civilisation had come under foreign rule. The answer, for Gandhi, was not that the British had a more ‘advanced’ civilisation that made their global expansion a matter of human progress—as British evolutionists generally argued—but because Indians had cravenly surrendered their country to them. ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them.’27 Indians had come to depend on the foreigners, just as addicts depended on their drugs. The British were helped also by internal political and religious divides, so that in supporting one group against another they in time came to dominate all. ‘Some Englishmen state that they took and they hold India by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them.’28 The British maintained their ongoing control though ‘subtle methods’ that succeeded in dazzling the Indian people in a variety of ways, ‘soothing’ them into accepting their exploitation and ruin.29   Adopting Gramscian language, we may say that Gandhi understood British control as primarily hegemonic and ideological rather than based on physical force.30 This was a crucial move that set Gandhi apart from the radical Indian nationalists of his day; for they held that India was controlled above all by the superior armed force of the British, so that although their imperial rule might be weakened through passive resistance, the ultimate challenge would have to take a military form. If, however, the hold of the British was largely a mental one, then their position would soon become untenable if large numbers of Indians refused to accept imperial control and disobeyed them whenever they acted oppressively. For this, Indians required above all the psychological courage to stand up for their cause and suffer the consequences without the use of any arms and military means. As Gandhi asserted: ‘Strength lies in absence of fear, not in the quantity of flesh and muscle we may have on our bodies.’31 Central to all of this was a refusal to allow the British to divide and rule—in its most obvious form, the way in which the British stoked Hindu–Muslim enmity. This, for Gandhi, 93

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was another mental issue, for religious groups were allowing the British to divide them. Once they saw themselves as a large family, they would realise how important it was to keep quarrels within those bounds rather than expose themselves to the wiles of non-family members. ‘If two brothers want to live in peace, is it possible for a third party to separate them? If they were to listen to evil counsels we would consider them to be foolish.’32 Rather than resort to British-run courts of law to resolve disputes, Indians had to learn to adjudicate quarrels through their own independent methods and institutions. Once they did this, they would create an environment in which the psychological hold of imperial rule was further undermined.33   Gandhi then set out his own alternative vision for India. He argued that Indian civilisation differed profoundly from that of the West. ‘The tendency of the Indian civilisation is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilisation is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God.’34 In essence, Indian civilisation was: …that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means ‘good conduct’.35

  Gandhi held that the large majority of people in India continued to live in such a ‘civilised’ way. Only the upper classes had fallen under the allure of the British: And where this cursed modern civilization has not reached, India remains as it was before. The inhabitants of that part of India will very properly laugh at your new-fangled notions. The English do not rule over them, nor will you ever rule over them. Those in whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us. I would certainly advise you and those like you who love the motherland to go into the interior that has yet been not polluted by the railways and to live there for six months; you might then be patriotic and speak of Home Rule.36

  Once these masses learnt to assert themselves, and once their values were respected and allowed to form the base for a new Indian national polity, then there would be genuine swaraj.   Addressing the question as to precisely how India could become free, the ‘Reader’—mouthing the views of the radical nationalists of 94

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the day—asserts: ‘There seems little doubt that we shall have to expel the English by force of arms.’37 The ‘Editor’ (Gandhi) upbraided him for not getting the point, namely that rather than use force, all they had to do was to refuse to co-operate with British ‘civilisation’. The British were, anyway, too well armed for nationalists to take them on in such a way at that time, and if eventually they armed themselves sufficiently, they would merely be embracing western civilisation, with all its corrupting elements, and, in that case, it would be better to accept the British, as they were most skilled in operating such a system. READER: You are over-stating the facts. All need not be armed. At first, we shall assassinate a few Englishmen and strike terror; then, a few men who will have been armed will fight openly. We may have to lose a quarter of a million men, more or less, but we shall regain our land. We shall undertake guerrilla warfare, and defeat the English. EDITOR: That is to say, you want to make the holy land of India unholy. Do you not tremble to think of freeing India by assassination? What we need to do is to sacrifice ourselves. It is a cowardly thought, that of killing others. Whom do you suppose to free by assassination? The millions of India do not desire it. Those who are intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization think these things. Those who will rise to power by murder will certainly not make the nation happy. Those who believe that India has gained by Dhingra’s act and other similar acts in India make a serious mistake. Dhingra was a patriot, but his love was blind. He gave his body in a wrong way; its ultimate result can only be mischievous. READER: But you will admit that the English have been frightened by these murders, and that Lord Morley’s reforms are due to fear. EDITOR: The English are both a timid and a brave nation. England is, I believe, easily influenced by the use of gunpowder. It is possible that Lord Morley has granted the reforms through fear, but what is granted under fear can be retained only so long as the fear lasts.38

  The ‘Editor’, i.e. Gandhi, went on to argue that ends were determined by means, and violence would merely create escalating cycles of violence: Let us first take the argument that we are justified in gaining our end by using brute force because the English gained theirs by using similar means. It is perfectly true that they used brute force and that it is possible for us to do likewise, but by using similar means we can get only the same thing that they got.You will admit that we do not want that.39

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  He argued that, contrary to generally-perceived wisdom, the resolution of conflict by peaceful means was a far stronger force than that of violent revolt. When issues were settled by force, those who were so coerced invariably continued to kick against what they had been compelled to do unwillingly, whereas if people accepted courses of action through peaceful debate and discussion, both parties would accept the outcomes. What they should therefore aim at was to bring about a change of heart in their opponent. He described this as ‘love-force, soul-force, or, more popularly but less accurately, passive resistance. This force is indestructible. … The force of arms is powerless when matched against the force of love or the soul.’40   In a fresh chapter, Gandhi then elaborated on what he meant by the idea of ‘soul force’. In the Gujarati original, this chapter was titled ‘Satyagraha–Atmabal’, which means ‘Truth-Force—Soul-Force’.41 In the English version, the title was rendered merely as ‘Passive Resistance’, indicating that he felt that the term was still necessary when addressing an English-speaking readership. Nonetheless, at the start of the English version, the ‘Reader’ refers implicitly to the Gujarati concept when asking: Is there any historical evidence as to the success of what you have called soul-force or truth-force? No instance seems to have happened of any nation having risen through soul-force. I still think that the evil-doers will not cease doing evil without physical punishment.42

  Gandhi answered that most so-called ‘history’ merely recorded acts of violence by rulers, with the everyday peaceful resolution of conflict being ignored even though it provided the basis for any civilised life. He went on to explain exactly what such a method involved. Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arm. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force. For instance, the Government of the day has passed a law which is applicable to me. I do not like it. If by using violence I force the Government to repeal the law, I am employing what may be termed body-force. If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self. Everybody admits that sacrifice of self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of others. Moreover, if this kind of force is used in a cause that is unjust,

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‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1906–14 only the person using it suffers. He does not make others suffer for his mistakes. Men have before now done many things which were subsequently found to have been wrong. No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be. This is the key to the use of soul-force.43

  Gandhi went on to argue that such a method could be used by a minority to impress its views against the dictates of majorities. It is a superstition and ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority. Many examples can be given in which acts of majorities will be found to have been wrong and those of minorities to have been right. All reforms owe their origin to the initiation of minorities in opposition to majorities.44

  In contrast to armed struggle, passive resistance could be applied by anyone, where young or old, male or female: ‘even a man weak in body is capable of offering this resistance.’45 It could be offered by just one person, or millions could use it together. All that was required was mental strength.46   Gandhi thus held that the sort of ‘soul-force’ that he extolled provided a much better and more equitable means for conflict resolution in every sphere of interaction, including the political. Furthermore, it provided an exemplary expression of an Indian civilisational ethic, in that it valorised spiritual above material power. It was therefore particularly suited to India and the Indian diaspora—as in South Africa. In this way, with considerable dexterity, he turned a method of protest that had evolved above all in modern Europe into a strategy that was rooted in what he claimed were foremost ‘Indian’ values. In contrast to Aurobindo Ghose, he did not locate these values primarily within Hinduism, but rather understood them as civilisational ones, spanning religious divides. Gandhi had, after all, seen Muslims and Hindus struggle alongside each other according to such principles in his movement in South Africa. While each might understand their actions in terms of their own theologies, what mattered was the overall ethos that they held in common. Gandhi also went beyond the cult of the strongbodied young male ruled by the martial values of a warrior caste, as 97

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invoked by Aurobindo, holding that no great physical strength was required for passive resisters, only a mental resolve that could be manifested by people of both genders and all age-groups, whether physically strong or weak.

Natal, 1908–14 So far, the struggle had been confined primarily to the Transvaal. Sympathisers had travelled from Natal to court arrest, but there had been no attempt at passive resistance there. The Indian who suffered most in Natal were the indentured labourers who worked in its plantations and mines. Many of them were Tamils. Once their contracts expired, they had either to renew them on the same harsh terms, or pay a poll tax of £3 per head—a punitive sum for poor workers. Imposed in 1895, this tax was designed explicitly to force them to take out new contracts rather than set themselves up as small farmers or petty traders. The Natal Indian Congress had not fought for the rights of the Indian workers in any serious way, representing mainly the rights of an Indian business and trading class that was less under threat than their counterparts in the Transvaal. Some Tamil white-collar workers sought to rectify this—and, in the process, challenge the political dominance of the largely Gujarati business elite—by campaigning against the £3 tax from 1908 onwards. Their leader was a well-educated Tamil called P.S. Aiyar, and their newspaper was the African Chronicle. Aiyar and his colleagues made little headway, even though they had a vision of leading a mass movement that would eclipse Gandhi’s protest in the Transvaal. Aiyar proved to be a poor organiser compared to Gandhi.47   The stalemate in the Transvaal continued, with Smuts in no position to get parliamentary approval for the formal repeal of the Asiatic Registration law. The eventual legislation of 1913 provided only very inadequate concessions. Gandhi began to see that the sort of campaign that he had waged in the Transvaal had failed to generate sufficient pressure to gain their objective. Already he had been considering extending his campaign to include other issues that affected the Indian community as a whole—in particular, the £3 tax.48 Then, in 1913, a judge in Cape Town had refused to recognise a Muslim marriage on the  

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grounds that both Islam and Hinduism permitted polygamy. This called into question the validity of all Indian marriages. Gandhi saw immediately that this represented a challenge to the residency rights of all Hindu and Muslim wives in South Africa and he demanded an immediate change in the law. He asserted that: ‘Any nation that fails to protect the honour of its women, any individual who fails to protect the honour of his wife is considered lower in level than a brute.’ A mass meeting was held in Johannesburg at which passive resistance was threatened. Gandhi’s wife Kasturba volunteered on her own initiative to go to jail.49   On 12 September 1913, civil resistance was resumed on a range of issues. The main ones were that the discriminatory legislation against Indians be repealed, including the restrictions on their freedom of movement between provinces in South Africa; the abolition of the £3 tax; and that a law be enacted legalising all forms of Indian marriage. These multiple agenda provided a basis for strong support from Indians throughout South Africa, and in particular those of Natal, who were by far the largest in numbers.50 The marriage issue was important in mobilising Indian women, and Gandhi made a point of projecting them as a central force within his movement. This was an extremely radical step by the standards of the day. The campaign of passive resistance in India had been an almost entirely all-male affair, with the men who led and participated in the Swadeshi movement refusing to allow female members of their families to protest in public. The idea of women exposing themselves to the gaze of males by demonstrating in the streets, still less being sent to jail, was almost unthinkable in a culture in which family status was judged in terms of the ability to protect the ‘honour’ of female members.   What made Gandhi adopt a radically different approach in this respect? On his visit to London in late 1906, he had been inspired by the tactics that were being used by the suffragettes to obtain the vote for women. Four days after he had arrived, on 24 October, some women had demonstrated at the House of Commons with such vigour that they had been arrested and prosecuted. They were ordered to provide sureties of £5 each, and, on their refusal, most were sentenced to three months in jail. In an article written for Indian Opinion, Gandhi quoted one of the suffragettes, Jane Cobden, as exclaiming: ‘I shall  

 

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never obey any law in the making of which I have no hand; I will not accept the authority of the court executing those laws: if you send me to gaol, I shall go there, but I shall on no account pay a fine. I will not furnish any security either.’ Gandhi observed that many people in Britain laughed at the women, refusing to take them seriously. He was however convinced that they would eventually gain the vote, as deeds were always better than words. By their courage, he said, the suffragettes provided an example that Indians in South Africa should emulate.51 Gandhi continued to take an interest in the suffragettes and their movement over the following years.   Gandhi was also influenced by Henry Polak’s wife Millie, who was a strong feminist. Gandhi and his family had lived with the Polaks in the same house in Johannesburg from 1904, and had seen the way that Millie refused to allow herself to be treated as a subordinate in any way. Although Kasturba Gandhi was never entirely submissive to her husband, sometimes waging what M.K. Gandhi later described as ‘satyagraha’ against his dictates, she had always in the final instance acquiesced in her husband’s demands. Millie Polak was able to hold her own in the house, putting forward well-reasoned and convincing arguments. Gandhi also relied strongly on another feminist, his secretary Sonja Schlesin, who showed how women could take charge of their own lives with great independence and courage. Gandhi, if he had remained in India, would not been exposed to the challenge of living on an everyday basis with such strong feminists—this experience came entirely in consequence of the unorthodox life that he led in South Africa. It was to give a whole new dimension to his struggle there, and the movement that he led later in India.52   The protest started with men and women who were domiciled in Natal attempting to enter the Transvaal without permission. They were arrested and jailed. Hindu and Muslim women, including Kasturba Gandhi, were among those so punished. They were housed in the same cells as African women convicts—something that would previously have attached much stigma for ‘respectable’ Indian families. In October 1913, Gandhi took a gamble by calling for Indians working in the coal mines of Natal to go on strike. The miners deeply resented the £3 tax, as it drove many of them back into taking out fresh contracts—even though they would have preferred to set themselves up as individual  

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famers or traders once their initial term had expired. In 1913, 65 per cent of the work-force were on follow-on contracts. Gandhi’s leading Tamil colleague, Thambi Naidoo went to the mining centre at Newcastle and organised rallies at which the miners were exhorted to stop work. They began to down tools from 18 October, and within two weeks up to 5,000 miners from several different collieries were out. Once the strike was firmly under way, Gandhi sent in seasoned campaigners, particularly Tamils born in Natal, to provide leadership. Gandhi accompanied them as they toured the mining areas, addressing mass meetings, urging miners to strike and dissuading those who were showing signs of returning to work. They met the mine owners and told them that if the £3 tax was repealed, the miners would resume work immediately.53   The government initially made little attempt to break the strike, merely posting armed guards to protect the mines. The intent was to wear the miners down, and it was expected that they would soon drift back to work. By the second week, Gandhi realised that he needed to force a confrontation. On 23 October, he announced that those on strike were to march to the border with the Transvaal and cross it illegally. The march set out at the end of October, with Gandhi at its head. In all, about 4,000 took part, carrying their own provisions and sleeping in the open at night. Smuts, now the Minister for Defence for the New South African Union, took no action, believing that Gandhi had taken on more than he could handle logistically and that the march would soon collapse. Both the merchants and the Indian public were, however, prepared to donate money generously to provide provisions. On 29 October, there was an enthusiastic meeting in Johannesburg, with large sums being raised by auctioning the possessions of those present at highly inflated prices. The first batch of marchers reached the border on 6 November, and Gandhi led them into the Transvaal. The local police feared that there would be violence and arrested him. Gandhi appealed the next day for bail, which was granted by the judge. He re-joined the marchers and continued at their head, but was arrested again on 8 November, and again released on bail. Smuts had now decided that the march must be stopped. The next time that Gandhi was arrested, his request for bail was rejected and he was jailed. Other leaders who had marched with Gandhi, such as Henry  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Polak and Hermann Kallenbach, were also detained. The miners were arrested en masse, escorted by the police to a railway station and put on three specially-commissioned trains back to Natal. The mines were classed as temporary prisons, with mine-labour being considered as a compulsory part of their punishment. Most accepted this without dissent, but some who tried to resist were driven back to work by the police who wielded fearsome leather sjambok (whips).54   While the police were breaking the miners’ strike, the protest spread to the sugarcane plantations of coastal Natal. Indentured labourers began to leave work on their own initiative. They had a wide range of grievances relating to their harsh and exploitative working conditions, with the abolition of the £3 tax being high on the agenda. News of the miners’ strike had filtered through word of mouth to these largely illiterate workers who came mainly from poor peasant backgrounds in India, leading to rumours similar to those experienced frequently in peasant insurgencies in India.55 It was said, for example, that a great ‘raja’, or king, had come to abolish the £3 tax. The raja, it was alleged, would decapitate anyone who failed to support the strike. Others who had heard of the Indian nationalist support for their cause, claimed that Gokhale was coming from India to sweep away the tax— even that he was coming at the head of an army for this purpose. Some who had heard of Gandhi believed that he had told them to go on strike, which was not, in fact, the case at that juncture. Although leaders emerged from the workers, their control was limited to individual plantations or barracks of workers. As a result, there were no clearlystated demands for the workers as a whole—instead, there was a welter of disparate complaints. Over 15,000 workers joined the strike. Most remained in their barracks, while some congregated in small towns or made their way to Gandhi’s headquarters in Natal—the Phoenix Settlement.56   The plantation owners feared for their livelihood and property, believing that there would be rioting and arson. A few, but not many, fields of sugarcane were set on fire—about 150 acres in all. The crop for the year was being harvested at that time, and although a good deal had already been processed, much still had to be cut, crushed and transported to the sugar mills. The white owners were entirely dependent on Indian labour for most of these tasks. Rumours spread through 102

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the white population of Natal. It was said that the Indians were calling on black Africans for support, and with the so-called ‘Zulu rebellion’ of 1906 still fresh in mind, many whites were thoroughly alarmed. The police were called in to suppress the strike. The black African civil rights leader John Dube observed all this, reporting that the strikers had congregated on open ground and refused to move despite being beaten by the police. He was impressed by their courage and endurance, and gained a new respect for them. The Cape Coloured leader, Dr. Abdurahman, also praised them, stating that the Indians were showing a way for all of the ‘coloured races’ to demand their rights. In some instances, the police fired on gatherings of workers, claiming to be acting in self-defence. Although many workers carried their large cane-cutting knives and in some cases threw stones, the police were never seriously threatened, and the firing was clearly intended to intimidate. By the end of November, the strike had spread to Indian labourers working in brick kilns and then to Indians in all sorts of employment in Durban itself. The Durban and Pietermaritzburg produce markets were in a state of paralysis. The Chief Magistrate of Durban toured the city, urging the strikers to return to work. He was told everywhere that their ‘Rajah’, Gandhi, had told them to strike until the £3 tax was repealed. The Magistrate had 120 supposed ‘ringleaders’ arrested in the city, to no avail, as the leadership was so dispersed. The government then called in the army. Strikers were attacked, with six being killed and thirty-four seriously wounded in firing by the soldiers.57   The strikes by the Natal Indian workers attracted widespread publicity in Britain and India, much of it critical towards the South African Government. Mass meetings were held in India in support, and the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, took the issue up, criticising the South African authorities severely. Even in South Africa, some liberal whites called for a greater recognition of Indian rights. In response to this pressure, the South African Government announced in the second week of December that it would set up an ‘Indian Enquiry Commission’ to report on the disturbance and its causes. For all their bluster, white South Africans needed Indian labour and were now prepared to compromise. Gandhi, Polak and Kallenbach were released on 18 December, and others, such as Kasturba Gandhi, released in the following days.  

 

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Gandhi was shocked at her emaciated appearance—she had eaten little in jail. Gandhi had, while in jail, shaved his head and started to wear white in mourning for those killed in the firings. He said that he would henceforth dress like an indentured labourer.   Gandhi was not impressed by the composition of the three-man commission of inquiry, as two of its members were known to have anti-Indian views, and at first said that he and his supporters would boycott it. Gokhale felt that this would a grave tactical error, as it would alienate many influential sympathisers, and he sent a telegram to Gandhi to this effect. Gokhale had persuaded Hardinge to depute a senior Indian civil servant, Sir Benjamin Robertson, to represent the Government of India at the commission. Gokhale’s councils prevailed, and Gandhi said that they would cooperate. Gokhale briefed Robertson before he left, and also persuaded two English clergymen who taught at St Stephen’s College in Delhi, C.F. Andrews and W.W. Pearson, to go to South Africa to mediate. They met Gandhi and persuaded him to negotiate directly with Smuts. On 6 January 1914, Gandhi wrote to Smuts, offering to see him. Smuts was also being pressurised by the well-known British social reformer Emily Hobhouse, who had condemned the harsh treatment of imprisoned Boers in the Boer War and was, as a result, greatly respected by Afrikaaners. Hobhouse was in South Africa at that time, and after meeting Gandhi became sympathetic to the Indian cause. She was a personal friend of Smuts, and urged him to settle the issue in a decisive and generous way. Gandhi met with Smuts in mid-January, and the negotiations went well. An agreement was reached on 21 January 1921, in which Gandhi promised to suspend passive resistance pending the outcome of the commission and the introduction of legislation that would satisfy the demands of the movement. The commission reported in April 1914, which led to Act 22 of June 1914, or the ‘India Relief Bill’ as it was known at the time. The £3 tax was abolished. One wife was guaranteed a right to enter and live in South Africa. There was, however, no provision for the right of free movement of Indians born in South Africa between the colonies of the Union. This was, nonetheless, a triumph for Gandhi and his campaign of passive resistance.58   Gandhi felt that he had achieved all he could in South Africa and left in July 1914 for London, then India. His movement had made him a  

 

 

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celebrity in his home country. Gokhale was his greatest supporter, even visiting South Africa to put pressure on the white authorities, and playing a crucial role in gaining the support of the Indian authorities in 1913. The Extremist nationalists were also highly impressed by Gandhi’s bold defiance. Comparing the situation in Bengal with that in South Africa, Aurobindo Ghose said in 1909, that in Bengal they had only talked about ‘passive resistance’, but in South Africa they had made it a reality in far more difficult conditions.59 When Gandhi arrived in India in early 1915, he was thus welcomed by nationalist of all persuasions.

Conclusion Although passive resistance in the Transvaal established Gandhi as a well-known political leader, and engaged the hitherto ‘quiescent’ Indians in principled law-breaking and jail-going, the numbers involved were limited due to the small size of the relatively isolated Indian population. The campaign was unable to generate sufficient pressure to gain support for reform from a racist whites-only parliament. This happened only when the campaign switched to issues other than the Asiatic Law, namely the £3 poll tax that was a major grievance for the much larger community of indentured and ex-indentured labourers, and the refusal to recognise Indian marriagesw, which Gandhi was able to use in a way that engaged women in the movement. Key to the success of any campaign of civil resistance is that of the ability of leaders and participants to respond imaginatively and flexibly to moves by the state. Gandhi proved up to the challenge here, first taking up new issues, and then countering state strategies with fresh initiatives. Most notable was his decision to stage a long march involving the striking miners. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi observed that this method of passive resistance was a commonplace in India, and he cited a case from his own native Kathiawad: The fact is that, in India, the nation at large has generally used passive resistance in all departments of life. We cease to co-operate with our rulers when they displease us. This is passive resistance. I remember an instance when, in a small principality, the villagers were offended by some command issued by the prince. The former immediately began vacating the village. The prince became nervous, apologized

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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19 to his subjects and withdrew his command. Many such instances can be found in India. Real Home Rule is possible only where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people.60

  Gandhi was referring here to a protest technique known as hijrat, in which people marched en masse to a different area, where they remained—often camped outside—until the ruler capitulated. Perhaps the best known such case occurred in Surat in 1669, when 8,000 merchants and businessmen left the city in protest against the tyranny of a local judge and marched to a town about 60 kilometres to the north. Eventually, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb intervened, dismissed the judge and promised to redress their grievances. They then returned to the city.61 In using such a tactic in South Africa, Gandhi demonstrated his skill in adapting an old method for a new situation in a way that wrong-footed his opponents. Smuts decided not to intervene, mistakenly believing that the logistical problems involved would defeat Gandhi. His adversary, though, proved up to the challenge, arranging sustenance for the marchers. A momentum was built up, and a propaganda victory was won before repression was eventually unleashed. Gandhi had revealed his strategic acumen. His abilities in this respect proved to be superior to those of many of the leaders and participants in the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, who tried to carry on passive resistance alongside violent activities—most notably the generally botched attempts to assassinate British officials. They also failed to make it, for the main part, a mass movement that involved peasants and workers. In this, they showed both a lack of faith in the method and shortcomings in executing this form of mass action.   There was one important principle that Gandhi developed in South Africa that was not present in earlier campaigns, namely that the method could be deployed in such a way as to win over the opponent. Hitherto, ‘passive resistance’ had sought to apply pressure on the adversary through the mass withdrawal of all forms of cooperation, the establishment of parallel forms of authority, as well as through the refusal to obey objectionable laws. The aim was to make a country ungovernable or a law unworkable, forcing the authorities to step down. The idea that such a method worked best if the opponent became morally convinced as to the rightness of a demand was a new and ambitious one. Gandhi claimed in Hind Swaraj that his method was 106

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‘based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love.’ He held that he was inspired by what he had observed in disputes within families: ‘Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. … Two brothers quarrel; one of them repents and re-awakens the love that was lying dormant in him; the two again begin to live in peace…’62 A polity was no different from a family in this respect, and all that had to be made clear was what was best for the harmony of the whole. Gandhi claimed that in South Africa he had reached out in this way to his main adversary, Smuts, with considerable success. In his history of the movement in South Africa, written in 1924, he claimed that his appeals to Smuts had, at first, fallen on deaf ears. It was only when the movement continued strongly, even after his arrest on 9 November 1913, that Smuts began to waver:  

Government saw that my arrest did not dishearten or frighten the pilgrims, nor did it lead them to break the peace. If they took to rioting, Government would have an excellent opportunity of converting them into food for gunpowder. Our firmness was very distressing to General Smuts coupled as it was with peacefulness, and he even said as much. How long can you harass a peaceful man?63

  Gandhi held that by mid-December, Smuts appreciated ‘there had been an injustice which called for a remedy.’64 He agreed to meet Gandhi. At the same time, a strike by white rail workers was going on, which put the government under severe pressure. Gandhi told Smuts that he and his followers were not going to support the railway strike as the issue was entirely separate, and that they would suspend their protest until the railway strike was resolved. This created a ‘deep impression’. One of the secretaries to Smuts told Gandhi: I do not like your people, and do not care to assist them at all. But what am I to do? You help us in our days of need. How can we lay hands upon you? I often wish you took to violence like the English strikers, and then we would at once know how to dispose of you.You desire victory by self-suffering alone and never transgress your selfimposed limits of courtesy and chivalry. And that is what reduces us to sheer helplessness.65

  Smuts, Gandhi asserted, expressed similar sentiments when they met. He was much more conciliatory than on previous occasions. C.F. Andrews, who accompanied Gandhi at this meeting, was struck  

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by the courtesy of Gandhi’s whole demeanour, and held that it won Smut’s respect.66 The overall impression given by Gandhi in his later account of the movement is that Smuts became morally convinced as to the justice of the Indian cause, leading to a new harmony in South Africa.67 Yet, Smuts continued to believe firmly in racial segregation and the inevitable discrimination that this entailed against non-whites. His son, in his biography of his father, claimed that he had made a few insignificant concessions to Gandhi while maintaining the most important discriminatory laws against Indians. His father had in fact burst Gandhi’s bubble: ‘His outwitting by my father had been complete, and it was in this sense of failure that he set out dejectedly to brood and scheme in India.’68 This, certainly, is the impression conveyed in Smuts’ well-known remark as Gandhi left South Africa later in 1914: ‘Gandhi approached me on a number of small administrative points, some of which I could meet him on, and as a result, the saint has left our shores—I sincerely hope for ever.’69 Little of this suggests a moral coming-together of the two men—only a pragmatic concession by Smuts, so as to calm the waters at that particular juncture. Thus, although Gandhi had advanced a notion as to how his form of protest operated, the evidence does not suggest that this was the real reason for his success in South Africa in 1914.

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BUILDING A NATIONALIST BASE IN RURAL INDIA PEASANT STRUGGLES IN BIJOLIYA, CHAMPARAN AND KHEDA

In ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’, Aurobindo Ghose had argued that the British would be particularly hard hit if peasants refused to pay their land-tax on a wide scale. It was, after all, the single most important tax levied by the British in the subcontinent. He saw however, that the time was not then ripe for such a protest. Tax-refusal was an illegal act, and it would lead to harsh sanctions and, most likely, police violence against peasants; it should be undertaken only when there could be a strong and united pan-Indian movement of this sort that could bring the government to its knees. There was, however, one important respect in which he held high hopes for such a struggle, namely in the ability of the Indian people to maintain solidarity through social pressures. India was, he wrote, a country in which ‘the people are more powerfully swayed by the fear of social excommunication and the general censure of their fellows than by the written law.’1 Once a peasant community had determined on such action, it would be able to act in a united way. As it was, the only strong peasant campaign during the Swadeshi Movement was not in Aurobindo’s Bengal, but in Punjab, where the agitation in the canal colonies brought quick concessions from the British. The lesson here was that the British were prepared to

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conciliate the peasants of one region to avoid such protest spreading. Similarly, in Natal, when the Indian indentured agricultural workers and ex-indentured peasants protested in 1913–14 against the £3 tax, the state moved rapidly to defuse the protest by agreeing to remove it. More was gained for the Indian community in South Africa in these few months than had been achieved through years of protest by the business and trading classes of the Transvaal.   Although Gandhi never provided any active leadership of the agrarian protest in Natal, he was clearly impressed by it, and returned to India with a belief that the Indian nationalist movement would only find its soul once it had rooted itself in the countryside amongst the toiling masses—who he estimated to make up 85 per cent of the population in 1916.2 While Aurobindo viewed the peasantry in instrumental terms—as providing merely the mass strength needed to shift the British in a movement that was driven primarily by urban middle-class interests—Gandhi wanted to mobilise them in a way that would transform the movement as a whole. As he wrote at two later junctures:  

 

I have believed and repeated times without number that India is to be found not in its few cities but in its 7,00,000 [7 lakh] villages. But we who have gathered here are not villagers. We are town-dwellers. We town-dwellers have believed that India is to be found in its towns and that the villages were created to minister to our needs. We have hardly ever paused to inquire if those poor folks get sufficient to eat and clothe themselves with and whether they have a roof to shelter themselves from sun and rain… I have found that the town-dweller has generally exploited the villager, in fact he has lived on the poor villager’s substance. Many a British official has written about the conditions of the people of India. No one has, to my knowledge, said that the Indian villager has enough to keep body and soul together. On the contrary they have admitted that the bulk of the population live on the verge of starvation and 10 per cent are semi-starved, and that millions have to rest content with a pinch of dirty salt and chillies and polished rice or parched grain.You may be sure that if any of us were to be asked to live on that diet, we should not expect to survive it longer than a month or should be afraid of losing our mental faculties. And yet our villagers go through that state from day to day.3  

 

The village work frightens us. We who are town-bred find it trying to take to the village life. Our bodies in many cases do not respond to the hard life. But it is a difficulty which we have to face boldly, even hero-

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BUILDING A NATIONALIST BASE IN RURAL INDIA ically, if our desire is to establish swaraj for the people, not substitute one class rule by another, which may be even worse. Hitherto the villagers have died in their thousands so that we might live. Now we might have to die so that they may live. The difference will be fundamental. The former have died unknowingly and involuntarily. Their enforced sacrifice has degraded us. If now we die knowingly, our sacrifice will ennoble us and the whole nation. Let us not flinch from the necessary sacrifice, if we will live as an independent, self-respecting nation.4

  To this end, Gandhi exhorted the educated and wealthy to become champions of the peasantry in their struggles for a dignified livelihood free from the tyranny of oppressive officials—to all of which white officials turned a blind eye so long as order was maintained and the revenues came in. A key example of this was the Indian tax-collectors who often enforced their demands through threats of punishment and even coercion and torture. Supporting the self-assertion of the peasantry had, Gandhi insisted, to be a principled concern for the movement. Nonetheless, as we shall see, he found over time that the peasantry did not always live up to his expectations. Their society was riven by inequalities and hierarchies; they were certainly not all half-starved, as he wrongly implied in the above quote. Also, violence was deployed routinely within villages to enforce the will of the dominant against subordinate castes and by men against women, and sometimes in insurrectionary revolts against their rulers and exploiters.   The Indian peasantry had a long history of resistance, both violent and nonviolent. As Ranajit Guha has shown, violent insurrections against what he labels the triumvirate of ‘sarkar, sahukar and zamindar’ (officials, moneylenders and landlords) were common in the earlier period of British rule, reaching a crescendo during the great revolt of 1857–58.5 However, as Guha points out, such revolts were not undertaken lightly, as the reaction could be harsh indeed. Peasant insurgents faced loss of their land, the confiscation of their property, imprisonment, execution, and—perhaps most important—the loss of moral standing in a society that demanded unquestioning obedience to one’s ‘betters’.6 Because of such fears, peasants with a grievance commonly avoided using overtly challenging language, and if possible refrained from violence. They made much of the moral argument that the good ruler would only take a fair share of their produce and earnings, while leaving enough to them for an adequate subsistence. In some cases, 111

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they threatened to leave the area under the jurisdiction of an oppressive ruler and negotiate better terms elsewhere.7 In many cases, the peasants knew that their complaints were more likely to be addressed if they argued that they were being oppressed by local landlords or officials who were abusing their powers, and they would appeal to their overlord to remedy the situation and restore justice (insaf) by taking action to stamp out such malpractices.8 The oppressed were seen as having a moral right to bring such matters to the attention of their ruler, who, being a supposedly just overlord, would remedy the situation and restore justice. We can see the operation of such a principle in the Himalayan hill states. There was a practice there known as dhandak in which the aggrieved people marched to the capital city and demanded an audience with the monarch. There was a certain ritual to this—the ruler would normally appear before them and promise to look into the matter, after which they would disperse. If he failed to do so, they might take further action. The people claimed that they were helping their ruler by drawing his attention to malpractices committed within his state.9 In some cases the action would be more localised, with an oppressive official being seized and ritually humiliated in public. For example, peasants of the Indian Himalaya would catch an unpopular official, shave his hair and moustache, blacken his face, and parade him around the village mounted backwards on a donkey.10 It was rare in such instances for insurgents to kill even the most violent of oppressors.11   In these protests, the dominant and the subordinate groups of a village or rural region generally acted together in solidarity. Peasant society was shot through with ties of patronage in which the poor depended for their survival on keeping in favour with the dominant members of their communities—that is, people who were often of a relatively ‘respectable’ caste, who had substantial landholdings, and hereditary power. They were the crucial group mediating between the mass of the peasantry and superordinate groups and did their best to limit tax-exactions, deploying under-reporting, deception, and bribes. Poor peasants who tried to take action by themselves were, as a rule, isolated and unlikely to succeed.12 The dominant peasants, in turn, often looked to support from particular sympathetic members of the elite, who in the British period were often of the new professional 112

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class, notably lawyers and nationalist politicians. They would request them to submit petitions or represent them in court, arguing their cases in an idiom that the imperial rulers could understand. Such pleas were couched in the familiar language of loyalty to a ‘benevolent’ state, something that the early nationalists were well versed in.   There are several examples of predominantly nonviolent resistance by peasants during the nineteenth century in both British India and in the states of princely India. Some of these were as follows: 1852:                                     Khandesh peasants protested against a land-tax survey and settlement operation. Thousands of peasants gathered in front of the tent of the chief survey officer and demanded that he abandon the work. He did so, moving elsewhere, and the protest was repeated in the same way after he resumed the survey there. On this occasion, there was some stray violence, which gave an excuse for the British to bring in the military and arrest the ringleaders. A no-tax campaign was then launched, but this was subdued by a display of armed might by the British and further arrests.13 1859:                                      The dum in Kinnaur, where the peasants refused to cultivate their fields until the land-tax levied by the Maharaja was lowered. The ruler capitulated.14 1859–60:  Successful protest by peasants of Bengal against white indigo planters. The Lieutenant–Governor observed that when he travelled through Nadia and Jessore Districts, the peasants ‘all were most respectful and orderly… the organization and capacity for combined and simultaneous action in this cause… over so large an extent of the country…[is] worthy of much consideration.’15 The peasants were championed by certain members of the urban elite of Bengal.16 1873:                                               Pabna no-rent campaign against zamindars.This resulted in the abolition of many cesses placed on the peasants by the landlord. In his detailed study of the movement, K.K. Sen Gupta stated that the peasants resisted in a largely nonviolent manner, even in the face of much violence by the zamindars.17 1873–74: Campaign by Maharashtrian peasants to refuse to pay new rates of tax after they were raised in a revised land-tax settlement. They were supported by the Poona Sarvajanik  

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Sabha, an organisation whose key leaders were Englisheducated lawyers. The government compromised by ruling that tax rises should be modified in certain cases in favour of the peasants.18   Such protests appear to have become more frequent in the years after the suppression of the revolt of 1857. Once peace prevailed, the British carried out a systematic disarming of the countryside at the same time as they were strengthening their own military power. The growth of the railways meant that troops could be deployed more rapidly, and advances in weapon technology, particularly the invention of the breech-loading rifle and machine-gun, meant that violent confrontations became increasingly one-sided. This was coupled with the establishment of firmly codified regulations and laws that legitimised—on paper at least—peaceful forms of dissent and the arbitration of disputes through due legal process. For example, during the protest by tenants against zamindars in Pabna in 1873, the government made it known that it would permit peaceful protest against oppression by zamindars, but that the least hint of violence on the part of the peasants would be punished harshly—the district officers were as good as their word in this respect.19 Here, the terms of the struggle were largely determined by the state, and the peasants responded astutely by acting non-violently. As I have argued elsewhere: The colonial state claimed for itself a monopoly of the use of disciplinary violence of all sorts. It was able increasingly to enforce this claim as local warlords and chiefs were subjugated and the populace systematically disarmed, while at the same time it extended the power of the police into even the most remote areas. Any protest that involved violence, even of a relatively petty kind, was considered illegitimate, to be legitimately crushed with what were described as ‘salutary’ measures, which meant the use of an overwhelming violence however feeble the resistance might be.20

  Increasingly, the subaltern classes became aware that there was very little to be gained by violence, while nonviolent protest that advanced a claim to accord with British liberal principles had a much greater chance of success. In other words, the structure of colonial rule increasingly encouraged the subaltern to embrace nonviolent rather than violent forms of resistance. As yet, the process was uneven, with 114

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popular protests in many regions at times becoming violent when faced with the aggression of the state or the local elites.   The peasant protests that occurred in the Bijoliya estate in Rajasthan from 1897 onwards illustrate this process, bringing out the way such resistance provided an opening for a nationalistic and progressive elite to provide leadership for the people in their struggles.

Bijoliya, 1897–22 Rajasthan was ruled largely by Indian princes, most of whom were Rajputs by caste. During the Mughal period, they were under the paramount rule of the emperors; under British rule they accepted the suzerainty of the foreign imperialists. The Government of India maintained officials known as ‘political agents’ in the major states to keep a close watch on the rulers, deposing any who were considered incompetent, corrupt or disloyal. Within the states, rulers delegated power in localities to subordinate Rajputs, who paid taxes and performed military service in return for being able to extract rents and services from the people of the area. Their estates were known as jagirs, and they themselves as jagirdars. The protest that forms the subject of this section occurred in a jagir under the Maharana (‘great king’) of Mewar, who was based in the city of Udaipur in southern Rajasthan. Mewar was one of the largest and most important of the princely states. At that time, the Maharana was Fateh Singh, who was born in 1849 and ascended the throne in 1884. Though he was said by the British agent in Rajasthan to be a charming and courteous man, he was rigidly conservative in his view, uncompromising in his administration, and extremely sensitive to the least encroachment on what he saw as the ancient practices of the feudal polity of his state.21   The power of the pre-British state in Rajasthan was severely restricted by rival power centres among the elites, by weaknesses in administrative organisation, by poor communications, and by the low population density that placed a premium on the retention of the subjects needed to provide income for the state. The ability to police the people was poor, and the state often had to concede to pressures. During the eighteenth century, petitioning the ruler became increasingly popular as a means of expressing dissatisfaction and dissent. 115

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People typically complained in their petitions about high taxes and the excessive demands placed on them. Most were directed against state functionaries or jagirdars, meaning that the Rajput prince himself was not blamed. It was universally accepted that officials were rapacious and abusive of their power and the demand was for the ruler to intervene. How a ruler reacted to such a demand was unpredictable; sometimes they conceded the demands, sometimes not. In general, the rulers accepted the legitimacy of petitions, as they provided a window into the mind-set of the subjects and a safety-valve, lessening the chances of popular insurgency. It was wise for a ruler to keep such channels open. If petitions had no success, the people concerned might refuse to perform services or migrate to the territories of neighbouring princes and jagirs.22   These forms of dissent continued to be practiced into the nineteenth century, as we will see in the next paragraph by examining a case from the closing years of the nineteenth century in Bijoliya. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, however, popular protest was transformed through the impact of the Indian nationalist movement, though migration and petitions to the Maharana of Mewar continued to be important. It is this development that forms the subject of this section.   The Bijoliya estate was in a fertile plateau in the north-east of Mewar state, covering an area of about 260 square kilometres. There were eighty-three villages and a population of 7,673 in 1901. The most important peasant caste was that of the Dhakads, who made up over a quarter of the population at that time. The ruler was a Rajput of the Panwar clan who bore the title of Rav. He in turn had thirteen small jagirdars under him, the largest of which covered thirteen villages. Although the jagir had a rudimentary bureaucracy based at the headquarter ‘town’ of Bijoliya Kalan (in reality hardly more than a village with a population of only 1,850 in 1901), there was no systematic written law, and the jagir and his officers both ruled and meted out justice. Rent was collected from the peasants twice a year, with staple grains being taxed at half of the estimated yield each year, and cash crops at fixed rates per area of land. There were also a large number of burdensome cesses, levied for a range of often spurious reasons, and periodic enforced ‘loans’ to the jagir. The peasants had to provide raw foodstuffs and horse-feed for the jagir and his officers, and also trans116

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port in bullock carts, for which they were not paid. Any official or policeman could demand such goods and services at any time. They were required to perform free labour for the jagir on demand—known as beggar—and this was extracted in often brutal ways. People doing such work were frequently beaten, and cases were recorded of people dying as a result. In all, the peasants suffered from an onerous oppression that got worse over the years as the lifestyle of the Ravs became increasingly extravagant.23   A protest of the traditional sort occurred in Bijoliya in 1897. Peasants of the Dhakad caste marched to the residence of the Rav to protest about the tax that he levied on marriages of all his subjects. Among them were about 200 young unmarried women of the caste, demanding that they be allowed to marry free from the tax. The ruler, Krishna Singh, at first refused to talk to them, but when they persisted he rejected their demand. The peasants, infuriated, resolved to migrate out of the state to an area directly under the ruler of Mewar, which they promptly did. This alarmed Krishna Singh, as the economy of his estate depended on their taxes, and he sent a message to them that he would abolish the marriage tax. The protestors then returned to their villages. Because Bijoliya adjoined the territories of other states of Rajasthan and Central India, and because the pressure of population was not high (in marked contrast to areas such as Bengal and the Gangetic plains), migration continued to provide an effective weapon of protest for the people of this area. Their victory over the marriage tax emboldened the peasants to demand redress for other grievances. A deputation of two leading Dhakad peasants delivered a petition to the Maharana of Mewar, demanding that he intervene to order the Rav to reform the system he used to estimate his land-rents. Mewar sent an official to enquire into the matter, and he reported back that the jagirdar was levying far more than was his right. Although a warning was sent to the Rav, no action was taken except to punish the two Dhakad leaders by confiscating their farms and expelling them from the estate. They were able to return only after paying heaving fines. The Rav won over some of the other leading peasants by granting them special concessions. In this way, he undermined the unity of the peasants. The peasants of this area suffered badly from the great famine of 1899–1900, the effects of which lasted for many years after 117

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wards. Further complaints were made to the Maharana in 1903, and although an officer was sent to Bijoliya to investigate, the Rav proved intransigent. In 1904, many of the peasants refused to cultivate their fields in protest. They also petitioned the Rav on a number of occasions. Faced with this, the Rav eventually agreed to reduce some of his demands. These reductions were however all cancelled in 1906 and new levies introduced.24   During the first decade of the twentieth century, an idealistic young man of Bijoliya called Sadhu Sitaramdas began to carry out social work amongst the people of the estate. Born in 1883, he was educated in Bijoliya, then Banaras, Jaipur, and Udaipur, gaining expertise in Sanskrit and Ayurvedic medicine. He started a Mitra Mandal (Friends’ Association) in Bijoliya in 1905, and through this spread word about the nationalist movement in British India, projecting it as a common cause. A group of elite-educated people who were in opposition to the Rav were associated with the organisation. Sitaramdas closed it in 1907 when he then took up a position with the Rav, but resigned this post in 1908 due to disagreements. He then practised Ayurvedic medicine, which brought him into contact with the peasants whom he treated. From them, Sitaramdas learnt of the oppression they suffered, and he began visiting the villages to get further information about their plight. He told the people that they were being exploited and should resist the high taxes, levies and forced labour: ‘How long will you keep on giving away 40 per cent of your major crops to the Rav? How long will you accept the position of slaves? Have some self-respect. If you organise yourself promptly, you will be the winner in the end.’ He told them of revolutionary activities in British India and recited nationalistic poems. Sitaramdas also worked with the caste leaders of the Dhakads, advising them in drawing up a list of leading demands. Such demands included relief from high rents; honest persons to be employed by the jagir to weigh grain collected in lieu of rent and to keep accounts of the amount taken; and removal of cesses.25   In March 1913, peasants led by Sadhu Sitaramdas and some other educated men from the local elite launched a campaign against the jagir. They worked with the caste leaders of the Dhakads who controlled the caste panchayat (council), which ensured strong support for the protest from this community. The educated leaders were critical of the feudal  

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structure of the polity. At this time, the estate was being administered directly by officials appointed by the Mewar State, as Krishna Singh had died in 1912, and his successor, Kesari Singh, was still a minor. The peasants declared that they would not cultivate any crops in protest, and nearly three-quarters of the land of the Dhakads went uncultivated for three successive growing periods across a span of two years. They refused to provide free labour to the jagir and its officers whilst the administration tried to force these peasants to pay their rents and cesses. In late 1913, between 800 and 1,000 went to Bijoliyan Kalan to put their demands, but the administrators refused to listen to them. Many then migrated to Mewar and other neighbouring states. Leading peasants were arrested, harassed, or beaten. After one peasant was beaten for refusing free labour, about 2,000 peasants assembled at the jagir headquarters and shouted that the person should be either left alone or that they should all be arrested. They were confined for three days in a courtyard without food or water and then let go. Sadhu Sitaramdas was arrested and imprisoned for six months. He reported what was going on to Tilak, who publicised the protest in his newspaper. The British came to know of this, and asked the Maharana to release Sitaramdas, which he did. Certain of the peasant demands were accepted in 1915. Six cesses were withdrawn and the tax on staple grains was reduced by 10 per cent, after which the movement ended. The movement lasted to December 1915.26   Although this campaign involved the longstanding protest method of migration, the involvement of an educated local intelligentsia with sympathies for the Indian nationalist movement and with ideals of social service was a significant new development. The ultimate appeal now was not to the Maharana, or even the British, but to renowned nationalists whose publicity could wrong-foot the paramount power. Also, the legitimacy of the whole Rajput order was now being called into question by these leaders.   Sitaramdas and some colleagues established a branch of the Vidya Pracharini Sabha (Association for the Propagation of Education). This organisation, which sought to educate children and awaken the masses, had been started by a teacher elsewhere in Mewar in 1915. The branch in Bijoliya organised a school, a library and a weekly meeting, and it popularised nationalist songs in the area. Through this organisation, the 119

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local leaders came into contact in 1916 with a nationalist called Vijay Singh Pathik. Pathik, born in 1882, was originally from Bulandsharh District of UP, which lies just to the east of Delhi. His original name was Bhoop Singh Gujar, and his grandfather had played a prominent role in the 1857 revolt in the area. He himself became a revolutionary nationalist in the second decade of the twentieth century, being sent to Rajasthan to carry on such work there, but was arrested by the British and jailed. He subsequently escaped, and after changing his name to Vijay Singh Pathik, took refuge in the princely states of the region. Pathik became involved with the Vidya Pracharini Sabha, and it was through this that the Bijoliya activists met him and persuaded him to come there to assume leadership of their movement. He took up a post as teacher for the Vidya Pracharini Sabha in Bijoliya in January 1917, and spent the first half of that year teaching, lecturing, and meeting state and jagir officials. His students learned about the nationalist movement, and were encouraged ‘to be fearless, fight injustice and torture with courage and determination.’ Pathik also trained boys in the use of lathis and swords, teaching them to wrestle as well as how to hide in the forest to escape repression. He organised means to pass messages from village-to-village, was an excellent orator, and could put his case using convincing factual evidence. He was a good poet and singer also, and often used poems and songs in his speeches. Pathik proved equally adept at maintaining contacts with state employees, from the local policeman to top officials of Mewar State. This gave him insights into how the state dealt with dissent, allowing him to develop effective counter-strategies.27   Pathik launched a new and more militant campaign on 1 August 1917, on the occasion of the festival of Hariyali Amarvasya, stating that this provided an auspicious day for the occasion. He composed a poem to inaugurate the campaign containing lines to the effect that they would remain in a depressed condition if they lacked the courage to fight injustice. Pathik wanted to run the movement without any outside help. The branch of the Vidya Pracharini Sabha was dissolved and an Uparmal Kisan Panch (Peasant Service Council) created as the organising body for the campaign. This became known locally as ‘the Board’. The aim here was to create an organisation that could both coordinate the campaign and reach out to all the different peasant communities of  

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the estate—not just the Dhakads. Pathik called a meeting of peasants to elect a sarpanch (Board leader) from amongst themselves. Around 2,000 attended, but nobody was willing initially to put themselves up for election as leader for fear of the consequences. Pathik eventually persuaded Mannalal Patel to take the post.   Representatives of other peasant castes sat on the Board. There was a secretary, who acted as the chief assistant of the sarpanch, and a treasurer. Besides the office bearers, there were twenty-one other members. Three were elected by the general assembly and the rest nominated, with at least one member from each agricultural caste being selected. The Board took responsibility for justice, education and social welfare activities in the villages. It provided an alternative to the jagir courts, hearing both civil and criminal cases, including cases of theft, rape, arson, looting, divorce, property disputes, cattle theft, destruction of crops, and so on. It observed all the formalities of a state court, with a court stamp on papers, a court fee, written presentation of cases, affidavits, and names of witnesses, and so on. Securities were given when needed. It worked quickly, deciding cases in a day or two. Fines up to a maximum of 1,000 rupees were the normal punishment, though an offender might also be ordered to give a feast to the community. If anyone appealed a judgement to the state court, the person concerned was expelled from the movement and suffered a caste boycott. Such turncoats were not invited to social functions, there was no social intercourse with them, and nobody of their caste would marry into their family. A school was opened in one village, with night classes to educate adults, both male and female. The school thrived more than the night classes. What Pathik was doing here was creating a form of parallel government. The Board was a democratic authority that acted in opposition to the feudal autocracy of the Mewar ruler and his jagirdars, and the peasants began to regard the sarpanch as a person whom they should obey over the officials of the state. Hence, the peasants were encouraged to think for themselves and question the legitimacy of the jagir. By demonstrating that they were quite capable of running their own affairs, the peasants showed that the princely state had become an unwanted and exploitative anachronism.28   The Board decided on tactics, such as leaving land fallow, migrating to neighbouring territories, stopping payment of taxes to the jagir, and 121

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so on. Pathik, Sitaramdas and other leaders attended the Board meetings and advised on strategy while being careful not to appear to dominate the proceedings. Decisions were circulated to villages. The peasants were asked to take a vow of support for the movement. The main demands were that there be a fixed rate of tax per area of land irrespective of the crop sown, as in the khalsa areas of Mewar State (those that paid tax directly to the state, as in the ryotwari system of British India), and an end to all cesses. Further demands were added in 1919, such as better provision of pasture for cattle, changes in land rights, the establishment of schools and dispensaries, a judicial system based on written and published rules rather that the arbitrary system that had prevailed hitherto, administrative decisions to be written down rather than being verbal and thus deniable at a later date, and improved conditions in the jagir prison.29   Pathik and a number of other activists composed songs and poems in Mewari and Hindi to inspire the peasants and raise consciousness. The Board published two books of such bhajans (devotional songs), one by the peasants, and one by Pathik. The songs described the bad conditions in the jagir, inspired unity, praised the Board and the leaders, demanded social reform, and so on. At a later stage, Pathik encouraged the Board to publish a weekly handwritten newspaper.30   Soon after the start of the movement in 1917, the jagir officials asked the Mewar authorities for permission to arrest the ringleaders. Pathik’s contacts in the Mewar administration informed him that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and he left Bijoliya and took refuge outside the estate. From there, he continued to direct the movement, moving at night into Bijoliya territory. Sitaramdas and another leader were, however, arrested for sedition and jailed. Peasants were brought to the court to testify against them, but they refused to state that their actions had been instigated by them—they claimed to have taken all the initiative themselves. Pathik briefed them before they appeared in court. The case dragged on in this way for three months.31   The Board stepped up the protest in 1918. It established a Seva Samiti (Service Association) that appointed volunteers to work as local activists. They guarded the villages and counteracted the propaganda of the jagir’s officers. A young peasant called Ghisi Lala Dhakad organised a group of young volunteers to stage demonstrations at short notice. 122

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They carried out social work on two days each month, such as cleaning wells and tanks, and were helped by the peasants in this. They also took punitive action against villagers who opposed the movement, destroying their wells, burning their crops, cutting their trees, and smashing their fences. In this, they deployed methods that would have been anathema to Gandhi. No physical violence was, however, employed against the backsliders. The Board and Seva Samiti were declared illegal and a new administrator was appointed for the jagir by the Mewar authorities—a known hardliner called Madho Singh Kothari. All meetings were banned and messengers of the Board were arrested. Peasants were tortured and made to perform begar. The cesses were taken by force. In some cases, this led to physical clashes between the peasants and the officers of the jagir. Again, the campaign was straying beyond the boundaries of nonviolence.32   Pathik was a friend of the editor of the Kanpur newspaper Pratap, and he went to the city to publicise the movement through this and other Indian-language newspapers. He attended the Congress session in Delhi of 1918; other representatives of the movement went from Bijoliya as well. Gandhi showed an interest in what was happening there, and in early 1919 called Pathik to Bombay to tell him about the movement. Gandhi was much impressed, and sent his secretary Mahadev Desai to Bijoliya to investigate. He spent a few days there, and afterwards informed Gandhi about the movement. At that time, Gandhi considered going to Bijoliya to take charge, but the launch of the Rowlatt Satyagraha took precedence and no more was heard of this proposal.33 Gandhi is said to have praised Pathik for his bravery, for being an active worker while others were mere talkers, and as someone in whom the masses of Bijoliya trusted completely.34 It appears that Gandhi was unaware of the physical intimidation going on in Bijoliya, which he would have condemned strongly had he known.   The news that the protestors were making contacts with leading Indian nationalists increased Kothari’s determination to suppress the movement. Fifty-one peasant leaders were arrested and held at the Jagir headquarters. Ordinary peasants were arrested without warrants and beaten until they gave a promise in writing to accept cesses and begar. Children were beaten in front of their parents, and the jagir officers molested women in the presence of their relatives. The houses of 123

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the peasants were looted, their crops destroyed and cattle taken away. Still they did not give in. At this juncture, the Maharana of Mewar, Fateh Singh, ordered an enquiry into the jagir, and a commission of three was appointed for this purpose in April 1919. Pathik advised the peasants to talk to the commission only if the fifty-one leaders were released. He prepared a memorandum for the peasants to present to the commission that highlighted their complaints, which included a demand for better medical and educational facilities. The commission was impressed by the memorandum and ordered the release of the peasants and a just realisation of taxes. The latter proviso was not, however, acted on.35   At the end of 1919, Pathik attended the Congress session in Amritsar, organising an exhibition there to show the way that physical punishment and torture was used in Bijoliya to suppress the protest. He and two other nationalists of Rajasthan established a new organisation called the Rajputana Madhya Bharat Sabha, which held its first session there. Its main aim was to promote political liberty in the states of Rajasthan and the Central Provinces. The Sabha appointed a commission to look into the situation in Bijoliya. When he heard of this, Maharana Fateh Singh appointed another commission and asked the Rajputana Madhya Bharat Sabha to wait until it had completed its investigations. Fifteen peasants were called to Udaipur to testify to the commission. Pathik supplied them a memorandum to present there that was similar to the one he had produced before. The commission recommended that the peasants should be treated better, but nothing was done to ensure this. The movement thus intensified.36   At the start of 1920, Pathik moved to Wardha in central India to edit a weekly called Rajasthan Kesari, in association with the prominent Gandhian Jamnalal Bajaj.37 Pathik did not remain long there, soon moving to the British-ruled enclave of Ajmer as a base for a movement for the rights of all the people of Rajasthan. From both these places, he sent instructions to the peasants of Bijoliya on the conduct of the movement. He told them to disobey all the orders of the jagir, refuse all cesses, taxes and begar, not to visit the jagir headquarters, to stop drinking, stop death feasts, to cultivate no land in the jagir, to boycott foreign cloth and the Baniya usurers of the area. The income of the estate and its smaller subsidiary jagirdars dried up and they were in 124

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great difficulties as a result. The small sub-jagirdars approached Pathik and said that they would accept the demands of the peasants. Pathik then told the peasants under these jagirdars to again cultivate the land and pay the regular rent. At this time, he appears to have become more familiar with Gandhian principles, particularly the understanding that any deviance from nonviolence provided an excuse for a ruler to suppress a protest harshly. He began to insist increasingly on the need for a much stricter conformity to Gandhian standards. By 1922, Pathik was able to claim in a letter to the British Agent in Rajasthan that he had forged a strong moral tone for the movement in Bijoliya.38   In 1921, the Board told the peasants to cultivate their land. When the crop was ready to be harvested, they told the jagir authorities that the crop estimate should be carried out in the next week. The authorities replied that the estimate would be made only after the arrears of taxes and cesses had been deposited. As the peasants refused to do this, they harvested their crops and removed them. The authorities sent soldiers to attach the crops, but the soldiers refused to do this when they reached the villages. The administrator was disheartened, arranged to reach an agreement, and granted that Pathik could represent the peasants in the negotiations. Pathik told them all to come to Ajmer. Representatives of the peasants and the Jagir went to Ajmer and negotiated for fifteen days. When practically everything had been agreed, the jagir authorities decided to renege on this lest it enhance the prestige of Pathik and the Board still more. The negotiations then broke down on a petty issue. The peasants returned and the movement restarted. The peasants of nine neighbouring jagirs now became involved in the protest.   The spread of the movement alarmed Robert Holland, the British Agent in Rajputana, who pressed on the Maharana to settle it all quickly. In contrast to many of his subordinates in the political department, he had a good grasp of the political realities of the situation and was a political operator of some subtlety. He understood that it was hard to defend the ways of the local Rajput jagirdars and their henchmen and that the peasants of Rajasthan had much justification for their protests. Holland could see that the main obstacle in the way of any effective resolution was the rigid and conservative Maharana Fateh Singh. The British Resident at Udaipur, Wilkinson, was extremely criti 125

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cal of the ruler, stating in May 1921: ‘All powers are merged in one man, who by want of education, narrowness of outlook, slavish adherence to precedent, suspicion, niggardliness with regard to public improvement, fear of opposition, and inability to grasp the situation or come to decisions is unfitted to rule.’ Holland realised that Fateh Singh was incapable of dealing with such widespread discontent in his state. Furthermore, the subordinate officials of Mewar were corrupt and selfish, and the judicial system completely inadequate. He felt that the only remedy was to force the Maharana to step down in favour of his better-educated and more broadminded and liberal son. Holland met Fateh Singh in July 1921 and told him that he must abdicate. The shocked ruler tried to argue his case, but agreed to abdicate a few days later. To his save face, it was announced in public that he had merely delegated extensive powers to his son.39   With a free hand to negotiate a settlement, Holland headed to Bijoliya, along with Wilkinson and some top Mewar officials. When there, he called a meeting of the peasant representatives and put pressure on the jagir in a tactful way. The discussion went on for five days and an agreement was reached in February 1922. A number of concessions were agreed to, meeting most of their demands, but some were not accepted. Holland later met Pathik at Abu in the presence of a Mewar minister, and these were also settled. The agreement was printed and circulated in Bijoliya in June 1922, bringing an end to the movement.40   This movement was notable because it involved nonviolent mobilisation of peasants by nationalists other than Gandhi, revealing that such movements were developing in their own ways before he became involved. Although in Bijoliya there was a laxity about violence against the property of turncoats and physical confrontations with officials— elements that Gandhi would have condemned strongly—this did not characterise the movement in general, which was remarkable for the way in which peasants were mobilised by a nationalist leader, Pathik, who encouraged the people to act as independently as possible in establishing the parallel authority of the Board. In this, he taught them how to set up and run a civil institution that acted as a counter to the power of the state. This in itself provided a revolutionary repudiation of all that the feudal polity of Rajasthan stood for. Pathik appears not 126

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to have worried that the masses might get out of hand, as Gandhi always feared. Rather, he trusted them to largely run their own campaign, with his own judicious input as and when required. Above all, under nationalist guidance, the peasants of Bijoliya now found themselves striving to bring into being ‘a new social system based on equality, secularism and peasant unity’, and associating themselves with the Indian nationalist movement as a crucial ally in this struggle.41   Gandhi himself became personally involved in peasant protest when he led a movement in the Champaran District of North Bihar in 1917, and in 1918 he led a second such movement in Kheda District of Gujarat. These two events form the subject of the remainder of this chapter. During these campaigns, Gandhi developed further his technique and methods of nonviolent resistance.

Champaran, 1917 When Gandhi arrived back in India in January 1915, the Indian National Congress was in a state of transition. Tilak had been released from jail in 1914, and the two leading Moderates, Gokhale and Mehta, both died in 1915, with no similar figures to replace them. Tilak planned to reorganise the Congress to make it more of a mass organisation, and then launch a campaign for Home Rule using ‘the obstructionist methods of the Irish.’ He was unable, however, to win the other main Congress leaders to this plan.42 Annie Besant, a new presence in the Indian nationalist movement, felt strongly that they should hold back from such a protest while the war continued. Born in 1847, she had built a reputation as a radical feminist, Fabian, and supporter of Irish Home Rule in Britain in the 1880s, but from the 1890s onwards had devoted her life to spiritual matters as the leader of the Theosophical Society in India. She returned to politics in 1914, joining the Indian National Congress in that year, and her ‘commanding personality and magnetic presence’ ensured that she quickly became one of its leading figures.43 She argued that Indian troops had already shown exemplary courage in the battlefields in Flanders, gaining a new respect for Indians and demonstrating that India had ‘a right, as a Nation, to justice among the people of the Empire.’ They had every right to expect that there would be a devolution of power to elected assemblies once 127

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hostilities ended.44 Besant was not a proponent of ‘passive resistance’, which she believed tended to end in violence. In this, she was at odds with Tilak. She did, however, believe in constitutional forms of agitation that involved mass meetings, campaigns in the press, and other forms of pressure.45   Besant and Tilak set up separate ‘Home Rule Leagues’ to agitate for a promise that home rule would be granted after the war was over. Tilak’s League, which was started in 1915, was confined largely to the Maharashtrian heartland and Karnataka, while Besant’s—founded in 1916, but soon the more vigorous of the two bodies—covered the rest of India. These were the first national organisations that formally demanded Indian self-government, albeit as a dominion within the British Empire. Local branches of Besant’s league enjoyed considerable autonomy, allowing it to become a vehicle for young people who had been inspired by the Extremists in the previous decade. The Bombay City branch was particularly dynamic, attracting many young nationalists of Gujarati backgrounds. They started their own English weekly, Young India, to propagate their views. Members carried out propaganda work through the press, discussion groups and public meetings, and in some cases carried out social work that was designed to win sympathy and spread the message. When the annual Congress session was held in Lucknow at the end of 1916, Besant and Tilak felt that they now had the strength to gain control of the organisation, but this did not prove to be the case. The British believed that they could counter the two leagues by banning students who attended government-controlled colleges from attending their meetings, and in June 1917 they interned Besant and two other leaders. This measure backfired, as there was an India-wide outcry that provided a fillip to her Home Rule League. Even Moderates now joined the League in protest. There was talk of ‘passive resistance’, and Gandhi—the best-known proponent of such a form of protest— was consulted. Until now, he had remained aloof from active involvement in nationalist politics, as he toured India gaining experience of the subcontinent and its problems. Gandhi suggested that 1,000 young activists march from Bombay to Besant’s place of confinement in Madras Presidency. He also organised the collection of signatures for a monster petition condemning the internments. Now based in Ahmedabad, in his home province of Gujarat, Gandhi encouraged the young activists of 128

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Bombay City to tour Gujarat collecting signatures. In Gujarat itself, many educated high-caste youths in towns and villages of south and central Gujarat took up this work on their own initiative.46   Many of these young nationalists had at first been disappointed with Gandhi after his return to India, as he appeared to be on the side of the Congress Moderates and more interested in social rather than political matters. He gained a reputation initially in Gujarat as an impractical idealist who was concerned more with the plight of the untouchables than Indian self-rule. This all changed after he was asked by a peasant leader of Champaran District in Bihar to come and help them in their struggle against the exploitation of white planters who had for long intimidated the peasants into growing indigo on disadvantaged terms. Gandhi travelled to the district in April 1917 to carry out an investigation of their complaints. On arrival, he was ordered by the authorities to leave forthwith. Gandhi refused to comply, and was arrested and tried. He pleaded guilty to the charge and refused to pay any bail, demanding to be imprisoned. This embarrassed the authorities, and they postponed judgement so that they could consult with their superiors. The provincial government—then that of Bihar and Orissa—realised that the order was of dubious legality, as there was no evidence that Gandhi intended to create any breach of the law. They ruled that the district officials had acted beyond their authority, and that Gandhi could carry out his investigation, so long as there was no disturbance of the peace. This victory was unprecedented—Gandhi had defeated the much-feared district authorities, and immediately became the hero of the local peasants. Huge numbers flocked to see him. His action was widely applauded throughout India, especially in his home area of Gujarat.47   Champaran District, in north Bihar bordering on Nepal, was an extremely fertile region, but one that was known for its agrarian poverty, due to rack-renting by landlords and exploitation by white indigo planters. Although called ‘planters’, these men in fact ran indigo-processing factories that were dotted through the region. Each such works was surrounded by an ‘estate’ of up to seventy villages, where the peasants—who largely rented land from indigenous landlords—were forced to agree to contracts with the factory-bosses to grow indigo as a crop on a portion of their land. This was known as the tinkathiya system. The landlords connived at this whole arrangement for their 129

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own advantage. The crop produced a blue dye that was in great global demand up until the end of the nineteenth century, and huge profits were earned by the planters from its sale. Between 1830 and 1895, the area under indigo quadrupled in north Bihar. When a much cheaper chemical blue dye was invented in Germany in the 1890s, the planters responded by squeezing the peasants still harder to try to maintain their profits. When the German dyes disappeared from the market during the First World War, indigo prices rose again, but the planters refused to pass any of this on to the peasants. As the price of the other major crop of this region, rice, also soared during the war, the peasants resented being made to grow indigo for low returns when they could be earning substantially by growing rice on the same land.48   The richer peasants had long resisted the tinkathiya system, often drawing the attention of the British authorities to the illegal forms of coercion that were used against them by the planters and their hired strongmen. There were several campaigns led by powerful villagers that involved a refusal to grow indigo. None managed to span the whole district, and they were all suppressed, though the British officials did at times try to persuade the planters to clean up their act somewhat. The planters were adept at using the local courts and their influence with the authorities to keep peasant protesters in line. In general, the poorer peasants were unwilling to take such action, as they were more vulnerable to punitive action by the planters. This was the case in a major protest of 1907–8. The dominant peasants organised meetings at night in village temples at which they demanded that all the villagers take oaths before the deity to refuse to grow indigo. Those who refused to join or backed down were threatened by the richer peasants with social boycott. A few of those who failed to heed the demand were beaten up and their property or crops burnt. Some of the planters’ men were attacked and their property burnt, and one white planter was killed in a fracas. When the planters tried to have the land cultivated with hired labourers, the workers were chased away by peasants wielding clubs and agricultural tools. The authorities reacted by sending in the police and arresting the leaders. Several were given prison sentences. The richer peasants could afford to hire lawyers from Patna, the state capital, to defend them. Some of these lawyers—encouraged by the spirit of defiance in the Swadeshi Movement in neighbouring Bengal—became 130

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strong advocates of the peasants for nationalistic reasons and several provided their services free of charge. They helped the village leaders draw up petitions in English. In 1912, when King George V and his queen came to the area on a hunting expedition, 15,000 peasants assembled at a railways station where his train stopped to present a petition that set out their grievances. Later, after the royal couple had returned to Calcutta, a further memorandum was sent to the same end.49   It was at this point that a leader emerged from the peasants. Raj Kumar Shukla was a Brahman by caste who held small parcels of land in four villages under the Belwa planter and owned a substantial herd of cattle. Shukla had sufficient capital to lend money to poorer peasants. He was a literate man who had worked as a clerk for some years for a large landowner, and was known as an excellent orator. He had been insulted by the local planter in a dispute, leading to a court case in 1914 that had brought him in contact with some nationalist-leaning lawyers. The case went against him, and he was jailed for three weeks. After his release, he set about organising the resistance of the peasants. He took up the matter with the lawyers he knew in Patna, and they encouraged him to accompany them to the annual session of the Indian National Congress in Lucknow in December 1916. Gandhi, who attended this session, was very moved by Shukla’s speech to the Congress, delivered in a rustic dialect of Hindi. After initial hesitation, he eventually promised Shukla that he would try to find time to go to Champaran to investigate. Later, in early 1917, Shukla travelled to Gandhi’s headquarters in Ahmedabad to remind him of his promise. Gandhi eventually went there in April 1917, leading to his successful confrontation with the local authorities that gained so much attention throughout India.50   Gandhi began his enquiry by recruiting some educated middle-class Biharis to help him in the task. Most were young lawyers who had been inspired during the Swadeshi Movement. They agreed to give up their practices for the duration of the movement and work without pay, touring the villages to take down statements. They had often acted as legal advocates for the peasants and knew the area and its dialect well; they could not be accused of being outsiders. In all, they collected 10,000 full statements and 15,000 shorter ones. Gandhi encouraged these co-workers to live with greater simplicity, persuading them to 131

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dispense with the servants and cooks that they had brought with them, look after their own needs and eat from a common kitchen with food prepared by a Muslim cook—a very radical move, as it meant that caste rules were being broken. This helped reduce the cultural gap between them and the peasants. Gandhi wrote out a detailed set of instructions for them on 16 April 1917 that set out the principles of nonviolent struggle, and the need to educate the peasants about them. He also set out plans in case he was arrested, and said that they in turn should be prepared to go to jail. The lawyers amongst them feared the implications a criminal record would have on their careers, and were not keen about this, but they did willingly spread the message of nonviolence. The planters did their best to obstruct Gandhi and his co-workers as they toured the villages, even burning Raj Kumar Shukla’s house down. One planter called Erwin tried to bribe the Muslim cook whom Gandhi had hired to poison the food, but he refused to do this. Others tried to create enmity between Hindus and Muslims, without success. Despite all this, Gandhi made a point of seeking out planters and informing them of the peasants’ complaints to their face. In turn, he listened respectfully to what they had to say. Talking on equal terms in this way with the feared planters raised the reputation of Gandhi and his workers still further.51   Wherever Gandhi went in Champaran, huge crowds flocked to see him. Many believed that his powers were supernatural and he had the ability to perform miracles—how otherwise could he overcome the ‘white gentlemen’—the ‘Gora Sahibs’? He was compared to Lord Rama whose courage in taking on Ravana, the king of demons, saw the people lose their fear of demons in general. One peasant indeed described the planters to Gandhi as rakshashas, or ‘demons’. Some believed him to be a reincarnation of God—the naya malik or ‘new leader’ of the people in their woes. Many went to have his darshan (auspicious viewing of a deity or person of extraordinary powers), and his co-workers arranged certain times of day when this was possible. There was also a pervasive belief that he had been sent by the Viceroy to rectify wrongs, revealing the continuing hold of the popular belief in a superordinate benign authority. When an official was transferred for routine bureaucratic reasons it was assumed that Gandhi had used his influence with the Viceroy to have him removed. Some believed that Gandhi was about to  

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take over the administration of the district, even that the British were about to leave, because, according to one rumour, they were about to lose the war in Europe. Others said that Gandhi would force the planters to pay back the irregular payments they had levied, or that they no longer had to show any deference to the planters, local officials and police, or fulfil their many onerous and often humiliating demands. With such a perceived figure as their champion, peasants gained a new courage in their confrontation with the planters.52   Peasants from all parts of the district were now resisting the planters with unprecedented solidarity. They believed that Gandhi had ordered them to stop cultivating indigo. Many stopped paying rent to the landlords also. They allowed cattle to graze on indigo land and wasteland that had been enclosed by the planters, and cut and sold trees that the planters claimed a right over. The campaign was led at the village level by the dominant peasants of a similar class to Raj Kumar Shukla. They ensured that the poorer peasants stood firm despite the intimidation of the planters and their henchmen. Rather than use the methods of maintaining solidarity that were common in the past—such as social boycott or even violence—their main threat now against backsliders was that they would take them to Gandhi to be reprimanded. The planters found themselves helpless in the face of this combined opposition. They were being challenged to their faces in a previously unthinkable way, and realised that that their power and prestige was disintegrating.53 In all this, there was no violence. A couple of cases of arson were alleged by the planters, but it was later discovered that the planters themselves had ordered fires in their factories to try to discredit the protesters.54 The local authorities were thus denied an excuse to suppress the movement, as had been the case in the agitation of 1907–8. The officer in charge of one of the subdivisions of the district recognised this when he stated: ‘The local leaders among the raiyats [peasants] have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. In 1909 [this should be 1907–8] they went about in mobs, broke the peace, were run in, convicted. They know now that boycott is a much more potent and less dangerous weapon.’55   Gandhi sent his report to the government on 15 May. In it, he criticised the indigo system harshly. The Government of India agreed to establish an official five-member commission of enquiry. Gandhi was to represent the peasants. On it there was also a representative of the  

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planters, a representative of the zamindars, and two British officials. They began work in mid-July, touring the district collecting evidence, and finished in mid-August. The atmosphere of defiance against the planters continued, with boycotts of the planters and their employees. Gandhi nonetheless sought to win the planters over by agreeing to compromise on some of their demands, for instance allowing them some compensation for loss of their earnings. The report was published on 18 October, and though a compromise, generally found in favour of the peasants. Most importantly, it recommended that the tinkathiya system be abolished. The Government of Bihar and Orissa declared on the same day that it accepted the findings. This encouraged further, stronger resistance, with peasants refusing everywhere to cultivate indigo. Some of the planters used their strongmen against the peasants, beating them up, destroying their houses and fields, confiscating their cattle. In 1918, the recommendations of the Commission became law. This was a major blow to the planters, though not a terminal one (as some historians have claimed), as many found new ways to extract a surplus from the peasants.56   The protest movement led by Gandhi in 1917 later became known as the ‘Champaran Satyagraha’. He had come at a time when there was already a strong atmosphere of dissidence, with a tradition of protest going back many years. Although the indigo system in Bihar was not in a healthy state, he provided a major blow to it in a way that won publicity and praise for his methods all over India. His insistence on strict nonviolence meant that the 1917 protest was characterised by a much lower degree of violence than previous peasant agitations in the region, and it was also far more successful in achieving its aims. The oppressed had advanced their cause by adopting a position of superior morality, that of nonviolence, in a situation in which the rich and powerful routinely deployed forms of violence that were considered by colonial law to be, in principle, criminal acts. This allowed for an appeal to higher authority over and against the representatives of the state at the local level, who tended to connive at the extra-legal violence of locallydominant groups.   In this, Gandhi held the British to their own laws. It was, in all, a remarkable demonstration of the efficacy of Gandhi’s methods.  

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Kheda, 1918 The next agrarian protest led by Gandhi occurred in the following year, in 1918, and in this instance, it was in his home region of Gujarat. Rather than being primarily a boycott movement, as in Champaran, this campaign involved actively breaking the law through a widespread refusal to pay land-tax to the British. Aurobindo Ghose had rightly singled out this form of protest as being particularly threatening to the British. Because of this, I shall deal with this movement in greater depth.   In the British-ruled areas of Gujarat, the peasants, for the most part, paid their land-tax direct to the imperial state. In this, these areas were something of an exception in Gujarat, as most of its land mass was ruled by Indian princes and large landlords, with only a relatively small area covering five administrative districts being under direct British control. These five districts included within their borders some of the most prosperous rural areas of the province. One such district was that of Kheda, covering a fertile tract of central Gujarat close to the capital city of Ahmedabad. There were few big landlords, and certainly no white planters, and most landowning peasants paid their land-tax direct to the British. The area was ruled by members of the British civil service, who dealt directly with the peasantry without having to take into account the interests of any important intermediary elites.   The British officials claimed to be benevolent and paternalistic rulers who had the interests of the mass of the people at heart. The lynchpin of the whole system was the Indian Civil Service, with its districtlevel officers. They were responsible for land-tax assessment and collection as well as law and order, and they served as magistrates in the local courts. Known as district collectors—a telling title that emphasised the huge importance of land-tax for the overall revenue of the state—they were constantly on tour, camping outside villages, inspecting the crops and hearing representations from the peasants. They saw themselves as benign rulers, incorruptible and with the interests of the simple rural folk at heart, believing the masses to be an almost childish Oriental folk whose culture and beliefs led them to respect their rulers with reverential deference.57 They styled themselves as the ma-bap, or parents, of the cultivators, and expected the peasantry to accept their strict but fair guardianship. In the words of one such official: ‘A good collector is the peasants’ friend, and holds 135

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none of his trusts more sacred than their welfare.’58 They believed that they represented the rule of law in the countryside, bringing to it an order that replaced the lawlessness that prevailed prior to colonial rule. They considered, generally quite sincerely, that they had the real interests of the people at heart, unlike the indigenous elites, who supposedly lacked empathy for those they saw as their caste inferiors. Nationalist leaders who came from the western-educated members of this elite were, they frequently argued, merely manipulating the masses in their own interests; they had no real experience of government, and could not be trusted with the responsibility. Few of these officers believed in 1918 that Indians were ready for self-government.59   What such views disguised was the sheer degree of coercion that held the Indian people in a state of subjection, even in the areas ruled directly by the British. This coercion was exercised in part by lowerlevel Indian bureaucrats, in part by the police (and army in cases of major disturbance), and by members of the Indian elite who were loyal to the British. Much of this coercion was not legal, and British officers were aware that the law did not always stretch to village society. A former district officer of Kheda whom I interviewed many years ago admitted very candidly that he generally let the police get on with their work in their own way, even though he knew that they were ‘a pretty rough lot’ who could not always be controlled. He accepted that they could act in brutal ways.60   Extra-legal coercion was common at times when peasants had difficulties in paying their land-tax demands. The British maintained a dogmatic belief that land-tax rates were low and reasonable, and that peasants could make savings in good years that could be used to pay when times were less favourable. In practice, moneylenders tended to take the major share of the crops whatever the season, leaving their clients perpetually in debt and thus lacking the resources to pay in adverse years.61 Because this was not officially recognised, orders were routinely sent out to the lower-level tax officials to levy full assessments regardless of the state of the crops or prices. Those who succeeded in this could be promoted, but demoted or even dismissed if they failed. Because of this, they did not flinch from using heavy-handed and extra-legal methods when peasants proved obdurate. For example, they would beat peasants with sticks, or humiliate them in public by 136

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making them stand in contorted positions until they agreed to pay up.62 The money was usually found in the end by taking out loans at ruinously high rates of interest.   While such forms of extra-legal oppression went generally unrecorded, some cases came to light during the great Gujarat famine of 1899–1900. During this year, the rain failed almost entirely in the north and partially in the south of the province. While in the northern districts, the British agreed to suspend much of the land-tax for the year, in the southern districts they demanded it in full. Many saw this as a grave injustice, for they had a very poor harvest that year. Some of the more substantial landowners decided to organise a concerted resistance to the tax demands. They raised funds to fight their cause, set up an Association for the Amelioration of the Cultivators, and tried to approach the top British officials to put their case, largely to no avail. Social boycotts were threatened for anyone who paid their taxes, and threats were issued to local tax officers. The British decided to break the movement using—at an official level—legally-sanctioned coercive processes against the large landowners. They identified certain supposed ringleaders and threatened them with the confiscation and sale of their land. Some were told that they would have to pay an extra 25 per cent of their tax assessment as a punishment, what was known as a chothai (one-quarter) fine. Others had their houses raided and property attached in lieu of tax. In most cases, the mere threat of such action broke the resistance of the larger landowners, and the tax was paid.63   What did not appear in the official report was the fact that the higher officials appear to have turned a blind eye when the subordinate officials applied their more directly physical methods to extract tax payments from the poorer peasants. Often, they had to mortgage or sell their land to realise the money demanded. In this particular year, the matter did not end there, for a large landowner who had observed the high-handed ways of the subordinate officials sent a report to the Bombay press. Officials were named and their oppressive acts set out in the influential newspaper, The Times of India. A prominent Bombay lawyer and nationalist called Gokaldas Parekh took the matter up, accusing the government of using torture in a systematic way to raise revenue in a year of famine. A British officer, Evan Maconochie, was appointed to carry out an enquiry. He found evidence of such torture,  

 

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which he recorded in his report. Although he made various recommendations to prevent such abuse in future, the Bombay authorities largely ignored his suggestions.64   What this revealed was that poorer peasants who had difficulties paying their tax were routinely subjected to physical abuse until they paid, while the more substantial landowners could be cowed down by threats that their land and property would be confiscated if they sought to organise a no-tax campaign. Here, there was no unquestioning acceptance of the British, only a fear of what might happen to them if they disobeyed. In this case, a large landowner managed to invoke the law, and although the British had to accept that there had been abuses, they were held to be an aberration, and no mechanism was put in place to stop such practices in future.   This was a society in which there was a continuing struggle for power between the larger landowners and the tax-collecting bureaucracy. Both claimed to stand for the true interests of the subordinate peasantry. As it was, the bureaucracy held the upper hand because they controlled the means of coercion. As for the subordinate peasantry, they lived in a state of powerlessness, in the face of both the British bureaucracy and their Indian superiors. While the former relied in the last instance on the coercive force of police and army, the power of the latter rested on a combination of patronage, caste sanctions, and p­ hysical force.   The dominant landowning caste in Kheda District was that of the Leva Kanbis. They had settled the villages of the region many centuries ago, with the land being divided between caste members as patis (parts), so that the village shareholders became known as ‘Patidars’. The majority had settled in a particularly fertile tract that covered about two-thirds of the district, which was known as the Charotar. Over the generations, with property being inherited equally by all sons, estates were divided, and by the twentieth century many lived by cultivating their smallholdings largely with family labour. In a few elite villages, however, there were large Patidar landlords who had retained big estates through their role in the precolonial tax-collecting system. Their lands were cultivated by tenants whose families often rented the land from generation to generation. Though ostensibly a paternalistic relationship, the tenants understood that any dissidence would be pun138

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ished with eviction from both land and home. The elite Patidars generally married amongst themselves, acting as a corporate group. They were a major force in the politics of the district, often serving on the local government councils that the British had established from the late nineteenth century onwards.65   Most villages of the Charotar were, however, ruled by a ‘brotherhood’ of Patidar cultivators. The office of village headman (patel) generally rotated amongst the leading families. They usually owned most of the village land. The lower castes, who were mostly poor peasants or agricultural labourers, were kept firmly within their place by the Patidars, with sanctions being applied ruthlessly, and even violently, against anyone who dared assert themselves. The Patidars had a reputation for being ‘tough’, always ready to beat up anyone of low caste who challenged their dominance. For example, a male of the subordinate Baraiya caste who was seen wearing a red turban (a symbol of rulership) would be thrashed and made to remove it. Similarly, Baraiyas would be forcibly prevented from riding a horse in front of a Patidar house. Many villages had significant populations of people considered ‘untouchable’, notably those of the Dhed or Vankar community, many of whom worked as agricultural labourers for the high castes. They had to live outside the village and were not allowed to draw water from the village wells or have any social contact with the Patidars. Women were also controlled through violence; any Patidar woman who was known to have transgressed strict patriarchal boundaries would be beaten mercilessly, even murdered. The Patidar males routinely exploited lower caste women sexually.   The situation was otherwise in many of the villages that lay outside the Charotar tract. There, Baraiyas, and sometimes Muslim peasants predominated, and Leva Kanbis were few and far between. In some cases the Kanbis rented land from these other groups. There, the Kanbis lacked the power they had in the Charotar.66 For much of the nineteenth century, the British were considered in this region to be a relatively benign force. Previously, the area had been largely controlled by the Marathas, who ruled from Pune City. Their land-tax demands were high, being collected often by force. Also, the continuing warfare of that time meant that armies constantly crossed the region, extracting demands for water, food and labour from the peasants. One report 139

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spoke of how an overnight stay by the Maratha cavalry saw an entire village reservoir drained of its water in a matter of hours. The British had annexed part of the district in 1803, making the small town of Kheda into a military base. Local Rajput and Baraiya warlords, who were terrorising the region and its peasants, were suppressed.67 The rest of the area was annexed in 1817. Although land-tax remained high, it was collected in a less arbitrary manner, and the peasants appreciated the relative peace that prevailed now in the region. Ideological cement was applied to this mix by a charismatic religious leader, Swami Sahajanand, who preached peacefulness and the need for order under colonial law. He valorised a work ethic of the sort that Max Weber would have described as ‘Protestant’.68 He founded the Swaminarayan sect, which is extremely popular amongst Gujaratis throughout the world to this day. The strong imperial power-base that was thus established remained largely untroubled for nearly a century.   The hegemony of the British only began to be challenged in a serious way in this area from 1905 onwards. This was the year that the Swadeshi movement started in Bengal, and some young people became attracted to the proto-nationalist religious sect the Arya Samaj. This asserted a fundamentalist form of Hindu religion, in which the British, Muslims, and Christian missionaries were depicted as aliens who were destroying the moral fibre of the ancient land of Bharat (India). They followed a muscular nationalism that did not refrain from the use of violence and celebrated the Bengali and Marathi nationalist terrorists of these years. A group of them even established a secret society that tried without success to assassinate the Viceroy of India on a visit to Gujarat in 1909.69   When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, these young nationalists looked to him for leadership. Gandhi was at that time developing a strategy of working with a range of caste groups, deploying their internal solidarity to win mass support for the nationalist cause.70 He saw the Patidars as one such group. Influenced by Tolstoy and Ruskin, he believed the Indian peasantry to be the salt of the earth, and he believed that they could become exemplary practitioners of his method of resistance: satyagraha.   Gandhi’s opportunity for working with the peasants of Gujarat came in 1917, after the monsoon of that year culminated in torrential rain 140

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that destroyed crops growing in Kheda. For many, their harvest was ruined. Despite this, the government refused to provide any significant tax relief. Two nationalists of Kathlal village called Mohanlal Pandya and Shankarlal Parikh decided to draw up a petition to send to the Bombay government. Forms were printed in November 1917 and taken around the villages by young nationalists, and 22,000 signatures collected. It was sent to Bombay, with copies forwarded to Gandhi in Ahmedabad and the two representatives for Kheda in the Bombay Legislative Assembly, Gokaldas Parekh (who had championed the peasants at the time of the famine of 1899–1900), and Vithalbhai Patel, a Patidar barrister from Kheda. Pandya and Parikh also met the district collector, who assured them that leniency would be shown when the land-tax collections started on 5 December. The Bombay government threw back the petition, stating merely that it was up to the officials based in Gujarat to decide on tax demands.71   On 6 December 1917, a meeting was held in Nadiad, the largest town of Kheda District, attended by Gandhi. A committee was set up to investigate the grievances of the peasants. A resolution was also passed that the people should refuse to perform free service for officials. Known as veth in Gujarat, this was similar to the begar of the Hindi-speaking areas to the north. Under this system, touring officials expected to be provided with free labour, transport and provisions. This was not sanctioned under British law, but few dared to challenge this abuse of power. Indeed, anyone who did so would be regarded as a troublemaker and most probably beaten. Pamphlets were printed and circulated exhorting the peasants to refuse veth.72 This soon became a major element in the protest. A further meeting was held at Nadiad on 13 December in which farmers recounted their losses and inability to pay their tax. They spoke of how they were being pushed to do so by officials who were being rewarded for their success in extracting tax. One Patidar said that when he had tried to collect signatures for the petition in his village, officials had gone around threatening anyone who signed with imprisonment. Another peasant recounted how in his village the talati (official village-level accountant) had initially assessed the crop as only about a quarter of the average, but had been forced by his superior, the mamlatdar, to raise this estimate to a half. Mamlatdars were Indian officials who oversaw a sub-district, a unit known as a  

 

 

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taluka, and they were people with considerable local power. This mamlatdar had told all his subordinates that they had to be firm, as nationalist troublemakers were instigating the people not to pay. Under this pressure, the talati had acted like a tyrant, harassing and insulting the cultivators. He told them to sell their wives and daughters to pay the tax, if necessary, and confiscated the cattle of non-payers in an arbitrary manner. He made six untouchables who had failed to pay stand for two hours holding their big toes, releasing them only when they promised to shell out. They did so by borrowing money at a rate of interest of 37 per cent. Others were detained illegally until they paid by borrowing at these high rates. Elsewhere, peasants were warned that if they did not pay promptly, they would be punished with a chothai fine.73   The man in overall charge of the five British districts of Gujarat was the Commissioner of the Northern Division, Frederick Pratt, based in Ahmedabad. Once the situation in Kheda became serious, he stepped in and took control. The main reason for this was that the long-standing district collector was at that time on leave, with a temporary collector filling in for him, and soon after he returned in April 1918, he was transferred, and a new and relatively inexperienced collector appointed. Being, in effect, the ruler of British Gujarat, Pratt felt that he needed to take a hands-on approach in Kheda. In some ways, he was an unlikely candidate to take firm action against the agitators. He was seen in government circles as a somewhat eccentric figure who wore shabby clothes and, despite his high office, rode around Ahmedabad City on a bicycle. His grandmother was an Indian princess, and his younger brother William was the famous film actor known as Boris Karloff. He had many Indian friends, and knew Rabrindranath Tagore, whom he invited to Ahmedabad.74 Nevertheless, he was not at all sympathetic to the Kheda peasantry that year, stating merely that they were always complaining and petitioning and that over the years he had learnt to ignore them.75 For him, it was an important matter of principle. As he wrote in a letter to Gandhi: ‘In India, to defy the law of land revenue is to take a step which would destroy all administration. To break this law, therefore, is different from breaking all other laws.’76 He issued a notice on 8 January 1918 to all the talatis of the district stating that the tax assessment had now been fixed and if they did not collect it promptly, they would be dismissed from their posts. Nationalist agitators were to be reported to the authorities.77  

 

 

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  On 16 January 1918, the Bombay Government published a press statement specifying that a fifth of the usual tax would be suspended that year in three talukas of Kheda, and that this was quite adequate. The statement went on to assert that the agitation was mischievous and ill-advised, and led by people who came from outside the district.78 Gandhi was busy elsewhere in India and only gave his response on 4 February. He announced that he was going to take the matter up, and if necessary lead a campaign of ‘Satyagraha, non-violent non-co-operation. … I wish to prove to the British Government and to the world that it is with the help of this weapon that we may hope to secure justice.’79 On 16 February, he and a group of his followers travelled to Nadiad to carry out their own investigation. He divided them into groups, each of which was sent out to inspect one area. They were to walk around on foot, not using any mechanised vehicles, and they were to carry their own food so that they would not be a burden on the peasants. They were also encouraged to wear Indian rather than western dress, and most of them complied. Gandhi himself visited thirtyfive villages, and on one occasion he rode on a horse for ten hours. By 23 February, he was satisfied that the peasant grievance was justified.80 He then became embroiled in the strike by millworkers of Ahmedabad, which was only brought to a satisfactory conclusion on 18 March. In Kheda, the first instalment of the land-tax had been largely collected by then, often using coercive methods, and orders were now issued for the second and final instalments to be taken. Some leading Patidars of the district felt that the no-tax campaign should be abandoned as the peasants who were holding out would have their land confiscated in the end, and they would be financially ruined. Gopaldas Desai, a large Patidar landlord of Nadiad, travelled to Ahmedabad to try to persuade Gandhi to abandon his support for the protest.81   Gandhi announced that a public meeting would be held at Nadiad on 22 March to launch the satyagraha. Roughly 4,000 peasants attended, along with the leading nationalist activists in Gujarat. Gandhi explained the idea of satyagraha, and said that it would involve much suffering. He had drawn up a pledge, or sacred vow, designed for the more substantial cultivators among them. It stated that they were not prepared to allow the bureaucracy to call them liars and thus lose their self-respect, and that they therefore resolved to refuse their tax whether they could  

 

 

 

 

 

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afford to pay or not. In doing so, they were prepared to have their land confiscated. In the words of the pledge: ‘The reason why the well-to-do among us would not pay is that, if they do, the needy ones would, out of fright, sell their chattels or incur debts and pay the revenue and thus suffer.’ There was a long delay before 200 larger landowners got up one-by-one and agreed to sign.82 In doing so, they made the point that this was a matter of principle, and that the tax bureaucracy could not ride roughshod over the people. They knew that the tax officers could cow down the mass of the peasantry, and that the only way that their fear could be overcome was for the richer peasants to take the lead. This had, in other words, gone beyond being an economic matter, and had become a power struggle between the British bureaucracy and the more substantial Patidars.   The protest was organised from Nadiad, with Vallabhbhai Patel providing day-to-day district-level leadership. Gandhi was away from Kheda a lot, as he had various engagements elsewhere in India. Patel was a Patidar from Karamsad, one of the most prestigious Patidar villages—though his father was not a rich man. For the first decade of the twentieth century, Patel had worked as a local lawyer in Kheda, where he developed a reputation for being able to obtain the acquittal of almost anyone charged of a crime. He had become a local hero for many Patidars, for he exposed the slipshod ways of the police, and was known to stand up to the British administrators. Between 1910 and 1913 he studied law in London and after qualifying as a barrister, returned to practice in Ahmedabad. He had joined Gandhi in 1917, but this was his first experience of a Gandhian satyagraha. He gave up his black lawyer’s suit and henceforth wore kurta (long shirt) and dhoti (lower garment) in the Patidar style. Gandhi was testing him, stating on 4 April that: ‘Vallabhbhai is still in the fire and will have to endure a good deal of heat, but I think that out of this all we shall have gold in the end.’83 He was to become the most powerful nationalist leader in Gujarat under Gandhi and a practitioner of satyagraha with an all-India reputation. He ended his career as Deputy Prime Minister of India at the time of independence.   Other activists were given an area to mobilise and lead. By far the most talented of these was Indulal Yagnik, a Brahman from Nadiad who had been educated in Bombay City. He and a comrade were sent to  

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work in Matar Taluka. They rented a small house in Matar town as a base, and from there walked or cycled to villages, where they held meetings encouraging farmers to sign the pledge. On several occasions, government officials told Yagnik not to do this, though he ignored them as it was not illegal. The officials backed off, being intimidated by this well-educated Brahman. Peasants who saw this were highly impressed—they would never have dared stand up to them in that way. Yagnik told the peasants that they had to suffer in the short term to gain long-term liberties. He sent regular reports to the press in Bombay, exposing the torture of peasants by officials—for example, being made to stand in the sun holding their toes until they paid up. The government appointed three special mamlatdars for Matar, who rode around on horseback intimidating the peasants and collecting the tax. Yagnik established a system whereby watchers would beat drums when the officers were coming, so that they could lock their houses and hide their cattle to prevent confiscation. He himself was lent a horse by a farmer—he had never ridden before—so that he could go ahead of the officials and warn the farmers.84 In an interview that I conducted with him in 1971, Yagnik said that he found the people extremely receptive to Gandhi’s style of non-cooperation. He felt, however, that the village leaders supported the movement for their own ends, rather than for the good of society in general.85   Elsewhere, the organisation of the movement was patchy. Much depended on the calibre of the activists responsible for an area. The city-based leaders did not always develop a good rapport with the people. One of them rode around in a horse-drawn carriage, exuding an elite persona. In some areas, such as Borsad Taluka, young Patidar nationalists from a relatively humble background proved extremely active and were adept at winning widespread support. Tax collections there were second lowest after Matar Taluka. There was no response at all in some areas, with almost all tax being collected.86   Where the protest was strongest, namely in Matar, Nadiad and Borsad Talukas, people refused to co-operate with officials in any way. They would not point out the house of a defaulter, and officials were provided with no food, drink, or shelter, or any other services. The campaign against veth was a part of all this. Because of this, officials could not commandeer carts to carry confiscated goods, so they had to 145

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be put up for auction in the village itself, where nobody would bid. The caste organisations of the Patidars and other agricultural castes, such as the Baraiyas of Matar, were mobilised in support of the movement. They resolved that anyone who paid tax would be socially boycotted. The group of village elders known as the panchayat also held meetings in some villages at which they passed similar resolutions. People who tried to pay were in some cases forcibly prevented from doing so. The activists even held meetings of non-agricultural castes to get them to participate in the campaign. For example, a meeting was called for the barbers of forty-two villages of Nadiad Taluka, where Phulchand Shah told them that they should refuse to provide haircutting and shaving services for officials without payment.87   The presence of the English-educated nationalists from an elite background was crucial in maintaining the morale of the peasants. They had the poise and social status to be able to stand up against the bullying tactics of the officials. To take one example, a government official who had been sent to Nayaka village to attach the property of defaulters commandeered the public rest-house for his exclusive use. Indulal Yagnik told him that he needed space for his own residence, and if he would not accommodate him he would move in anyway. The officer silently vacated the premises. The villagers saw this as a huge victory and were elated.88 The activists also showed that they could use the local courts of law to their own advantage. Most peasants regarded the courts as terrifying sites of injustice; few had the resources to hire skilled lawyers to defend them. This now changed. When, for example, the Mamlatdar of Kapadvanj Taluka tried to intimidate an activist called Bhulabhai Shah by taking him to court for ‘wrongly persuading people not to pay the land revenue’, Vallabhbhai Patel represented him, arguing that he had not broken any law. Faced by this London-trained barrister, the magistrate had to dismiss the case and let Shah go.89 With such examples before them, the more substantial Patidars were emboldened to defy the authorities. In turn, their active involvement gave courage to the poorer peasants in overcoming their deep-rooted fear of the officials.   The activists also invoked the law on behalf of the peasants. Gandhi complained to the Collector of Kheda about the way that extra-legal forms of coercion were being inflicted on the peasants. The Collector 146

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replied that if the accusations could be proved, those responsible would be dismissed. He issued orders that no such methods were to be used, and he promised to make enquiries.90 Under the gaze of the campaigners, officials became increasingly careful about the way they behaved. This was also a very significant victory—that of making the British conform to their own rhetoric of legal process. The effect was that it deprived the tax bureaucracy of one of the most potent weapons in their armoury of fear-inducement.   Attempts were made also to get women to participate actively in the campaign. Although few women in this patriarchal society owned land, and thus had responsibility for paying land-tax, they were the main carers for the milk-buffaloes that were one of the main targets for confiscation in lieu of tax. It was thus important for them to be willing to make sacrifices in this respect. When he visited the villages, Gandhi made a point of sharing the platform with women when he gave speeches.91 When on one occasion, Gandhi saw that only men were attending a meeting, he rebuked the audience: ‘It was my hope that women also would be present at this meeting. In this work there is as much need of women as men. If women join our struggle and share our sufferings, we can do fine work.’92 In some cases, special meetings were held for women.93   Realising how important the participation of the larger landowners was, the authorities now singled them out for exemplary punishment. For example, in Vadthal, a man had Rs. 10,000 worth of property attached to pay Rs. 45 in tax. Another had all his land confiscated to pay Rs. 80.94 This broke the resolve of several of those who had signed the pledge, which gave encouragement to the British, who felt that things were turning their way.95   On 12 April, Frederick Pratt decided to speak to the people of Kheda at Nadiad to set out the government’s point of view. Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, other nationalist leaders, and many peasants went there to hear him out. The occasion brought out in a graphic manner the way in which this had become a fight for hegemony between the British and the nationalists. Pratt told them that there could be no compromise, and that he enjoyed the full support of the Governor of Bombay, Lord Willingdon. He said that the relatively small sums involved were not what was at issue, but the whole land-tax revenue of  

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the state, which was over 36 million rupees. People could not be allowed to get away with non-payment of taxes. He told them that it was all right for sanyasis (holy men) to lose their property, but farmers were not sanyasis. ‘Mr Gandhi is a very good man, a very holy man and he gives you advice because he believes genuinely and honestly that it is in your interest. … But isn’t the Government the protector of the poor? … Gandhi is my friend. But although he is well versed in religion he knows little of political matters and land revenue matters.’ He and the other nationalist leaders would not suffer and lose property or go to jail, while the peasants would if they followed their wrongheaded advice. They were misguided if they believed that the nationalists were their real friends. Pratt reminded them of the famine of 1899–1900, when the government had saved them. He said he regretted confiscating the land of good Patidar farmers, but it was all because of a misunderstanding over the rights of farmers. ‘Therefore, the benevolent Government is giving you the final opportunity of listening to its advice.’ He assured them: ‘The Government does not harbour any anger against you. If children kick their parents, the parents are sad, but they do not get angry.’96   A peasant rose and took up Pratt’s argument: ‘Government is our ma bap (mother and father), we are grateful to have the rare privilege of seeing you, sir, today. I implore you as the representative of the ma bap to visit our villages to ascertain the amount of our crops.’ He said that they had no grain in their homes, and food prices had gone up a lot during the War. The poor had nothing to eat. The price of iron had also risen considerably, affecting the cost of ploughs and agricultural implements. Labour costs were high. ‘Sarkar (government) ma bap should have mercy on us.’ Pratt replied that he would not debate the matter, and that they should merely state whether they were going to pay up.97   For the nationalists there, Pratt’s speech rang very hollow. Mohanlal Pandya spoke:  

Sir, the question is not now so much of payment or otherwise as one of truth against untruth. We say that the crops have been less than four annas. Government do not believe us. If they admit that the crops are under four annas we will surely pay up the dues, for we understand that the Government are very hard pressed during the war. What is intolerable is that the word of an ordinary talati should be accepted as true,

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BUILDING A NATIONALIST BASE IN RURAL INDIA while what a respectable agriculturalist says should be rejected as false. We know from the Hindu shastras (scriptures) that Harishchandra renounced his whole kingdom for the sake of truth. To give up a small piece of land for the sake of truth is of no account therefore. We took the vow we have with the fullest deliberation and knowledge and we are not going to swerve therefrom even though the sun shall change his course. And if inspite of this the Sarkar ma bap decided to deal death with us we will not fail.98

  In emphasising truth (satya), Pandya was stating the core principle of Gandhian satyagraha. His reference to Harishchandra was an astute one. The story of king Harishchandra was recounted in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and was known well to the audience. In it, this noble and righteous ruler had relinquished his kingdom, then his wife, and finally his children to fulfil a promise to a sage. The Gods were so impressed by his noble sacrifice that they returned to him all he had lost, and blessed him with good fortune. The story had in 1913 been recounted in the first full-length Indian film, Raja Harishchandra, which reinforced its hold over the popular imagination.   As Pratt left the meeting, the peasants shouted nationalist slogans, such as ‘Bande Mataram!’ and ‘Gandhiji ki jai!’ Gandhi then spoke, pointing that the relationship between father and son was different to that between master and slave, and that a son had a duty to resist injustice by a father. He considered it a victory that Pratt had come to talk to them—many there had never set eyes on him previously.99 He did not need to say much more, for clearly Pratt had made no impression on the crowd. The submissive mentality that had prevailed in the past when high officials held audience with the people had evaporated. Fear had been overcome and the advantage now lay with the nationalists. This was a turning point in the history of Kheda, being the moment at which political legitimacy could be observed to have passed from the British to the Gandhian nationalists.   By mid-April it had become apparent to the British that resistance remained strong in certain pockets. Policemen were sent to patrol the recalcitrant villages, carrying guns, lathis (metal-tipped staves), and handcuffs, which they clanged together as they marched, to frighten the people. The Mamlatdar of Anand said that the government would confiscate land and give it to those who had fought in the war as a reward.100 As it was, the focus turned to wide scale handing out of chothai fines, 149

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and the attachment and sale of the property or grain-stocks of defaulters. Parties of tax officers went from village to village and worked from dawn to sunset confiscating buffaloes, cooking utensils, grain, ornaments, cupboards, and anything to hand. They broke open the locks of houses and drove the cattle to the government office in the village to await auction and sale.101 The buffaloes were treated roughly, with calves being separated from their mothers, so that the villages were filled with their piteous bellowing. The women who cared for the buffaloes wept at their mistreatment. Attempts to commandeer carts to transport the confiscated good to the towns for auction largely failed, and few villagers dared bid for fear of being socially ostracised.102   By late-April, Pratt realised that his bluster had largely failed. He was, in fact, uncomfortable about ordering the confiscation and sale of Patidar land, as he considered them excellent cultivators, and the sort the British depended on to control the rural areas. In fact, no such land had been sold so far. At this juncture, Gandhi had gone to Delhi to attend a conference in support of the First World War effort. Gandhi was still ostensibly a supporter of the British in this respect, arguing that while he was protected by British law, he had a moral duty to support them in their time of need. Pratt did not want to be accused by his superiors of jeopardising the conference by alienating Gandhi, and he issued an order to the Collector of Kheda stating that in a time of national danger for Britain there should be an end to confrontation. He cancelled previous orders to confiscate land, and ordered that no chothai fines should be levied. Only moveable property should be attached. Those who really could not pay should not be compelled to do so, and arrears should be carried over to the following year. The Collector passed these orders on to the mamlatdars on 25 April, but they were not published in full. The press was informed merely that notices of land confiscation were to be withdrawn, and that tax would henceforth be realised only through confiscation of moveable property. No publicity was given to the order to suspend the tax demand for those who could not afford to pay, which was the major demand of the nationalists. The officials in Kheda went on confiscating moveable property throughout the month of May. With the war conference brought to a satisfactory conclusion, with Gandhi promising to help the British, Pratt had no further need to ensure that  

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this part of the order be publicised. It was more important to teach the recalcitrant landowners a lesson for their defiance.103   As it was, Gandhi found out about the order in the first week of June, when he met the Mamlatdar of Nadiad in a village of that taluka. The Mamlatdar told him that an order had already been issued that rich people must pay, but poor people need not. He agreed to put this in writing. Gandhi wrote to the Collector asking for the order to be publicised throughout the district. The Collector agreed to do this. Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel then announced that the satyagraha would be called off. The struggle thus ended, but with a sense of anti-climax. Gandhi said that the order had been passed reluctantly, in a devious way, and not in a spirit of open generosity.104   By June, the movement was in fact flagging. Gandhi had been shocked to hear that some who had signed the pledge were leaving money in an obvious place in their houses, so that the attachment officers could take it with ease.105 He was also upset about the way that some officials had been insulted and even hit by satyagrahis. In Khandali village, for example, the Mamlatdar was attacked by women and children when he was attaching buffaloes, and was struck, though not badly. The culprits had then fled to a neighbouring area under Baroda rule to escape the British police. Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel had gone immediately to the village, but while Patel said that they should offer themselves for arrest and he would defend them in court, Gandhi merely told them off.106 Gandhi was, therefore, looking for a way of calling the movement off, and the information from the Mamlatdar of Nadiad provided this for him. As Indulal Yagnik later told me: ‘He could take a straw and make it into a mountain.’ He and the other nationalist activists supported Gandhi fully in this, as they knew that the movement was in decline. Yagnik felt that what mattered was that the attitude of the people had changed profoundly.107   The British managed, however, to provide one last provocation that allowed the end of the satyagraha to be celebrated as a great triumph. It also provided a lesson in one element of satyagraha that had not so far been experienced in Kheda—that of going to jail for standing up for one’s truth. This happened in the following way. A field in the large Patidar-dominated village of Navagam in Matar Taluka had been attached but contained some harvested onions that were left lying 151

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there. Indulal Yagnik discovered that the attachment order had not named the field in the regulation manner, and when he told Gandhi about it, Gandhi said that he believed that they had a right to remove the crop. He noted also that as the monsoon was due, the onions would spoil if left outside. Mohanlal Pandya went to Navagam and with the help of some villagers carried the onions away. They were charged with theft. On 8 June, after the movement had been called off, Pandya and five others were summoned to the court at Kheda. There was a festive mood, with over 300 sympathisers in the courtroom to provide solidarity to the accused. Three, including Pandya, were given jail sentences of twenty days, the others ten, and they were locked up in Kheda sub-jail. When the three remaining prisoners were released on 27 June, they were greeted by a large and jubilant crowd who had come to welcome the ‘dungri chor’ (‘onion thieves’). This indeed became Pandya’s nickname thereafter, reversing the stigma that was normally attached to petty thieving. Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel had come, and after Gandhi had said some words, Pandya thanked him effusively, and said jail had been for him a paradise. Again, the effect was to remove the fear of jail-going for a cause. They all then went on a triumphal procession from Kheda to Navagam, where there was a celebratory meeting. Next day, they went on to Kathlal—Pandya’s home village and the place the movement had originally started from—for another procession accompanied by music. On the following day, they all went on to Nadiad for the final victory procession, in which 5–6,000 people participated. In his speech, Gandhi said that although the court verdict had been unjust, it had provided a splendid opportunity for the cause to be advanced through jail-going. He concluded: ‘So sweet is the taste of satyagraha that one who has known it will ask for nothing else… I hope this struggle will have made you permanently conscious of your strength to employ satyagraha at any time.’ Against many odds, the nationalists had been able to declare the satyagraha a triumph, providing a valuable lesson in how to develop fearlessness in future satyagrahas.108   This was, though, the high point of Gandhi’s involvement with the peasants of Kheda District. He had been asked at the war conference in Delhi to help the British in their drive for military recruits, and soon after the satyagraha ended in Kheda, he led other nationalist leaders in  

 

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a tour of the district, requesting volunteers to join the army. He said that he would lead them in person to the battlefield in France, and although he would carry no weapon, he would head their charge on the German lines.109 Villagers who had received him with enthusiasm only a few weeks before now gave him a very frosty reception. Many refused even to provide food for the party. Even at Navagam, a meeting held on 8 July had to be abandoned after everyone disappeared into the surrounding fields.110 Some peasants were heard to shout at Gandhi: ‘We made you great! We helped you make satyagraha work!—and see what you ask of us now.’111 Gandhi felt bitterly let down. In August, he collapsed mentally and physically, and had to be taken back to recover in his ashram in Ahmedabad.112   His disenchantment with the Kheda people was compounded in the following year, when some of its nationalists supported his first allIndia protest—the Rowlatt Satyagraha—by acts of what Gandhi considered unacceptable violence. In Nadiad, they cut telegraph lines and removed tracks from the railway, so that a train was derailed, and a crowd of youths pelted the government high school and a European dairy with stones. Similarly, in Anand, a crowd threw stones at the government dairy and burnt down the house of a police informer. The crowds who carried out these acts had been heard in some cases to have been shouting ‘Gandhiji ki jai!’ (‘long live Gandhi!’).113 After that struggle had ended, Gandhi came to Nadiad and in a speech recalled how the people of Kheda had misused and misunderstood him in 1918. He described the Rowlatt Satyagraha as a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’; the people were clearly not yet ready for satyagraha.114 His faith in the peasants of Kheda was shaken, and henceforth he was extremely reluctant to sanction their participation in acts of civil disobedience.   Despite this, the Patidars of the district continued to be among the most fervent supporters of the Indian nationalist movement over the next two-and-a-half decades. When Gandhi was passing through the district in 1930 on his famous salt march, several of them came to him and said that they were going to refuse their land-tax in support of the satyagraha. Even though Gandhi tried to dissuade them, as he wanted to be able to maintain a strict control over the protest, they went ahead anyway.115 They had remained fearless, despite Gandhi’s fear of them.  

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The Ahmedabad Fast Before we end this chapter, a few brief remarks may be made on the fast that Gandhi underwent in 1918 to resolve a wage dispute between the textile workers and mill owners of his home city of Ahmedabad. The action was taken to shame both the workers, who had doubted his commitment to their cause, and the mill owners to show how strongly he felt on the issue.116 This was the first time he had fasted in this way in a public arena—his previous actions of this sort had been over internal discipline in his ashrams. Refusing food as an act of protest was not new to Indian politics—the Bengali radical Nani Gopal Mukherji had, for example, in 1912 gone on a hunger strike in protest at the appalling conditions that his fellow political prisoners were subjected in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. Mukherji managed to gain some improvements in the way that they were treated.117 Indian hunger strikers were in turn inspired by political protestors in the West, such as the American revolutionaries who refused food in 1774,118 and the British suffragettes who deployed this method from 1909 onwards.119 The Irish nationalist leader James Connolly had gone on hunger strike for eight days in September 1913 in protest against his imprisonment.120   Gandhi sought to distinguish his fasts from ‘hunger strikes’, which he believed were rooted in violence and coercion. While the hunger strike was, he held, a form of moral blackmail, the fast—properly conceived—was carried out above all for self-purification. It was not something to be undertaken lightly. According to Shridharani: Self-purification is advanced by its adherents as an instrument for convincing the opponent that the Satyagrahis intend to struggle to the finish, and that they are ready to make any sacrifice in order to achieve their ends. It is also expected to assure the opponent that the Satyagrahis harbour no motive of revenge but are, on the contrary, prepared to suffer willingly. Furthermore, voluntary suffering and selfdenial attract the attention of the people at large.121

  Gandhi discussed the issue in some depth many years later, in 1940. He said that he had never undertaken a fast in a calculated way—it was something that had always come ‘on the spur of the moment, gifts from God.’ He said that it should be undertaken as a form of pressure only against someone that you know personally. He asserted: ‘There can be 154

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no room for selfishness, anger, lack of faith, or impatience in a pure fast. … Infinite patience, firm resolve, single-mindedness of purpose, perfect calm, and no anger must of necessity be there.’ Any impure thought during a fast could compromise all that it was trying to achieve. Because of this ‘no one who has not devoted himself to following the laws of ahimsa1 should undertake a satyagrahi fast.’122 Bondurant has pointed out that Gandhi never conceived fasts as a form of mass action, but only as an individual act carried out to emphasise a personal conviction.123 As it was, he never fasted against the British, only against fellow-Indians who he considered to have violated his feelings by failing, for instance, to observe vows that they had solemnly undertaken, or by acting violently or in communally divisive ways. Although rooted in Gandhian nonviolence, the fast was not therefore conceived as a form of strategy to be deployed routinely in nonviolent struggles.

Conclusion It has often been argued that Gandhian nonviolence succeeded in India because the colonial state observed the rule of law, and that faced with a ruthless and authoritarian regime, the results would have been very different.124 The British were held to be relatively liberal, and in general ruled through the consent of their subjects rather than through coercion. The implication is that the Indian people did not fear the British in the way that the people did in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. What I hope the evidence in this chapter has shown is that although the rule of law operated at a certain level, it did not protect the mass of the people from the extra-legal oppression of state officials, policemen, white planters or the local elites, so that they lived in constant fear of these superordinate groups. This meant that they were normally very wary about engaging in direct action, and overcoming this fear was a major achievement. This happened for the first time under Gandhi’s leadership in India in Champaran and Kheda, and the two movements proved an inspiration for many, and played their part in forging the new spirit of defiance that was to become generalised in the next four years.   By taking up these rural issues at a time when other leading nationalists were agitating for constitutional reforms through their Home 155

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Rule Leagues, Gandhi was trying to shift the focus of the movement in a radical new direction—namely, towards building an India that rooted itself and its identity in self-sufficient and politically assertive village communities. In championing peasant issues in two districts in 1917– 18, he demanded that middle class Indians identify with the peasantry by renouncing their comfortable urban lifestyles and share their simple fare on equal terms, and thus come to empathise with them and their problems. The movement was being turned on its head.   Gandhi could build such a politics in 1917–18, because the British allowed him the space to do so at that juncture. He still projected himself as a well-wisher of the British Empire who supported the war effort that preoccupied Britain at that time. In Champaran, he gave orders that there was to be no mention of Congress or Indian nationalism, lest it antagonise the British officials whose support he was trying to gain against the planters, and he refused to invite any well-known nationalist leaders to join him there.125 He preached complete nonviolence, and thus projected his activities as being based on morality as well as being non-threatening. He addressed local abuses of power that the higherlevel officials could hardly condone. This approach combined well with that important strand of peasant politics that saw oppression as primarily a local abuse of power, and the belief that once the ruler was informed, the grievance would be rectified. Gandhi was thus seen by some Champaran peasants as an emissary of the Viceroy, come with his permission to right wrongs. In all this, his tactics and strategy met the needs of the hour superbly. At that moment, he was not challenging British rule as such. However, when he later did so, the allies and supporters that he had gained in places such as Champaran and Kheda became firm supporters of the nationalist struggle in general.   The peasants who provided the backbone to the movements in Champaran and Kheda were from a wealthy village oligarchy, and although they mobilised the subordinate peasantry, they were not fighting to end inequalities within the villages. Their main aim was to end their own oppression at the hands of the planters or state officials. In Champaran, for example, the agrarian legislation of 1918 that came out of the struggle benefitted mainly the wealthier peasants. The poorer peasants, who were largely tenants of indigenous landlords, now found that the latter were exploiting them as much as, if not more than, the 156

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planters had hitherto. In subsequent years, they were heard to be quite scathing about Gandhi and his legacy for the area.126 In Kheda, an area with a reputation for violence between castes, the dominant Patidars appreciated Gandhi’s emphasis on strict nonviolence, as it permitted political mobilisation without the sort of violence that could have threatened their control.   In these various ways, Gandhi forged a new language of protest for India by both building on older forms of resistance while at the same time accepting the colonial censure of all forms of violent protest. In time his new methods were to become as ritualised as the older forms of resistance. Part of their efficacy lay in the strong moral base that Gandhi gave to this form of protest through his doctrine of nonviolence, and it is to this idea that we shall turn in the next chapter.

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The idea of nonviolence as a form of political strategy was theorised by Gandhi in India during the second decade of the twentieth century. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the first recorded usage of the word in its hyphenated form was in the nineteenth century: as a medical term describing either a certain type of surgical procedure (Britain) or the failure of the body to resist the violence that is inflicted on it by disease (USA). Only in 1914 did it appear in a political context when a Wisconsin newspaper contrasted ‘rumpus and riot’ with ‘the tenets of moderation, orderly thinking and non-violence.’ The next usage recorded in the dictionary was by Gandhi, who is quoted as stating in 1920: ‘I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.’1 Despite the preceding appearances of the word in Britain and the USA, the dictionary gives its etymology as a translation of the Sanskrit word ahimsa, which is a combination of a- (non-) and himsa (violence). This indeed was how Gandhi was to project the idea—namely that nonviolence was a major philosophical principle that was rooted in ancient India. If, however, we look at the nineteenth-century Sanskrit–English dictionary by MonierWilliams, we find that the term—spelt here as ahinsa—is translated as ‘not injuring anything, harmlessness (one of the cardinal virtues of most Hindu sects, but particularly of the Buddhists and Jains; also personified as the wife of Dharma)… security, safeness.’ Ahinsa-nirata is

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defined as ‘harmlessness or gentleness’, ahinsana as ‘not hurting’, and ahinsra as ‘innocuous, harmless behaviour.’2 The term thus suggested passivity, rather than, as Gandhi understood it, a principled resistance to wrong-doing that avoids the use of violence.   I have elsewhere examined the way that ahimsa was understood in India in the pre-modern world, trying to show how differently it was then conceived and practised.3 To summarise, it was associated during ancient Vedic times with debates over the correct form that animal sacrifice should take. Later, it became an informing principle of worship that rejected all forms of animal sacrifice. This led to it being associated with vegetarianism. It was also regarded as a quality of thought in which action was detached from desire, and a mentality in which physical injury and death might be inflicted as a matter of duty, freed from any ignoble thirst for vengeance. It was also a mental and practical quality that only those of high caste and status were expected to maintain, whether of the Brahman who refused to eat meat and sacrifice animals; the Kshatriya warrior who waged war as a duty that was detached from any desire for glory or revenge; or the ruler who sought to maintain correct social order through corporal punishment, meted out as a supposed moral necessity. Low caste people were not expected to practice ‘nonviolence’ of these sorts. These various qualifications allowed for much variation—and indeed pedantry and hypocrisy—in the practice of what was claimed as ahimsa. The boundaries between himsa and ahimsa were always a matter for debate, and they shifted constantly over time. Reformers often claimed to practice a more truthful and genuine form of nonviolence. The Jains spelt out in most detail the various forms and degrees that ahimsa could assume, drawing up fine distinctions about motive and amounts of harm avoided. Throughout the post-Vedic period, the practice of ahimsa, however understood, was justified in terms of gaining moral credit, and thus obtaining divine favour and support in times of need.   In the past, ahimsa was hardly deemed to have any applicability to popular protest, or understood to be a political technique. This only became possible in the epistemic space that we associate with modernity, with its emphasis on the need of states to enjoy popular legitimacy and with acts of mass civil protest providing an important outlet for popular feeling. In emphasising the need for peaceful means, dissent 160

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could be expressed without the need for a violence that could threaten both civil tolerance and even civil society itself. Although such a principle was conceived initially in terms of the secular method of ‘passive resistance’—with peaceable methods being deployed tactically rather than as a matter of principle—it was Gandhi who first tried to make ahimsa-cum-nonviolence into an imperative principle for all forms of civil protest. In doing so, he claimed a compelling power to a moral stance that was, as he understood it, invested with a divine quality: that of ‘truth force’. In this, God/Truth was accorded agency. Secular notions of ‘passive resistance’, ‘civil resistance’, ‘people power’ and the like never made such a daring claim.   Gandhi only began to talk about ahimsa as an informing principle of his method of resistance after his return to India from South Africa in 1915. Although Gandhi had already forged his method of satyagraha, he had never previously described it as a form of either ahimsa or ‘nonviolence’. There has been some confusion on this matter, as the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi gives the impression that he deployed the concept when he launched his first campaign of passive resistance in 1906. In this source, Gandhi had allegedly asserted: ‘This is for us the time for deeds, not words. We have to act boldly; and in doing so, we have to be humble and non-violent.’4 If we examine the original version in Gujarati, we find that he is quoted as saying ‘narmash vaparvani che’ which literally means ‘make use of softness.’ In fact, the root of ‘narmash’ is the noun ‘naram’, which means soft and smooth, gentle, tender, humble, soft, weak, effeminate. In other words, it suggests passivity, a connotation that Gandhi was soon to distance himself from. Things get rather more complicated if we go to the original source, namely Gandhi’s weekly paper Indian Opinion of 15 September 1906. The speech that he reported from Johannesburg was in fact delivered by Abdul Ghani, the Chairman of the British Indian Association. It was apparently delivered in Urdu, after which it was translated for the English-speakers who were present by Dr. William Godfrey, and this is the version published in Indian Opinion. This stated that: ‘… I would ask you, in your demeanour and in your language, to be moderate. Our cause does not require any such props, but action is undoubtedly demanded of you. It will speak far more eloquently and appeal far more forcibly to the powers that be than any words however strong.’ In  

 

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other words, there is nothing about nonviolence as such. Gandhi then translated this speech by Abdul Ghani into Gujarati, printing it on pp. 664–5 of the same edition of Indian Opinion. Only when the editors of the Collected Works came to translate Gandhi’s Gujarati report into English in the 1950s, did they use the term ‘non-violent’.   During the campaign of passive resistance in South Africa, many poems were composed by followers of Gandhi that sought to convey the principles of his struggle in popular terms. A selection of these has been edited by Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt. The two editors claim in the introduction that the poems ‘stress the strength of ahimsa (non-violence).’5 Nonetheless, nowhere in the thirty-five selected poems that they reproduce in full in both English and Gujarati is this term or even concept actually used. The main themes that come across in the poems were a patriotic pride in Indian national identity, the need for sacrifice for one’s sense of truth, and the need to uphold one’s religious values. The editors argue that it was ‘a campaign for right grounded in faith. It created an atmosphere in which each satyagrahi could turn to his/her faith as a source of strength for himself/ herself and others.’6 The faith itself could be either Hindu or Muslim, and it appears that Gandhi refrained during this period from trying to define the essence of his method in terms that were clearly Hindu. As I argued in Chapter 2, Gandhi had to constantly fight incipient communal tensions within the movement in South Africa, and the poems reflect this concern, with people of different religions being exhorted to pull together for the sake of Indian pride. The emphasis was on support for the movement regardless of affiliation, and Gandhi was probably careful not to try to define his whole approach in terms of a concept—ahimsa—that would not have resonated with Muslims.   This impression is reinforced by the only occasion during this period when Gandhi discussed ahimsa, which was in Hind Swaraj (1909). In a section on cow protection, he took up the issue of whether Hindus and Muslims could work together in harmony, given that Muslims ate beef. Gandhi argued that this should not stand in the way of peaceable co-existence: …if it be true that the Hindus believe in the doctrine of non-killing and the Mahomedans do not, what, pray, is the duty of the former? It is not written that a follower of the religion of Ahimsa (nonkilling) may kill a

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NONVIOLENCE fellow-man. For him the way is straight. In order to save one being, he may not kill another. He can only lead—therein lies his sole duty. But does every Hindu believe in Ahimsa? Going to the root of the matter, not one man really practises such a religion because we do destroy life. We are said to follow that religion because we want to obtain freedom from liability to kill any kind of life. Generally speaking, we may observe that many Hindus partake of meat and are not, therefore, followers of Ahimsa. It is, therefore, preposterous to suggest that the two cannot live together amicably because the Hindus believe in Ahimsa and the Mahomedans do not.7

  The emphasis here was on downplaying the need to adhere in a dogmatic way to a doctrine that could alienate Muslims. Moreover, Gandhi translated the term as ‘nonkilling’, rather than ‘nonviolence’. Significantly, the term did not appear in Gandhi’s detailed exposition in the same work on his method of passive resistance. As it is, I have not been able to find any other occasion in South Africa when he talked about either ahimsa or nonviolence.   In South Africa, rather than describe his method in such terms, Gandhi talked of ‘non-resistance’ and described the protestors as ‘nonresisters’. He had taken this from Leo Tolstoy, a figure whom he admired profoundly. Tolstoy, he claimed, had made him aware of ‘the infinite possibilities of universal love.’8 Tolstoy had in 1884 written a book called What I Believe, that was highly critical of the Christianity practised by the Church of his day. In particular, he pointed out how it failed to stand up for what he asserted was the Christian ‘law of nonresistance to evil by violence.’ In this, he said he was guided by Jesus’ statement in the Sermon on the Mount (Mathew 5, 39–42): ‘I say unto you, that you resist not evil, but whatsoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also…’9 In his subsequent book, The Kingdom of God is WithinYou, he stated that: ‘A Christian recognises the law of love revealed to him by his teachers, as perfectly sufficient for all human relations, and therefore regards all use of violence as unnecessary and wrong.’ A real Christian, he went on to say, will not quarrel with anyone or attack them, and will endure violence inflicted on them. ‘And by that very attitude towards violence he not only frees himself from all external power, but the world also.’10 In a discussion of Tolstoy’s views in this respect, Stephen Huxley has pointed out that  

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it may seem contradictory to argue that the idea of ‘never resist’ provided a basis for a doctrine of resistance. Tolstoy, like the rebellious early Christians, was saying that he could not submit to an authority that violated his ideals. By modifying Jesus’ ‘resist not evil’ into the phrase ‘non-resistance to evil by violence’ he refused to be complicit with violence. This avoided the inaction of ‘resist not evil’. Tolstoy argued that over the centuries only a minority of Christians had acted in this way. The Quakers were among them, providing the best example for Tolstoy. Tolstoy was also influenced by the American non-resisters William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou. From these he learnt that ‘evil is to be resisted by all just means, but never with evil.’ Tolstoy also cited the work of Daniel Musser, Non-resistance Asserted (1864).11 Tolstoy understood resistance without violence to provide a powerful means for people to struggle against tyranny and evil. Those who controlled church and state had always opposed such a force, and tried to suppress ideas about it, as it threatened their whole system of oppression and enforced submission. He saw it as a practical weapon, for violent revolution was counter-productive, merely strengthening the forces of repression. He did not discuss in any detail how such a form of resistance was to be put into practice, even in his correspondence with those waging passive resistance against the Russian regime in Finland in 1899–1905. He merely stressed the need for action. Tolstoy advised his correspondents that resistance should not be based on faith in a system of jurisprudence, since the legal order is always slave to the structural violence of the state. He also rejected patriotism as a basis for action.12 Tolstoy supported his fellow-Russians who refused to be conscripted into the Tsarist army, seeing this as a case of ‘non-resistance’.13 Clearly, Gandhi discerned a spirit of defiance in Tolstoy that accorded with his feelings. When he wrote to him in 1909, Gandhi stated that he and his fellow Indians were trying to put into practice ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to evil’ in the context of South Africa.14 He had already deployed the term earlier and in other contexts.15   Gandhi began to apply the term ‘ahimsa’ to his method of resistance—satyagraha—only after his return to India from South Africa in January 1915. He first did so in a speech that he gave three months after his arrival at St. Stephens College in Delhi—an Anglican institution where his friend C.F. Andrews had taught up until the previous  

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year. Gandhi began by distancing himself from fundamentalist Hinduism, recalling how Gokhale—a Hindu with a deep belief in God—had once been approached by a Hindu sannyasi (ascetic) who encouraged him to push a Hindu political agenda in a way that would have suppressed Muslim political influence. Gokhale had replied: ‘If to be a Hindu I must do as you wish me to do, please publish it abroad that I am not a Hindu.’ Gandhi praised him for taking this stance. He then went on to set out his own credo: ‘Fear God, therefore, and do not fear men, and remember that ahimsa is our religion, the great gift of our rishis. What we have got to do is to bring this religion of the Fear of God into all our lives and even into politics. Nothing but this and the passionate love of truth will help us.’16 Here, Gandhi expressed his disapproval of a narrow Hindu-centrism that he believed had corrupted and divided the nationalist movement, and proclaimed that his Hinduism was of an inclusive and nonviolent sort. In two speeches that he delivered later that month in Madras, he projected ‘truth’ and ‘ahimsa’ as his two main guiding principles in life.17 In the following year, in a talk at his ashram that was transcribed in Hindi, he set out the virtues expected of a satyagrahi, one of which was ahimsa.18 Then, in October 1916, he set out in full exactly what ahimsa entailed for him in a rejoinder to an article in The Modern Review by the radical nationalist and Arya Samajist Lala Lajpat Rai. Gandhi took issue with Rai’s assertion that the doctrine of ahimsa had contributed to the emasculation and downfall of India. Rai understood it as excusing passivity. In this, we may note, Rai had some justification, as the definitions found in nineteenth-century dictionaries do give such an impression. Gandhi, however, wanted to project a different understanding of the concept. His argument against Rai provided an important early statement not only on why he disagreed with his nationalist colleague in this respect, but also how he had devised his own unique understanding of the term.   Gandhi said that he had been introduced to the notion of ahimsa as a child, and that he had studied the idea in the Hindu, Jain and other scriptures. ‘Our shastras seem to teach that a man who really practises ahimsa in its fullness has the world at his feet, he so affects his surroundings that even the snakes and other venomous reptiles do him no harm. This is said to have been the experience of St. Francis of Assisi.’ In the scriptures it was, however, used in a negative sense, as refraining from 165

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harming any living being physically or mentally. It meant not bearing ill-will towards others. In South Africa, Gandhi argued, he had extended this principle to not wishing any harm to his opponents, while still resisting the evil policies of the government. ‘Their resistance consisted of disobedience of the orders of the Government, even to the extent of suffering death at their hands. Ahimsa requires deliberate self-suffering, not a deliberate injuring of the supposed wrong-doer.’19   Gandhi asserted against Lala Lajpat Rai that rather than emasculating people, the practice of ahimsa in protest campaigns required ‘the most soldierly of a soldier’s virtues.’20 To be prepared to stand one’s ground and even die in ‘a hail of bullets’ without any protection, or without lifting a finger against the opponent, required courage of the highest order. ‘A man cannot then practise ahimsa and be a coward at the same time.’ This was the spirit that had informed his campaign for civil rights in South Africa: ‘And so the South African passive resisters in their thousands were ready to die rather than sell their honour for a little personal ease. This was ahimsa in its active form. It never barters away honour.’ By standing firm with such courage, the protestor appealed to the conscience of the opponent: ‘the odds are that the soul in the latter will be awakened’, and the objective achieved. This was indeed soul-force.   Gandhi argued that the real problem was not that the doctrine of ahimsa had emasculated the people of India, but that its truth had been either ignored or perverted for the past 1500 years. The Indian people had been swayed by the spirit of irreligion rather than religion, and quarrels and strife had prevailed. Gandhi concluded: If we are unmanly today, we are so, not because we do not know how to strike, but because we fear to die. He is no follower of Mahavira, the apostle of Jainism, or of Buddha or of the Vedas, who being afraid to die, takes flight before any danger, real or imaginary all the while wishing that somebody else would remove the danger by destroying the person causing it. He is no follower of ahimsa (I agree with Lalaji) who does not care a straw if he kills a man by inches by deceiving him in trade, or who will protect by force of arms a few cows and make away with the butcher, or who in order to do a supposed good to his country does not mind killing off a few officials. All these are actuated by hatred, cowardice and fear. Here love of the cow or the country is a vague thing intended to satisfy one’s vanity or soothe a stinging conscience.

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NONVIOLENCE Ahimsa, truly understood, is, in my humble opinion, a panacea for all evils mundane and extra-mundane. We can never overdo it. Just at present, we are not doing it at all. Ahimsa does not displace the practice of other virtues, but renders their practice imperatively necessary before it can be practised even in its rudiments. Lalaji need not fear the ahimsa of his father’s faith. Mahavira and Buddha were soldiers, and so was Tolstoy. Only they saw deeper and truer in their profession, and found the secret of a true, happy, honourable and godly life. Let us be joint sharers with these teachers and this land of ours will once more be the abode of gods.

  Although Gandhi appeared to be endorsing Tolstoy’s pacifism—and many commentators have understood his call for ahimsa in this spirit— he did not in fact rule out the use of weapons in all circumstances. Violence was justified in certain circumstances—for example if a person lacked the courage to defend their country through nonviolent means, it was better to use physical force rather than surrender. In a speech of March 1917, he stated: …your duty is [not to run away from an enemy]; it will be a grave lapse if you do, saying in excuse ahimsa paramo dharmah.You wish destruction of your enemy some way or other. Because you cherish belief in nonviolence,21 it does not mean that you are effectively observing the rule, for in that rule there is no place for running away in fear. It is your duty to defend those among the Indian people who want themselves, their women, their moral standards and their wealth to be defended. How to do this? Those who have no faith in the principle which is dear to me and which I embrace may certainly take up arms. It is for this reason that I welcome the right of enlisting as volunteers which has been granted to us. I shall advise the people in this hall to join up. If anyone asks me whether he would be offered a commission or not, I would tell him to reserve such grumbling for the future, and not be too particular for the present and so miss the opportunity offered. Let us tell the Government that we are ready. That will be worthy of us.22

  Following this principle, Gandhi encouraged his fellow Indians to support the British war effort and join the army. As we have seen in the last chapter, he led a recruitment campaign in Kheda District in the following year.   In a speech in Bihar in late 1920, Gandhi addressed the issue of how villagers should respond when attacked by the police. This was in the context of some police atrocities carried out in a village that he visited 167

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near Bettiah in Champaran District. He had heard how the villagers had fled while the police went on the rampage, looting property and molesting and shaming women. Gandhi deplored the fact that the people had acted in a cowardly manner, failing even ‘to protect women’: ‘Our dharma does not teach us to be cowards, to submit to tyranny.’ They should rather have waged satyagraha against the police, even at the risk of losing their lives. Although nonviolent resistance was the morally-superior path to take, Gandhi would have not have minded so much if they had fought back violently—better this than to have fled. As it was, even the law allowed people to use violence in selfdefence. Thus, if the police came to arrest a person in a legal way, they should allow the arrest to go ahead. But if, rather, the police entered their houses and seized their cattle or money in an illegal way, then they were justified in using ‘a stick’ to beat the police back. He concluded by stating his desire that the people ‘should not be timid, should never behave as cowards, and yet not take anyone’s life.’23   For Gandhi, in other words, ahimsa should be practised as an act of courage. He argued that over time this principle had been perverted, and it had been followed formulaically, and often hypocritically. He now sought to restore it to its true essence. Later, in ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’ he returned to this theme, arguing: I have therefore ventured to place before India the ancient law of selfsacrifice. For satyagraha and its off-shoots, non-co-operation and civil resistance, are nothing but new names for the law of suffering. The rishis, who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence, were greater geniuses than Newton. They were themselves greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms, they realized their uselessness and taught a weary world that its salvation lay not through violence but through non-violence.24

  For Gandhi, ahimsa was not confined to physical violence, but included mental and verbal violence against others. In this he was influenced strongly by a Jain ethos that held that ahimsa had three guptis (principles); those of mental nonviolence, verbal nonviolence and physical nonviolence. The Jains believed also that a person violated ahimsa not only if they acted violently themselves, but if they asked others to do so or condoned it in any way.25 Later, when giving a discourse on the Bhagavad Gita in 1926, Gandhi spoke of how it was not 168

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enough to merely act outwardly, but one must also attempt to control one’s thoughts; vilifying an opponent in one’s mind was as bad as striking them physically. It was similarly an act of violence to encourage others to attack and injure an opponent, and in fact the person guilty of such instigation should be held more responsible for the violence than the one who had carried out the deed. ‘There should’, Gandhi said, ‘be no contradiction between thought and action.’26 Likewise: Ahimsa is not the crude thing it has been made to appear. Not to hurt any living being is no doubt a part of ahimsa. But it is its least expression. The principle of ahimsa is hurt by every evil thought, by undue haste, by lying, by hatred, by wishing ill to anybody.27

  Following from this, Gandhi held that it was intent that above all distinguished an act of violence. One might thus act in a manner that appeared, formulaically, to be violent, when the aim was to act in the most truthful and compassionate manner in the circumstances. He enunciated this particularly clearly after he had, controversially, ordered in 1928 that a sick calf in his ashram be put out of its misery. This was seen by many orthodox Hindus and Jains to be an act of himsa, or violence. Gandhi argued that for him it was more important to discharge what he saw as his duty truthfully than to be swayed by public opinion. In this case, his understanding of ahimsa led him to believe that he should order the calf to be given a lethal injection.28   Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout and Eric Meyer have argued that ‘the construction of meaning around violence or non-violence is always effected by the ideological and social relations of power to whose determination it is contributing.’29 Because of this there was always debate in India as to what and what did not constitute ahimsa, and there were many ambiguities. Vidal, Tarabout and Meyer hold that it was Gandhi above all who created the idea of two poles which are mutually exclusive—acts that are unambiguously either violent or nonviolent. In my view, although Gandhi sought to refigure the scope of ahimsa, he still had to interpret it, and in this there were still elements that were open to dispute. His injunction that it was better to be violent than act in a cowardly manner was a case in point. Another was when he ordered the calf to be killed in 1928. Gandhi’s understanding was always relative, and what constituted ahimsa-cum-nonviolence contin 169

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ued to have grey areas. Nonetheless, in making himself the judge of what did or did not constitute ‘nonviolence’, Gandhi was taking on a huge personal burden and making himself a target for future controversy, as we shall see.

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EXPOSING STATE TERROR THE ROWLATT SATYAGRAHA, 1919

Although the campaigns in Champaran and Kheda had exposed locallevel tyrannies by white planters and lower officials, many higher British officials continued to claim that British rule was benevolent in intent. During 1919, the credibility of this claim was left in tatters after a protest led by Gandhi in March and April of that year—the Rowlatt Satyagraha. The brutality of the British reaction to this act of dissent caused widespread revulsion and alienation from their rule.  In The Prince, Machiavelli dealt in some detail with the dangers for rulers who acted in ways that could alienate their subjects. He gave as an example certain Roman emperors who were ‘extremely cruel and extremely rapacious. In order to satisfy their soldiers, they did not hesitate to inflict all kinds of injuries upon the people.’1 They soon lost the confidence of the public and ‘came to a sorry end.’ Machiavelli held that it was of utmost importance for a successful ruler to avoid ‘those things that make him hated or contemptible.’ In other words, rulers who acted in morally repugnant ways were likely to lose the support of many of their subjects. Following from this, authorities on nonviolent resistance have argued that draconian violence against unarmed protestors is liable to create what is termed ‘backfire’: a process that involves hitherto uncommitted observers being so repelled and

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angered that they then become active supporters of a campaign. Repression also tends to unite different factions within a movement, and gains international sympathy for a cause. The authorities lose the moral high ground to their opponents. Similarly, the police, soldiers and bureaucrats who are commanded to act in such ways may no longer be prepared to obey their orders and desert the regime.2 In their study of nonviolent movements that have occurred since 1900, Chenoweth and Stephan have found that a violent crackdown has tended to enhance the probability of eventual success in a significant way.3 The Rowlatt Satyagraha provides an example of such ‘backfire’, as we shall see in this chapter.

The Rowlatt Satyagraha Following the end of the First World War, the British had granted a limited devolution of power in the Government of India Act of 1919. This measure was projected as being a step on the path towards what Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, held to be ‘the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.’ Some less-important governmental departments in the provinces were to be placed under the control of elected members—a system known as ‘dyarchy’. The first elections under an enlarged franchise were to be held in 1920. The aim of the British was to co-opt Indian nationalists within the system, deflecting the challenge that had come from the Home Rule Leagues of Besant and Tilak. What this imperial strategy failed to consider was a strong mood of popular discontent, brought about in part by the severe economic difficulties caused by the war, and in part by a new spirit of defiance that was encouraged by an awareness of the deficiencies of imperial systems that were tearing each other apart in Europe. The revolution in Russia appeared for many to provide a beacon towards a new world free from such empires. The British certainly saw revolutionaries everywhere at that time; the Governor of Bombay described Gandhi during the Kheda protest of 1918 as ‘honest, but a Bolshevik and for that reason very dangerous.’ Demobilised soldiers who returned to India in large numbers appeared to have carried this new spirit of assertion with them— particularly to Punjab, which was the chief recruiting ground for the Indian Army.4 172

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  It was in this explosive atmosphere that the British introduced parallel measures to the Government of India Act, namely legislation that was designed to counter radical extremists through detention for up to two years without trial, coupled with the establishment of secret tribunals to try such cases. This had been recommended by a ‘sedition committee’, headed by Sir Sidney Rowlatt, that was appointed by the Government to investigate ‘criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India’ and to recommended legislation to deal with this threat.5 In its report of 1918, the committee set out an exhaustive account of the plans and actions of extremist nationalists in all parts of India since the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on ‘revolutionary crime in Bengal.’ The overall effect was to magnify the activities of people who were generally marginal to the nationalist movement, giving an impression that the movement was being carried forward by violent seditionists who threatened the very stability of India.   As Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, states in modern times have tended to inflate the threat posed by terrorist groups out of all proportion to any actual danger posed by their isolated acts of violence. This is because ‘the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of violence.’ In pre-modern regimes, there were many different groups that retained the ability to settle disputes through armed conflict, without the overall ruler feeling any need to intervene. In such a world, ‘terrorism’ was not a meaningful category, as armed groups used terror routinely to enforce their will. In contrast, modern centralised states refuse to tolerate any political violence that is out of their own control. ‘Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state.’ Because of this, acts by small clandestine organisations may succeed by spreading fear and confusion. Unlike actual warfare in which material losses to troops and infrastructure determines victory or defeat, terrorists are poorly armed and pose no actual military threat. Their strategy is, rather, to carry out conspicuous attacks directed against symbolic targets such a prominent leader or state official, a well-known public building, or vehicle such as a railway train or aircraft. ‘Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.’ The spectacle is designed to cause outrage and 173

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provoke overreaction in a way that polarises the civil population. The state takes on authoritarian powers that are excused supposedly by the need to protect the populace. Atrocities may be committed in a stateled ‘war on terrorism’, with fresh ‘martyrs’ being created. All of this can provide fertile ground for recruitment to the cause. The game is, for the terrorist, a high-stakes one—the possibility of defeat and death is high, and only in some instances will state counter-terrorism provoke the anticipated wider alienation.6   In India, the government responded in such a way to the miniscule security threat posed by the revolutionary nationalists. They did it as a sop to conservative politicians in Britain and bureaucrats in India who resented the forthcoming reforms and had long demanded ‘strong’ measures be made available to tackle extremist plots and violence that were viewed as a threat to the Empire. As Edward Snowden has pointed out: ‘politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism—of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously—than they are of the crime itself.’7 The most notorious hardliner of this sort in India who had to be satisfied was the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab from 1912 to 1919, Sir Michael O’Dwyer. He headed an administration that took a deeply alarmist view of Indian nationalist activity, believing that the constitutional reforms would give unwarranted power to scheming middle-class Indians at the expense of the salt of the earth—the peasantry.8 When Montagu met O’Dwyer on his tour of India in 1917–18, he commented that ‘he is determined to maintain his position as the idol of the reactionary forces, and to try to govern by the iron hand…’ O’Dwyer had already managed to persuade the Government of India to implement an emergency measure during the First World War that enabled the suspension of due legal processes in the case of suspected radical nationalists, and he then acted as the chief spokesman for the demand that these powers be made permanent once the war had ended. Already, he had taken a leading role in crushing the Ghadar movement, in which émigré Punjabis and some extremist nationalists from Bengal and Maharashtra had tried to link up with the Germans and foment an army revolt in India (particularly Punjab) on a par with that of 1857. The plot was discovered before it could be implemented in early 1915, and the plotters were arrested. After trials in Lahore, 42 were executed, 114 transported for life, and 93 jailed. Ironically, these 174

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harsh measures left the radical nationalists in a state of severe disarray that continued well into the 1920s. Draconian measures, known popularly as the Rowlatt Acts, were being taken for what was, by then, a largely non-existent problem. Imperial officials of a more liberal bent of mind were concerned about this, as they knew that the legislation could be used oppressively by die-hard imperialists who had always believed that Indian nationalists should be crushed rather than parleyed with. They feared that if this happened, moderate nationalists would be alienated and the constitutional reforms would be jeopardised.9   Gandhi, whose reputation as an agitator had soared after the Champaran and Kheda protests, was approached by some radical young Home Rule League activists of Bombay City early in February 1919 and asked to lead a campaign. He examined the two pieces of legislation carefully, and concluded that they abandoned some of the basic principles of British justice, such as the need for the prosecution to prove guilt, rather than for the accused to prove his or her innocence. The arbitrary powers that were being granted by them could be applied to curb almost all free speech in India: …even the members of the new Councils with enlarged powers which are to come into being will tremble while making any comments and be able to avail themselves of their nominal freedom only by turning themselves flatterers. If this is true as regards members of the Legislature, what will be the condition of the defenceless, ignorant people?10

  Gandhi felt that the British had been able to ignore the Home Rule League agitation with impunity and believed that stronger methods were needed. Writing to the nationalist leader M. M. Malaviya in early 1919, he stated that: ‘In my opinion you should all make it clear to the Government that so long as the Rowlatt Bills are there you will pay no taxes and will advise the people also not to pay them.’11 It seems that the no-tax campaign of the previous year in Kheda was still in his mind. On 11 February, he held a meeting in his ashram that drew up a Satyagraha Pledge stating that they would refuse to obey the two laws and any other laws that a yet-to-be established committee would decide were appropriate for acts of civil disobedience.12 On 24 February, he sent a telegram to the Viceroy stating that he had decided to ‘OFFER SATYAGRAHA AND COMMIT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE OF SUCH LAWS AS COMMITTEE TO BE  

 

 

 

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FORMED FROM OURSELVES MAY DECIDE.’ He went on to set out the principle of such dissent: It is necessary to demonstrate to government that even a government the most autocratic finally owes its power to the will of the governed. Without recognition of this principle and, consequently, withdrawal bills, many of us consider reforms valueless.13

  Writing to C. F. Andrews next day, Gandhi stated: ‘The telegram to the Viceroy eased me considerably. He has the warning. He can stop what bids fare to become a mighty conflagration. If it comes, and if the satyagrahis remain true to their Pledge, it can but purify the atmosphere and bring in real swaraj.’14 Clearly, he had high hopes of this confrontation.   The impetus behind the protest had come from radical young nationalists, and gaining the support of Gandhi was for them a major achievement. Gandhi, in turn, then tried to win support from other leading nationalists. He argued that if established leaders failed to provide a nonviolent outlet for youth, more violent methods would come to the fore. In other words, his form of protest would provide an outlet for radicalised Indians to protest against what Gandhi projected as the ‘terrorism’ of the state as well as provide a counter to the violence of certain extremist nationalists. In a letter to the veteran nationalist of Bombay City Sir Dinshaw Wacha he maintained that: ‘the growing generation will not be satisfied with petitions etc. … Satyagraha is the only way, it seems to me, to stop terrorism.’15 Similarly, to the campaigning journalist Kamakashi Natarajan:  

 

I hope, however, that you will not summarily dismiss the Pledge from your mind. If you do not provide the rising generation with an effective remedy against the excesses of authority, you will let loose the powers of vengeance and the doctrines of the Little Bengal Cult of violence will spread with a rapidity which all will deplore. Repression answers only so long as you can overawe people. But even cowards have been known to exhibit extraordinary courage under equally extraordinary stress. In offering the remedy of self-suffering which is one meaning of satyagraha, I follow the spirit of our civilization and present the young portion with a remedy of which he need never despair.’16

  These arguments failed to resonate with most moderate nationalists, who felt that they had achieved their main objective in the Montagu– 176

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Chelmsford reforms and should not now rock the boat. Srinivasa Shastri argued that civil disobedience was not a suitable weapon in this instance as the laws that were to be broken were not the ones objected to—namely the Rowlatt Acts—but other laws. Annie Besant was among the group opposing the protest, warning Gandhi that his form of law-breaking would open the floodgates to uncontrollable turmoil. She ensured that the Home Rule groups that she had greater control over—mainly in Madras Presidency—played little part in the satyagraha, while some other branches, most notably that in Bombay, fell behind Gandhi. The other Home Rule Leaguer leader, B.G. Tilak, was away in Britain at that juncture, and members of his Home Rule League, mainly from Maharashtra, were also lukewarm and in some cases actively hostile.17   On 26 February, Gandhi issued a statement for the volunteers who were collecting signatures for the Satyagraha Pledge. They were meant to read it out to anyone who intended to sign, and explain exactly what the breaking of laws in a ‘civil’ manner entailed. The pledge was to be given only if a person was over eighteen years of age and was prepared to suffer, for ‘the true test of the satyagraha, lies in his capacity to bear pain and [the volunteer] must warn the signatory that resort to satyagraha may lead to loss of personal liberty and property and ask him to sign the Pledge only if he is prepared for these sacrifices.’ All so enrolled had to ‘fearlessly adhere to truth and ahimsa.’ This all meant not being ‘discourteous’ to officials, and if obstructed by the police, not to become angry with them. A single ‘intelligent’ signatory was worth ‘a hundred signatories who have not realized their responsibility.’18 Gandhi was seeking here a control which was to prove to be beyond his capacity to maintain at that time.   On the same day, Gandhi issued a warning to the British that the Rowlatt legislation was symptomatic of ‘a deep-seated disease in the governing body.’ He told them that if they continued to rule in such a way, they would be faced with possible violence by extremist nationalists:  

 

 

Subterranean violence will be the remedy applied by impetuous hotheaded youths who will have grown impatient of the spirit underlying the Bills and the circumstances attending their introduction. The Bills must intensify the hatred and ill-will against the State of which the

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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19 deeds of violence are undoubtedly an evidence. The Indian covenanters by their determination to undergo every form of suffering make an irresistible appeal for justice to the Government towards which they bear no ill will and provide to the believers in the efficacy of violence as a means of securing redress of grievances with an infallible remedy, and withal a remedy that blesses those that use it and also those against whom it is used. If the covenanters know the use of this remedy, I fear no ill from it. I have no business to doubt their ability.

  Despite this faith, he ended by accepting that the outcome of the protest ‘lies in the lap of the gods.’19 He also sought to counter the British accusation that he was a ‘Bolshevik’: Bolshevism is the necessary result of modern materialistic civilization. Its insensate worship of matter has given rise to a school which has been brought up to look upon material advancement as the goal and which has lost all touch with the finer things of life. Self-indulgence is the Bolshevic [sic] creed, self-restraint is the satyagraha creed. If I can but induce the nation to accept satyagraha if only as a predominant factor in life, whether social or political, we need have no fear of the Bolshevic propaganda.20

  On 5 March, Gandhi met Lord Chelmsford in Delhi, and although he reported that their discussion was cordial, he found that the Viceroy was not prepared to give way at all.21 The Home Member of the Viceroy’s Council, Sir William Vincent, warned: ‘Mr. Gandhi might exercise great self-restraint in action, but there would be other young hot-headed men who might be led into violence which could not but end in disaster. Yielding to this threat, however, would be tantamount to complete abolition of the authority of the Governor-General-inCouncil.’22 The first of the bills, the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crime Act, was passed on 18 March. This made the temporary wartime measures permanent. It allowed secret trials of offenders by a tribunal of three judges with no jury or right of appeal, and it enabled suspects to be arrested without a warrant and detained for up to a year without trial.23   Gandhi toured India during March and early April, setting out the general principles of satyagraha in a high moral tone. He spent twelve days touring the Tamil areas of Madras Presidency, hoping, perhaps, that he would get the same enthusiastic response from this linguistic community that he had received in South Africa (and possibly be able  

 

 

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also to counter Besant’s influence in the province). Speaking in Madras City, he argued of his method of protest: It constitutes an attempt to revolutionize politics and to restore moral force to its original station. … We hope …by our action [to] show that physical force is nothing compared to the moral force, and that moral force never fails. It is my firm belief that this is the fundamental difference between the modern civilization and the ancient, of which India, fallen though it is, I venture to claim is a living representative.24

  Gandhi asserted that satyagraha was ‘essentially a religious movement. It is a process of purification and penance.’25 In Tanjore, he held that ‘the voice of a disciplined conscience was the voice of the divine and any man who refused to listen to that voice degraded human dignity.’ He went on to say that this was the traditional Indian way. ‘In the countries of the West, when the governors did a wrong, there ensued bloodshed. In India, on the other hand, the people instinctively abhorred the doctrine of violence.’ He cited the story of Prahlad, who refused to obey his father when he disagreed with him as a matter of principle, and claimed it as an act of love. ‘This was what was called civil disobedience or satyagraha, which mean the force of truth, the force of soul. If they accepted satyagraha, they rejected the doctrine of physical violence.’26   The ancient legend that Gandhi cited concerned the refusal of Prahlad to give up his worship of Vishnu, a deity his father abhorred. His father tried to kill him for this act of disobedience, but he was protected by Vishnu, and eventually his father was killed by the deity Narasimha, a form of Vishnu. Clearly, it was stretching the point to describe such a form of divine intervention as ‘civil disobedience’ or ‘satyagraha’, which are forms of protest that derive much of their power from a secular rationale. We may also note that the idea of ‘civil disobedience’ had originated in what Gandhi characterised as the ‘violent’ West. The day after this, in his next speech, he accepted that Prahlad was a mythical figure, but rather than try to give a more convincing example from ancient or medieval times, described the selfsacrifice of a valiant Tamil woman who had died during the satyagraha in South Africa.27   On 23 March, for the first time, Gandhi set out a programme for the initial day of protest. They were to undergo a 24-hour fast to put  

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them in the right moral frame of mind and demonstrate the strength of their feelings on the matter. He emphasised that this was ‘not to be regarded, in any shape or form, in the nature of a hunger-strike, or as designed to put any pressure upon the Government.’ They should also suspend all work for the day, though if they were employees they should obtain permission from their employer to do so. Here, Gandhi was deploying the method of the hartal—a form of protest with a long lineage in India. Third, there should be public meetings on that day. There was nothing about any civil disobedience here.28 Gandhi nonetheless discussed what this might entail with some of his close associates, namely breaking the law by printing and publishing banned literature, and publishing newspapers without licence. He also hinted that he had the liquor licensing laws, the salt laws and land-tax on his list of targets, but said that it would be unwise of him to suggest other laws to break until he saw how things turned out after the initial day of protest.29 In this, Gandhi revealed to his immediate circle some lack of faith in the claimed infallibility of his method.   Throughout India there were widespread rumours about the Rowlatt legislation, which became known as ‘the Black Acts’. Though often fanciful in their details, they revealed popular suspicions about the British and their police force. It was said that the Acts gave local policemen arbitrary powers to oppress the people, for example by enabling them to summarily confiscate half of all private property. It was claimed that no more than four people would be allowed to congregate in temples, that brides and bridegrooms were to be inspected by a British doctor before being permitted to marry, and that marriage and death ceremonies were to be taxed.30 Although this was an issue that united large numbers, Gandhi carried out the actual mobilisation through networks of local groups and leaders who had particular grievances. The appeal was to local solidarities based on caste, class and religion, rather than a broad all-India national identity. For example, he linked up with Muslims who were agitating against what they saw as the British threat to the Ottoman caliph and the Muslim holy places during the war and its aftermath.31 The drawback to this approach was that Gandhi relied on local leaders to control often volatile crowds— and events were to reveal that they were in most cases either not up to the task or not particularly committed to nonviolence.32 Indeed, some 180

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local activists distributed flyers calling for tax refusal, the destruction of government property, and even the assassination of officials and policemen.33 According to one posted in Hisar (Punjab), the British: ‘… made India their slaves, converted part of it to Christianity and used the knife of irreligion. The Punjabis have vowed to go on fighting till Emperor George V and other Englishmen die. Kill with the sword whenever you come across them.’34 Gandhi was now heading a protest that in many areas bore little resemblance to the sort of campaigns that he had carried out previously.   Gandhi initially announced that the first day of protest would be on 30 March, but later changed this to 6 April 1919. Because overall coordination was poor, it began on the earlier date in certain places. In Amritsar, there were mass meetings on 23, 29 and 30 March with crowds of up to 45,000 people. The main leaders were a Muslim ­lawyer, Said-ud-Din Kitchlew, and a Hindu doctor, Satyapal, and they mobilised both the Muslim and Hindu populations of the city. Such communal unity was to be a marked feature of this campaign throughout India, and it was something that particularly alarmed the British as it represented a failure of their tactic of divide-and-rule.35 O’Dwyer took immediate action, issuing an order on 29 March that forbade Satyapal from speaking in public, and confining him to Amritsar. He also imposed such strict censorship on newspapers that many stopped publication. Despite this, the hartal in Amritsar on 30 March attracted a huge crowd in the central square of Jallianwala Bag, presided over by Kitchlew, who called for strictly ‘passive’ resistance. Despite his peaceable message, he was similarly banned from public speaking or leaving Amritsar by an order of 3 April.36   There was a hartal in Delhi on 30 March 1919. Initially it was peaceful, but it turned violent around midday. Officials alleged that a crowd attacked the police and soldiers near the railway station and that they had had to open fire defensively, killing five and injuring fourteen people. Against this, the Delhi leader, Swami Shraddhanandji, claimed that a crowd had marched to the station to demand the release of some people who had been arrested, and when they refused to obey an order to disperse were fired on. He had, he said, gone to the scene immediately, but the British officer-in-charge, City Magistrate Currie, had turned his back on him, while the Gurkha soldiers waved their  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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unsheaved kukris (large curved knives) at him with threats of: ‘Tum ko chhed denge’ (‘we are going to cut you’). Of those killed by these soldiers, two were Muslim and three Hindu. Their funeral processions on the following day became mass demonstrations of both religious communities. In his initial response to this news, Gandhi read it as a case of unarmed satyagrahis being shot down by a brutal state, and said that he was pleased with their sacrifice and expected them to protest again on 6 April. Although several leading nationalists of Delhi refused to support any further agitation, others did—particularly Shraddhanandji— and the protest continued sporadically over the next three weeks, with more hartals.37  The hartal was observed in Bombay Presidency on 6 April. Gandhi was himself in Bombay City at that time, and he had held a meeting of industrial workers two days before, urging them to participate, on condition that their employers had no objection. The mill owners were mainly Indian businessmen with mixed feelings about the protest, and they closed only eleven of the eighty mills of the city on 6 April. The large majority of mill workers continued to work. Gandhi inaugurated the day of protest at an impressive mass meeting on the beach at Chowpatty, as described in next day’s Bombay Chronicle:  

 

 

Mr. M. K. Gandhi was one of the first arrivals at Chowpatty with several volunteers, and by 6.30 a.m., or earlier he had taken his seat on one of the stone benches with about a hundred satyagrahis around him. … As the day advanced people kept pouring in on the seashore. Every new arrival took his bath in the sea first and then came and sat round Mr. Gandhi. In this manner the crowd swelled and swelled until it became one huge mass of people. Mr. Gandhi, as the time for the meeting on Chowpatty sands neared, moved in that direction, where he was shortly joined by Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas, Mr. Horniman and others. There were also about twenty-five ladies. It was a splendid sight at this time, for the whole Sandhurst Bridge swarmed with people and there must have been approximately one-anda-half lakhs of people. … All communities were represented there— Mahomedans, Hindus, Parsis, etc., and one Englishman. Mahomedans joined the main body of the people at Chowpatty in strong numbers. … At exactly eight o’clock, Mr. Gandhi made his speech.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  The crowd consisted predominantly of Gujarati-speaking traders and merchants and Muslims, and there was fraternisation between 182

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Hindus and Muslims. About 80 per cent of the shops of the city were closed—though, as it was a Sunday, many would have been shut anyway. There were further rallies and marches, some of which were—in contrast to the main rally—rowdy, with businesses that had remained open being threatened and even damaged. A breakaway march that made for the European business area was broken up the police after it refused to disperse. On the whole, however, the day was judged a success by Gandhi and his fellow-leaders.38 In Ahmedabad City, on the same day, there was a procession of over 50,000 people of all classes, representing one-sixth of the entire population of the city. Many workers participated. The day proceeded peacefully, with nationalist leaders giving speeches.39 There were similar peaceful hartals in towns and villages of Kheda District.40   There were hartals again in Punjab on 6 April. Large numbers of people from many walks of life demonstrated in the streets of Lahore, Amritsar, Gujranwala and some smaller towns. In Amritsar, 50,000 gathered in Jallianwala Bag, with demands being made for the gagging orders on Kitchlew and Satyapal to be lifted. The remarkable unity displayed between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs continued to alarm the British. In Lahore, the British Deputy Commissioner refused to allow the crowd to proceed to the administrative area, but a potential clash was averted when a local nationalist persuaded the crowd to go elsewhere for their speeches. In the end, the day progressed peacefully in Punjab. Despite this, in a speech in the Punjab Legislative Council of 7 April, O’Dwyer condemned the protests as ‘puerile’, claiming that ‘ignorant and credulous people’ were being led astray by seditious trouble-makers. He concluded, ominously: ‘Those who appeal to ignorance rather than to reason have a day of reckoning in store for them.’41   On 6 April, a demonstration in Madras City was attended by about 100,000 people—one of the largest nationalist gatherings that had ever occurred there.42 In Calcutta, there was a successful hartal, with a claimed turnout of 200,000 at the main rally.43 The day was observed in Bihar in towns all over the province, with Hindus and Muslims coming together to hold hartals and offer prayers. There were processions in which people shouted ‘Bande Mataram’, ‘Ram Chandra ki jai’, ‘Mahabir ki jai’, ‘Allah-o-Akbar’—which shouted together demonstrated solidarity between Hindus, Jains and Muslims—and ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai.’ The processions made their way to rivers, where the  

 

 

 

 

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participants took ritual cleansing baths, and to holy Islamic sites, such as dargahs. Many fasted for the day. Proscribed literature and unregistered newspapers were sold in the streets. The protests were organised by the upper-class leaders whom Gandhi had linked up with during the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917, with many urban shopkeepers and businessmen, particularly Marwaris, playing an active role. Many lowermiddle class town-dwellers and artisans also participated, with small landlords and rich peasants coming into the towns from surrounding areas for the day. The large landlords as a class actively opposed the protest, in some cases ordering shopkeepers to keep their businesses open.44 There were similar demonstrations that brought together Hindus and Muslims in towns throughout UP. Urban merchants were to the fore in this. Although many other parts of India remained quiet on the day, the overall extent of the protest was impressive.45   On 7 April, Gandhi launched a ‘newspaper’ called Satyagrahi— edited by himself and printed in Bombay—that was in defiance of the law, as it was not registered with the government. He also instructed his followers to sell banned literature, citing four works, three of which he had authored, namely Hind Swaraj, and his paraphrases of Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Plato’s Defence and Death of Socrates. He stated that this form of civil disobedience had been chosen for five reasons:  

 

1. To cause as little disturbance as possible among the governors and the governed; 2. Until satyagrahis have become seasoned, disciplined and capable of handling delicately organized movements, to select such laws only as can be disobeyed individually; 3. To select, as a first step, laws that have evoked popular disapproval and that from the satyagraha standpoint, are the most open to attack; 4. To select laws whose civil breach would constitute an education for the people, showing them a clear way out of the difficulties that lie in the path of honest men desiring to do public work; 5. Regarding prohibited literature: to select such books and pamphlets as are not inconsistent with satyagraha, and which are, therefore, of a clean type and which do not, either directly or indirectly, approve of or encourage violence.

  He also issued instructions for those courting arrest: We are now in a position to expect to be arrested any moment. It is, therefore, necessary to bear in mind that, if anyone is arrested, he

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EXPOSING STATE TERROR should without causing any difficulty allow himself to be arrested and, if summoned to appear before a court, he should do so. No defence should be offered and no pleaders engaged in the matter. If a fine is imposed with the alternative of imprisonment, imprisonment should be accepted. If only a fine is imposed, it ought not to be paid but that his property, if he has any, should be allowed to be sold. There should be no demonstration of grief or otherwise made by the remaining satyagrahis by reason of the arrest and imprisonment of their comrade. It cannot be too often repeated that we court imprisonment and we may not complain of it when we actually receive it. When once imprisoned, it is our duty to conform to all prison regulations, as prison reform is no part of our campaign at the present moment. A satyagrahi may not resort to surreptitious practices, of which ordinary prisoners are often found to be guilty. All a satyagrahi does can only and must be done openly.46

  Gandhi thus launched this stage of the campaign only after the first day of hartal. Civil disobedience was to be strictly limited and highly controlled. As it was, very little was to come of it.   At this juncture, Gandhi decided to travel north to lead the protest there, setting out, the evening of 8 April, on the overnight train from Bombay to Delhi. Hearing of Gandhi’s plans, the governments of Delhi and Punjab promptly issued orders banning him from their areas of jurisdiction and the Government of India an order confining him to Bombay Presidency. Next day, he was arrested before he could reach his destination and sent back to Bombay. When news of this reached Bombay City on the evening of 10 April, angry crowds that consisted largely of Gujarati and Marwari traders, including Muslims, gathered in the streets shouting Bande Mataram and Allaho Akbar. Many shops were closed. The nationalist leaders addressed the crowds and urged them to disperse, and many did. Next day, they came out on the street again and attacked shops that remained open and any trams that continued to run. Stones were thrown at the police, who responded cautiously on the whole, not opening fire. Gandhi arrived back in Bombay that evening and found himself almost immediately in the middle of a battle between the crowd and the police. Mounted lancers charged and, according to Gandhi, there was a ‘rout’. After this, things quietened down.47 In Gujarat, the news of Gandhi’s arrest led to rioting by textile mill workers in Ahmedabad and nearby Viramgam. Europeans were  

 

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attacked, and when the police intervened, the crowds turned on them, with one policeman being killed. The police, in turn, opened fire. Calls for calm by the main nationalist leaders went unheard. The rioting continued into a second day, with a European police sergeant being killed in Ahmedabad, and an Indian official burnt to death in Viramgam. Government and municipal building and police stations were set on fire, and the houses of leading officials looted. The police and troops fired on the crowds, killing at least thirty and wounding 118. This, coupled with the news of Gandhi’s release, brought an end to the disturbances in these two places by 13 April.48   In Kheda District, the workers of Nadiad town went on strike on 10 April and there was a procession and meeting. Next day, when news came of the riots in Ahmadabad, the crowd turned violent. The rails on the main line between Bombay and Ahmedabad were torn up and a train carrying reinforcement troops for Ahmedabad was derailed (though nobody was injured). There was similar violence in Anand town, with houses of an Indian loyalist and the European station-master being burnt down. In the rural areas, Patidar peasant leaders organised the cutting of telegraph wires at four places along the main railway line in an attempt to destroy communications.49   Meanwhile, in Punjab, O’Dwyer had on 9 April ordered the arrest and deportation of Kitchlew and Satyapal on the grounds that they were dangerous revolutionaries, rather than people who might be worked with to calm the crowds (an approach generally favoured by top officials in Bombay Presidency). He held a misguided notion that these Congress leaders intended to link up with invading insurgents from Afghanistan and engineer a revolution in India. It was a view shared by many of his fellow civilian officials and army officers in the province, who were by now convinced of the need for ‘prompt force’—in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Smith of the Amritsar garrison. When news of the arrests became public on 10 April, large crowds gathered in the streets of Amritsar. They were now far more belligerent, being led by rabble-rousers rather than the established nationalists who had previously kept things calm. They began to pelt the police with stones, after which troops were called in to disperse the crowd by armed force. Up to thirty people were killed and many more injured. This merely inflamed the situation, with ram 

 

 

 

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paging crowds attacking banks, burning them and assaulting any European staff they could catch. They targeted other symbols of British rule, such as the railway station, town hall, post offices and churches. In all, five Europeans were killed, and several others badly injured. The rest took refuge in the fort, where they were protected by armed soldiers. It was popularly believed that the city had been liberated and that the nationalists now ruled.50   Lahore witnessed similar disturbances, with Muslim artisans and workers coming out in a particularly militant way, causing the British to panic. Believing that they were about to be attacked, the police were ordered to disperse the crowds by force. They fired on protestors, killing over twenty people. The British then retreated to the cantonment, leaving the city under the control of a self-appointed lathi-wielding militia called the Danda Fauj (stick army). It distributed inflammatory posters, one of which stated: ‘O Hindu, Muhammad and Sikh brethren, enlist at once in the Danda army and fight with bravery against the English monkeys… Leave off dealings with the Englishmen, close offices and workshops. Fight on. This is the command of Mahatma Gandhi.’ In this way, Gandhi’s name was appropriated for methods he would have abhorred, had he known. Popular rule continued for three days, during which the British refused to talk to any of the nationalist leaders of the city, believing that they were stirring up the people, when in fact most of them wanted to calm the situation. There was similar crowd violence at Gujranwala and Kasur with government buildings burnt and two soldiers being beaten to death.51 Tuteja has argued that the crowds in these Punjab cities greatly overestimated their power at this juncture: …once the fear of mighty British rule was removed from the minds of the people through the influence of Gandhi’s idea of offering resistance to the arbitrary authority of the colonial regime, they quickly experienced a sense of liberation and were filled with a confidence which impelled them to under-estimate the power of the regime. This produced in them a strong desire to take on its might and overthrow it with one strong push. This overconfidence and impatience made them transgress the limits of the Gandhian idea of resistance, and they did not hesitate to resort to violent means in retaliation against the oppression being carried on by the colonial state.52

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  With Amritsar and Lahore largely out of control of the British, troop reinforcements from elsewhere in Punjab were ordered to move to these cities to restore order. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer led a contingent of British and Indian soldiers from Jullundar to Amritsar on 11 April. He came expecting a fight; he had told his son before leaving: ‘Musalmans and Hindus are united. I have been expecting this, there is a big show coming.’ Fifty-five years old at the time, Dyer had lived almost all his life in India. He had been brought up under the shadow of the great revolt of 1857, when Muslims and Hindus had fought together to try to oust the British from India, and was always alert to the possibility of a second such rising, ready to nip any dissidence in the bud before it could develop and get out of hand. This attitude was shared by many British people in India at that time. Dyer was known as a man of courage who had a record of distinguished service in troublespots in Burma and on the North-West Frontier, but also as a hotheaded swashbuckling character who tended to act before thinking. By 1919, he was, however, a sick man, in constant pain from a series of riding and sporting accidents that were compounded by degenerative arteriosclerosis. Despite this, he was allowed to continue in his command pending his retirement, which was due in 1920.53   Upon arriving in Amritsar on the evening of 11 April, Dyer met the Deputy-Commissioner, Miles Irving, who told him in alarmist tones that a second ‘mutiny’ was under way in Punjab. Dyer was infuriated when he heard of the murderous assault on a missionary, Miss Sherwood—he felt a God-given duty to protect white women and believed that this slight to the ruling race demanded the harshest reprisals. Dyer and Irving drew up a public notice that forbade gatherings of any sort and gave notice that any group of four or more people would be fired on. The city was now under the control of Dyer and his troops, who were given license to use any means to crush the protest. In all, he had under his command 474 British and 710 Indian soldiers and a couple of armoured cars with mounted machine-guns. They went in procession through the city on 12 April, and although they encountered one hostile crowd, Dyer decided to wait until the order banning meetings had been formally distributed before using force.54   Next day, Sunday 13 April, was the festival of Baisakhi, and large numbers of peasants from surrounding villages had already come into  

 

 

 

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the city to worship at the Golden Temple. There was also a horse and cattle fair attended by many others. Many spent the night of 12–13 April in the Jallianwala Bag, as it was a place that they could sleep free of charge. During the morning, Dyer marched a column of his troops around the city with occasional halts to have the banning order read out in Urdu. He was informed in the early afternoon that despite this the nationalist were about to hold a meeting at the Jallianwala Bag. Between 15,000 and 50,000 were soon gathered there (estimates varied), being a mixture of people who had come to protest and peasants from rural areas. Dyer, who saw this as a case of deliberate insubordination, mustered a force of ninety men from Gurkha, Sikh and Frontier regiments, fifty of whom were armed with rifles while forty—all Gurkhas—carried only their kukri knives. He followed in a car, along with the two armoured vehicles. At the square, they filed through one of the three entrances and took up position on a raised area—the way in was too narrow to allow the armoured cars with machine-guns to enter. The square was surrounded by walls of varying heights with only two other entrances that were hardly one-and-a-half metres wide, one of which was closed by a door. The crowd was entirely peaceful, and was being addressed by speakers calling for the repeal of the Rowlatt laws and condemning the firings of the previous days. Not everyone was listening; many were sleeping, gossiping and amusing themselves in other ways. Dyer ordered his soldiers to open fire without giving any advance warning. The crowd panicked as people fell dead and wounded, but most were unable to get out of the square. The soldiers continued firing, picking their targets carefully so as to cause maximum casualties. The one open entrance was soon clogged with piles of bodies. Many tried to scramble over the walls, and they were shot at too. The firing continued for ten minutes until almost all the ammunition was spent. In all, 1,650 rounds had been fired. Dyer then ordered his troops to withdraw, got back in his car and motored off, satisfied that he had achieved the necessary ‘moral effect’. He made no attempt to arrange to have the wounded treated. The Gurkhas— who had no love for the Punjab plainspeople—were heard to boast that it had been a ‘splendid’ affair. Officially, 379 were killed and over 1,000 were wounded, but no actual count was ever carried out, and the actual figures are likely much higher. Nationalists commonly claimed  

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that between 1,000 and 1,500 had died. The wounded and dying were left to suffer, and the strict curfew ensured that they received no medical aid, or even food or water, until the following day.55   Next day, some leading Indian citizens of the city were ordered to attend a meeting with the authorities. Irving harangued them, telling them that the Government ‘is very angry with you’, and that the killing of Europeans was being revenged. Dyer told them that if they continued to disobey they would be shot. ‘For me the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same. I am a military man, and will go straight.’ He told them that they were being misled by ‘persons educated in Bengal and Germany’ who preached sedition, and he would uproot all of them. If it was war they wanted, he would give it to them. The police and army then set about terrorising the inhabitants of the city. The strict night curfew was maintained, and during the day if any Indian met a European in the street they were made to give a salaam in a cringing manner or suffer arrest and a flogging. All horse-drawn vehicles and bicycles were commandeered for army use, and the sale of lower-class railways tickets was banned to prevent most rail travel. Electrical goods were confiscated, particularly fans that were then used to cool the troops. Water and electricity were cut from the Indian quarters, causing misery in the summer heat. Many who were suspected of supporting the nationalist movement were arrested, tortured and deprived of food and water until they agreed to incriminate themselves and others. Leaders who had tried to calm the crowds and doctors who had given medical aid to the wounded were arrested and told to identify those who had participated in the violence, even when they did not know their names. Dyer himself sat as judge, handing out sentences regardless of the evidence. Conditions in the jail were squalid, with prisoners being kept in over-crowded and dirty cells, often handcuffed together and deprived of food. Most notoriously, Dyer ordered that anyone passing along the lane in which the missionary, Miss Sherwood, had been attacked had to crawl its length. Soldiers were posted to enforce the order, accompanying each person, prodding with their boots and rifle-butts to keep them flat on their bellies on the dusty and dirty lane. A whipping frame was erected in the middle of the lane and six men accused of participating in the attack on her were whipped and the frame then left as a warning of what would happen to anyone who 190

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refused to obey the crawling order. Even residents of the lane who had rescued Miss Sherwood from the crowd and thus saved her life were not excused. An attempt was made to black-out all news of this, but word of the massacre and its aftermath spread by word-of-mouth.56   On 14 April, the army was sent into Lahore under the command of Colonel Frank Johnson to parade through the streets and terrorise the inhabitants. There was a curfew, and anyone caught breaking it was either shot, or caught and flogged in public. Shopkeepers who closed their shops had their stock seized and given away free. All gatherings, even if in food kitchens for the poor, were banned, motor and horsedrawn vehicles belonging to Indians were confiscated, and troops entered houses confiscating electrical goods. Leaders were seized and deported. College students and some of their teachers had to report to the military four times a day, and when a martial law notice was torn down from the walls of one college, Johnson ordered that all members of staff be detained in military custody for three days. He himself sat as judge, finding nearly three-quarters of the accused guilty on flimsy grounds. He boasted that he was deliberately targeting the middle class, as they were—he held—responsible for the ‘sedition’.57   There was further crowd violence in Gujranwala on 14 April, with attacks on government buildings. The officer-in-charge, Colonel O’Brian, ordered RAF pilots to attack villages from the air, with gatherings being bombed or strafed with machine-guns under the assumption that they involved political activity, with no attempt being made to check whether they were in fact social events such as marriages or funerals or merely groups of peasants labouring in the fields. Gujranwala city was bombed from the air, with fleeing people being fired at from the aeroplane. Throughout the province, over 1,200 Indians were recorded officially as having been killed and 3,600 wounded, while a total of four white people were killed. Once order had been restored, the population was subjected to a regime of collective punishment, with no attempt made to collect evidence against individuals. People were seized and flogged in public, or forced to stand in the hot sun for the whole day, or had their noses rubbed forcibly in the ground. Anybody considered to be acting disrespectfully towards European officers—in practice, this could mean failing to adopt a suitably grovelling demeanour in their presence—was subject  

 

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to summary arrest, jail, or a fine or whipping. At Kasur, Captain Doveton ordered that all should touch the ground with their foreheads before European officers. He had a public gallows and a large cage erected, after which the whole male population was paraded before the soldiers, with 150 being selected for incarceration in the cage regardless of any guilt. The Assistant Commissioner at Kasur, Marsden, was convinced that schoolboys had played a leading role in the disturbance, and he selected three boys from each school to be caned before their schoolmates. He described this as ‘a most ordinary and healthy mode of discipline for schoolboys’, arguing that similar methods of collective punishment had been used in his own school of Cheltenham College when a culprit did not own up. Every person who had attended a wedding that had happened to stray beyond the curfew time was arrested and whipped, including the priest. Similar arbitrary punishments were inflicted by other officers in different parts of Punjab. This repression was all carried out with the full support of Michael O’Dwyer, who even sent a telegram to Dyer approving of his action. In Lahore, the European community gave Colonel Johnson a public dinner as a mark of appreciation for his ‘protection of the poor’ from the supposed deceits of nationalist trouble-makers.58   Elsewhere, there was trouble in Delhi, where protest escalated from 14 April, with Jat peasants armed with lathis flocking into the city from the surrounding rural areas and, having joined with militant Muslims from the city, confronting the police aggressively. There were police firings that led to fourteen deaths.59 In Calcutta, there were clashes with the police and army between 11–13 April, and the British used machine guns to kill nine people. The protestors were largely recent immigrants into the city, both Hindu and Muslim, while the middle class bhadralok groups who were prominent in the Swadeshi Movement played little part.60   Sarkar has described this as ‘the biggest and most violent anti-British upsurge which India had seen since 1857.’61 It was, nonetheless, a mainly urban affair, with lower middle-class groups and artisans being the most militant. Except in Ahmedabad City, the working classes played only a marginal role. In Bombay Presidency, peasant involvement was confined to Kheda District. In northern India, Jat peasants from the countryside around Delhi and Amritsar came into these two  

 

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cities to protest, and it was they who suffered particularly high casualties—especially in Amritsar.   On 12 April, observing the disturbances in Bombay City, Gandhi ordered a stop to all demonstrations for the time being. He abandoned his plan to court arrest by trying to return to Delhi, and instead went to Ahmedabad on 13 April, where he immediately admitted that he had miscalculated the degree to which the people had grasped the principles of satyagraha. He was particularly upset that the textile workers had been at the core of the rioting, as he felt that he had achieved a good rapport with them.62 He held a public meeting at which he chided the people for their violence and announced he would now wage satyagraha against his fellow-Indians by undertaking a penitential 72-hour fast.63 He called a temporary halt to civil disobedience on 18 April, though he continued to propagate the principles of satyagraha through a series of leaflets issued from Bombay. The scale of the atrocities in Punjab became apparent to the Indian public only gradually, as very little news was coming out from the province due to the continuing crack-down and strict censorship of all news from there. Gandhi’s first reaction was on 21 April, but to the public whippings rather than the massacres of crowds. The editor of the Bombay Chronicle, B.G. Horniman, received reports smuggled out from Punjab, and exposed the atrocities in the newspaper. He was arrested on 26 April and deported from India. Rather than silence him, this meant that he publicised it all more stridently in Britain.64 Gandhi continued to try to organise hartals in Bombay during May, but they had little impact. On a visit to Kheda District on 6 July, Gandhi remembered how his message was misunderstood or ignored by many in the district in 1918, and he now realised that to launch the Rowlatt Satyagraha in such an environment had been a ‘Himalayan Miscalculation’. Gandhi formally suspended civil disobedience on 12 July. He concluded that it was not possible for him to lead a satyagraha in future if he could not be certain that those who took part were committed to strict nonviolence.65   Many moderates felt that Gandhi had shown a naïve faith in the peaceability of the masses. A lawyer of Peshawar wrote to him of his experience there: ‘I have seen with my own eyes the excitement that prevailed in the bazaars and by-lanes of that hitherto most peaceful and unagitating town. Would you believe me when I tell you that the people  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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who organised this orgy of sheer lawlessness had not the remotest comprehension of the spiritual philosophy that you offer in the formula of passive resistance?’66 Rabindranath Tagore—whose moral authority in India was probably greater at that time than Gandhi’s—had refused to approve the protest despite Gandhi’s requests.67 He wrote to Gandhi on 12 April, telling him that although his motives were exemplary, he was playing with fire:  

Power in all its forms is irrational—it is like the horse that drags the carriage blindfolded. The moral element in it is only represented in the man who drives the horse. Passive resistance is a force which is not necessarily moral in itself; it can be used against truth as well as for it. The danger inherent in all force grows stronger when it is likely to gain success, for then it becomes temptation. I know your teaching is to fight against evil by the help of the good. But such a fight is for heroes and not for men led by impulses of the moment. Evil on one side naturally begets evil on the other, injustice leading to violence and insult to vengefulness. Unfortunately such a force has already been started, and either through panic or through wrath our authorities have shown us the claws whose sure effect is to drive some of us into the secret path of resentment and others into utter demoralization.68

  However, once the scale of the British killings in Punjab became apparent, Tagore renounced his knighthood in disgust. As for Annie Besant, she argued that the troops were justified in firing on crowds, stating that: ‘when the mob begins to pelt them (soldiers) with brickbats, it is more merciful to order the soldiers to fire a few volleys of buckshot.’69   The Viceroy, Chelmsford, initially supported the use of force to end the protest, and he permitted martial law to continue in Punjab for many months. Attempts by nationalists, and even a British lawyer, to enter Punjab to find out what had happened were thwarted. Chelmsford did however feel that some of the treatment meted out—such as the ‘crawling order’ and whipping of innocent people—was likely to be counter-productive, causing a legacy of bitterness, and advised that less harsh methods be applied. Nonetheless, no action was taken against either O’Dwyer or other British officers and in September they were granted legal indemnity for their actions. This attitude was challenged by an Indian member of Chelmsford’s Executive Council, Sir Sankaran Nair, who resigned in protest. The Secretary of State for India, Montagu, 194

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was far more troubled by what had happened and announced in the House of Commons in May that there would be an enquiry. A commission was appointed in October with William Hunter in the chair. In his testimony to this body in November, Dyer adopted a brazen attitude, claiming that his action had averted a potential rebellion in India. He compared the crowd in the Jallianwalla Bagh to a ‘naughty boy’ who required chastisement. He admitted that if the entry into the square had been wider he would have brought in an armoured car and strafed the crowd with a machine gun.70   Others who testified before the Commission expressed a similar contempt for the nationalists and a belief that the firm action had ‘saved India’. Evidence was now held in camera, as the government did not want a repeat of the publicity that Dyer’s testimony had attracted. As it was, the mind-set of both British and Indian officers was again revealed. Michael O’Dwyer claimed that the protest that Gandhi had launched had given a green light to violent revolutionaries. Gandhi might appear to be a highly spiritual and principled person, but his methods would lead only to anarchy and an end to government. He claimed that this view was shared by ‘the man in the street.’ Without Dyer’s resolute action, there would have been ‘an infinitely more serious state of rebellion.’ The loyalty of Indian soldiers and policemen might have been compromised, leading to another great mutiny. General Sir Havelock Hudson—who had expressed his full approval of Dyer’s action, including the ‘crawling order’—claimed that the army in Indian was undermanned and ill-equipped to deal with revolution or invasion from the north-west. Without the salutary effect of Dyer’s firm action in Amritsar, the situation would, he alleged, soon have been out of hand. The Punjab loyalist Sir Umar Hayat Khan, who had, during the war, carried out exemplary military service in France and Iraq, claimed that there had been a plot to overthrow the government by force in which Indian Hindus and Muslims would link up with insurgents from Afghanistan who were invading India. Although there was indeed an attack from Afghanistan at this time—which was quickly repulsed—Khan was unable to provide any evidence of co-ordination with Indian nationalists. He said of Gandhi and his colleagues: ‘If Government is firm with those who are teaching these things and hang them or at any rate send them to the Andamans or somewhere, that would stop it. This is the best way.’71 195

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  As the Hunter Commission refused to take any testimony from Punjab nationalists who were still in custody, the Congress set up its own committee to carry a parallel investigation. Its members included nationalist politicians of all shades of opinion, namely, the mainstream leaders Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, and Abbas Tybaji; the moderate M.R. Jayakar; the Hindu nationalist M.M. Malaviya; the Muslim nationalist Fazlul Haq; and a lawyer, K. Sanataran, who acted as secretary. The committee carried out enquiries in Punjab, with Gandhi being at last allowed to travel there after the externment order on him was lifted in October 1919. Before it reported, the Indian National Congress held its annual session in Amritsar in late December 1919. This debated the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms, with some, including Gandhi, arguing for a tentative acceptance of them, with others led by Chittaranjan Das and Tilak demanding that they should be obstructed. Gandhi’s position prevailed after much debate. The events of the previous April were discussed, and Gandhi caused considerable consternation when he insisted that besides denouncing the vindictive actions of the British, they should also condemn the violence of the Indian crowds. Gandhi argued that they had to accept that both sides had ‘gone mad’, and he insisted that he could not belong to an organisation that condoned any act of violence. In the end, a resolution was passed that acknowledged that the British had been provoked by ‘mob frenzy’. It was significant that in all this that Gandhi’s views prevailed, revealing how influential he now was within the Indian National Congress.72   The Congress Report was published on 20 February 1920. It argued that the people of Punjab had opposed only the tyrannical regime personified by Michael O’Dwyer, and not British rule as such. Although there had been indefensible acts of violence by crowds, these did not in any way excuse the response by the army, and particularly General Dyer. The report claimed that around 1,000 people had died that afternoon in Jallianwala Bagh. The massacre and subsequent tyrannising of the people of the province ‘were unworthy of a civilised administration and symptomatic of the moral degradation of their inventors.’ The muted response by Chelmsford and his attempts to exonerate the guilty were condemned—he was no longer fit for his high office and should be recalled. In all this, the report sought to turn the idea of ‘Western Civilisation’ on its head; the Europeans were the uncivilised,  

 

 

 

 

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and their Indian opponents had proved themselves to be more worthy of such a label.73   The Hunter Commission sent its report to the Government of India in March 1920, and made it public in May of that year. There was a Majority Report signed by the European members and a Minority Report by Indian members. Both condemned the behaviour of the Punjab authorities, though the latter used much harsher language. Dyer was reprimanded in both reports for his failure on 13 April to give advance warning to allow the crowd to disperse, for using grossly excessive force, and for his subsequent ‘Crawling Order’. The Minority Report went further, comparing his action to that of the Germans in Belgium and France in August 1914—the lurid accounts of which provided at that time a yardstick for state-backed barbarity. The Majority Report accepted that the use of aircraft to bomb villagers and machinegunning of crowds had not always been warranted, though it refused to condemn most instances of firing on crowds, arguing that they had in general been in proportion to the danger. Whereas Montagu in London was prepared to accept both reports, the Indian Government would only accept the Majority one, and insisted that O’Dwyer escape any censure.74   Immediately after the Hunter Report was submitted to the Government of India, Dyer was relieved of his command and sent back to Britain. He was given an emotional farewell by the European community and soldiers of his garrison town of Jullundur, being told in an address presented to him by a delegation of women that ‘it was your action which saved the Punjab and thereby preserved the honour and lives of hundreds of women and children.’ He was taken in a triumphant procession to the station, and as the train pulled out was acclaimed with a rousing recital of the song ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’ The same happened in Bombay, where a large crowd of Europeans and loyalists cheered him as his steamer left the port. Dyer arrived back in Britain as a hero for conservatives, being praised by them as ‘the saviour of the Punjab.’ Interviewed by the Daily Mail, Dyer claimed that: ‘Every Englishman I have met in India has approved my action, horrible as it was.’ He complained that he had been condemned by a committee that had no proper understanding of India and had not been given the chance to speak in his own defence before a court mar 

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tial. The Chief of Staff in Britain, Sir Henry Wilson, sympathised with this and demanded that Dyer be allowed to put his case in public. O’Dwyer, by now back in Britain, also lobbied for Dyer, producing a long and detailed rebuttal of the Hunter Commission report, arguing that there was a definite conspiracy to overthrow the Government that had been thwarted by his and Dyer’s decisive actions. The Government wanted to keep the lid on all this, but the clash soon became public knowledge. Dyer hired lawyers to put his case, with a full statement appearing in early July in which he now claimed that he and his soldiers were about to be attacked in Jallianwala Bagh. This contradicted his testimony to the Hunter Commission, in which he had said he ordered the firing as a salutary warning to people who were defying the ban on meetings, while never maintaining that they were in any danger themselves. He asserted, furthermore, that he regarded the street in which Miss Sherwood had been attacked as sacred ground, and following the custom of ‘the East’, required that people treat it with the sort of deference that they would have treated any sacred place. Here, he (or rather his lawyers) were stretching credibility, appealing to Orientalist fantasies rather than any reality.75   A week later, on 8 July, the House of Commons debated the issue watched from the public gallery by both O’Dwyer and Dyer. Montagu opened the debate by posing a question: ‘Are you going to keep your hold on India by terrorism, racial humiliation, and subordination, and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the growing good will of the people of your Indian Empire? I believe that to be the whole question at issue.’ State ‘terrorism’, he argued, involved arbitrary collective punishment regardless of individual guilt, which in turn stirred fresh animosity and yet more repression. Indians who had imbibed British lessons on constitutional government, the rule of law and liberty were being punished for demanding that these principles be put into practice in India. Enforced obedience at the barrel of a gun was no way to bring India towards ‘free partnership in the Commonwealth.’ He was heckled strongly while he spoke. Edward Carson, who was notorious for his encouragement of a vicious and extra-legal form of British loyalism in Northern Ireland, then spoke in defence of Dyer, who he depicted as a gallant soldier who had been denied the very justice that Montagu spoke of. In marked contrast to Montagu, Carson was cheered  

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throughout his speech. Winston Churchill, as a member of the Government, defended Montagu, arguing that it was ‘a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’—in other words not typical of British imperialism. While Labour politicians demanded even harsher action against Dyer and his ilk, many Conservatives defended the General vociferously, holding that Montagu was despised by most Indian administrators and that India could be held only by exemplary force. Although the Government eventually won the vote, many of the attitudes that were revealed left a very sour taste, particularly for Indian observers.76   On the day of this debate, the Morning Post announced that it was to raise a public subscription to reward ‘The Man Who Saved the Empire’, namely General Dyer. The idea had been put forward by O’Dwyer and Carson. Money poured in from Britain, the white dominions and India, with several loyalist newspapers in India launching their own appeals. Although the Indian Government ordered that none of its officials should make donations, many did so anonymously. Some came with anti-Montagu tirades. In all, £26,317 was raised which, it was claimed, rescued Dyer from penury. On 19 July, a motion that Dyer had been dealt with unjustly was debated in the House of Lords. An Indian member, Lord Sinha, defended the Hunter Commission and insisted that there had never been the slightest danger of a second Indian Mutiny. Lord Curzon pointed out the contradictions within Dyer’s claims and the absurdity of his notion that Indians regularly crawled before their deities, reiterating that there was no way in which Dyer could have been said to have ‘saved India’. Despite these arguments, the motion was carried by a majority of forty-three. This was taken by many as a public vindication of the General.77  

Backfire The debate on whether or not the rule of terror imposed by the British in Punjab in 1919 typified British imperialism or was an aberration has continued to this day. Nigel Collet depicts Dyer as an anomaly in his biography of the general, The Butcher of Amritsar.78 Sherman, who quotes Collet in this respect, argues that the man-on-the-spot had considerable discretion on how to react to disturbance, which suggests that 199

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there was a certain arbitrary quality in how each crowd was dealt with.79 Against this, we may observe that each provincial service had its own ethos, and that of Punjab was radically intolerant of any dissidence. Dyer’s action may have been extraordinary, but it existed in a context in which the reaction of the authorities was generally disproportionate to the threat. By contrast, officials in Bombay Presidency tended to be less willing to deploy excess violence against crowds, and in 1919 were comparatively restrained in their use of physical force even when confronted by widespread riots. Although there were criticisms of the way that soldiers were deployed in certain instances in Bombay City and Gujarat, the nationalists accepted that in general some military coercion had been needed to stop the actions of what they called ‘mobs’. Thus, while the terror deployed in Punjab in 1919 may be said to be a logical outcome of the ethos adopted by the administration of that province, the same cannot be said to typify the counter-nationalist strategy of the imperial state in India as a whole. There is no doubt however that the actions of the Punjab administration in 1919 caused lasting harm to British rule in India in general. As Sherman has pointed out: ‘In nationalist circles, Dyer came to epitomise British rule, and his actions were used to mobilise the public against the imperial occupation of India.’80   The damage was not merely that of exposing the extent to which the state was prepared to use firepower to quell street-protests. The Congress Enquiry Report was also very critical of the way that officials had punished the people collectively after the event, through physical humiliation and public beatings. It was argued that such methods were ‘unworthy of a civilised administration’ and ‘symptomatic of the moral degradation of their inventors.’ It was held that ‘British idealism and fair-play’ had been replaced in Punjab by ‘Prussian brutishness’.81   Also at issue were the collective fines that were imposed after the event. This form of punishment assumed that an entire population was responsible for a disturbance. The fine could be imposed without having to go through the courts or collect incriminating evidence. It penalised many innocent people in the process, some of whom might hitherto have been loyal to the government. Such fines were imposed not only in Punjab, but also in places in which the level of violent coercion had been less dramatic, as in Delhi and Gujarat. For example, in Nadiad 200

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in Kheda District of Gujarat, the scene of the derailment of a troop train, attempts to try and punish fourteen people for this crime before a Special Tribunal failed, after only one of the accused was found guilty—and as he had been only a peripheral figure, he received a light sentence. Vallabhbhai Patel had acted as the defence lawyer, using his skills to discredit the state evidence. The authorities were furious at this, accusing the people of the town of maintaining an atmosphere that was hostile to collecting evidence and prosecution. The Collector decided to impose a collective fine on the town to pay for the cost of posting extra police there. This took the form of a poll tax that was meant to be collected by the municipal board. This body, which had some elected nationalist members, refused to cooperate. Gandhi condemned the tax. It all caused much resentment in the town, even among prominent loyalists. Thus, although the Bombay authorities had reacted in a relatively restrained way in suppressing the rioting in April 1919, they subsequently lost much of what credit they might have gained from this by then acting in a vindictive and punitive manner. In general, the collective fines stoked a lingering resentment long after the event, as the authorities tried to force a reluctant populace to pay up. In the end, many such attempts had to be abandoned.82   Just as shocking for many nationalists was the way that summary justice was deployed in Punjab in 1919. British imperialism was supposed to stand for a rule in which all had the same legal rights regardless of race or class, with Indian administrators and judges working within legal bounds, administrating justice impartially and with due process. In Punjab in 1919, 3200 people were detained without any formal charge or attempt to collect evidence. Some were tried before military officers with no legal training and were sentenced to flogging and imprisonment without regard for any evidence. A Martial Law Commission was appointed that carried out secret trials in Punjab with no recording of evidence and hardly any cross-examination. Many of the accused were charged not for specific crimes but the vague catchall of ‘waging war on the King Emperor.’ The commissioners believed that it was their duty to hand out severe sentences. Of the 852 who appeared before it, 108 were sentenced to death, 264 to transportation for life, and 409 to various lengths of imprisonment. Only 271 were acquitted. No appeals were allowed, though the Lieutenant Governor 201

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of the Punjab or Viceroy could consider and change the sentences if they so wished. This body tried Kitchlew, Satyapal and thirteen other leading nationalists of Amritsar for ‘criminal conspiracy’ to overthrow the government. On 5 July, Kitchlew, Satyapal and a local newspaper editor were sentenced to transportation for life, two others to death, five to imprisonment of varying length, and five were acquitted. The whole affair, from what filtered out, had been a travesty, with the testimony of an extremely dubious informant—who was probably an agent provocateur—being accepted at face value by the Commission.83   Rather than intimidate, the gross injustice of these procedures left many Indians very angry, stoking the nationalist cause. Their legality was challenged, with appeals to the Privy Council in London. The outcry led to the cases being reopened, with two High Court judges, one European and the other Indian, being directed to review the cases tried by the Martial Law Commission. They found numerous faults in the way that the cases had been conducted and the verdicts arrived at. Before they had even reached this conclusion, Kitchlew, Satyapal and others were released under a Royal Proclamation of December 1919, and the sentences of the rest reduced. This supposed ‘leniency’ was condemned harshly by officials and judges in Punjab and other provinces, who spoke in alarmist tones of a coming revolt in which whites would be massacred. Once released, leaders such as Kitchlew and Satyapal described in detail the ways in which the ‘trials’ had represented a scandalous travesty of any ‘justice’. All of this polarised opinion.84   The way that Dyer was feted on his departure from India and back in Britain was considered particularly outrageous, revealing the way that many white people felt about Indians and the form of rule appropriate for India. Jawaharlal Nehru expressed the feelings of many of his fellow-nationalists when he wrote: ‘This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly. It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent… I realised, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper class.’85 It was this that above all made him realise that independence would never be won through pleading, but only through struggle and resistance.86   Another provocation that created a major backfire so far as the Sikhs of Punjab were concerned was that of the felicitation of Dyer by the priests who ran the Golden Temple in Amritsar. He was even made an  

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honorary Sikh. The temple was controlled by loyalists who had been appointed by the British, and large numbers of Sikhs were outraged by their sycophantic behaviour. A nonviolent movement began in 1920 to have this and all other gurdwaras removed from the control of the state and made accountable to their congregations. This powerful campaign will be examined in the next volume.87   During the next year and more, nationalists made all of this into what Sherman calls ‘a narrative of national grievance.’88 The horrific image of the massacre in Jallianwala Bagh provided the centre-piece to this account. The story of what had happened in the square on 13 April 1919 was told and retold all over India through prose, poetry, picture and song that lamented the suffering of Amritsar while exhorting the people to stand up and face the machine guns and cannons of the British without being cowed. ‘Dyer’ became a shorthand term signifying the brutality of British imperial rule in general. A public subscription was raised in 1920 to purchase the square and erect a nationalist memorial. Though it remained a rather barren space, it provided an iconic location for ongoing nationalist rallies against British rule. A formal monument was erected in 1961, creating a pleasant garden that was gradually improved and manicured to become one of the most sacred nationalist sites of modern Indian.89   Judith Brown has argued that the Rowlatt Satyagraha was a ‘manifest failure’, as it failed to bring about the repeal of the Rowlatt legislation, and it erupted into violence. She notes, nonetheless, that it did see Gandhi come into his own at the national level for the first time while revealing ‘both the strengths and weaknesses of the Mahatma in politics.’90 Over and above this, we may argue that the protest of April 1919 had achieved the very important objective of bringing about a whole new level of alienation against British rule in India. Sherman notes how: ‘… the two words Jallianwala Bagh no longer merely indicate a location in Amritsar, but have rather come to symbolise the brutality of British rule.’91 K.L. Tuteja maintains that ‘… the massacre instead of lending strength to the British empire proved to be a landmark event in weakening it, and resulted in strengthening the forces which were posing a challenge to it.’92 He goes on:  

 

… the tragedy registered in popular consciousness as an example of brute suppression by the colonial state. Further, it was viewed that

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THE NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR INDIAN FREEDOM, 1905–19 Gandhi as Mahatma (a deified image) could alone protect them from such a repressive state. In other words, it was the experience as well as the fear of suppression which not only established a bond of unity but also led the common people to identify themselves with the anti-colonial struggle spearheaded under the leadership of Gandhi. This is how after the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy the elite and popular anti-colonial consciousness converged in India. This is an important after effect of the Jallianwala tragedy, the logic of which was already inherent in the initiative Gandhi had taken to give mass character to the national movement by involving the lower middle class groups as well as rural peasantry and the workers.93

  In this respect, it achieved the ‘backfire’ that the literature on nonviolent resistance speaks of as a major objective in any such campaign. Moderate nationalists were outraged and in many cases now willing to support out-and-out agitation, and even agree to a boycott of the forthcoming elections under the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. Many Indians who had hitherto seen British rule as generally legitimate now demanded its end.94 This was particularly the case in Punjab, hitherto known as a bulwark of ‘loyalism’ in British India.   The ‘backfire’ did not, however, extend to officials, whether British or Indian. Many British officers—civilian and military—excused it as a necessary measure to avoid a second ‘Indian mutiny’, and continued to be hardened in their opposition to Indian nationalism. The large majority of Indian officers, whatever scruples they had, continued to serve the government. The army remained loyal, and it may be noted that although some people of Amritsar had in early April tried to win sympathy from the soldiers stationed there by handing out sweets, the rank-and-file had carried out their brutal orders with no compunction.95 Nonviolent strategists consider it particularly important to win the sympathy of those who have to obey and enforce oppressive commands; and in this respect the events in the Punjab did not have the desired effect in creating a climate in which Indian soldiers, policemen and officials began to question their loyalties to British imperialism.   Indeed, retaining the loyalty and support of officials at every level became so important to British strategy that the state was increasingly unwilling to scrutinise or condemn the actions of officials in public. The Congress largely took over this task, with its enquiry committee of 1919 being the first such exercise in this respect. Sherman has described 204

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this as a new form of ‘political theatre’. The Congress leaders often had legal training in Britain, and knew how to carry out such investigations in a way that could cause maximum embarrassment to the government.96 During the Noncooperation Movement that was launched in 1920, the government was initially very careful not to over-react.   As for Gandhi, he learnt the important lesson that Indian crowds could be very violent. Nonviolence was not intrinsic to the culture of the sub-continent, as he had hitherto asserted so optimistically. He now knew that it would have to be inculcated and maintained by careful training and rigorous control by nationalist leaders. As he had stated in the thick of the campaign in April: When we have acquired habits of discipline, self-control, qualities of leadership and obedience, we shall be better able to offer collective civil disobedience… It is, therefore, necessary for us till we are sufficiently disciplined and till the spirit of satyagraha has permeated large bodies of men and women to obey all regulations regarding processions and gatherings. Whilst we disobey certain selected laws, it is incumbent on us to show our law-abiding character by respecting all other laws. And then when we have reached the necessary standard of knowledge and discipline, we shall find that machine-guns and all other weapons, even the plague of aeroplanes, will cease to afflict us.97

  This lesson that protest should be undertaken only with great caution and escalated carefully in graduated stages was one that he was to apply during the Noncooperation Movement of 1920–22. His restraint this respect was challenged by many of his fellow nationalists, as we shall see in the second volume of this history.

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This volume ends with the first all-India satyagraha led by Gandhi. Over the previous decade-and-a-half he had enunciated the ethics and strategies of his form of civil protest, and in 1919 he sought for the first time to put them into practice on an all-India stage. In this, Gandhi drew from two main traditions that he fused together in a strikingly original way. The first was that of passive resistance, which can be dated back to the nationalist struggle by the Hungarians against the Austrian empire. Initially conceived as a practical strategy suited to situations in which the opponent commanded an overwhelming control of armed force, it was applied by the Irish in their fight for Home Rule, and then the Finns in their movement for self-determination within the Russian empire. The struggle in Finland produced some analysis of the method, with distinctions being made between the tactics of noncooperation, civil disobedience (e.g. breaking of specific laws), and nonrecognition (e.g. refusal to recognise the whole edifice of rule imposed by the oppressor). The other major tradition was the spiritual and moral one, developed in the USA by Christian dissidents and free-thinkers, and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy. Christian dissidents drew on Christ’s injunctions for his followers to obey their conscience while at the same time abstaining from the use of any physical force against the armed might of the state. The Quakers were notable in their principled stands in this respect. It came to be known as the tenet of ‘non-resistance’. The idea was developed in a secular form by some Americans of the early-tomid nineteenth century, who emphasised the moral superiority of the method. Tolstoy took this up, arguing that any endorsement of violence

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was unchristian. He held that resistance without recourse to violence provided a far more moral and compelling means for opposing a despotic state than attempts at armed revolt, as the latter merely gave an excuse to the rulers to act yet more oppressively. All of this inspired Gandhi in his development of a spiritual and moral theory of nonviolent resistance.   Gandhi was not, of course, the only Indian nationalist to develop a theory of civil resistance—Aurobindo Ghose was the other notable figure in this respect. It is notable that both Ghose and Gandhi spent important formative years away from India—Ghose in Britain and Gandhi in South Africa—and this gave an international dimension to their thinking and writing on nationalist strategy. While Ghose became an adherent of the practical form of passive resistance that had been developed in the European nationalist movements mentioned above, Gandhi became convinced of the spiritual superiority of a principled renunciation of any recourse to physical force through his study of the alternative American and European thinkers, along with a selection of Indian scriptures. In this, he melded Christian non-resistance with what he understood as an Indian tradition of non-killing, or ahimsa, giving it a new political dimension in his notion of satyagraha. In this, the force of Truth employed with strict nonviolence was seen to possess a compelling spiritual power.   Certain features of this whole process stand out. One involved mass mobilisation. Ghose had sought to blend European-style passive resistance with the strategic use of Indian social institutions that could enforce mass solidarity, such as caste organisations. His projection of India as a ‘Motherland’ that was associated with the Hindu mother-goddess—a sentiment developed initially by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in the late nineteenth century—provided a powerful emotional foundation to the nationalist resistance of many Bengali Hindus. It was not a sentiment, however, that appealed to the Muslim majority in Bengal, or indeed the large Muslim minority in India generally. This was a pitfall that Gandhi scrupulously avoided in his work amongst Hindus and Muslims in South Africa. His emphasis on ‘Truth’ was something that had emotional appeal for people of both religions. Later, back in India, he projected the idea of nonviolence as a universal value that cut across religious divides. This allowed his Muslim com208

CONCLUSION

rades and followers to accommodate nonviolence as a non-sectarian moral principle. Thus, while Gandhi built on Ghose’s theorising on methods of civil resistance, for example using social boycott during his campaign in South Africa to enforce solidarity, he found a way to avoid the trap of religious sectarianism while at the same time appealing to powerful spiritual values.   At the same time, Gandhi sought to reshape the notion of honour in public affairs. The politics of honour and shame permeated public life in India at a popular level. This involved, typically, maintaining one’s standing in one’s caste and community, and it gave rise to violent vendettas and blood feuds. Gandhi’s own Kathiawad was a hotbed for such hostilities, and Gandhi knew from his early experience how destructive they could be. He never denied the importance of maintaining one’s honour, stating that: ‘My honour is the only thing worth preserving.’1 This, however, was to be achieved not through violent retaliation but in a nonviolent refusal to cooperate. In this, it was better to accept death rather than retaliate with force. Gandhi sought through his campaigns to expand the question of honour beyond the realm of the family and local community or caste into a defence of the honour of the people as a whole against the state.2 He advocated a self-imposed suffering that was free from any feeling of hatred of the opponent. This might involve the taking of vows to abstain from the use of foreign cloth or liquor and the like, as well as other forms of self-imposed discipline. In his case, this included fasting, though he argued that even a fast could be violent in intent if deployed wrongly. It was best used only in cases in which the two parties knew each other personally and enjoyed a mutual respect. All of this struck a chord with the popular belief, seen in such practices as dharna (sitting on fast before the door of someone against whom one had a grievance), that self-suffering, in itself, legitimised protest.   By such means, the idea of armed struggle by small groups of dissidents—one that had inspired so many young Indian nationalists during the first decade of the twentieth century—lost much of its appeal over the following decade, being replaced by a commitment to nonviolent methods, whether on moral or pragmatic grounds. The most important of the pragmatic considerations was that nonviolent methods allowed for the mobilisation of a far greater proportion of the 209

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population than violent ones. While only younger able-bodied people, and, in the context of the day, mainly young men, were seen to be suited to armed struggle, nonviolent resistance could be undertaken by anyone who had the courage to take a stand, whether male or female, young or old, physically fit or disabled. Gandhi held that his method was particularly suited to women.3 His belief in this respect was inspired by his friendship with feminists in South Africa and by what he had seen of the suffragette movement in Britain. No longer could Indian freedom fighters ignore the large majority of the population in their strategies for mobilisation. Gandhi argued this all very persuasively in Hind Swaraj and other writings of this period.   Another element that stands out in this history is that of leadership. Besides Ghose and Gandhi, there were, at the national level, the trio of B.G. Tilak, Bipinchandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai—three men who came to be regarded popularly as the chief heroes of the Swadeshi Movement. Rai, especially, managed to place himself at the helm of a peasant protest in Punjab that forced the government into a humiliating volte-face. This major achievement laid the ground for Gandhi’s subsequent campaigns for the redressal of peasant grievances in Bihar and Gujarat. Besides these national-level leaders, there were also local leaders able to inspire and mobilise large numbers in their respective areas. A remarkable figure in this respect was the schoolteacher Aswinikumar Dutta of Barisal District in East Bengal, who had been carrying out social work with a nationalist content in this area since the 1880s and who became a powerful figure there in the Swadeshi Movement. His work was rooted in an organisation for young people called the Brojomohan Vidyalaya that carried out both social and political activity. He thus had the means to dispatch volunteers to mobilise villagers throughout the district, Hindu and Muslim alike, once the Swadeshi Movement was launched. He was a firm adherent of nonviolence, sending violent revolutionaries packing when they tried to develop a base in Barisal. The movement that he led suffered severe repression during 1906–7, with Datta and other leaders being arrested and jailed. This all showed that what Gandhi later called ‘constructive work’ could provide a solid and compelling foundation for strong local protests that could feed into wider nationalist campaigns.   We see similar principles applying on the other side of India, in Bijoliya. There, a longstanding protest by peasants against an oppressive  

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jagirdar became linked with social and educational work being carried out by an idealistic and nationalistic member of the local intelligentsia, Sadhu Sitaramdas. Sitramdas provided leadership in further protests, but by 1916 realised that he lacked the skills to take the protest to a higher level. He thus encouraged an outside activist, Vijay Singh Pathik to take up the reins. Pathik proved to be an astute tactician, providing guidance to the peasants while at the same time allowing them considerable responsibility and autonomy. He linked the struggle with the nationalist movement as led by Gandhi, in the process insisting on the need for adherence to strict nonviolence. In common with some many other former supporters of revolutionary armed struggle, Pathik accepted the logic of very different methods at this time. The struggle was long and drawn out, but it eventually played an important role in bringing about the deposition of the ruler of Mewar State and gaining a satisfactory settlement for the peasants. These were major achievements. Similarly, in Champaran and Kheda local-level activists such as Raj Kumar Shukla and Mohanlal Pandya alerted regional and national-level leaders about peasant grievances and persuaded them, in some cases with difficulty, to come and provide active leadership of the campaigns.   What was notable in these rural campaigns was that the local leaders first articulated the grievances of the peasantry and then persuading national-level leaders to throw their weight behind a campaign. In this way, peasant grievances that had in the past been mediated either by colonial officials or local landlords or princely rulers, became a nationalist concern, with peasants beginning to look to nationalist leaders rather than the British for redress. During the post-1857 period, nonviolent methods of resistance that were already a part of a long-standing repertoire of popular resistance, such as marches, hartals, and noncooperation, came to be seen by growing numbers as being more suited to a situation in which a state commanding overwhelming force accepted— in principle at least—that certain forms of peaceful dissent were legitimate. The campaigns that resulted were in some cases remarkably nonviolent, though in some cases the peasants reacted to the aggression of local officials and elites through small-scale counter-violence. This gave an excuse for the state to crush such protest through mass arrests and jail sentences. It was Gandhi’s insistence on maintaining strict nonviolence, and making this into a fundamental moral principle, that allowed 211

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for a more compelling form of popular nonviolent protest. He sought to maintain this discipline by deploying trained nationalist cadres who could work with the people during each campaign. This could, in practice, produce tensions, as popular notions of legitimate nonviolence were not always the same as those of Gandhi and his fellow activists. We shall examine this issue in the next volume. Nonetheless, because Gandhi projected nonviolence as a form of spiritual Truth, many Indians came to regard it, however defined, as a force blessed by God. Indeed, many came to believe that its practice, as they understood it, conferred even miraculous powers, able to overwhelm opponents in amazing ways. In all this, Gandhi forged a new language of protest for India by both building on older forms of resistance while at the same time accepting the colonial censure of all forms of violent protest.   Gandhian nonviolence thus provided a potent means for a legitimate and effective form of mass resistance within the imperial political order. Under Gandhian leadership the downtrodden could advance their cause by adopting a position of superior morality—that of nonviolence—in a situation in which the rich and powerful routinely deployed forms of physical coercion that could be challenged by sympathetic nationalist activists with access to good legal advice and help. This allowed for an appeal to higher authority over and against the representatives of the state at the local level, who tended to connive at the extra-legal violence of superordinate groups.   During these years, Gandhi engaged with his fellow-nationalists in arguing for the strategic superiority of nonviolence in all these respects. He succeeded in this to the extent that in 1919 he was able to assume the leadership of the all-India protest against the Rowlatt Acts. It quickly became apparent that Gandhi had only very limited authority over the urban crowds that came out in large numbers during this protest. In a few notable cases in which leaders who had worked diligently to maintain nonviolence were arrested by the authorities, leadership was quickly assumed by people with fewer scruples. They exhorted the crowds in violent attacks on both white people and the symbols of imperial authority. The repression that flowed in the wake of this upsurge—with, most notably, the atrocities committed on unarmed protestors by the armed forces in Punjab—generated a backlash in public opinion against British rule in India. This paved the way for the more 212

CONCLUSION

sustained and widespread protest that was launched in the following year. Gandhi had seen that mass mobilisation was a force with both great potential and much danger. He now set about building and directing a national-level movement that, he hoped, would avoid any violence. This, the Noncooperation Movement of 1920–22, proved to be a remarkable campaign that brought unprecedented numbers of Indians into nationalist politics in largely nonviolent ways. As a movement, it has been largely ignored in the literature on Gandhian nonviolence. How it was all achieved, and the many guises the movement assumed in different regions of India, forms the subject of the second volume.

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pp. [1–3]

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. I was fortunate to have for this subject an inspired history-teacher, Graham Stephenson. 2. A classic in this genre is Reginald Coupland, The Constitutional Problem in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1945). See also R.J. Moore, Liberalism and Indian Politics 1872–1922, London: Edwin Arnold (1966), and R.J. Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity 1917–1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1974). Moore—a fine constitutional historian in his own right—had devised the course I took at SOAS at that time, though I was not taught by him. 3. H.C. Mookerjee, Congress and the Masses, Calcutta: The Book House (1945), p. 259: ‘The masses are awake and they have to be led.’ Mookerjee was an important Congress nationalist. 4. For example, B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress (1885–1935), Madras: Congress Working Committee (1935); and Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, Vol. II, (1935–1947), Bombay: Padma Publications (1947). In the first volume, pp. xvi–ii, Sitaramayya writes of how ‘unfortunate popular disturbances’ blighted protest in 1919 and 1922. 5. Ravinder Kumar, ‘The Bombay Textile Strike, 1919’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1, 1 (1971), pp. 1–2. 6. Ravinder Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1971). 7. D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle 1917– 47, London: Heinemann (1977). The papers themselves were written mostly in 1974. 8. Published subsequently as Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District 1917–1934, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1981).  

 

 

 

 

 



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NOTES

9. Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I:Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1982), pp. 1–7. 10. Some key texts in this were Subaltern Studies, Volumes 1–7, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1982–1992); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Books (1986); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1993); Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defence of the Fragments: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26, 11 & 12 (March 1991), pp. 559–72. 11. Rajnarayan Chandavarker, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 271–73. 12. Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of Muslim Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1997), p. 9. 13. David Hardiman, Histories for the Subordinated, New Delhi: Permanent Black (2006), pp. 1–28. 14. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1970), pp. 11–12. 15. Ranajit Guha, ‘Indian Democracy: Long Dad, Now Buried’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 6, 1 (1976), pp. 39–53. 16. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1983), p. 9. 17. Ranajit Guha, ‘Discipline and Mobilise’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, Subaltern Studies VII, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1992), p. 107. 18. For more on this, see my ‘Towards a History of Nonviolent Resistance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 48, 23, (June 2013), pp. 41–2. 19. Rajani Palme Dutt, India Today, London: Victor Gollancz (1940), pp. 307–8. 20. For a statement that endorsed Guha’s position in this respect, see my Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, pp. 253–55. The work on the adivasis was published as The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1987). 21. Sumit Sarkar, Sumit, ‘The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28, 5 (1993), pp. 165, 167, fn. 6. 22. On this, see Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action, New York: Columbia University Press (1993), pp. 150–9, and Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001), pp. 141–46.

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pp. [10–12]

NOTES

23. David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, New Delhi: Permanent Black (2004). 24. Robert Benewick and Trevor Smith (eds.), Direct Action and Democratic Politics, London: George, Allen and Unwin (1972); April Carter, Direct Action and Liberal Democracy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1973); John Rawls, ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience’ in H. Bedau, Civil Disobedience. Theory and Practice, Indianapolis and New York: Pegasus (1969); Howard Zinn, Disobedience & Democracy, Nine Fallacies on Law and Order, New York: New American Library (1968). 25. Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Boston: Porter Sargent (1973); Waging Nonviolent Struggle: Twentieth Century Practice and Twentyfirst Century Potential, Boston: Porter Sargent (2005). 26. For example, Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century, Westport: Praeger (1994); Stephen Zunes, Lester R. Kurtz, and Sarah Beth Asher, Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective, Malden: Blackwell (1999); Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave (2000); Kurt Schock, Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota (2005); Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009); Sharon Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (2011); April Carter, People Power and Political Change: Key Issues and Concerns, Abingdon: Routledge (2012). 27. For example, Adam Curle, Another Way: Positive Response to Contemporary Violence, Oxford: Jon Carpenter (1995); Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren, Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for the Protection of Human Rights, West Hartford: Kumarian Books (1997); Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan and Thomas Weber (eds), Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders. A Recurrent Vision, Honolulu: University of Hawaii (2000); Michael Nagler, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World, Berkeley: University of California (2001). 28. Rawls, ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience’, p. 248. 29. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, p. 455. 30. For a detailed elucidation of these principles, see Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, pp. 594–810. 31. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, New York: Columbia University Press (2011), pp. 6–7.  

 

 

217

pp. [13–15]

NOTES

32. For a good explication of this issue, see Schock, Unarmed Insurrections, pp. 35–8. 33. Sharp, Politics of Nonviolent Action, pp. 75–87. 34. Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea, London: Jonathan Cape (2006). There are exceptions to this rule, provided mainly by British scholars. I shall examine them later in this introduction. Another notable exception is Steven Duncan Huxley, a somewhat maverick figure in the field, who in his detailed study of passive resistance in Finland from 1899 to1905 provides an excellent general history of the evolution of this technique from 1848 onwards. Huxley, Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland: Finnish “Passive Resistance” against Russification as a Case of Nonmilitary Struggle in the European Resistance Tradition, Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae (1990). This work will be used to contribute to the argument in Chapter 1. 35. Gene Sharpe, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House (1960); Sharp, Politics of Nonviolent Action, pp. 76–87. 36. Ackerman and Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, p. 157. 37. This has been disputed by some Indian historians, who have argued that although the Civil Disobedience Movement was particularly well organised and focussed, it excluded many social groups that had been mobilised in the Noncooperation Movement of 1921–22. For example, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, New Delhi: Macmillan (1983), pp. 290–1. 38. Ackerman and Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, pp. 157–9. 39. Ackerman and Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, pp. 192–99. 40. For a more detailed treatment of this subject, see David Hardiman, ‘Nonviolent Resistance in India 1915–47’, in D. Hardiman (ed.), Nonviolence in Modern Indian History, Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan (2017), pp. 53–91. 41. Mary Elizabeth King, Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Change, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2015). 42. For some recent examples, see Howard Clark, ‘Introduction’, Howard Clark (ed.), People Power: Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity, London: Pluto Press (2009), pp. 6–7; April Carter, People Power and Political Change: Key Issues and Concepts, Abingdon: Routledge (2012), pp. 18–19; Tim Gee, Counter Power: Making Change Happen, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications (2011), pp. 41–57; Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works, p. 56. 43. Stephen Zunes, Lester Kurtz and Sarah Asher, ‘Introduction’ in Zunes, Kurtz and Asher (eds.), Nonviolent Social Movements, p. 3.  

218



NOTES

pp. [15–23]

44. Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions, pp. 9–10. 45. Michael Randle, Civil Resistance, London: Fontana (1994), pp. 21–51. 46. Bob Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser: An Analysis of Local and National Campaigns in India 1915–1922’, The University of Bradford: unpublished Ph.D. thesis (1982). 47. For example, Howard Clark, ‘Introduction’, Clark (ed.), People Power, pp. 6–7. 48. Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser’, pp. 351–3. 49. Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser’, pp. 337–40. 50. Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser’, pp. 336–7, 340–1. 51. In addition to Subaltern Studies, particularly important for me in this respect has been the work of E.P. Thompson. See, for example, his Customs in Common, London: Merlin (1991).  

 

1. ‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN INDIA, 1905–09 1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s: Environment, Economy, Culture, Ranikhet: Permanent Black (2014), p. 2. 2. Ibid., pp.  2–4. 3. Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character: The Illusion of Authority, London: I.B. Tauris (1990), pp. 25–8. 4. Ibid., p. 12. On p. 14, Tidrick quotes Herbert Edwards, a British army officer based in Punjab, who stated in the 1840s: ‘There is no arguing in this country without force to back you up.’ 5. For the worship of the Punjab officer John Nicholson as an avatar of Vishnu by the ‘Nikalsainite’ sect, see ibid., p. 19. Crooke also noted how some renowned Europeans were believed to have possessed miraculous powers—which might be malign—and after they died their graves became objects of worship. Propitiation ceremonies were held at them, that were believed to either confer good fortune or counter the malign influence of the deceased. William Crook, Religion and Folklore of Northern India, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1926), pp. 171–2. 6. For a study of the Indian nationalist movement in its first fifteen years, see John McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1977). 7. As Philip Woods has noted about the British in India at this time: ‘… there was a cavernous gap between their liberal professions and their authoritarian practice.’ Philip Woods, Roots of Parliamentary Democracy in India: Montagu Chelmsford Reforms, 1917–1923, Delhi: Chankaya Publications (1996), p. 27. The ‘fundamental contradictions’ of British rule in this respect are analysed by Woods on pp. 28–39. Sumit Sarkar, in examining the impact of British party political divides on India argues  

219

pp. [24–34]

NOTES

 that they were important at certain junctures, though by no means always; Modern Times, pp. 5–7. 8. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House (1973), pp. 13–20. 9. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 20–30. 10. Anindita Ghose, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime, and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta c. 1860–1920, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2016), p. 279. 11. Ghose, Claiming the City, pp. 279–80; Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, New York: Columbia University Press (2008), pp 91–2. 12. Ghose, Claiming the City, pp. 280–6. 13. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, p. 92. 14. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 97–9; Ghose, Claiming the City, pp. 285–6. 15. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 93. 16. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 150–55. 17. Ibid., pp. 37–45, 311. 18. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 103–5. 19. This divide has been discussed extensively in the literature on Indian nationalism. For example, see Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Reform and Revolution in the Making of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press (1962); Richard I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley: University of California Press (1975); B.R. Nanda, Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the Raj, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1977); Pal quote from Parimala V. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism: Discrimination, Education and Hindutva, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan (2010), p. 243. 20. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 112–14. 21.  Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 6 and 7, Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches 1890–1908, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust (2002), pp. 210–11. 22. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 120. 23. Ibid., pp.  3–27. 24. Peter Heehs (ed.), Nationalism, Religion, and Beyond: Writings on Politics, Society, and Culture, New Delhi: Permanent Black (2005), pp. 2–23. 25. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 3–8. 26. ‘India and the British Parliament’, Indu Prakash, 26 June 1893, and ‘New Lamps for Old’, Indu Prakash, 7 August 1893 to 6 March 1894, in Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 6 and 7, pp. 7–62; Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 38–40. 27. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 44–7, 318. 28. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism, p. 232.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

220

 



NOTES

pp. [34–48]

29. Cashman, Myth of the Lokamanya, pp. 75–150; Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism, pp. 238–43; Curzon quote from Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, p. 49. 30. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 61–3. 31. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Doctrine of Passive Resistance’, in Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 6 and 7, Bande Mataram, pp. 266. 32. Ibid., p.  267 33. Ibid., pp.  265–9. 34. Ibid., pp.  276–7. 35. Ibid., pp.  278–9. 36. Ibid., pp.  277–9. 37. Ibid., p.  78. 38. Ibid., pp.  278–9. 39. Ibid., pp.  281–3. 40. Ibid., pp.  283–284. 41. Ibid., p.  284. 42. Ibid., pp.  284–6. 43. Ibid., pp.  287–90. 44. Ibid., pp.  290–1. 45. Ibid., pp.  291–3. 46. Ibid., pp.  294–5. 47. Ibid., pp.  295–97. 48. Ibid., pp.  298–300. 49. Ibid., pp.  302–3. 50. John Roselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century Bengal’, Past and Present, 86 (1980), pp. 121–48; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press (1995). 51. Cashman, Myth of the Lokamanya, pp. 18–21, 30, 33, 55, 113–14, 52. Bankimcandra Chatterji, Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood, translated by Julius J. Lipner, New York: Oxford University Press (2005), pp. 144–45. 53. The quoted version is the translation from Bengali made in 1909 by Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Hymn to the Mother: Bande Mataram’, in Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 5, Translations, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram (1999), pp. 465–68. It may be noted—following the quote from the poem—that the population of Bengal was around 70 million at that time. 54. Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900–1910, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1993), pp. 65–6; 70–3.  

 

221

pp. [49–59]

NOTES

55. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, pp. 405–62; Pradip Kumar Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1999). For evidence of British ‘divide and rule’ see Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal, pp. 83–4. 56. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 318. 57. Thomas Parent, ‘Passiver Widerstand’ im preussischen Verfassungskonflikt: die Kölner Abgeordnetenfest, Cologne: DME–Verlag (1982). 58. Karl Marx, ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 31 December 1848, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 8, 1848–1849, London: Lawrence and Wishart (1977), p. 168. 59. Steven Duncan Huxley, Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland: Finnish “Passive Resistance” against Russification as a Case of Nonmilitary Struggle in the European Resistance Tradition, Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae (1990), p. 54. 60. Huxley, Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland, p. 54; Thomas Csapody and Thomas Weber, ‘Hungarian Nonviolent Resistance against Austria and its place in the History of Nonviolence,’ Peace and Change, 32, 4 (October 2007), pp. 1–21; Tamás Csapody, ‘Ferenc Deák and the Era of Passive Resistance’, http://www.iprafoundation.org/grant_tamas_ csapody.shtml. 61. Richard P. Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-Violent Sinn Fein, Dublin: Anvil Books (1974), pp. 101, 103–6; David Thornley, ‘The Irish Home Rule Party and Parliamentary Obstruction, 1874–87’, Irish Historical Studies, 12, 45 (March 1960), pp. 38–57. 62. Bernard O’Hara, Davitt: Irish Patriot and Father of the Land League, Bredons Norton: Tudor Gate Press, (2009); Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-Violent Sinn Fein, pp. 97, 100. 63. Huxley, Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland, pp. 14, 24–6. 64. Ibid., pp.  143–8. 65. Ibid., pp.  166–70. 66. Ibid., pp. 162–65, 168. 67. Ibid., pp.  148–50. 68. Ibid., pp.  173–4. 69. Ibid., pp. 205–10, 216–20, 230, 244–7. 70. Ibid., pp.  261–3. 71.  Arthur Griffith, ‘The Sinn Féin Policy’, in Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary, Dublin: University College Dublin Press (2003), pp. 139–63. Finland is cited on p. 163. 72. Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-Violent Sinn Fein, pp. 92, 194, fn. 13; Aurobindo Ghose, ‘An Irish Example’, Bande Mataram, 24 May 1907, in Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 6 and 7, p. 440.  

 

 

 

222



pp. [59–73]

NOTES

73. Richard Davis, Arthur Griffith, Dundalk: Dublin Historical Association (1976), p. 17. 74. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 118–19. 75. Ghose, ‘Doctrine of Passive Resistance’, p. 277. 76. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Old Year’, Bande Mataram, 16 April 1907, in Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 6 and 7, pp. 311–12. 77. Ghose, Claiming the City, pp. 287–90. 78. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 51, 381–8. 79. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 391–404. 80. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 78–9. 81. Mridula Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s Non-Violent Revolution: Practice and Theory, New Delhi: Sage (2004), p. 27. 82. Ian Catanach, ‘Plague and the Indian Village, 1896–1914’, in Peter Robb (ed.), Rural India: Land, Power and Society under British Rule, London: Curzon Press (1983), pp. 225–6. 83. For an example from Gujarat, see Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India, Berkeley: University of California Press (2007). 84. Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s Non-Violent Revolution, pp. 27–8; Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, p. 49. 85. N. Gerald Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: The Response of the British Government in India to Agrarian Unrest’, Modern Asian Studies, 1, 4 (1967), pp. 364–8; Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s NonViolent Revolution, p. 28; Jitendra Nath Sanyal, Bhagat Singh: A Biography, edited by K.C. Yadav and Babar Singh, Gurgaon: Hope India (2006) [1st.  ed. 1931], pp. 17–19. 86. Barrier, ‘Punjab Disturbances of 1907’, pp. 368–77. 87. Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s Non-Violent Revolution, p. 29. 88. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 122–23. 89. Ibid., pp.  125–6. 90. Ibid., pp.  126–9. 91. Ibid., pp.  137–9. 92.  Ibid., pp.  139–41; Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism, pp. 230–32. 93. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 88–9. 94. Peter Heehs, Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism: Essays in Modern Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1998), pp. 30–32. 95. Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal, pp. 150, 158–68. 96. Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal, pp. 198–204, 209–11, 225–6. 97. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism, pp. 244–46. 98. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 220. 99. Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal, pp. 219–22. 100. Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 232–3.  

 

 

 

223

pp. [74–86]

NOTES

101. For example, C.H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1964); Kenneth W. Jones, Social-Religious Reform Movements in British India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989). On the Ramakrishna Mission, see Gwilym Beckerlegge, Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2006). 102. On this, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, London: Anthem Press (2009), pp. 161–67. 103. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, pp. 52–5. 104. Ibid., pp.  55–61. 105. Ibid., pp.  82–5. 106. Ibid., pp.  86–8. 107. Ibid., pp.  493–509.  

 

2. ‘PASSIVE RESISTANCE’ IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1906–14 1. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India, London: Allen Lane (2013), pp. 128–9; Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, Johannesburg: Ravan Press (1985), pp. 38–42. 2. Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern’, in Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2008), pp. 120–1, 129. 3. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 204–10. 4. Ibid., pp. 212–21; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 241– 3, 163. 5. M.K. Gandhi, ‘A Point Of Honour’, Indian Opinion, 6 July 1907, in CWMG, 4, pp. 72–3; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 144–7. 6. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 144–45, 148, 155, 159–60. 7. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Johannesburg Letter’, Indian Opinion, 19 October 1907, in CWMG, 7, p. 295. 8. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 150–60; Guha, Gandhi Before India, p. 261; M.K. Gandhi, ‘Johannesburg Letter’, Indian Opinion, 19 October 1907; 2 November 1907; 14 December 1907, in CWMG, 7, pp. 295–6, 328, 437. 9. Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, A Fire that Blazed in the Ocean: Gandhi and the Poems of Satyagraha in South Africa, 1909–1911, New Delhi: Promilla and Co. (2011), pp. 135, 165. 10. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 271–7, 298; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 163–4.  

 

 

 

 

 

224

 

 



pp. [86–93]

NOTES

11. There has been confusion on Smut’s intents and actions. While Guha and Swan both depict Smuts as wilfully reneging on his deal with Gandhi, the editors of Gandhi’s Collected Works have provided a more nuanced account of Smuts’ insistence on conditions. See ‘Preface’, CWMG, 8, pp. vii–viii. Smut’s son, in his biography of his father of 1952, claimed that Smuts not only agreed to repeal the Act when he met Gandhi, but actually did so ‘at the next sitting’ of the Transvaal parliament. This is incorrect. See J.C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts, London: Cassell & Company (1952), p. 105. 12. Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2016), p. 261. 13. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 279–82; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 165–9; M.K. Gandhi, ‘Triumph of Truth’ and ‘Secret of Satyagraha’, Indian Opinion, 8 & 22 February 1908, in CWMG, 8, pp. 60–2 & 91–2. Much has been written on how the term ‘satyagraha’ was forged—e.g. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, London: Granada (1982), pp. 102–3. 14. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 293–6, 301–7, 314, 319–26, 352; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 169. 15. Ibid., pp.  350–62. 16. M.K. Gandhi to G.K. Gokhale, 11 November 1909, CWMG, 9, p. 532; Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 353–4. 17. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 342–8. 18. On this, see Schock, Unarmed Insurrections, pp. 154–5. 19. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 358–7, 392–4, 397–9, 407–8, 428–9, 543; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, p. 173. 20. Guha, Gandhi Before India, p. 262. 21. M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, pp. 8–11. 22. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, pp. 12–13. 23. Ibid., p.  13. 24. Guha, Gandhi Before India, p. 363. 25. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, p. 15. 26. See Gandhi’s references in the two appendices to Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, pp. 65–6. For a detailed discussion of some of these critiques, see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship, New Delhi: Permanent Black (2006). 27. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, p. 22. 28. Ibid., p.  23. 29. Ibid., 10, pp. 23, 25. 30. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart (1971), p. 12.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

225

pp. [93–107]

NOTES

31. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, pp. 25. 32. Ibid., p.  31. 33. Ibid., pp.  32–5. 34. Ibid., p.  38. 35. Ibid., 10, p. 37. 36. Ibid., p.  38. 37. Ibid., 10, p. 40. 38. Ibid., pp.  41–2. 39. Ibid., p.  43. 40. Ibid., p.  46. 41. M.K. Gandhi, Gandhijino Akshaheh, 10, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Prakashan Mandir (1968), p. 50. 42. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, p. 47. 43. Ibid., pp.  48–9. 44. Ibid., pp.  49–50. 45. Ibid., p.  50. 46. Ibid., p.  51. 47. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 45–6, 63, 191–7, 215. 48. Ibid., pp. 231–3, 241. 49. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 446–47. 50. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 241–5 51. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Deeds Better than Words’, 26 October 1906, CWMG, 6, pp. 29–30. 52. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 464–5, 534–5; Eric Itzen, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press (2000), p. 61. 53. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 466–70; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 244–8. 54. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 473–83; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 247–54. 55. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1983). 56. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 251–2. 57. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 484–5; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 252–4. 58. Guha, Gandhi Before India, pp. 487–516; Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 255–6. 59. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, pp. 77–8. 60. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, p. 51. 61. For more details, see Hardiman, Gandhi in his Time and Ours, p. 45. 62. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, p. 48. 63. M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House (1950) [first ed. 1928], p. 306.  

 

 

 

226



pp. [107–113]

NOTES

64. Ibid., p.  321. 65. Ibid., pp.  325–6. 66. Guha, Gandhi Before India, p. 504. 67. Ibid., pp.  335–7. 68. J.C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts, p. 106. 69. Guha, Gandhi Before India, p. 529.  

3. BUILDING A NATIONALIST BASE IN RURAL INDIA: PEASANT STRUGGLES IN BIJOLIYA, CHAMPARAN AND KHEDA 1. Ghose, ‘Doctrine of Passive Resistance’, p. 267. 2. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Gurukul Anniversary’, 20 March 1916, CWMG, 13, p. 264. 3. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Khadi and Village Industries Exhibition, Lucknow’, 28 March 1936, CWMG, 62, p. 298. 4. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Schoolmasters and Lawyers’, 17 April 1924, CWMG, 23, p. 454. 5. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, pp. 8 and passim. 6. Ibid., p.  9. 7. This method dated back to at least the Mughal period. See Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1701, Bombay: Asia Publishing House (1963), pp. 328–36. 8.  Gautam Bhadra, ‘The Mentality of Subalternity: Kantanama or Rajdharma’, in Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies VI:Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1989), p. 75. 9. Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1987), pp. 67–8. 10. Ibid., pp.  67–8. 11. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, p. 161. 12. On this, in a similar context in Southeast Asia, see Michael Adas, ‘“Moral Economy” or “Contest State”? Elite Demands and the Origins of Peasant Protest in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Social History, 13, 4 (Summer 1980), pp. 530, 535–6. 13.  Gazetteers of the Bombay Presidency: Khandesh, 12, Bombay: Government Central Press (1880), pp. 261–2, 269, 293. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, pp. 120–21, describes this protest, but categorises it as a series of ‘riots’, which is exactly the same term used by the Governor of Bombay at that time. In fact, it was an almost entirely peaceful protest. The Collector of Khandesh stated initially that he could do little as the action did not break the law. Only after some  

 

 

 

 

 

227

pp. [113–120]

NOTES

stray acts of violence were committed as the movement progressed did he feel that he had an excuse to intervene forcibly by calling in the army to crush the protest. 14. M. D. Mamgain (ed.), Himachal Pradesh District Gazetteers: Kinnaur District, 3, Ambala: Government of Himachal Pradesh (1971), p. 62. In Kinnaur, a dum was the term for a popular combination to redress specific grievances or to enforce claims to certain rights. 15. L.S.S. O’Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers: Jessore, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot (1912), pp. 40–42. 16. Blair Kling, The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal 1859– 1862, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1966); Ranajit Guha, ‘Neel-Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2, 1 (1974), pp. 1–46. 17. Kalyan Kumar Sen Gupta, Pabna Disturbances and the Politics of Rent 1873–1885, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House (1974), p. 57. 18. Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1968), pp. 174–84. 19. Sen Gupta, Pabna Disturbances, pp. 66, 70. 20. Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, p. 48. 21. A.H.T. Martindale, Agent in Rajputana, 30 June 1903, National Archives of India, Foreign Department, Internal-A, 51–56, February 1904. Rudyard Kipling has provided us with a sketch of Fateh Singh, noting that he led a sober life, was highly religious, worked diligently on state business throughout the day, and retired to bed early. He did not, however, know English. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, Vol. 1, London: Macmillan (1926), pp. 68–71. 22. Nandita Prasad Sahai, Politics of Patronage and Protest: The State, Society, and Artisans in Early Modern Rajasthan, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2006), pp. 153–6, 158. 23. Puspendra Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure: A Study in the Princely State of Mewar, New Delhi: Manohar (1983), pp. 13–14, 27, 29–34, 37–8. 24. Ibid., pp. 63–7; Pema Ram, Agrarian Movement in Rajasthan 1913–1947 AD, Jaipur: Panchsheel Prakashan (1986), pp. 15–7. 25. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 67–9. 26. Ibid., pp. 70–5; Ram, Agrarian Movement in Rajasthan, pp. 17–20. 27. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 76–9; Ram, Agrarian Movement in Rajasthan, p. 20; S.S. Saxena and P. Sharma, Bijoliya Kisan Andolan ka Itihas, Bikaner: Rajasthan State Archives (1972), pp. 59–65 (in Hindi); Ghanshyam Shalabha, Kranticheta Vijay Singh Pathik, Udaipur: Rajasthan Sahitya Academy (1990), (in Hindi).  

 

 

 

 

 

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pp. [121–132]

NOTES

28. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 79–83. 29. Ibid., pp.  83–7. 30. Ibid., p.  89. 31. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 87, 90, 95. 32. Ibid., pp.  91–3. 33. M.K. Gandhi to Narhari Parikh, 13 February 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 89, fn. 3 refers to Mahadev Desai’s visit to Bijoliya, showing that it took place around the second week of February 1919. Bijoliya is not mentioned again in CWMG for this period, and it is not mentioned in Gandhi’s autobiography at all. See also Saxena and Sharma, Bijoliya Kisan Andolan ka Itihas, pp. 104–5. 34. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, p. 89. 35. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 93–5. 36. Ibid., pp. 96; Ram, Agrarian Movement in Rajasthan, pp. 23–4. 37. Shriman Narayan, Jamnalal Bajaj, New Delhi: Publications Division of India (1974), p. 190. 38. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 96; V. S. Pathik to R.E. Holland, 26 March 1922, National Archives of India, Foreign and Political Department, 428-P (Secret—Printed) of 1922–23. 39. R.E. Holland, 16 March 1921 and 23 July 1921; Wilkinson, 18 May 1921; Press Communiqué, Simla, 16 August 1921, British Library, India Office Records, R/2/147/100. 40. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, pp. 98–9; Ram, Agrarian Movement in Rajasthan, pp. 28–33. 41. The phrase in quotes was one of the final demands added to the peasant’s agenda in 1920–22. It appears to have been drafted by Pathik. Surana, Social Movements and Social Structure, p. 86. 42. Sitaramayya, History of the Indian National Congress, pp. 204–5. 43. Hugh Owen, ‘The Home Rule League, 1915–18’, in D.A. Low (ed.), Soundings in Modern South Asian History, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson (1968), p. 165. 44. Sitaramayya, History of the Indian National Congress, pp. 201–2. 45. Owen, ‘Home Rule League’, pp. 165–6. 46. Ibid., pp.  166–75. 47. Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, p. 80; Jacques Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi: Planters, Peasants and Gandhian Politics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2000), pp. 167–71. 48. For a detailed study of this whole system, see Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, pp. 1–143. 49. Ibid., pp. 144–62, 204–8, 211–3, 216. 50. Ibid., pp. 162–71, 195–8. 51. Ibid., pp. 190–4; Bob Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser’, pp. 5–12;  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pp. [133–138]

NOTES

Girish Misra, ‘Gandhi’s Champaran Struggle’, Mainstream, 53, 1 (2014), p. 63. 52. Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, pp. 216–9; Lata Singh, Popular Translations of Nationalism: Bihar, 1920–1922, Delhi: Primus Books (2012), p. 158. 53. Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, pp. 171–203, 207–10, 216–20; Rajendra Prasad, Satyagraha in Champaran, Madras: S. Ganesan (1928), pp. 183–200; Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser’, pp. 5–12; Singh, Popular Translations of Nationalism, p. 158. 54. Prasad, Satyagraha in Champaran, pp. 190–1. 55. Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, p. 220. 56. Ibid., pp. 171–84; Overy, ‘Gandhi as Political Organiser’, pp. 13–14; Singh, Popular Translations of Nationalism, p. 159. After World War One, the Bihar indigo industry went into sharp decline as the price of indigo collapsed. The planters initially sought other ways to exploit the peasantry, leading to further campaigns in 1920–22 (see the next volume). They had however lost their authority, and by the 1930s, no Europeans were processing indigo in Bihar. The erstwhile planters returned to Europe, or migrated to East Africa or Australia. 57. For example, see the statement by Sir Walter Lawrence, The India We Served (1928) quoted in Ian Copland, India 1885–1947, Harlow: Longman (2001), pp. 91–92. Lawrence was a senior official serving in India in the early twentieth century. On the supposed incorruptibility of the British official, see Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century, London: Andre Deutsch (1975), p. 187. 58. R.D. MacLeod, Impressions of an Indian Civil Servant, London: H.F. and G. Witherby (1938), p. 49. 59. Interview with Alfred Master, Ascot, 2 October 1975. Master (1883– 1978) served as a district officer in Gujarat between 1906 and 1931. 60. Ibid. 61. For a study of such rural indebtedness, see my book Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1996), pp. 129–53. 62. For an example, see statement by Hathibhai Kishorbhai Kanbi of Bhadran, 1 December 1873, IOL, R/2/339/486/68. 63. J. Weir, Collector of Surat District, Annual Report 1899–1900, and S. Kadri, District Deputy Collector, Surat District, Annual Report 1899–1900, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, Revenue Depart­ ment, 1901, 55/137. 64. Evan Maconochie, Life in the I.C.S., London: Chapman and Hall (1926), pp. 124–5.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pp. [139–144]

NOTES

65. Interview with Kanubhai Apabhai Patel, Vallabh Vidyanagar, 27 February 1977. 66. Interview with Kanubhai Apabhai Patel, Vallabh Vidyanagar, 27 February 1977. 67. A. M. Shah, ‘Social Structure and Change in a Gujarat Village’, University of Baroda: unpublished Ph.D. thesis (1964), p. 46. 68. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Allen and Unwin (1930). 69. National Archive of India, Home Political Department, January 1910, 143–53. The bomb was amateurish, and failed in its intent. The British tried to prosecute the leading member of this group, but had no firm evidence, and they had to be acquitted. See Advocate of India, 7 February 1912; and Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement in India Collected from Bombay Government Records, Vol. II, Bombay (1958), p. 601. It was nonetheless well-known in nationalist circles in Gujarat that a group of young nationalists from Kheda District was responsible. One of them was Mohanlal Pandya, later a stalwart of the Gandhian movement in Gujarat and a leading figure in the Kheda Satyagraha of 1918. 70. Ravinder Kumar, ‘Class, Community or Nation? Gandhi’s Quest for a Popular Consensus in India’, Modern Asian Studies, 3, 4 (1969). 71. Shankarlal Parekh, Khedani Ladat, Ahmedabad: Rashtriya Sahitya Karyalaya (1922), (in Gujarati), pp. 9–13. 72. Indulal Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, Ahmedabad (1970), (in Gujarati), pp. 65–7. 73. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 14, 16, 18, 19, 28, 30. 74. Interview with Alfred Master, Ascot, 2 October 1975. 75. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, p. 17. 76. Narhari Parikh, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Vol. 1, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House (1953), p. 67. 77. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 18–20. 78. Ibid., pp. 478, 481; Bombay Chronicle, 18 January 1918, p. 6. 79. Speech by M.K. Gandhi, 4 February 1918, Bombay, quoted in Parikh, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Vol. I p. 62. 80. Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, pp. 89–93; Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 87, 94. 81. Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, p. 95. 82. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 106,112; Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, p. 96; M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Nadiad’, 22 March 1918, CWMG, 14, pp. 277–8; interview with Shankarlal Banker, Ahmedabad, 4 August 1972. 83. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Karamsad’, 4 April 1918, CWMG, 14, p. 307.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

231

pp. [145–153]

NOTES

84. Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, pp. 97, 98, 102, 105; Bombay Chronicle, 1 April 1918, p. 4. 85. Interview with Indulal Yagnik, Ahmedabad, 1 December 1971. 86. By late April, 30 per cent of the tax remained unpaid in Matar, and 22 per cent in Borsad. Between 14 per cent and 2 per cent had not been paid in other talukas. Bombay Chronicle, 25 April 1918, p. 5. 87.  Bombay Source Material, Vol. II, pp. 733–34; Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, p. 112; Criminal Investigation Department Office, Mumbai, Secret Bombay Police Abstracts of Intelligence, 1918, p. 230; Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 269, 320. 88. Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, p. 104. 89. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 113–15. 90. Ibid., pp. 145, 149. 91.  Ibid., p. 150. 92. Speech at Uttarsanda, 6 April 1918, CWMG, 14, p. 396. 93. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, p. 221; Bombay Chronicle, 30 April 1918, p. 9. 94.  Bombay Chronicle, 1 April 1918, p. 4. 95.  Bombay Source Material, III, pt. I, p. 85. 96. ‘Appendix XIII, Commissioner Pratt’s Speech’, 12 April 1918, CWMG, 14, pp. 549–51. 97.  Bombay Chronicle, 17 April 1918, p. 9. 98. Ibid., p.  9. 99. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, p. 198. 100. Ibid., p.  167. 101.  Bombay Chronicle, 8 May 1918, p. 8. 102. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, p. 312. 103. Ibid., pp. 330–1, 392–3; Bombay Chronicle, 1 May 1918, p. 6. 104. Parikh, Khedani Ladat, pp. 330–31, 417; Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. 2, p. 113. 105. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Dhundakuva’ (Borsad Taluka), 13 May 1918, CWMG, 14, p. 396. 106. Source Material, Vol. II, pp. 733–34; interview with Ambalal Ishwarbahi Patel, Khandali, 15 February 1977. 107. Interview with Indulal Yagnik, Ahmedabad, 1 December 1971. 108. Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. 2, p. 106; interview with Devshankar Dave, Navagam, 5 December 1971; M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Nadiad’, 8 June and 29 June 1918, CWMG, 14, pp. 419–21, 461; Khedani Ladat, pp. 341, 346, 351, 355, 361, 372. 109. Parikh, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Vol. I, p. 97. 110. Yagnik, Atmakatha, Vol. II, p. 131. 111. Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, London: Faber & Faber (1970), p. 371. 112. Erikson provides a diagnosis in Gandhi’s Truth, pp. 371–6.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

232

 

 



pp. [153–159]

NOTES

113. Bombay Chronicle, 25 & 26 July 1919; evidence before tribunal, Nadiad derailment case, continuous in Bombay Chronicle, 26 July–22 August 1919; Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, Home Department Special, 1919, 521, pt. 3; Evidence Taken before the Disorder Inquiry Committee, Vol. II, Bombay Presidency, Calcutta 1920; evidence before tribunals, Anand arson case, continuous in Times of India, 3–15 December 1919. 114. M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, Vol. II., Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press (1929), pp. 508–15. 115. Ravjibhai Manibhai Patel, Jivanna Jharna, Vol. I, Ahmedabad: Navajivan (1959), (in Gujarati), pp. 331–4. 116. The best analysis of Gandhi’s role in this strike is Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth, pp. 227–392. See also Sujata Patel, Making of Industrial Relations. Ahmedabad Textile Industry 1918–1939, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1986). 117. Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal, p. 238. 118. D.H. Davis, Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774–1789: Contributions to Original Intent, New York: Oxford University Press (2000), p. 84. 119. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003), pp. 83–4, 87. 120. George Sweeney, ‘Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-Sacrifice’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28, 3 (July 1993), pp. 424. 121. Shridharani, War without Violence, p. 14. 122. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Fasting in Satyagraha’, Harijan, 10 October 1940, CWMG, 73, pp. 90–3. 123. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence, p. 37. 124. For example, Hannah Arendt: ‘If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy—Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even pre-war Japan, instead of England—the outcome would not have been decolonisation, but massacre and submission’, Hannah Arendt, On Violence, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1970), p. 53. 125. Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, pp. 209–10, 224–5. 126. Ibid., pp.  227–9.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. NONVIOLENCE 1. In fact, Gandhi had used the English term ‘non-violence’ at least a year earlier, at the time of the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, e.g. ‘Telegram  to G.A. Natesan’, 18 April 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 243. Although the  

 

233

pp. [160–166]

NOTES

word appears often in the English version of CWMG from 1915 onwards, it is in all cases before April 1919 a translation of ‘ahimsa’ from Gandhi’s writings and speeches in Gujarati or Hindi. 2. M. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press (1899), p. 125. 3. David Hardiman, ‘Nonviolence in India History’, in David Hardiman (ed.), Nonviolence in Modern Indian History, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan (2016), pp. 11–35. 4. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Johannesburg Letter’, translated from Gujarati article in Indian Opinion, 15 September 1906, CWMG, 5, p. 339. 5. Bhana and Shukla-Bhatt, A Fire that Blazed in the Ocean, p. 33. 6. Ibid., p.  41. 7. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, CWMG, 10, pp. 30–1. 8. M.K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Vol. 1, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press (1927), pp. 322, 373. 9. T.K. Unnithan and Yogendra Singh, Traditions of Non-Violence, New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann India (1973), p. 12. 10. Leo Tolstoy, Kingdom of God and Peace Essays, translated with an introduction by Aylmer Maude, London: Oxford University Press (1946), pp. 253–4. 11. Daniel Musser, Non-resistance Asserted, Lancaster, PA: Elias Barr & Co. (1864). 12. Huxley, Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland, pp. 177–81. For the American tradition of non-resistance, see Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd (eds.), Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, New York: Orbis Books (1995), pp. xi–xxiii, 1–17. 13. Aylmer Maude, ‘Introduction’ to Tolstoy, Kingdom of God, p. 1. 14. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Leo Tolstoy’, 1 October 1909, CWMG, 9, p. 444. 15. For example, M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Indian National Congress’, 4 November 1907, CWMG, 7, p. 333. 16. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at St. Stephens’, 13 April 1915, CWMG, 2nd.  edition, 14, pp. 399–400. This speech does not appear in the first edition of CWMG. 17. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Gokhale Club, Madras’, 20 April 2015; ‘Speech at YMCA, Madras’, 27 April 2015 CWMG, 13, pp. 50, 65. 18. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech on the Secret of Satyagraha in South Africa’ (in Hindi, in a reply to a question during a post-prayer meeting at Satyagraha Ashram near Kochrab, Ahmedabad), 27 July 1916, CWMG, 13, p. 287–91. 19. M.K. Gandhi, ‘On Ahimsa: Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai’, The Modern Review, October, 1916, CWMG, 13, p. 295. The article runs in CWMG from pp. 294–7.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pp. [166–174]

NOTES

20. Ibid for all quotations in this paragraph and the following. 21. This is a later translation from the original Gujarati speech in which Gandhi talks about ‘ahimsa’. 22. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Surat on Indenture’, 26 February 1917, CWMG, 13, pp. 350–1. 23. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Bettiah’, 8 December 1920, CWMG, 19, pp. 88–90. The police atrocities are described in Mahadev Desai, Dayto-Day with Gandhi, Vol. III, Banaras: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan (1968), pp. 146–8. 24. M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’, Young India, 11 August 1920, CWMG, 21, pp. 134–35. 25. I.C. Sharma, ‘The Ethics of Jainism,’ in Robert L. Holmes and Barry L. Gan, Nonviolence in Theory and Practice, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press (2005), pp. 6–7. 26. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Discourses on the “Gita”’, February–November 1926, CWMG, 32, pp. 149–50 (commentary on Bhagavad Gita, Ch. I, verse 39). 27. M.K. Gandhi, From Yeravda Mandir: Ashram Observances, Ahmedabad: Jivanji Desai (1935), p. 11. Gandhi wrote this when in jail in 1930. 28. M. K. Gandhi, ‘The Fiery Ordeal’, CWMG, 37, pp. 310–15. This incident and the resulting controversy has been discussed in depth by Tridip Suhrud, ‘Fiery Ordeal: Conundrums of Ahimsa’, in Hardiman (ed.) Nonviolence in Modern Indian History, pp. 35–51. See also A.L. Basham, ‘Traditional Influences on the Thought of Mahatma Gandhi’, in Ravinder Kumar (ed.), Essays in Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1971), pp. 312. 29. Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout and Eric Meyer, ‘On the Concepts of Violence and Non-Violence in Hinduism and Indian Society’, in Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout and Eric Meyer (eds.), Violence/Non-Violence: Some Hindu Perspectives, New Delhi: Manohar (2003), pp. 22 and 26.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. EXPOSING STATE TERROR: THE ROWLATT SATYAGRAHA, 1919 1. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (translated and edited by Peter Bondanella), Oxford: Oxford University Press (2005), pp. 62, 67. 2. David Hesse and Brian Martin, ‘Repression, Backfire, and the Theory of Transformative Events’, Mobilization, 11, 1 (2006), pp. 249–67. 3. Chenoweth and Stephen, Why Civil Resistance Works, p. 50. 4. Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 165–78, 187. 5.  Sedition Committee 1918: Report, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing India (1918), p. i. 6. Yuval Noah Harari, ‘The Theatre of Terror’, The Guardian, 31 January  

235

pp. [174–177]

NOTES

 2015, pp. 19–20. Harari’s argument draws in part from Brian Jenkins’s observations in the 1970s that ‘terrorism is theatre’ and that ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.’ Brian Jenkins, International Terrorism: A New Kind of Warfare, Santa Monica: Rand Corporation (1974), p. 4. 7. Edward Snowden, ‘Truly Unauthorised Disclosures are an Act of Resistance’, The Guardian, 3 May 2016, p. 8. 8. The administration of the Punjab had for many years been notoriously authoritarian and intolerant of any dissent. On this, and the reasons for it, see K.L. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh: A Critical Juncture in the Indian National Movement’, Social Scientist, 25, 1–2 (Jan–Feb 1997), pp. 28–32. 9. Amales Tripathi, Indian National Congress and the Struggle for Freedom 1885–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2014), p. 73; Philip Woods, ‘O’Dwyer, Sir Michael Francis (1864–1940)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com; Khushwant Singh and Satindra Singh, Ghadr 1915: India’s First Armed Revolution, New Delhi: R & K Publishing House (1966); Maia Ramnath, The Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press (2011); Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s Non-Violent Revolution, pp. 30–2. Montagu quote from Alfred Draper, Amritsar: The Massacre that Ended the Raj, London: Cassell (1981), p. 33. 10. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Summary of Rowlatt Bills’, 26 February 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 118. 11. M.K. Gandhi to M.M. Malaviya, 8 February 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 86. 12. M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Satyagraha Pledge’, 24 February 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 101–2. 13. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Telegram to Private Secretary to Viceroy’, 24 February 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 102. 14. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to C.F. Andrews’, 25 February 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 104. 15. M.K. Gandhi to Sir Dinshaw Wacha, 25 February 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 107. 16. M.K. Gandhi to K. Natarajan, 25 February 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 105–6. 17. Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, pp. 168–70; David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnad: Nationalist Politics in South India 1919–1937, London: Curzon Press (1977), pp. 28–9; Sitaramayya, History of the Indian National Congress, p. 273. 18. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Instructions to Volunteers’, 26 February 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 118–20.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pp. [178–182]

NOTES

19. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to the Press on Satyagraha Pledge’, 26 February 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 121–2. 20. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Message to Madras Meeting’, 30 March 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 168–9. 21. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Devdas Gandhi’, on or after 5 March 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 125–6. 22. Quoted in M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech on Satyagraha, Madras’, 20 March 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 141. 23. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, p. 41. 24. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech on Satyagraha, Madras’, 20 March 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 142. 25. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to the Press on Satyagraha Movement’, 23 March 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 145. 26. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech on Satyagraha Movement, Tanjore’, 24 March 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 148–9. 27. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech on Satyagraha Movement, Trichinopoly’, 25 March 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 153. 28. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to the Press on Satyagraha Movement’, 23 March 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 145–6. 29. ‘Notes Taken Down by Mahadev Desai’, 23 March 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 147–8. 30. These rumours are reported in a file in the National Archives of India, Home Political A, February 1920, 421–31. See also P.C. Bamford, Histories of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements, Delhi: Government of India Press (1925), p. 10. 31. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilisation in India, New York: Columbia University Press (1982), pp. 68–70. This Muslim grievance will be examined fully in the next volume. 32. Ravinder Kumar, ‘Introduction’, in R. Kumar (ed.), Essays in Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1971), pp. 12–16; H.F. Owen, ‘Organisation for the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919’, in Kumar (ed.), Essays in Gandhian Politics, pp. 65–91; Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 188–9. 33. Bombay Source Material, Vol. III, pt.1, p. 109; Bombay Secret Abstracts, 1919, p. 307, and 1920, p. 1795. 34. Bamford, Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements, p. 11. 35. For an analysis of how such communal unity was forged at this time in Punjab, see Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, pp. 32–41. 36. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 38, 44–6. 37. Donald Ferrell, ‘The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Delhi’, in Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics, pp. 189–91; M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to the  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

237

pp. [183–191]

NOTES

Press on Delhi Tragedy’, 3 April 1919 and ‘Speech at Chowpatty, Bombay’, 6 April 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 174–5, 184. 38. James Masselos, ‘Some Aspects of Bombay City Politics in 1919’, in Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics, pp. 176–80, 220. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Telegram to Swami Shraddhanandi’, 3 April 1919, and ‘Speech at Chowpatty, Bombay’, 6 April 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 172, 183–8. 39. K.L. Gillion, ‘Gujarat in 1919’, in Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics, p. 135. 40. David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalist of Gujarat, pp. 131. 41. Kumar, ‘Rowlatt Satyagraha in Lahore’, pp. 282–97; Draper, Amritsar, pp. 46–78; Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 189–91. 42. David Arnold, Congress in Tamilnad, pp. 29–30. 43. C.R. Das to M.K. Gandhi, after 8 April 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 204. 44. Singh, Popular Translations of Nationalism: Bihar, pp. 13–16. 45. Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, p. 173. 46. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Satyagrahi’, ‘Instructions to Satyagrahis’, ‘Statement of Laws for Civil Disobedience’, 7 April 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 190–4. 47.  Masselos, ‘Bombay City Politics in 1919’, pp. 182–7; Gandhi, Experiments with Truth, Vol. II, pp. 498–500. 48. K. L. Gillion, ‘Gujarat in 1919’. The casualty figures are from Bombay Source material, Vol. III, p. 777. Gandhi estimated that the likely numbers were probably double the official ones. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Bombay’, 25 April 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 250. 49. David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalist of Gujarat, pp. 130–5. 50. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, pp. 45–6; Draper, Amritsar, pp. 51–3, 61–9. 51. Ravinder Kumar, ‘The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Lahore’, in Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics, pp.  278–97; Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 191–2. 52. Tuteja, ‘Jallianawala Bagh’, p. 53. 53. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 21–5, 73–4; on enduring British memories of 1857, see Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, p. 48. 54. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 76–7 55. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh, pp. 25–61; Draper, Amritsar, pp. 80–9, 96; Sitaramayya, History of Indian National Congress, pp. 276–84; Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 191–2. Sherman states that it is probable that around 530 were in fact killed, this being based on a house-to-house survey carried out in Amritsar after the massacre. Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, Abingdon: Routledge (2010), p. 16, and fn. 7, p. 185. As, however, many of those present were from rural areas, a survey of the city alone would not have been adequate for such an enumeration. 56. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 97–101, 106–12; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, p. 28.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pp. [191–202]

NOTES

57. Sitaramayya, History of Indian National Congress pp. 282–3; Draper, Amritsar, p. 115. 58. Sitaramayya, History of Indian National Congress, pp. 284–8; Draper, Amritsar, pp. 115–6; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, pp. 28, 32. 59. Ferrell, ‘The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Delhi’, pp. 205–6, 220–35. 60. Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875–1927, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1984), pp. 242–3; Sarkar, Modern India, p. 194. 61. Sarkar, Modern India, p. 189. 62. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to J.L. Maffey’, 14 April 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 218; Gandhi, Experiments with Truth, Vol. II, pp. 506. 63. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Mass Meeting, Ahmedabad, CWMG, 15, pp. 220–4. 64. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 113–14. 65. Gandhi, Experiments with Truth, Vol. II, pp. 507–9. 66. ‘Letter from M. Abdul Aziz’, 27 July 1919, CWMG, 16, p. 531. 67. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Rabindranath Tagore’, 5 April 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 179–80. 68. ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Letter to Gandhiji’, 12 April 1919, CWMG, 15, p. 495. 69. Sitaramayya, History of Indian National Congress, p. 291. 70. Ibid., p. 290; Draper, Amritsar, pp. 117–8, 166–79. 71. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 181–5, 193–6. 72. Sitaramayya, History of Indian National Congress, pp. 293–8, 303–9; Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, pp. 188–9. 73. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 199–202. 74. Ibid., pp.  204–8. 75. Ibid., pp. 213–6, 221–6; Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, p. 25. 76. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 227–35. 77. Ibid., pp.  236–42; T. R. Moreman, ‘Dyer, Reginald Edward Harry’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com. 78. Nigel Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer, London: Hambledon (2005), p. x. 79. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, p. 16. 80. Ibid., p.  32. 81. Ibid., p.  29. 82. Ibid., pp. 22–6; Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, pp. 135–7. 83. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 124–6, 134–7; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, pp. 17–20. 84. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 137–142; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, pp. 20–1.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

239

pp. [202–210]

NOTES

85. Jawaharlal Nehru, India and the World, London: Allen and Unwin (1936), p. 147. 86. S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Vol. I, London: Jonathan Cape (1975), p. 37. 87. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 120–21; Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making, Berkeley: University of California Press (1985), pp. 79–86. 88. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, p. 35. 89. Draper, Amritsar, pp. 190, 285–8. 90. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, p. 185. 91. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, p. 16. 92. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, p. 27. 93. Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala bagh’, p. 51. 94. The young Jawaharlal Nehru was alienated in such a way when he happened to overhear Dyer bragging about his actions to some fellow officers when they inadvertently shared a railway sleeping compartment in late 1919. He had been shocked to hear the General asserting that he had felt like reducing the whole of Amritsar to ashes, but took ‘pity and refrained’. He then goes on to describe how his father Motilal Nehru, a leading moderate politician, was radicalised by the events of 1919. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, New Delhi: Allied Publishers (1962), pp. 43–4. 95. Draper, Amritsar, p. 170. 96. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, p. 36. 97. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Chowpatty, Bombay’, 6 April 1919, CWMG, 15, pp. 186–7.  

 

 

CONCLUSION 1. M.K. Gandhi, ‘If I were a Czech’, 6 October 1938, CWMG, 67, p. 405. 2. On this, see Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflict over Development in the Narmada Valley, New Delhi: Oxford University Press (1995), pp. 17–8. 3. In India at that time, all except very elite women faced huge obstacles in taking part in public affairs. The restricted way that this could be overcome in the context of Gandhian satyagraha is analysed with insight by Tanika Sarkar, ‘The Politics of Women in Bengal: The Conditions and Meaning of Participation,’ in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 21, 1 (1984), pp. 91–101.  

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES Archival Records British Library, London, India Office Records, Residency records. Criminal Investigation Department Office, Mumbai, Secret Bombay Police Abstracts of Intelligence. Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai: Home Department records. Revenue Department records. National Archives of India, New Delhi: Foreign and Political Department records. Home Political Department, records. Official Publications Bamford, P.C., Histories of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements, Delhi: Government of India Press (1925). Evidence Taken before the Disorder Inquiry Committee, Vol. II, Bombay Presidency, Calcutta: Government of India (1920). Gazetteers of the Bombay Presidency, 12, Khandesh, Bombay: Government Central Press (1880). Mamgain, M.D., (ed.), Himachal Pradesh District Gazetteers, Vol. 3, Kinnaur District, Ambala: Government of Himachal Pradesh (1971). O’Malley, L.S.S, Bengal District Gazetteers: Jessore, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, (1912). Sedition Committee 1918: Report, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing India (1918).



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Newspapers Bombay Chronicle. Times of India. Printed Collections of Primary Materials Gandhi, M.K., The CollectedWorks of Mahatma Gandhi, Vols.  1–100, New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India (1958–1994). Volumes consulted: 4–16, 19, 21, 32, 37, 63, 67, 73. ——— Gandhijino Akshaheh, Vol. 10, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Prakashan Mandir (1968), (in Gujarati). Ghose, Aurobindo, CompleteWorks of Sri Aurobindo, Vols.  5–7, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram (1999–2002). Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, CollectedWorks, Vol.  8, 1848–1849, London: Lawrence and Wishart (1977). Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement in India Collected from Bombay Government Records, Vol. II, Bombay (1958); Vol. III, part 1, Bombay (1965).  

 

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INDEX

mass 2 out-and-out 204 political 75–76 Ahimsa 18, 155, 159–69, 177, 207, see also Violence notion of 165 Ahmedabad 128, 131, 135, 141–44, 153–54, 183, 185–86, 192–93 Ahmedabad Fast 154 Aiyar, P.S. 98 Ajmer 124–25 Ajodhya 9 Allah-o-Akbar 85, 183, 185 American colonies 40, 46 resistance of 40 Amir of Afghanistan 71 Amritsar 124, 181, 183, 186, 188, 190, 192–93, 195–96, 199, 202–04 effect of Dyer’s firm action in 195 Anand town and taluka (Kheda District) 149, 153, 186 Anarchical and Revolutionary Crime Act 178 Andamans 154, 195 Andrews, C. F. 104, 107, 164, 176

Abdurahman, Dr., Cape Coloured leader 103 Abuse 61, 138, 141, 156 physical 138 Achilles’ lance 7 Ackerman, Peter 14 Activism 1, 12, 15 peace 12, 15 student 1 Adivasis 8, 11 Administration, refusal of 39 Afghanistan 71, 186, 195 Africa 17–18, 24–25, 34, 60, 67, 79, 81, 84–85, 87–90, 92, 97, 99–100, 103–08, 110, 140, 161–64, 166, 178–79, 207–09 African Chronicle 98 Aggression 42, 53, 115, 210 acts of 42 foreign 53 Agitation of 1907–8 64, 133 Agitations 2–5, 34, 64, 66, 75–76, 109, 128, 133–34, 143, 175, 182, 204 agrarian 34 constitutional forms of 128 intense 2 liberal–constitutional approach 5



 

 

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INDEX Animosity 10, 198 Anti-British campaign of 1920–22 18 Anti-landlord demagogy 48 Anti-reservation movement 9 Anushilan Regulations and Drill-book 63 Anushilan Samiti 35, 64 April Laws of 1848 in Hungary 50 Arbitration courts 16, 39, 41 Arendt, Hannah 7 OnViolence 7 Aristocracy 26, 50 bhadralok 26 Armed conflict 173 rebellion 34 revolt 37–38, 40, 207 struggle 35, 46, 50, 54, 59, 64, 76–77, 89, 97, 208–10 Arms and training 11, 39, 45, 59, 71, 93, 95–96, 107, 166–68 use of 45, 168 Arnold, David 3 Arrest and imprisonment 43, 66, 68, 80, 85, 111, 141, 154, 185, 201–02 Arrogance 25, 74 Arya Samaj 65, 140 Asher, Sarah 14 Ashrams 16, 76, 154 local 16 Asiatic ordinance of 1906 in Transvaal (South Africa) 80 Asiatic Registration Act in Transvaal (South Africa) 86, 98 Assam 24 Attrition, politics of 9 Aurangzeb, Mughal emperor 106 Australia 29 Australian National University 3 Austria 50–51

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defeat in Italy in 1859 51 Prussian defeat of 51 Austrian army 51 Autonomy 6, 21, 30–31, 50, 67, 128, 210 national 50, 67 political 30 Babri Masjid (mosque), Ajodhya 9 destruction of 9 Babus 23–24, 64 Backfire effect 18, 90, 128, 172, 199–205 Bajaj, Jamnalal 124 Ballou, Adin 164 Bande Mataram 25, 28, 30, 35, 41, 67–68, 72, 76, 85, 149, 183, 185 Banerji, Jatindranath 35 Banerji, Surendranath 28–29, 41, 69–70 Baraiyas 139, 146 Barisal district and town 28, 41, 61–62, 75, 209 Baroda 33–35, 47, 151 army 34–35 Begar 123, 124, 141 Belgium 197 Beliefs 5, 12, 26, 32, 35, 46, 63–64, 66, 76, 94, 110, 132, 135–36, 156, 165, 167, 179, 195, 208–09 dogmatic 136 Marxian 12 nationalist/nationalistic 26, 32 pervasive 132 Benevolence 14, 21 paternalistic 21 Bengal 7, 23–25, 28–30, 33, 35–36, 38, 40, 42, 45–48, 60–62, 64–67, 69–70, 73, 75–77, 80, 91–92, 105–06, 109,

INDEX 113, 117, 130, 140, 173–74, 176, 190, 207, 209 partition of 1905 24–25, 27, 29 radical nationalism in 35 Swadeshi and boycott movement in 24, 65, 91, 106 Bengali(s) 23–25, 59 culture 28 high-caste 23 Bengal Provincial Congress 28 Bengal Renaissance 25 Berar 24 Besant, Annie 127–28, 172, 177, 179, 194 Bettiah town 168 Bhadralok 23, 26, 63–64, 192 aristocracy 26 Bhagavad Gita/Gita 45, 86, 168 Bible, the 86 Bihar 24, 127, 129–30, 134, 167, 183, 209 indigo system in 134 peasant grievances in 209 Biharis, middle-class 131 Bijoliya 115–20, 122–27, 209 Black Acts 180 Black Power movement 7 Bloodshed 38, 43, 179 Bobrikov, Russian Governor in Finland 56 Boers 25, 34, 104 resistance of 34 Boer War 104 Bolshevism 172, 178 Bombay 24, 29, 33–34, 68–69, 90, 123, 128–29, 137–38, 141, 143–45, 147, 172, 175–77, 182, 184–86, 192–93, 197, 200–201 Bombay Chronicle 182, 193 Bombay Government 141, 143 Bombay Legislative Assembly 141 Bombay Presidency 24, 29, 182, 185–86, 192, 200

Borsad taluka (Kheda district) 145 Boycott 25–30, 34, 38–40, 42, 55, 57, 59, 61–63, 65–66, 75, 83, 104, 121, 124, 130, 133–35, 137, 204, 208 all-India campaign of 30 caste 121 effective 42 foreign goods 29, 42 movement 65, 135 social 42, 57, 62, 83, 130, 133, 137, 208 Boycott, Captain Charles 53 Bradford University 15 Braiding 5, 6 Britain 15, 22, 27, 29, 40, 49–50, 52, 88, 100, 103, 127, 150, 156, 159, 174, 177, 193, 197–99, 202, 205, 207, 209, see also United Kingdom conservative politicians in 174 ‘drain of wealth’ from India to 27 liberals in 29 suffragette movement in 49, 209 British administrators 144 bureaucracy 138, 144 conservatives 23 courts 39, 65 economic dominance 27 governance/government 52, 63, 81 hegemony of 140 idealism 200 imperialism 199, 201, 204 imperial rulers 3 legislation of 1901 23 liberals 23, 38 loyalism 198 monarch 21 officials 21, 106, 130, 134–35, 137, 156, 171

255

INDEX oppressive legislation 18, 21 policy in India 1 political leaders 88 racial discrimination of 25 ruling class 32, 89 tax officials, oppressive rule by 21 troops 22 zalum 65 British Agent 125 British Empire 29, 31, 79, 128, 156, 172 British India 25, 32, 67, 113, 118, 122, 204 British Indian Association 82–83, 161 British Indian Empire 21 British rule 14, 19, 21, 23–24, 26, 28, 30–32, 35, 45, 66, 71, 111, 115, 156, 171, 187, 196, 200, 203–04, 211 brutality of 203 progressive nature of 45 revolution against 66 subversion of 71 uprising against 66 Brojomohan Vidyalaya 61, 209 Brown, Judith 203 Brutality 22, 61, 171, 203 casual 22 Bureaucracy 21–22, 36–37, 39–42, 60, 116, 138, 143–44, 147 British 138, 144 foreign 36 meritocratic 22 provincial 21 tax 144, 147 tax-collecting 138 Burma 66, 72, 188 Butt, Isaac 52 Byron 32

256

Calcutta 10, 23, 25–26, 29–31, 33, 35, 60, 62, 64, 70, 131, 183, 192 challenge to British 26 north 26 post-Partition violence in 10 Cama, Bhikhaiji 67 Cambridge University 32 Campaign 2, 5, 9, 12–19, 21, 24, 27–28, 30, 37, 40, 49, 52–53, 57–58, 60, 77, 79–80, 82, 85, 88–90, 98–99, 104–06, 109, 113, 118–20, 123, 127–28, 130, 133, 135, 138, 143, 145–47, 161–62, 166–67, 171–72, 175, 181, 185, 203–05, 208–12 all-India 18, 30 anti-British 18 civil disobedience 17 exemplary 15 Gandhi’s 17 local 17 mass 2 national-level 16 non-cooperation 30 nonviolent 21 no-rent 52, 113 no-tax 40, 113, 138, 143, 175 of attrition against the Muslim minority 9 political 77 rural 210 social 77 success of 17 tax refusal 40 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 15 Canada 29 Carpenter, Edward 93 Caste panchayat 118 Caste(s) 5, 9, 23, 27, 29, 44–45, 63, 66, 74, 76, 83, 85, 97,

INDEX 111–12, 115–18, 121, 129, 131–32, 136, 138–40, 146, 157, 160, 180, 207–08 agricultural 121, 146 Baraiya 139 boycott 121 Brahmans 23, 44–45, 77, 82, 131, 144–45, 160 Dhakad 116–19, 121 high 74, 76, 160 Kshatriya 44, 46, 160 leaders 83 lower 74, 139 non-agricultural 146 organisations 146, 207 threat to 27 purity 27 Rajputs 45, 115–16, 119, 125, 140 sanctions 138 upper 63 warrior 44, 97 Cellular Jail, Andamans 154 Central India 11, 117, 124 Central Provinces 24, 124 Champaran district and town 13, 17, 127, 129, 131–32, 134–35, 155–56, 168, 171, 175, 184, 210 Gandhi’s campaign in 1917 13 Champaran Satyagraha 134, 184 Chandavarker, Rajnarayan 6 Chartist Movement in Britain 1 Chatterji, Bankimcandra 46–48, 207 Anandamath 46–47 Chesterton, G.K. 92 Children 11, 34, 119, 148–49, 151, 197 China 9 Chinese Revolution, successes of 7 Christian/Christianity 62, 84–85, 140, 163, 181, 206–07  

non-resistance 207 Churchill, Winston 199 Citizenship rights 79 Civil Disobedience 11, 13–14, 16–17, 55, 153, 175, 177, 179–80, 184–85, 193, 205–06 campaigns of 17 Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930–31 13–14 Civil Disobedience Movements of 1932–33 16 Civil protest 90, 160–61, 206 resistance 15, 45, 99, 105, 161, 168, 207–08 methods of 208 rights 10, 103, 166 societies 10 struggle 38 Civil Rights movement in USA 10 Civilisation 32, 93–95, 176, 178–79, 196 European 32 Indian 93–94 materialistic 178 modern 94–95, 179 Western 94–95, 196 Clark, Howard 15 Class(es) 1–7, 9, 16, 19, 22–23, 25, 32–33, 39, 48, 50, 56–57, 60–65, 69, 76–77, 79, 89, 94, 98, 110–11, 113–14, 121, 131, 133, 156, 174, 180, 183–84, 190–92, 201–02, 204 business and trading 79, 98, 110 capitalist 77 depressed 22 interests 64, 110 low 62 lower 6, 25, 50, 60, 64, 76 middle 1, 2, 3, 9, 16, 23, 33, 50, 56–57, 65, 110, 131, 156, 174, 184, 191–92, 204

257

INDEX power of 6, 23 privileged 50 British 32, 89 power of 7 ruling 7, 32, 48, 50, 89 social 19 subaltern 5, 114 upper 64, 94, 184, 202 Cobden, Jane 99 CollectedWorks of Mahatma Gandhi 161 Collet, Nigel 199 The Butcher of Amritsar 199 Colonial censure 157, 211 Colonial law 134, 140 Colonial Office 81, 88 Colonial regime 187 Colonial rule 114, 136 Communal harmony 84 tensions 84, 162 unity 181 violence 9 Conflicts 1, 9–11, 14, 17–18, 46, 96–97, 173 armed 173 high and low caste Hindus 9 military 14, 46 strategic 14 nonviolent 17 political 1 resolution of 10, 96–97 social 1 Confrontation 24, 51, 55, 101, 131, 133, 150, 176 direct 55 mode of 24 Congress Report 196 Connolly, James 154 Consciousness 3, 5–6, 18, 122, 203–04 anti-colonial 204

258

false 5 political 18 subaltern 5 Conscription Act 56 Conspiracy 173, 198, 202 criminal 173, 202 Constitutional power 2, 4 Constitutional reforms 1, 72, 155, 174–75 of 1909 1 of 1919 1 of 1937 1 Consumers 27, 39 Cooperation 12, 30, 40, 55, 58, 65, 106, 145 forms of 106 Counter-revolutionary strategy 50 Counter-violence 10, 210 Court arrest 88, 98, 193 Crawling Order in Amritsar 197 Cuban Revolution 7 Cultural idioms and traditions 84 pride 84 Society 35 Culture 10, 23, 25, 28, 32, 45, 49, 51, 53–55, 73, 84, 99, 135, 205 Bengali 28 democratic 10 Finnish 55 Indian 45, 49, 84 literary 25 national 51 of resentment 45 regional 32 vernacular 32 Victorian 32 Dacca riots 64 Dacca Anushilan Samiti 63, 72 Daily Mail 197 Danda Fauj (stick army) 187

INDEX Das, Chittaranjan 30, 71, 196 Datta, Aswinikumar 62 Davitt, Michael 52 Deák, Ferenc 50–52, 58 Delhi 10, 13, 22, 104, 120, 123, 150, 152, 164, 178, 181–82, 185, 192–93, 200 human rights of the Muslims of 10 Democracy 11, 33, 58, 60, 73 Eastern 60 mass 73 parliamentary 33 Demoralization 194 Deprivation 6 Desai, Gopaldas 143 Desai, Mahadev 123 Deshpande, K.G. 33–34 Despotism 42 Dhakad caste 116–19, 121 Dhakad, Ghisi Lala 122 Dhakad peasants/leaders 117 Dialogue and negotiation 11–12, 30, 91 Discipline 7, 11, 36, 62–63, 70, 154, 192, 205, 208, 211 self-imposed 208 Discrimination 17, 25, 74, 79, 108 racial 17, 25, 74 movement against 17 Disobedience 11, 16–17, 54–55, 153, 166, 175, 177, 179–80, 184–85, 193, 205 Disputes 75, 79, 94, 107, 114, 121, 173 arbitration of 114 Dissent 8–10, 13, 102, 114–16, 120, 160, 171, 176, 210 forms of 13, 114, 116 nonviolent 10 Divide-and-rule 22–23, 48, 93, 181  

tactics of 23, 48, 181 Doctrine of Passive Resistance 31, 35, 38, 59–60, 67, 109 Doke, Joseph 86 Dominion status, demand for 29 Doveton, Captain 192 Dube, John, black African civil rights leader 103 Durban 79, 84, 91, 103 Dutta, Aswinikumar 61, 75, 209 Dutt, Bhupendranath 68 Dwarkadas, Jamnadas 182 Dyarchy 172 Dyer, Reginald, Brigadier-General 188–90, 192, 195–200, 202–03 East Bengal 24–25, 28, 42, 48, 61–62, 64, 66–67, 209 Economic evil 27 Education 9, 22, 25, 27–28, 30, 32, 39, 45, 54–55, 58, 61, 63, 69, 74, 121, 126, 184 circular of 22 October 1905 27 higher 27 medium of 27 national 27, 30, 63, 69 national programme 27 official 27 reform 36 reservations in 9 system of 28, 39, 58 Education Act 39 Employment 9, 33, 42, 103 reservations in 9 Engagements 6, 8, 10, 13, 79, 86, 89 nonviolent 8 political 8, 10, 13, 89 principles of 79 England 32, 39, 53, 67, 80, 95, see also Britain/United Kingdom Conservative Government 39–40  

259

INDEX English Romantics 32 English rule 31, 92 Equality 127 Ethnography 6 Europe 1, 17, 25–26, 36, 39, 45, 49–50, 54, 60, 97, 133, 172 nineteenth-century 1 upsurge of 1848 50 Europeans 25–26, 62, 185, 187, 190, 196–97 Exclusivism 63 Exploitation 4, 93, 129 forms of 4 Externment order 196 Extremism 38 Extremists 18, 29–30, 39, 43, 59, 65, 67, 69–72, 75–77, 79, 81, 88, 91–92, 105, 128, 173–74, 176–77 Bengal 69 Maharashtrian 70 Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale in Ireland 53 Famine 34, 44, 61, 117, 137, 141, 148 Famine of 1896 34 Famine of 1899–1900 117, 137, 141, 148 Fanaticism 62 Fanon, Frantz 7 Farmers 56, 63, 98, 141, 145, 148 rights of 148 Fateh Singh, Maharana 115, 124–26 Fenian rising of 1867 52 Festivals 34, 61, 120, 188 Baisakhi 188 Ganapati 34 Shivaji 34 Finland 54–59, 164, 206 policy of Russification in 57

260

Russian administration in 57 Strike of October–November 1905 57 Finnish Diet 54, 56–57 Finnish law 54 Finnish movement 54 Forgiveness 159 Fort William 26 France 32, 50, 153, 190, 195, 197 Freedom 2, 4, 14, 27, 29, 36–38, 44, 46–47, 75–76, 80, 85, 87, 99, 163, 175, 209 of action 85 of movement 99 political 27, 36, 75 French military 7 French Revolution 32–33 Fuller, Bampfylde, governor of East Bengal 25, 66 Gaikwad, Sayajirao, Maharaja of Baroda 33 Gandhian idea of resistance 187 leadership 211 method 15 nationalists 149 nonviolence 8, 155, 211–12 satyagraha 17, 144, 149 notion of 17 Gandhi, Kasturba 49, 99–100, 103 Gandhi, M.K. 2–3, 5–6, 8–11, 13–19, 24, 31, 49, 67–68, 76–77, 79–108, 110–11, 123, 126–29, 131–35, 140–57, 159–72, 175–87, 193–96, 201, 203–12 24-hour fast 179 agrarian protest 135 all-India campaigns 18 all-India struggle 19 as political strategist 14  

INDEX as a lawyer 79 assassination on 30 January 1948 10 assault on 86 campaigns in Champaran 13, 129–34 Kheda 135–53 South Africa 79–108, 166 Vaikom 13 Civil Disobedience in 1930–31 13 constructive programme 16, 73 contempt and fear for the masses 8 fast in Delhi in January 1948 13 first all-India movement 3 first all-India satyagraha 206 Hind Swaraj 90–98, 105–06, 162, 184, 209 importance of 14, 15 influence of 187 in South Africa 24, 79, 207 intentions 16 leadership 14, 155 left South Africa 108 method of resistance 15–16, 97, 140, 161, 164, 179 adaptability of 16 efficacy of 134 flexibility of 15 nonviolent struggle 14 success in 16 protest in the Transvaal 79–91, 98 return to India from South Africa 18, 140, 161, 164 stress on nonviolence 8 suspended civil disobedience 193 techniques 14, 18 Ganga 25 Garrison, William Lloyd 164 George V, King-Emperor 181  

Germany 51, 80, 130, 155, 190 Ghani, Abdul 161–62 Ghazal 84 Ghose, Anindita 25–26 Ghose, Aurobindo 25–26, 28–36, 38–39, 41, 43–49, 53, 59–60, 67–73, 75–76, 97–98, 105, 109–10, 135, 207–09 acquittal of 71 Bande Mataram 59 Bhawani Mandir 47 in Britain 207 Shall India be Free? 67 The Doctrine of Passive Resistance 31–49, 59–60, 67, 109 Ghose, Barindra 31, 67, 70 Godfrey, Dr. William 161 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 29–30, 45, 69, 89–91, 102, 104–05, 127, 165 Golden Temple, Amritsar 189, 202 Goods/Products American, boycott by Chinese 25 British 39, 40, 62, 66 boycott of 40, 66 foreign 27, 29, 42 Indian-manufactured 26 indigenous 27 Russian 56 swadeshi 26, 64 Governance 52, 54, 58, 73 British 52 forms of 58 Government of Bihar and Orissa 134 Government of India 66, 80, 104, 115, 133, 172–74, 185, 197 Government of India Act of 1919 172 Government property, destruction of 181  

261

INDEX Gramsci, Antonio 4, 93 Greeks 32 Grievances 4–5, 63, 66, 102, 106, 117, 131, 141, 178, 180, 209–10 peasants 66, 141 Griffith, Arthur 52–53, 58, 59 The Resurrection of Hungary 58 Guerrilla 13, 59, 95 warfare theory 13 Guha, Ranajit 3–4, 7–8, 111 Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India 8 Gujarat 2–3, 8–9, 17, 19, 33, 127–29, 135, 137, 140–44, 185, 200–201, 209 peasants of 8, 140, 209 grievances in 209 nationalists in 8 Gujarat famine of 1899–1900 137 Gujarati language 84, 86, 91, 94, 96, 161–62 Gujaratis 90, 140 Gujranwala 183, 187, 191 Gurkha(s) 64, 181, 189 soldiers 62, 181 Hamidia Islamic Society 82–83 Hamidia mosque, Johannesburg 82, 88 Haq, Fazlul 196 Harari,Yuval Noah 173 Hardiman, David Gandhi in His Time and Ours 10 Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat 17 Hartal 81–82, 180–83, 185, 193, 210 tactic of 81 Hawker/Hawking 81–82, 87, 91 illegal 87 Hijrat 106 Hill, Christopher 1

262

Hilton, Rodney 1 Hind Swaraj 90–98, 105–06, 162, 184, 209 Hinduism 97, 99, 165 fundamentalist 165 Hindus and Muslims 48, 65, 72, 75, 90, 132, 162, 181, 183–84, 195, 207 enmity 93 riots 48 Hindu(s) 9, 18, 23, 25, 28, 33–34, 44–46, 48–49, 62–65, 72, 75, 80, 82, 84–85, 88, 90, 93, 97, 99–100, 132, 140, 149, 159, 162–63, 165, 169, 181–84, 187–88, 192, 195–96, 207, 209 Bengali 25 Bengali-speaking 23 fundamentalist 9 high caste 9 identity 34 landlord 48 low caste 9 middle-class 65 moneylenders 23 nationalists 18, 46, 48 orthodox 169 patriot 88 philosophy 80 religious idioms 48 ritual 44 urban 65 Hisar 181 Historians/History 2–3, 5–6, 22 colonial 6 elitist 5 Indian 14–15, 17, 79 Indian nationalism 1, 19 nationalist-elite 6 radical 1 social 1, 3, 18 statist 6

INDEX subaltern 4–9 writing, traditions of 12 Hobhouse, Emily, British social reformer 104 Hobsbawm, Eric 1 Holland, Robert, the British Agent in Rajputana 125 Homén, Viktor Theodor 54–55, 57 Home Rule 52, 94, 106, 127–28, 172, 175, 177, 206 movement 52 Home Rule League 52, 128, 172, 175, 177 agitation 175 Hooligans 41 Horniman, B.G. 193 House of Commons 52, 99, 195, 198 House of Lords 199 Hudson, Havelock, General Sir 195 approved Dyer’s action 195 Humiliation 85, 198, 200 physical 200 racial 198 Hungarian movement/struggle 51–52 Hungarian Parliament 51 Hungary 50–52, 58 Hunter Commission 196–99 Hunter, William 195 Husain, Liakat 62 Hyslop, Jonathan 80  

Ibbetson, Denzil, Governor of the Punjab 66 Identity 29, 34, 156, 162, 180 Hindu 34 national 29, 162, 180 Ideology 12, 21, 82–83, 92 imitative 92 of protest movement 82–83 paternalistic benevolence 21

Immigration 25, 79, 86 Immigration Restrictions Act 86 Imperialism 199, 201–02, 204 Imports 26, 62, 63 Independence 14, 19, 29–31, 35, 38, 40, 58, 67, 75, 77, 87, 100, 144, 202 absolute 31 complete 29, 30 effective 58 national 67, 77 India British policy in 1 British rule in 28, 200, 203, 211 end of 28 campaign of attrition against the Muslim minority 9 forms of protest in 17 Gandhian period 17, 73 Gandhi’s leadership in 155 independent 6 nationalism in, extremist 88 passive resistance in 21 political climate in 9 political system of 7 protest in nationalist campaign of 24 revolutionary movement in 173 struggle for independence 14 India House 88 Indian Army 65, 67, 172 Indian Civil Service 32–33, 135 Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act 72 Indian Government 197, 199 Indian ‘Mutiny’—alleged threat in 1919 199 Indian National Congress 3, 19, 23–24, 28–31, 33–34, 43, 61, 65, 69, 70, 74, 77, 80, 82, 89, 92, 98, 123–24, 127–29, 131, 156, 186, 196, 200, 204–05

263

INDEX Amravati session 1897 61 Amritsar session 1919 124, 196 Calcutta session 1906 30 Extremist wing 29–30, 65 formed in 1885 19, 23 Gandhian 31 Hindu-dominated 23 Lucknow session 1916 128, 131 methods of 80 politics 24 Subjects Committee 30 Surat session 1907 69–70 Indian nationalism 1–2, 3–4, 19, 31, 45, 48–49, 92, 156, 204 attack on 92 history of 1, 19 Indian nationalist 1–2, 6, 13–14, 17, 19, 23, 32, 40, 45–46, 49, 53, 58, 59, 79, 90, 92–93, 102, 110, 116, 119, 123, 127, 153, 172, 174–75, 195, 207–08 moderate 1 movement 2, 6, 13–14, 19, 79, 110, 116, 119, 127, 153 radical 93 sentiments 79 Indian(s) cotton, excise duty on 34 diaspora 97 discriminatory legislation against 99 educated 23, 86 freedom fighters 2, 209 impoverishment 30 in South Africa 81, 88, 100 middle-class 23, 174 patriotism 48 political discourse 33 politics 30–31, 154 social institutions 207 western-educated 23 Indian Opinion 82–84, 86–87, 99, 161–62

264

Secret of Satyagraha 87 Indian Sociologist 88 India Press Act 72 India Relief Bill 104 Indigo 21, 113, 129–30, 133–34 planters 113, 129 processing factories 129 refusal to grow 130 stop cultivating 133 system of producton 133–34 Indu Prakash 33 New Lamps for Old 33 Industrialists 5 Industries 27, 39, 58, 65 Indian 65 indigenous 27 swadeshi 39 Influenza epidemic of 1918 49 Injustice 10–11, 40, 107, 120, 137, 146, 149, 194, 202 appeal against 11 social 10 Insurgency 4, 12, 102, 116 peasant 102 success rate of 12 Insurrection 7–8, 11, 22, 63 forms of 11 Intellectuals 7, 28, 32, 80 Jewish 80 western 7 Intervention 10–11, 19, 31, 85, 179 nonviolent 10–11 Invincibility 22 Ireland 1, 32, 37–39, 52–53, 58, 73, 198 Irish 25, 29, 32, 37, 39, 52–53, 58, 127, 154, 206 Home Rule 52, 127 nationalists 29, 32 demand of 29 obstructionist methods of 127

INDEX self-rule 52 system of education 58 Irish Plan of Campaign 39 Irving, Miles, DeputyCommissioner 188 Islam 32, 99 Italy 1, 51 Jadhav, Madhavrao 34 Jagirdars 115–17, 121, 124–25, 210 Jagirs 115–26 campaign against 118 courts 121 Jainism 166 Jallianwalla Bagh 181, 183, 189, 195–96, 198, 203–04 Dyer ordered to open fire without giving any advance warning 189 massacre in 203 Japan 25, 36, 60 Jayakar, M.R. 196 Jewish intellectuals 80 Jhadav, Madhavrao 35 Johannesburg 80, 82–86, 88, 90–91, 99–101, 161 Johnson, Frank, Colonel 191–92 Jugantar 31, 67–68 Jullundar 188, 197 Justice 11, 39, 80, 108, 112, 116, 121, 127, 143, 175, 178, 198, 201–02 common sense of 11 principles of 11, 175 British 175 system of 39  

Kagal in Finland 56, 59 Kallenbach, Hermann 80, 102–03 Karmayogin 72, 73 Karnataka 128 Kasur 187, 192

Kathiawad 105, 208 Kemp, F.E., police superintendent 28 Kesari 72 Khan, Afzal, Mughal general 46 Khandesh peasants 113 Khan, Sir Umar Hayat 195 Kheda District 3, 17, 127, 135–36, 138, 140–44, 146–47, 149–53, 155–57, 167, 171–72, 175, 183, 186, 192–93, 201, 210 Kheda Satyagraha of 1918 17, 127, 135–53, 172, 175 King, Mary, the US civil rights activist and scholar 10, 14 Vykom Satyagraha of 1924–25 14 Kitchlew, Said-ud-Din 181, 183, 186, 202 arrest and deportation of 186 Koran 86 Kossuth, Lajos 50 Kothari, Madho Singh 123 Krishnavarma, Shyamji 67, 88 Kruegler, Christopher 14 Kurlansky, Mark 13 Nonviolence:The History of a Dangerous Idea 13 Kurtz, Lester 14 Labour/Labourer 79, 88, 98, 102–03, 105, 117–19, 130, 138–39, 141, 148 agricultural 139 forced 118 free 117, 119, 141 hired 130 indentured 79, 98, 102, 105 Indian 102–03 mine 102 Lahore 174, 183, 187–88, 191–92 trials in 174 Land League in Ireland 52

265

INDEX Landlordism 77 Landlord/Landowner 5, 8, 21–22, 28, 39–40, 48, 52–53, 63, 65, 77, 111–13, 129, 133, 135, 137–38, 143–44, 147, 151, 156, 184, 210 Hindu 48 indigenous 129, 156 interests 8 local 112, 210 loyalist 22, 28 Lands Act of 1881 (Ireland) 53 Land-tax settlement 113 Language 23, 27, 30–31, 33, 51, 54–55, 67, 72, 84, 91, 93, 111, 113, 123, 157, 161, 197, 211 Bengali 23–28, 31, 34, 45–47, 61, 67, 69–70, 140, 154, 207 English 27, 30, 33, 67 German 51 Gujarati 84, 86, 91, 94, 96, 161–62 Hungarian 51 Marathi 23, 24, 140 Russian 55 Urdu 62, 161, 189 Lassalle, Ferdinand 50 Lawler, James Fintan 52 Lawlessness 62, 136, 194 Leader/Leadership 1–2, 5, 14, 16, 18, 27–29, 34, 36, 48, 52, 59–60, 62–63, 69–70, 76–77, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 92, 101–03, 105–06, 110, 114–15, 117–20, 122–24, 127–28, 130–31, 133, 136, 140, 144–45, 147–48, 152, 155–56, 176, 180–81, 183–87, 196, 202, 204–05, 209–11 caste 83 community 83 directions of 2 educated 118

266

local 16, 120, 133, 180, 209–10 middle-class 16 Muslim 62 nationalist 136 political 86, 88, 105 public-spirited 2 qualities of 205 realistic 27 upper-class 184 village 131, 145 Legislation of 1901 against middleclass 23 Liberty 37–38, 43–44, 124, 177, 198 political 124 London School of Economics 1 London University 1 Lord Chelmsford 177–78, 194, 196, 204 Lord Curzon 23–24, 34, 199 Lord Hardinge 103 Lord Morley 95 Lord Willingdon 147 Low, D.A. 2, 3 Congress and the Raj 3 Loyalism 198, 204  

Maconochie, Evan 137 Madras City 179, 183 Madras Presidency 128, 177–78 Mahabharata, the 149 Maharana of Mewar 116–17, 124 Maharashtra 23, 28, 34, 45–46, 77, 174, 177 Maharatta 59 Majority Report, Hunter Commission 1920 197 Malaviya, M.M. 175, 196 Mamlatdar 141–42, 145–46, 149–51 Mao Zedong 7 power grows out of the barrel of a gun 7  

INDEX Maratha cavalry 140 Marcos, Ferdinand, downfall of 10 Marriages 49, 98–99, 105, 117, 180, 191 Indian 99, 105 tax 117 Marsden, Assistant Commissioner at Kasur 192 Martial Law Commission 201–02 Martyr 43 Marwaris 184 Marx, Karl 7, 50, 53 Mass(es) campaign 2 engagement 6 interests of 4, 8 mobilisation 11, 207, 212 movements 1, 16, 82, 98, 106 paternalistic concern for 22 power of 12 processions 26 protest 9, 25 Matar Taluka (Kheda District) 145–46, 151 Mayaram, Shail 6 Mediation 10 Meetings and processions 25–26, 28, 30–31, 41, 60–62, 65–66, 71, 74, 76, 82–84, 90, 101, 103, 122–23, 128, 130, 145–47, 152, 180–83, 186, 188, 197, 198, 205 ban on 198 confrontational 30 mass 26, 65, 101, 128, 181 political 60, 74, 76 public 66, 82, 128, 180 secret 31 Mehta, Pherozeshah 29–30, 69–70, 127 Mentality 6, 34, 149, 160 subaltern 6

Mewar 115–17, 119–24, 126, 210 Meyer, Eric 169 Middle class 1–2, 3, 9, 16, 23, 33, 50, 56–57, 65, 110, 131, 156, 174, 184, 191–92, 204 educated 23, 131 leaders 16 legislation of 1901 against 23 nationalists 3 outsiders 2 urban 65, 110 Militancy 9 Military French 7 revolt 36 US 7 Milossevic, Slobodan downfall of 10 Minorities 9, 21, 23, 37, 45, 97, 164, 207 Minority Report, Hunter Commission 1920 197 Mitra Mandal (Friends’ Association), Bijoliya 118 Mobilisation 5, 11, 82, 84, 126, 157, 180, 207–09, 212 mass 11, 207, 212 subaltern 5 ‘Mobocracy’ 8–9 Moderates 29, 30, 43, 69–70, 72, 79, 89, 91–92, 127–29 Modern India 3, 13 Monarchy 50, 52 dual 52 Moneylenders 21, 23, 77, 111, 136 Hindu 23 professional 77 Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms 176, 196, 204 Montagu, Edwin, the Secretary of State for India 172, 174, 176, 194, 196–99, 204  

267

INDEX Moral force 1, 73, 87, 179 Moral inferiority 25 Morality 38, 46, 86, 90, 94, 134, 156, 211 Morley, John, Secretary of State for India 29, 38, 72, 95 Morley–Minto constitutional reforms 1909 72 Morning Post 199 Motherland 25, 44, 46–47, 207 Movements 1–4, 6–10, 12–14, 16–19, 24–28, 31, 34–36, 40–43, 46–58, 60–68, 73–77, 79–80, 82–85, 89–92, 97–100, 104–11, 113, 116, 118–27, 130–31, 133–35, 137, 140, 145–46, 151–53, 155–56, 162, 165, 172–74, 179, 184, 190, 192, 203–07, 209–10, 212 all-India 3 anti-reservation 9 elite-led 6 frequency of 12 Hungarian 51 ideology 82–83 irresistible 42 mass 1, 16 national 14, 204 nationalist 1–2, 4, 6, 13–14, 19, 25, 40–41, 50, 65, 68, 74, 79, 110, 116, 118–20, 127, 153, 165, 173, 190, 207, 210 Naxalite 8 nonviolent 10, 12, 172 organized 184 peasants 3, 64 phases of 6 racial discrimination 17 reform 74 revivalist 65 revolutionary 46, 173 social 8

268

suffragette 49, 209 violence 89 well-organised 62 Mukherji, Nani Gopal 154 Muslim/Mahomedan 9–10, 23, 25, 45–46, 48–49, 61–65, 72, 75, 81–82, 84–85, 90, 93, 97–100, 132, 139–40, 162–63, 165, 180–85, 187–88, 192, 195–96, 207, 209 artisans and workers 187 human rights of 10 leaders 62 low class 62 merchant 81 murderous attacks on 9 peasantry 62 religious sentiment 62 revivalism 48 rule 46 ruling class 48 Musser, Daniel 164 Non-resistance Asserted 164 Mutiny 71, 188, 195, 204 Mutual defence 39 Nadiad 141, 143–47, 151–53, 186, 200 Naidoo, Thambi 101 Nair, Sir Sankaran 194 Naoroji, Dadabhai 30, 91 Narodniks 63 Natal 82, 87, 98–103, 110 agrarian protest in 110 Natal Indian Congress 82, 98 Natarajan, Kamakashi 176 National anthem 47 autonomy 50, 67 confusion and weakness 36 culture 51 defence 43 discipline 36

INDEX education 27, 30, 63, 69 emancipation 43 honour 45 identity 29, 162, 180 independence 67, 77 National Extremist Conference banned by government 72 Nationalism 1–4, 19, 31, 34–35, 45, 48–49, 59–60, 65, 67, 88, 92, 140, 156, 204 development of 4 extremist 67, 88 Indian 1–4, 19, 31, 45, 48–49, 92, 156, 204 muscular 140 nonviolent 19 overarching 3 radical 35 radical strands of 34 Nationalist 1–6, 8, 13–14, 16–19, 23–36, 38–41, 45–46, 48–50, 53, 58–59, 64–65, 67–68, 70–71, 74, 76–77, 79, 88–90, 92–95, 102, 105, 110, 113, 116, 118–20, 123–24, 126–29, 131, 137, 140–56, 165, 172–77, 182–83, 185–87, 189–90, 192, 194–96, 200–12 agitations, participation in 3 agitators 3, 67 arbitration 39 belief 26 elites 5–6, 65 failure of 5 English-educated 146 European movements 207 extremist 18, 65, 173–74, 176–77 Hindu 18, 46, 48 historians 2 Indian 2, 6, 13–14, 19, 40, 59, 79, 102, 110, 116, 119, 127, 153, 174, 207

Irish 29, 32 leaders 136 local 28 middle-class 3 moderate 45, 175–76 peasant 8 politicians 113, 196 propaganda 3 protest 2, 5 radical 2, 29, 38, 88, 94, 165, 174–76 sentiments 23, 79 upper-class 64 urban 64–65, 77 National resistance 57 National self-determination 52 Navagam village (Kheda District) 151–53 Naxalite(s) movement 8 Nehru, Jawaharlal 2, 67, 202 Nehru, Motilal 196 Nepstad, Sharon 15 Newspapers 27, 31, 54, 56, 61, 66, 72, 90, 98, 119, 122–23, 137, 159, 180–81, 184, 193, 199, 202 censorship on 181 loyalist 199 Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act 72 Noncooperation 30, 35, 40, 54–55, 68, 145, 206, 210 campaign of 30 Noncooperation Movement 8, 16, 18–19, 205, 212 Nonrecognition 54–55, 206 Non-resistance 163–64, 206–07 Christian 207 Nonviolence 5, 8, 10–14, 17–19, 87, 123, 125, 132, 134, 155–57, 159–63, 167–70, 180, 193, 205, 207–12

269

INDEX as a successful method of struggle 14 form of 17, 160 Gandhian 8, 155, 211–12 mental 168 physical 168 strict 134, 157, 193, 207, 210 verbal 168 Nonviolent 8, 10–19, 21, 24, 31, 53, 60, 73, 111, 113–14, 126–27, 132, 155, 165, 167–69, 171–72, 176, 203–04, 207–12 campaigns 21 conflicts 14, 17 strategic 14 discipline 11 dissent 10 intervention 10–11 means 13, 60, 167 method, advantages of 11 movements 10, 12, 172 nationalism 19 protest 13, 18, 114, 211 radical 15 resistance 12–15, 18–19, 53, 73, 113, 127, 168, 171, 204, 207, 209 literature on 12, 14, 18–19, 204 notion of 18 strategy 12, 15–16, 18, 73 struggles 11, 16, 155 future of 19 history of 17 No-rent campaign 52, 113 North Bengal 7 North Bihar 129–30 Northern Ireland 198 Obedience 12, 36, 41, 59, 63, 111, 198, 205 absolute 63 enforced 198

270

slavish 59 O’Brian, Colonel 191 Occupation 12, 200 foreign 12 O’Dwyer, Sir Michael 174, 181, 183, 186, 192, 194–99 Offences, criminal 22, 41 Oppression 4, 8, 12, 32, 37, 58, 65, 67, 72, 77, 114, 117–18, 137, 155–56, 164, 187 extra-legal 137, 155 forms of 137 retaliation against 187 semi-feudal 8 Optimism 8, 27 Orientalists 93 Orissa 24, 129, 134 Ostracism 53, 66 Ottoman caliph, British threat to 180 Outrage 37, 43, 173 Overy, Bob 15–17 Pabna District 76, 113–14 Pacifism 167 Pal, Bipinchandra 28–30, 59, 61, 67–69, 72, 76, 209 Palme Dutt, Rajani 8 Pamphlets and leaflets 27, 47–48, 54, 56–57, 61–62, 90, 184, 193 Pandey, Gyanendra 3 Pandya, Mohanlal 141, 148, 152, 210 Parekh, Gokaldas 137, 141 Parnell, Charles Stewart 32, 37, 52–53 Parochialism 45 Parsis 84, 182 Passive resistance 17, 21, 24, 30, 35, 37–39, 41–46, 49–50, 52–55, 58–60, 64, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79–83, 86–89, 93, 96–99,

INDEX 104–06, 128, 161–64, 194, 206–07 campaigns of 49, 52–53, 58, 60, 80, 82, 99, 104, 161–62 credibility of 58 Doctrine of by Aurobindo Ghose 31–49, 59–60, 67, 109 forms of 39, 44, 207 method of 105, 163 organised 37 principles of 54 strategy and practice of 53 Passiver widerstand 50 Patel, Vallabhbhai 2, 144, 146–47, 151–52, 201 Patel, Vithalbhai 141 Pathik, Vijay Singh 120–26, 210 Patidar land 150 Patidars 138–41, 143–46, 148, 150–51, 153, 157, 186 Patriotism 25, 48–49, 76, 91, 164 Indian 48 Peace 12, 15, 22, 38, 41–42, 63, 72, 94, 107, 114, 129, 133, 140 activism 12, 15 morality of 38 public 72 Peace News 15 Pearson, W.W. 104 Peasant(s)/Peasantry 3–4, 7–9, 12, 23, 34, 40, 50, 57, 62–67, 75, 77, 102, 106, 109–27, 129–49, 152–53, 156, 174, 184, 186, 188–89, 191–92, 204, 209–10 demands of 119 ex-indentured 110 grievances of 66, 141, 210 Indian 111, 140 insurgencies 102 insurrection 8 Jat 192 Maharashtrian 113  

Mahomedan 62 movements 3, 64 nationalists 8 politics 156 poor 102, 112, 130–31, 133, 137–39, 146, 156 protesters 130 rebels 7 resistance of 131 revolts, violence of 8 richer 77, 130, 144 rights of 64 rural 204 torture of 145 violence against 109 Penal code 22 People’s war 13 Permit Office 84 Philippines, the 10 Phoenix Settlement 102 Physical force 1, 35, 93, 138, 167, 179, 200, 206–07 Picket brigades 83 Plague in 1906–7 64 Plague Office 84 Plague outbreak of 1896–97 34 Plantations and mines 98, 101–02 Plato 86, 184 Defence and Death of Socrates 184 Poems/Poetry 32, 46, 84, 118, 120, 122, 162, 203 devotional 84 nationalistic 118 Polak, Henry 80, 90, 100, 102–03 Polish Solidarity movement 10 Political action, forms of 18 agents 115 agitation 75–76 agitator 34 autonomy 30 campaign 77

271

INDEX climate 9 conflict 1 consciousness 18 divides 93 engagement 3, 8, 10, 13, 89 freedom 27, 36, 75 killing 34 leaders 86, 88, 105 liberty 124 meetings 60, 74, 76 organisation 36, 43, 74 power 5 programme 27 rallies 27 self-determination 5 struggle 44 violence 173 will 4 Politicians 7, 17, 74–75, 79, 113, 174, 196, 199 elite 17 Labour 199 nationalist 113, 196 white 79 Politics 4–6, 8–9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 23–24, 30–31, 44, 74, 127–28, 139, 154, 156, 165, 174, 179, 203, 208, 212 Congress 24 elite 4 Gandhian 8 global 24 Indian 30–31, 154 of attrition 9 of dissent 9 of hatred 9 of petitioning 23 of terror 11 of the elites and masses 18 peasant 156 populist 6 subaltern 4, 6

272

Polygamy 99 Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 113 Poor and marginalised 16, 18, 75 Populism 6 Poverty 6, 16, 129 agrarian 129 causes of 6 mass 6 Power 2, 4–7, 11–12, 21–26, 29, 36–38, 41, 47–48, 50, 53, 56–58, 60, 66, 72, 81, 84–85, 92, 95, 97, 112, 114–16, 119, 126–27, 132–33, 138–42, 144, 156, 161, 163, 169, 172, 174–76, 179–80, 187, 207, 211 abuse of 141, 156 actual 7 arbitrary 175, 180 Asian 25 centres 115 change of 11 class 6, 23 constitutional 2, 4 cultural 53 devolution of 21, 127, 172 elite 5 extraordinary 25, 132 hereditary 112 ideological relations of 169 imperial 23, 26, 140 judicial 21 material 97 military 114 miraculous 5, 211 of masses 12 oppressive structures of 5 political 5 relationship of 6 social relations of 169 spiritual 207 structures of 5, 58 supernatural 5

INDEX threat to 5 transfer of 2 Pratap 123 Pratt, Frederick, Commissioner of the Northern Division 142, 147 Pretoria 81, 83, 85 Princely India 17, 113 Private Members’ Bills 52 Propaganda 3, 35, 76, 106, 122, 128, 178 Bolshevik 178 nationalist 3 public 35 revolutionary 35 Prose 203 Protest 1–5, 9, 13, 15–18, 21, 24–28, 30, 34, 39, 41, 48–49, 53–54, 56–57, 60, 64–67, 77, 81–84, 87, 90–91, 97–100, 102, 106–10, 112–19, 122, 124–25, 127–28, 130, 134–35, 141, 143–45, 153–54, 157, 160–61, 166, 171–72, 175–85, 188–89, 192–95, 200, 203, 205–06, 208–12 agrarian 110, 135 civil 90, 160–61, 206 diversity of 3 civil 17 elite 5 forms of 5, 13, 17, 49, 108, 128, 135, 157, 176, 179–80 language of 157, 211 legitimised 208 mass 9, 25 method of 4, 97, 179 nationalist 2, 5 nonviolent 13, 18, 114, 211 global 24 politics and political nature of 5 street 200 subaltern 5

violent 157, 211 Prussia 50 Prussian 50, 200 bourgeoisie 50 brutishness 200 monarchy 50 Publicity 30, 54, 60, 103, 119, 134, 150, 195 Punishments 22, 55, 62, 96, 102, 111, 121, 124, 137, 147, 159–60, 191–92, 198, 200 arbitrary 192 collective 191–92, 198 corporal 22, 160 exemplary 147 physical 96, 124 Punjab 18, 23, 29, 64–68, 77, 92, 109, 172, 174, 181, 183, 185–89, 192–97, 199–202, 204, 209, 211 agitation 66 British killings in 194 canal tracts of 64 hartals in 183 Hindu moneylenders in 23 Quit India Movement of 1942 16 Races, coloured 103 Racial discrimination 17, 25, 74 movement against 17 humiliation 198 Radical circles 7 nationalism 35 nationalist 2, 29, 38, 88, 94, 165, 174–76 nonviolent tradition 15 objectives 5 tradition 18 Rai, Lala Lajpat 29–30, 65–66, 69, 72, 77, 165–66, 209

273

INDEX Raja Harishchandra 149 Rajasthan 115, 117, 120, 124–26 feudal polity of 126 Rajasthan Kesari 124 Rajputana Madhya Bharat Sabha 124 Rallies 27, 101, 183, 203 organised 101 Ramakrishna Mission 73–74 Ramayana, the 149 Ram temple 9 Ranade, M.G. 33 Randle, Michael 15 Rape 26 Rationality 64 Rawls, John 11 Rebellion 22, 34, 103, 195 armed 34 Rebellion of 1857–58 22 Reformist demands 6 Regime change 12 Registration Act of 1907 81, 84, 86, 91 Religion 5, 29, 44, 47–48, 55, 65, 80, 84, 140, 148, 162–63, 165–66, 180, 207 Eastern 80 Hindu 140 Lutheran 55 Religious antagonisms 16 authorities 21 divides 24, 93, 97, 207 faith 14 idioms 48 networks 6 reform movement 74 revivalism 48 revivalist movement 65 sensibilities 82 sentiment 62 tensions 63  

274

tolerance 84 violence 9 Renan, Ernest, French intellectual 32 Rent-refusal 40 Repression 12, 39, 60, 62, 76, 106, 120, 164, 172, 176, 192, 198, 209, 211 means of 60 Reservations for disadvantaged groups 9 Resistance 7, 11–15, 17–19, 24–25, 30, 34–47, 49–60, 64–65, 67, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79–83, 86–89, 93, 96–99, 104–06, 111, 113–15, 127–28, 131, 134, 137, 140, 149, 157, 160–64, 166, 168, 171, 181, 187, 194, 202, 204, 206–11 active 34, 43, 73 act of 47 aggressive 42 American colonies 40 Boers 34 civil 15, 45, 99, 105, 161, 168, 207–08 forms of 24, 39, 50, 114, 157, 164, 211 nonviolent 24 methods of 210 national 18, 57 notion of 18 nonviolent 12–15, 18–19, 53, 73, 113, 127, 168, 171, 204, 207, 209 organised 36 method of 17, 161 organised 37 Doctrine of 31, 35, 38, 59–60, 67, 109 peaceful 37 principled 160

INDEX public 35 theory of 52 violent 50 Retaliation 43, 45, 187, 208 Revivalist movement 65 Revolt 8, 25, 36–38, 40, 50, 66, 96, 111, 114, 120, 174, 188, 202, 207 armed 37–38, 40, 207 violent 38, 96 Revolt of 1857–58 111, 120, 199 suppression of 114 Revolution 11, 32–33, 36, 50, 57, 60, 63, 66, 73, 164, 172, 186, 195 sanguinary 36 violent 11, 32, 66, 164 Revolution in Europe 1848 50 Revolutionary(ies) 8, 11, 13, 32, 35, 46, 50, 53, 59, 62–64, 66–67, 70–72, 118, 120, 126, 154, 172–74, 186, 195, 209–10 American 154 armed struggle 64, 210 associations 72 incitement 50 Japanese 35 movement 46, 173 propaganda 35 Russian 35 underground 62 violence 8, 53 violent 195, 209 Rigby, Andrew 15 Rights 10, 43, 50, 56, 63–64, 66, 79–80, 96, 98–99, 103, 122, 124, 148, 166, 201 citizenship 79 civil 10, 103, 166 farmers 148 human 10 land 66, 122

of movement 104 peasants 64 recognition of 103 residency 99 tenant 63 Rioting in Bengal in 1906 and 1907 63 Riots 37, 48, 63–64, 186, 200 communal 64 Ritual 44, 112, 184 Robertson, Sir Benjamin 104 Romans 32 Rowlatt Acts 175, 177, 211 Rowlatt Bills 175 Rowlatt legislation 177, 180, 203 Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 3, 16, 18, 123, 153, 171–72, 193, 203 Rowlatt, Sir Sidney 173 Royal Proclamation 202 Rule of codified law 22 Rumours 55, 66, 102, 133, 180 Rural India 17 Ruskin, John 86, 93, 140, 184 Unto This Last 184 Russia 25, 37–38, 51, 53, 56–58, 60, 63, 155, 172, 206 crisis of 1905 57 Russian 54–57, 164 administration in Finland 57 censorship laws 56 empire 206 invasion 71 law 54 Ryotwari 122 Sacrifice 44–45, 66, 70, 76, 84, 95–96, 111, 149, 154, 160, 162, 168, 179, 182 animals 160 Sahajanand, Swami 140 Salt Satyagraha of 1930 2, 13–15 SanatanVeda Dharma Sabha 82

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INDEX Sanataran, K. 196 Sangh Parivar 9 Sanitation 16, 43 Santiniketan 76 Sarkar, Sumit 9, 21, 24, 27, 70, 75, 77, 148, 192 definition of swadeshi 27 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7 TheWretched of the Earth 7 Satyagraha 2–3, 13–18, 86–87, 96, 100, 123, 134, 140, 143–44, 149, 151–53, 161, 164, 168, 171–72, 175–79, 184, 193, 203, 205–07 principles of 178, 193 Satyagraha Pledge 175, 177 Satyagrahi 184 Satyapal, Dr 181, 183, 186, 202 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 88 Schlesin, Sonia 80 School of Oriental and African Studies 1–2 Schools and colleges 26–27, 29 establishment of 29 government-sponsored 27 Scotland 31 Secession 12 Secularism 127 Sedition 40, 60, 62, 68, 72–73, 88, 122, 173, 190–91 charges 62 committee 173 Seditious Meetings Ordinance 62 Self-control 205 Self-defence 42–43, 103, 168 Self-denial 36 Self-determination 5, 52–53, 64, 206 national 52 political 5 social 5 Self-development 36, 40, 43, 74  

 

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Self-empowerment 74 Self-government 30, 35, 43, 128, 136 Self-help 36, 65, 73–74, 77 policy of 65 Self-preservation 38 Self-production 42 Self-protection 39 Self-purification 154 Self-reliance 16, 29, 75 Indian 29 Self-respect 65, 73, 118, 143 Self-restraint 178 Self-rule 32, 38, 43, 50, 52, 129 Irish 52 Self-sacrifice 44, 76, 84, 168, 179 Selfishness 33, 42, 155 Sentiment 27, 62, 207 nationalist 23, 79 religious 62 Separatism 48 Serbia 10 Settlement between Austria and Hungary of 1867 51 Seva Samiti (Service Association) 122 Shah of Iran, movement against 10 Sharp, Gene 10–14, 16 GandhiWields theWeapon of Moral Power 13 The Politics of Nonviolent Action 13, 16 Shastri, Srinivasa 177 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 32 Revolt of Islam 32 Sherman, Taylor C. 199–200, 203–04 Sherwood, Miss 188, 190–91, 198 Shivaji, Maratha ruler 34, 46–47 Shraddhanandji, Swami 181–82 Shukla, Raj Kumar 131–33, 210 Sikhs 65, 183, 187, 189, 202–03  

INDEX Sinn Féin 52, 58–59, 73 Sitaramdas, Sadhu 118–19, 122, 210 Slave 87, 149, 164 Smith, Henry, Lieutenant-Colonel 186 Smuts, Jan Christian 85–86, 91, 98, 101, 104, 106–08 Snellman, Johan Vihel 53 Social and religious reform movement 74 boycott 42, 57, 62, 83, 130, 133, 137, 208 campaign 77 capital 32 classes 19 conflict 1 discipline and punishment 62 events 191 excommunication 36, 42, 109 groups 2–3 hierarchy 22 injustice 10 institutions 207 movement 8 ostracism 66 pressures 109 reforms 22, 36, 122 movement 74 relations 53, 169 self-determination 5 system 127 transformation 5 Socialism 7 Songs 26–27, 31, 51, 76, 84–85, 119–20, 122, 197, 203 patriotic 26, 76 Soul-force 96–97, 166 use of 97 South Africa 17–18, 24–25, 34, 60, 67, 79, 81, 84–85, 87–90, 92,

97, 99–100, 103–08, 110, 140, 161–64, 166, 178–79, 207–09 campaign by Gandhi in 79–108, 162, 208 Government 103 Indians in 81, 88, 100, 110 M.K. Gandhi in 24 ‘passive resistance’ in 79 revolt of the Boers in 25 satyagraha in 179 South Gujarat 8 Spiritual 84, 207, 211 power 207 quality 84 Truth 211 Strike 37, 43, 47, 57, 95, 100–103, 107, 143, 154, 166, 180, 186 hunger 154, 180 millworkers 143 miners’ 102 railway 57, 107 Struggles 2–3, 5, 8, 10–11, 13–14, 16–19, 21, 31, 35–38, 42, 44, 46, 49–50, 52–54, 56, 59, 64, 67, 73, 76–77, 84–91, 97–100, 109, 111, 114–15, 127, 129, 132, 138, 144, 147, 151–56, 162, 164, 202, 204, 206, 208–10 all-India 19 anti-British 3 armed 35, 46, 50, 54, 59, 64, 76–77, 89, 97, 208–10 civil 38 decisive 8 for independence 14 local 21 nonviolent 11, 16, 155 political 44 united 2 Subaltern 3–9, 18, 114 classes 5, 114  

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INDEX communities 9 consciousness 5 mentality 6 mind-set 5 mobilisation 5 politics 6 protest, political nature of 5 Subaltern Studies 3–4, 6–9, 18 criticisms of 7 Susruta Samhita 87 Sussex University 2 Swadesh Bandhab Samiti 75 Swadeshi 24, 26–30, 35, 39, 41, 47–48, 58–61, 63–65, 69, 73–75, 77, 80, 91–92, 99, 106, 109, 130–31, 140, 192, 209 goods 26 industries 39 preachers 61 store 61 Swadeshi Movement 24, 28, 35, 41, 47–48, 60–61, 65, 73–75, 77, 80, 91–92, 99, 106, 109, 130–31, 140, 192, 209 leadership of 28 Swadeshism 76 Swaraj 16, 30, 69, 87, 90–92, 94, 105–06, 111, 162, 176, 184, 209 Tagore, Rabindranath 25, 47–48, 64, 74–75, 142, 194 ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ speech of 1904 74 Tamils 82, 90, 98, 101 Tanjore 179 Tarabout, Gilles 169 Taxes and cesses 21–22, 34, 39–40, 51, 61, 64, 66, 98–105, 109–19, 121–25, 135–48, 150, 153, 175, 180–81, 201 abolition of 99, 102

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assessment 135, 137, 142 bureaucracy 144, 147 collecting system 138, 145 precolonial 138 demands 136–37, 139, 141 land 40, 109, 113, 135–37, 139– 41, 143, 147, 153, 180 collections 141 refusal of payment 135 marriage 117 methods to collect 22 poll 98, 105, 201 refusal of payment 39–40, 51, 66, 109, 121, 181 water 64 Tea and indigo-planters 21 Tensions 9, 17–18, 63, 84, 162, 211 communal 84, 162 religious 63 Terror/Terrorism 11, 18, 26, 95, 173–74, 176, 198–200 politics of 11, 174 state 18, 198 war on 174 The Black Book (Finland) 57 Theosophical Society in India 127 Thompson, E.P. 1 Thoreau, Henry David 93 Three Fs in Ireland 53 Tidrick, Kathyrn 22 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar (B.G.) 28–30, 34, 45–46, 67, 69–70, 72, 77, 81, 119, 127–28, 172, 177, 196, 209 Times of India,The 137 Tinkathiya system 129–30, 134 Tolstoy Farm 90 Tolstoy, Leo 86, 90, 93, 140, 163–64, 167, 206 The Kingdom of God isWithinYou 163  

INDEX What I Believe 163 Traders 77, 81, 91, 98, 101, 182, 185 Transvaal 79–81, 83, 85–90, 98, 100–101, 105, 110 business and trading classes of 110 passive resistance in 105 Transvaal government 81, 85, 88 Treachery 42, 46 Treason 42 Truth-force 96 Tsarist Russia 25, 53 Tuteja, K.L. 203 Tybaji, Abbas 196 Tyranny 43, 47, 65, 84, 106, 111, 164, 168, 171 struggle against 164  

United Kingdom 43 Untouchability 16 Untouchables 22, 63, 74, 129, 139, 142 Uparmal Kisan Panch (Peasant Service Council) 120 Uprising 46, 66, 70 USA 7, 10, 25, 32, 45, 159, 206 Civil Rights movement in 10 immigration laws 25 military 7 Vaikom, Gandhi’s campaign in 1924–25 13, 14 Valorisation 7 Vedantism 44 Vegetarianism 160 Veth 141, 145 Vidal, Denis 169 Vidya Pracharini Sabha (Association for the Propagation of Education) 119–20 Vietnam war 7, 9

Village sanitation 16 Vincent, Sir William 178 Violence 2, 5, 7–12, 38, 44–46, 48, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 66, 83, 87–89, 95–96, 101, 107, 109, 111, 113–14, 123, 126, 128, 133–34, 139–40, 153–54, 157, 159–64, 167–69, 171, 173–74, 176–79, 184, 186–87, 190–91, 193–94, 196, 200, 203, 206–07, 210–12 acts of 2, 88, 96, 169, 173, 196 against crowds 200 application of 11 cathartic 7 communal 9 crowd 187, 191 efficacy of 178 endorsement of 206 enforced system of 55 escalating cycles of 95 excessive 7 extra-legal 134, 211 forms of 11, 46, 134 insurrection 11 instrument of 7 irrepressible 7 mental 168 movement 89 peasant revolt 8 police 109 political 173 post-Partition 10 religious 9 rely on 7 revolutionary 8, 11, 53 state/state-induced 12, 61 subterranean 177 use of 38, 45, 53, 66, 140, 160, 163 use of disciplinary 114 verbal 168 Viramgam 185–86

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INDEX Vivekananda, Swami 74 Wacha, Sir Dinshaw 176 Wardha 124 Warfare 10, 13, 59, 95, 139, 173 guerrilla 13, 59, 95 theory 13 Warwick University 10 Course on ‘Nonviolent Resistance: A Global History 1830–2000’ 10 Weber, Max 140 Western India 19, 23–24, 33, 35 Congress politics in 24 Western intellectuals 7 Wilson, Sir Henry, Chief of Staff in Britain 198 Women 11, 22, 26, 43, 49, 56, 71, 80, 99–100, 105, 111, 117, 123, 139, 147, 150–51, 167–68, 179, 188, 197, 205, 209 African 100 Asian 80 exploitation of 139 Hindu 100 honour of 99 Indian 99 lower caste 139 molestation of 123, 168 Muslim 100

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rape of 26 white 188 Wordsworth, William 32 Workers 4, 12, 16, 57, 79, 91, 98, 102–03, 106–07, 110, 130–32, 154, 182–83, 185–87, 193, 204 agricultural 110 illiterate 102 indentured 110 Indian 98, 103 industrial 16, 182 mill 182, 185 poor 98 textile 154, 185, 193 white-collar 79, 98 World War, First 130, 150, 172, 174 Worship 22, 43, 160, 178–79, 189 principle of 160 Xenophobia 55 Yagnik, Indulal 144–46, 151–52 Yajna 44 Zamindars 63, 113–14, 134 no-rent campaign against 113 protest against oppression 114 protest by tenants against 114 Zunes, Stephen 14