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Chapter 11: Mahatma Gandhi And The Nationalist Movement

On 12 March 1930, a thin, ageing man in a loincloth walked out of an ashram at Sabarmati and turned towards the sea. Behind him, at a careful distance, walked other men with a different job. They were police officials, deputed by the colonial government to watch him, to sit at the back of his village meetings, and to write down what he said.

Those watchers were not admirers. Yet it is their secret reports that now let us follow the march almost village by village. They copied out his speeches. They counted the crowds. They noticed that villagers of every caste came, and women as well as men, and that officials were resigning their government posts to join him. One District Superintendent of Police wrote to his superiors, in the flat language of duty, that Mr Gandhi appeared calm and collected, and was gathering more strength as he proceeded.

Higher up, the Home Department preferred not to believe it. Its confidential fortnightly reports described the march as a drama, an antic, a desperate effort to stir up people who were perfectly content under British rule.

Both things cannot be true. Somewhere between the spy’s notebook and the official’s summary lies the history of this chapter — and the skill of reading such sources against themselves is what you will practise here.

Fig. 11.0

Fig. 11.0 – The fortnightly report and the police notebook.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. Why did Mahatma Gandhi choose salt, of all things, as the law he would break? Q2. Why did peasants who had never met him believe he had miraculous powers? Q3. Why did B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi disagree about separate electorates? Q4. What can a secret police report tell us that its writer never meant to say? Q5. Why was Mahatma Gandhi absent from the celebrations of 15 August 1947? Keep these five questions with you as you read. This chapter answers every one of them.

11.1 A Leader Announces Himself

One Man, One Nation?

In the history of nationalism a single individual is often identified with the making of a nation. We associate Garibaldi with the making of Italy, George Washington with the American War of Independence, and Ho Chi Minh with the struggle to free Vietnam from colonial rule. In the same manner, Mahatma Gandhi has been regarded as the ‘Father’ of the Indian nation.

Nationalism, an idea you first met in earlier classes, is the belief that a people who share a land and a history should govern themselves rather than be ruled by outsiders. Movements built on that belief tend to gather around a name. The name becomes a shorthand for millions of people whose own names we never learn.

In so far as Gandhiji was the most influential and revered of all the leaders who participated in the freedom struggle, that characterisation is not misplaced. However, like Washington or Ho Chi-Minh, Mahatma Gandhi’s political career was shaped and constrained by the society in which he lived. For individuals, even great ones, are made by history even as they make history.

That last sentence is the argument of this whole chapter, so it is worth slowing down over. It does not say that Gandhiji was unimportant. It says that what he could do depended on what the society around him would accept, join, ignore or twist to its own purposes.

This chapter analyses Gandhiji’s activities in India during the crucial period 1915-1948. It explores his interactions with different sections of Indian society and the popular struggles that he inspired and led. It also introduces you to the different kinds of sources that historians use in reconstructing the career of a leader and of the social movements he was associated with.

Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.1 – Crowd at the Sabarmati riverbank, 1930.

Home After Two Decades

In January 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to his homeland after two decades of residence abroad. These years had been spent for the most part in South Africa, where he went as a lawyer, and in time became a leader of the Indian community in that territory.

As the historian Chandran Devanesan has remarked, South Africa was ‘the making of the Mahatma’. It was in South Africa that Mahatma Gandhi first forged the distinctive techniques of non-violent protest known as satyagraha — a method in which the protester refuses to obey a law he holds to be unjust, but neither hides from the punishment nor answers force with force. It was also in South Africa that he first promoted harmony between religions, and first alerted upper-caste Indians to their discriminatory treatment of low castes and women.

Notice how much is already there in that one sentence. The three causes that would occupy the rest of his life — non-violent resistance, Hindu-Muslim harmony, and the fight against caste discrimination — were not discovered in India. He brought them home with him.

Fig. 11.2

Fig. 11.2 – Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg, 1908.

The India He Came Back To

The India that Mahatma Gandhi came back to in 1915 was rather different from the one that he had left in 1893. Although still a colony of the British, it was far more active in a political sense.

The Indian National Congress now had branches in most major cities and towns. Through the Swadeshi movement of 1905-07 — the campaign, which you have met in earlier classes, to boycott foreign goods and use Indian-made ones instead — it had greatly broadened its appeal among the middle classes.

That movement had thrown up some towering leaders. Among them were Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra, Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal, and Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab. The three were known as ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’, the alliteration conveying the all-India character of their struggle, since their native provinces were very distant from one another.

Where these leaders advocated militant opposition to colonial rule, there was a group of ‘Moderates’ who preferred a more gradual and persuasive approach. The Moderates believed in petitioning the government, arguing their case in its councils and winning concessions step by step, rather than confronting it.

Among these Moderates was Gandhiji’s acknowledged political mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale — the senior figure whose judgement he trusted and whose advice he took. Also among them was Mohammad Ali Jinnah who, like Gandhiji, was a lawyer of Gujarati extraction trained in London.

That detail is worth holding on to. In 1915 the two men were not opponents. They belonged to the same broad political camp, had the same professional training, and came from the same region.

Q. If the Congress already had branches, leaders and a mass campaign behind it, what was left for Gandhiji to add?

A. A base outside the towns. The Congress of 1915 spoke mainly to the educated middle classes; the peasants and workers were not yet in it.

A Year Of Listening

On Gokhale’s advice, Gandhiji spent a year travelling around British India, getting to know the land and its peoples. A returning leader who begins by listening for twelve months is already telling us something about how he intended to work.

Fig. 11.3

Fig. 11.3 – Mahatma Gandhi arriving in Karachi, 1916.

Fig. 11.3 A press photograph, taken to show a public welcome. It shows that by 1916 crowds already gathered for him. It cannot tell you why they came — from belief, from curiosity, or because someone brought them.

The Speech At Banaras

His first major public appearance was at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in February 1916. Among the invitees to this event were the princes and philanthropists whose donations had contributed to the founding of the BHU. Also present were important leaders of the Congress, such as Annie Besant.

Compared to these dignitaries, Gandhiji was relatively unknown. He had been invited on account of his work in South Africa, rather than his status within India. He was, in other words, the least important person on that platform.

When his turn came to speak, Gandhiji charged the Indian elite with a lack of concern for the labouring poor. The opening of the BHU, he said, was ‘certainly a most gorgeous show’. But he worried about the contrast between the ‘richly bedecked noblemen’ present and ‘millions of the poor’ Indians who were absent.

Gandhiji told the privileged invitees that ‘there is no salvation for India unless you strip yourself of this jewellery and hold it in trust for your countrymen in India’. ‘There can be no spirit of self-government about us,’ he went on, ‘if we take away or allow others to take away from the peasants almost the whole of the results of their labour. Our salvation can only come through the farmer. Neither the lawyers, nor the doctors, nor the rich landlords are going to secure it.’

Read the last three sentences again slowly. He is not asking the rich to be kinder to the poor. He is saying that the rich in that hall — the lawyers, the doctors, the landlords — cannot deliver freedom at all, because freedom taken by a small class on behalf of everyone else would not be self-government.

The opening of the BHU was an occasion for celebration, marking as it did the opening of a nationalist university, sustained by Indian money and Indian initiative. But rather than adopt a tone of self-congratulation, Gandhiji chose instead to remind those present of the peasants and workers who constituted a majority of the Indian population, yet were unrepresented in the audience.

Who Was Missing From The Hall? The donors: a university built with Indian money is a nationalist victory in itself. Gandhiji: jewellery on the platform, and the millions who paid for it nowhere in the room. Both agree: the peasants and workers who were the majority of India were not in the audience.

What Gandhiji Said At Banaras Evidence: the words of the speech, quoted by historians from the reports of it. Reasoning: from them we can hear exactly whom he addressed, and what he accused them of. Limit: the speech records what he said. It does not record how the noblemen in the hall reacted, or whether a single one of them changed his mind.

Statement Of Fact, Statement Of Intent

Gandhiji’s speech at Banaras in February 1916 was, at one level, merely a statement of fact — namely, that Indian nationalism was an elite phenomenon, a creation of lawyers and doctors and landlords.

But, at another level, it was also a statement of intent. It was the first public announcement of Gandhiji’s own desire to make Indian nationalism more properly representative of the Indian people as a whole.

A statement of fact describes what is. A statement of intent announces what the speaker means to change. This single speech does both, which is why it is remembered.

A Peasant From Champaran

In the last month of that year, Gandhiji was presented with an opportunity to put his precepts into practice. At the annual Congress, held in Lucknow in December 1916, he was approached by a peasant from Champaran in Bihar.

The peasant told him about the harsh treatment of peasants by British indigo planters — European planters who grew indigo, a dye crop, on land worked by the local cultivators. Ten months after saying that India’s salvation could only come through the farmer, a farmer walked up to him and asked for help.

The sequence of these years is set out in Fig. 11.4.

Fig. 11.4

Fig. 11.4 – From South Africa To Champaran.

ITQ-1. Find out more about the national movement in India before 1915, and see whether Mahatma Gandhi’s comments about it are justified.

11.2 The Making And Unmaking Of Non-cooperation

Three Local Campaigns

Mahatma Gandhi was to spend much of 1917 in Champaran, seeking to obtain for the peasants security of tenure as well as the freedom to cultivate the crops of their choice. Security of tenure simply means the right to stay on the land you till and not be thrown off it at the landlord’s will.

The following year, 1918, Gandhiji was involved in two campaigns in his home state of Gujarat. First, he intervened in a labour dispute in Ahmedabad, demanding better working conditions for the textile mill workers. Then he joined peasants in Kheda in asking the state for the remission of taxes following the failure of their harvest.

These initiatives in Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda marked Gandhiji out as a nationalist with a deep sympathy for the poor. At the same time, these were all localised struggles. Each was fought over one district’s grievance, and each ended within that district.

Q. What was missing from Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda?

A. A single grievance that every Indian shared. Without one, there could be sympathy for the poor but no countrywide movement.

An Issue Handed To Him

Then, in 1919, the colonial rulers delivered into Gandhiji’s lap an issue from which he could construct a much wider movement. During the Great War of 1914-18, the British had instituted censorship of the press and permitted detention without trial. Detention without trial means the state can lock a person up without producing evidence before a judge.

These were emergency powers, taken for a war. Now, on the recommendation of a committee chaired by Sir Sidney Rowlatt, these tough measures were continued. The war was over; the emergency was not.

In response, Gandhiji called for a countrywide campaign against the ‘Rowlatt Act’. In towns across North and West India, life came to a standstill, as shops shut down and schools closed in response to the bandh call — a bandh being a general shutdown in which normal work and trade stop as a mark of protest.

The protests were particularly intense in the Punjab, where many men had served on the British side in the War — expecting to be rewarded for their service. Instead they were given the Rowlatt Act.

Gandhiji was detained while proceeding to the Punjab, even as prominent local Congressmen were arrested. The situation in the province grew progressively more tense, reaching a bloody climax in Amritsar in April 1919, when a British Brigadier ordered his troops to open fire on a nationalist meeting. More than four hundred people were killed in what is known as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

The Rowlatt Act, 1919 Wartime powers kept in peacetime → a grievance every province shares → bandh and shutdown across North and West India → Punjab, whose soldiers expected reward, protests hardest → leaders detained, tension rises → troops fire at Amritsar; over four hundred killed.

From Protest To Non-cooperation

It was the Rowlatt satyagraha that made Gandhiji a truly national leader. Emboldened by its success, Gandhiji called for a campaign of ‘non-cooperation’ with British rule.

The logic was simple and unfamiliar. A colonial state is not held up only by its army; it is held up by Indians who attend its schools, argue in its courts, staff its offices and pay its taxes. Withdraw all of that, and the machine slows down without a single blow being struck.

Indians who wished colonialism to end were therefore asked to stop attending schools, colleges and law courts, and not pay taxes. In sum, they were asked to adhere to a ‘renunciation of (all) voluntary association with the (British) Government’. If non-cooperation was effectively carried out, said Gandhiji, India would win swaraj — self-rule — within a year.

To further broaden the struggle he had joined hands with the Khilafat Movement that sought to restore the Caliphate, a symbol of Pan-Islamism which had recently been abolished by the Turkish ruler Kemal Attaturk.

What Was The Khilafat Movement? The Khilafat Movement (1919-1920) was a movement of Indian Muslims, led by Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali. It demanded that the Turkish Sultan or Khalifa must keep control over the Muslim sacred places in the former Ottoman empire; that the jazirat-ul-Arab (Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine) must remain under Muslim sovereignty; and that the Khalifa must be left with enough territory to defend the Islamic faith. The Congress supported the movement, and Mahatma Gandhi sought to conjoin it to the Non-cooperation Movement.

11.2.2 A People’s Leader

By 1922, Gandhiji had transformed Indian nationalism, thereby redeeming the promise he made in his BHU speech of February 1916. It was no longer a movement of professionals and intellectuals; now, hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers and artisans also participated in it.

Many of them venerated Gandhiji, referring to him as their ‘Mahatma’. They appreciated the fact that he dressed like them, lived like them, and spoke their language. Unlike other leaders he did not stand apart from the common folk, but empathised and even identified with them.

The Dhoti And The Charkha

This identification was strikingly reflected in his dress. While other nationalist leaders dressed formally, wearing a Western suit or an Indian bandgala — a high-collared formal coat — Gandhiji went among the people in a simple dhoti or loincloth.

Meanwhile, he spent part of each day working on the charkha (spinning wheel), and encouraged other nationalists to do likewise. The act of spinning allowed Gandhiji to break the boundaries that prevailed within the traditional caste system, between mental labour and manual labour.

That boundary was not a small one. In a social order where working with the hands was left to those ranked low, a leader who sat down and spun was making a claim about caste, not only about cloth.

Fig. 11.6

Fig. 11.6 – Mahatma Gandhi and the charkha.

Gandhiji explained his own objection to machinery in his journal Young India, which he wrote for a reading public of nationalists. He was profoundly critical of the modern age in which machines enslaved humans and displaced labour. He saw the charkha as a symbol of a human society that would not glorify machines and technology. The spinning wheel, moreover, could provide the poor with supplementary income and make them self-reliant.

Source 1 — Charkha From: Mahatma Gandhi, writing in Young India, 13 November 1924 and 17 March 1927 “What I object to, is the craze for machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on”saving labour”, till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all; I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of few, but in the hands of all.” (Young India, 13 November 1924) “Khaddar does not seek to destroy all machinery but it does regulate its use and check its weedy growth. It uses machinery for the service of the poorest in their own cottages. The wheel is itself an exquisite piece of machinery.” (Young India, 17 March 1927)

Source 1 Gandhiji is writing in his own journal, for readers he is trying to convince. It shows he attacked not machines but the concentration of wealth they produced. It cannot tell you whether spinning actually earned a poor household anything.

The second extract is a useful check on the first. He is not asking India to give up machinery. He says the wheel is itself a machine — one that a poor family can own and work in its own cottage, rather than one that owns them.

The Mahatma Of The Rumours

In a fascinating study, the historian Shahid Amin has traced the image of Mahatma Gandhi among the peasants of eastern Uttar Pradesh, as conveyed by reports and rumours in the local press. When he travelled through the region in February 1921, Gandhiji was received by adoring crowds everywhere.

This is how a Hindi newspaper in Gorakhpur reported the atmosphere during his speeches:

At Bhatni Gandhiji addressed the local public and then the train started for Gorakhpur. There were not less than 15,000 to 20,000 people at Nunkhar, Deoria, Gauri Bazar, Chauri Chaura and Kusmhi (stations) … Mahatmaji was very pleased to witness the scene at Kusmhi, as despite the fact that the station is in the middle of a jungle there were not less than 10,000 people here. Some, overcome with their love, were seen to be crying. At Deoria people wanted to give bhent (donations) to Gandhiji, but he asked them to give these at Gorakhpur. But at Chauri Chaura one Marwari gentleman managed to hand over something to him. Then there was no stopping. A sheet was spread and currency notes and coins started raining. It was a sight … Outside the Gorakhpur station the Mahatma was stood on a high carriage and people had a good darshan of him for a couple of minutes.

Wherever Gandhiji went, rumours spread of his miraculous powers. In some places it was said that he had been sent by the King to redress the grievances of the farmers, and that he had the power to overrule all local officials. In other places it was claimed that Gandhiji’s power was superior to that of the English monarch, and that with his arrival the colonial rulers would flee the district.

There were also stories reporting dire consequences for those who opposed him. Rumours spread of how villagers who criticised Gandhiji found their houses mysteriously falling apart or their crops failing.

Some of these rumours were recorded in the local newspapers of the United Provinces, and the historian Shahid Amin has collected them. Read them for what they tell us about the people who repeated them.

Source 2 — The Miraculous And The Unbelievable From: Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, Subaltern Studies III, Oxford University Press, Delhi — rumours recorded in local newspapers of the United Provinces “Local newspapers in the United Provinces recorded many of the rumours that circulated at that time. There were rumours that every person who wanted to test the power of the Mahatma had been surprised: 1. Sikandar Sahu from a village in Basti said on 15 February that he would believe in the Mahatmaji when the karah (boiling pan) full of sugar cane juice in his karkhana (where gur was produced) split into two. Immediately the karah actually split into two from the middle. 2. A cultivator in Azamgarh said that he would believe in the Mahatmaji’s authenticity if sesamum sprouted on his field planted with wheat. Next day all the wheat in that field became sesamum. There were rumours that those who opposed Mahatma Gandhi invariably met with some tragedy. 1. A gentleman from Gorakhpur city questioned the need to ply the charkha. His house caught fire. 2. In April 1921 some people were gambling in a village of Uttar Pradesh. Someone told them to stop. Only one from amongst the group refused to stop and abused Gandhiji. The next day his goat was bitten by four of his own dogs. 3. In a village in Gorakhpur, the peasants resolved to give up drinking liquor. One person did not keep his promise. As soon as he started for the liquor shop brickbats started to rain in his path. When he spoke the name of Gandhiji the brickbats stopped flying.” Discuss: You have read about rumours in the previous chapter, and seen that the circulation of rumours tells us about the structure of the belief of a time — about the minds of the people who believe them, and the circumstances that make such belief possible. What do you think these rumours about Gandhiji reflect?

What Peasants Thought Of Gandhiji Evidence: rumours printed in the local Hindi press of eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1921. Reasoning: peasants left few writings; what they repeated, and what a newspaper thought worth printing, shows what they hoped and feared. Limit: a rumour records belief, not fact. It cannot tell us what Gandhiji himself said or did in any of these villages.

Known variously as ‘Gandhi baba’, ‘Gandhi Maharaj’, or simply as ‘Mahatma’, Gandhiji appeared to the Indian peasant as a saviour, who would rescue them from high taxes and oppressive officials and restore dignity and autonomy to their lives.

Gandhiji’s appeal among the poor, and peasants in particular, was enhanced by his ascetic lifestyle, and by his shrewd use of symbols such as the dhoti and the charkha. Mahatma Gandhi was by caste a merchant, and by profession a lawyer; but his simple lifestyle and love of working with his hands allowed him to empathise more fully with the labouring poor and for them, in turn, to empathise with him.

Where most other politicians talked down to them, Gandhiji appeared not just to look like them, but to understand them and relate to their lives.

Q2. Why did peasants who had never met him believe he had miraculous powers?

A. They knew him only through rumour. To people crushed by taxes and officials, a leader who lived like them and challenged the state looked like a saviour — and the power they wished he had became the power they said he had.

Organisation, Not Only Devotion

While Mahatma Gandhi’s mass appeal was undoubtedly genuine — and in the context of Indian politics, without precedent — it must also be stressed that his success in broadening the basis of nationalism was based on careful organisation. Devotion filled the meetings; organisation kept them coming.

New branches of the Congress were set up in various parts of India. A series of ‘Praja Mandals’ were established to promote the nationalist creed in the princely states — the territories still ruled by Indian princes under British paramountcy, where the Congress could not simply open an office.

Gandhiji encouraged the communication of the nationalist message in the mother tongue, rather than in the language of the rulers, English. Thus the provincial committees of the Congress were based on linguistic regions, rather than on the artificial boundaries of British India.

Those provincial boundaries were artificial because they had been drawn for the convenience of administration, not because the people inside them shared a language. A party that organised itself by language could be understood without a translator. In these different ways nationalism was taken to the farthest corners of the country and embraced by social groups previously untouched by it.

Peasants And Industrialists

By now, among the supporters of the Congress were some very prosperous businessmen and industrialists. Indian entrepreneurs were quick to recognise that, in a free India, the favours enjoyed by their British competitors would come to an end.

Some of these entrepreneurs, such as G.D. Birla, supported the national movement openly; others did so tacitly. Thus, among Gandhiji’s admirers were both poor peasants and rich industrialists, although the reasons why peasants followed Gandhiji were somewhat different from, and perhaps opposed to, the reasons of the industrialists.

That sentence carries a warning. A peasant who wanted lower rents and an industrialist who wanted the British competitor removed were both in the same movement, but they were not asking for the same India. What would happen when freedom came and the two demands met?

The Men Around Him

While Mahatma Gandhi’s own role was vital, the growth of what we might call ‘Gandhian nationalism’ also depended to a very substantial extent on his followers. Between 1917 and 1922, a group of highly talented Indians attached themselves to Gandhiji.

They included Mahadev Desai, Vallabh Bhai Patel, J.B. Kripalani, Subhas Chandra Bose, Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Govind Ballabh Pant and C. Rajagopalachari. Notably, these close associates of Gandhiji came from different regions as well as different religious traditions. In turn, they inspired countless other Indians to join the Congress and work for it.

The Social Reformer

Mahatma Gandhi was released from prison in February 1924, and now chose to devote his attention to the promotion of home-spun cloth (khadi), and the abolition of untouchability. For, Gandhiji was as much a social reformer as he was a politician.

Untouchability was the practice by which people of certain castes were treated as polluting, kept out of temples, wells and schools, and forced into the work no one else would do. Gandhiji held that a society which did this to its own people had no right to demand freedom from anyone.

He believed that in order to be worthy of freedom, Indians had to get rid of social evils such as child marriage and untouchability. Indians of one faith had also to cultivate a genuine tolerance for Indians of another — hence his emphasis on Hindu-Muslim harmony.

Meanwhile, on the economic front Indians had to learn to become self-reliant — hence his stress on the significance of wearing khadi rather than mill-made cloth imported from overseas.

Notice that the three programmes are one argument. A nation divided by caste, split by religion and clothed by another country’s mills was, in his view, not yet ready to be free — and would not become ready by waiting.

The sequence of these years is set out in Fig. 11.7.

Fig. 11.7

Fig. 11.7 – The Making And Unmaking Of Non-cooperation.

ITQ-2. What was Non-cooperation? Find out about the variety of ways in which different social groups participated in the movement.

11.3 The Salt Satyagraha — A Case Study

Back Into Politics

For several years after the Non-cooperation Movement ended, Mahatma Gandhi focused on his social reform work. In 1928, however, began to think of re-entering politics.

That year there was an all-India campaign in opposition to the all-White Simon Commission, sent from England to enquire into conditions in the colony. A commission of enquiry sent to decide India’s political future, with not one Indian on it, made its own argument for Indians.

Gandhiji did not himself participate in this movement, although he gave it his blessings, as he also did to a peasant satyagraha in Bardoli in the same year.

Lahore, And A New Goal

In the end of December 1929, the Congress held its annual session in the city of Lahore. The meeting was significant for two things.

The first was the election of Jawaharlal Nehru as President, signifying the passing of the baton of leadership to the younger generation. The second was the proclamation of commitment to ‘Purna Swaraj’, or complete independence.

That second decision changed the terms of the argument. Until then the Congress had asked for a larger share of power inside the British system. Now it asked for the system to end.

Now the pace of politics picked up once more. On 26 January 1930, ‘Independence Day’ was observed, with the national flag being hoisted in different venues, and patriotic songs being sung.

Gandhiji himself issued precise instructions as to how the day should be observed. ‘It would be good,’ he said, ‘if the declaration [of Independence] is made by whole villages, whole cities even … It would be well if all the meetings were held at the identical minute in all the places.’

Notice what he was after. If every village declared independence at the same minute, a scattered country would feel, for one moment, like a single people acting together.

Gandhiji suggested that the time of the meeting be advertised in the traditional way, by the beating of drums. The celebrations would begin with the hoisting of the national flag.

The rest of the day would be spent ‘in doing some constructive work, whether it is spinning, or service of “untouchables”, or reunion of Hindus and Mussalmans, or prohibition work, or even all these together, which is not impossible’.

Participants would take a pledge affirming that it was ‘the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil’, and that ‘if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them, the people have a further right to alter it or abolish it’.

That pledge is doing something careful. It does not say that the British are cruel; it says that any government which takes a people’s freedom may be altered or abolished by them. The claim is about rights, not about grievances.

11.3.1 Dandi

Soon after the observance of this ‘Independence Day’, Mahatma Gandhi announced that he would lead a march to break one of the most widely disliked laws in British India, which gave the state a monopoly in the manufacture and sale of salt.

His picking on the salt monopoly was another illustration of Gandhiji’s tactical wisdom. For in every Indian household, salt was indispensable; yet people were forbidden from making salt even for domestic use, compelling them to buy it from shops at a high price.

The state monopoly over salt was deeply unpopular; by making it his target, Gandhiji hoped to mobilise a wider discontent against British rule. A tax on cloth touches those who buy cloth. A tax on salt touches everyone who eats.

Q1. Why did Mahatma Gandhi choose salt, of all things, as the law he would break?

A. Because no household could do without it, and yet no household was allowed to make it. The salt law reached the poorest kitchen in India, so breaking it let every Indian join a single act of defiance.

Fig. 11.8

Fig. 11.8 – The Dandi March, March 1930.

The Raj Misses The Point

Where most Indians understood the significance of Gandhiji’s challenge, the British Raj apparently did not. Although Gandhiji had given advance notice of his ‘Salt March’ to the Viceroy Lord Irwin, Irwin failed to grasp the significance of the action.

Giving notice was itself part of the method. Civil disobedience means breaking a law you hold to be unjust, openly and without violence, and then accepting the punishment. A conspirator hides his plan; a satyagrahi posts it to the Viceroy.

On 12 March 1930, Gandhiji began walking from his ashram at Sabarmati towards the ocean. He reached his destination three weeks later, making a fistful of salt as he did and thereby making himself a criminal in the eyes of the law. Meanwhile, parallel salt marches were being conducted in other parts of the country.

Fig. 11.9

Fig. 11.9 – Satyagrahis picking up natural salt.

Gandhiji explained in writing why salt, and not some other law, deserved this attack. Read his argument as an argument, and notice that most of it is about money and waste rather than about insult.

Source 3 — Why The Salt Satyagraha? From: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), vol. 49. Why was salt the symbol of protest? This is what Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “The volume of information being gained daily shows how wickedly the salt tax has been designed. In order to prevent the use of salt that has not paid the tax which is at times even fourteen times its value, the Government destroys the salt it cannot sell profitably. Thus it taxes the nation’s vital necessity; it prevents the public from manufacturing it and destroys what nature manufactures without effort. No adjective is strong enough for characterising this wicked dog-in-the-manger policy. From various sources I hear tales of such wanton destruction of the nation’s property in all parts of India. Maunds if not tons of salt are said to be destroyed on the Konkan coast. The same tale comes from Dandi. Wherever there is likelihood of natural salt being taken away by the people living in the neighbourhood of such areas for their personal use, salt officers are posted for the sole purpose of carrying on destruction. Thus valuable national property is destroyed at national expense and salt taken out of the mouths of the people. The salt monopoly is thus a fourfold curse. It deprives the people of a valuable easy village industry, involves wanton destruction of property that nature produces in abundance, the destruction itself means more national expenditure, and fourthly, to crown this folly, an unheard-of tax of more than 1,000 per cent is exacted from a starving people. This tax has remained so long because of the apathy of the general public. Now that it is sufficiently roused, the tax has to go. How soon it will be abolished depends upon the strength the people.” Discuss: Why was salt destroyed by the colonial government? Why did Mahatma Gandhi consider the salt tax more oppressive than other taxes?

Source 3 Gandhiji is arguing, not reporting. A maund is a large traditional weight — think of a heavy sackful, not a handful. ‘Dog-in-the-manger’ means denying others what you cannot use yourself. Limit: the tax figures are his, and he does not tell us where he got them.

The state destroyed salt because untaxed salt lying on a beach threatened the revenue. If people could simply scoop it up, no one would buy it from a licensed shop. Salt officers were posted to ruin what nature had made — which is why Gandhiji called the monopoly a fourfold curse rather than merely an expensive one.

A Fistful Of Salt, 1930 1. The state holds a monopoly on making and selling salt, so no household may make its own. 2. A family that needs salt must buy it from a shop, at a price swollen by the tax. 3. Salt officers destroy the natural salt lying on the coast, so that untaxed salt cannot be picked up. 4. Gandhiji gives the Viceroy notice, and on 12 March 1930 walks out of Sabarmati towards the sea. 5. He speaks at villages along the route, asking officials to leave government service. 6. Three weeks later, at Dandi, he bends down and takes a fistful of salt. 7. The law is broken in public. Parallel marches are held elsewhere, and nearly 60,000 Indians are arrested.

On 5 April 1930, the evening before the law was broken, Gandhiji spoke at Dandi. He is speaking to people who expect to be arrested, and he uses the moment to make an argument about what the government’s restraint reveals.

Source 4 — Tomorrow We Shall Break The Salt Tax Law From: CWMG, vol. 49. On 5 April 1930, Mahatma Gandhi spoke at Dandi: “When I left Sabarmati with my companions for this seaside hamlet of Dandi, I was not certain in my mind that we would be allowed to reach this place. Even while I was at Sabarmati there was a rumour that I might be arrested. I had thought that the Government might perhaps let my party come as far as Dandi, but not me certainly. If someone says that this betrays imperfect faith on my part, I shall not deny the charge. That I have reached here is in no small measure due to the power of peace and non-violence: that power is universally felt. The Government may, if it wishes, congratulate itself on acting as it has done, for it could have arrested every one of us. In saying that it did not have the courage to arrest this army of peace, we praise it. It felt ashamed to arrest such an army. He is a civilised man who feels ashamed to do anything which his neighbours would disapprove. The Government deserves to be congratulated on not arresting us, even if it desisted only from fear of world opinion. Tomorrow we shall break the salt tax law. Whether the Government will tolerate that is a different question. It may not tolerate it, but it deserves congratulations on the patience and forbearance it has displayed in regard to this party. … What if I and all the eminent leaders in Gujarat and in the rest of the country are arrested? This movement is based on the faith that when a whole nation is roused and on the march no leader is necessary.” Discuss: What does the speech tell us about how Gandhiji saw the colonial state?

The praise in that speech is a weapon. By congratulating the government on being too ashamed to arrest an army of peace, Gandhiji traps it: arrest us now and you admit the shame was fear. And by saying that a roused nation needs no leader, he removes the government’s simplest option — taking him away.

Q. Why did the colonial state hesitate to arrest an unarmed man walking to the sea?

A. Because he had made arrest look like cowardice, and because, as he said at Dandi, the movement was built so that it could go on without him.

The Streams Around The March

As with Non-cooperation, apart from the officially sanctioned nationalist campaign, there were numerous other streams of protest. Across large parts of India, peasants breached the hated colonial forest laws that kept them and their cattle out of the woods in which they had once roamed freely.

In some towns, factory workers went on strike while lawyers boycotted British courts and students refused to attend government-run educational institutions. As in 1920-22, now too Gandhiji’s call had encouraged Indians of all classes to make manifest their own discontent with colonial rule.

The rulers responded by detaining the dissenters. In the wake of the Salt March, nearly 60,000 Indians were arrested, among them, of course, Gandhiji himself.

Watched By The Police, Read By The World

The progress of Gandhiji’s march to the seashore can be traced from the secret reports filed by the police officials deputed to monitor his movements. These reproduce the speeches he gave at the villages en route, in which he called upon local officials to renounce government employment and join the freedom struggle.

In one village, Wasna, Gandhiji told the upper castes that ‘if you are out for Swaraj you must serve untouchables. You won’t get Swaraj merely by the repeal of the salt taxes or other taxes. For Swaraj you must make amends for the wrongs which you did to the untouchables. For Swaraj, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Sikhs will have to unite. These are the steps towards Swaraj.’

The march was about salt; the speech at Wasna was about caste and about religion. He was telling the marchers that repealing a tax would not by itself make them a free people.

The police spies reported that Gandhiji’s meetings were very well attended, by villagers of all castes, and by women as well as men. They observed that thousands of volunteers were flocking to the nationalist cause, and that among them were many officials who had resigned from their posts with the colonial government. Writing to the government, the District Superintendent of Police remarked, ‘Mr Gandhi appeared calm and collected. He is gathering more strength as he proceeds.’

The progress of the Salt March can also be traced from another source: the American newsmagazine, Time. This, to begin with, scorned at Gandhiji’s looks, writing with disdain of his ‘spindly frame’ and his ‘spidery loins’.

Thus in its first report on the march, Time was deeply sceptical of the Salt March reaching its destination. It claimed that Gandhiji ‘sank to the ground’ at the end of the second day’s walking; the magazine did not believe that ‘the emaciated saint would be physically able to go much further’.

But within a week it had changed its mind. The massive popular following that the march had garnered, wrote Time, had made the British rulers ‘desperately anxious’. Gandhiji himself they now saluted as a ‘Saint’ and ‘Statesman’, who was using ‘Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs’.

That The March Was Being Noticed Abroad Evidence: Time magazine’s reports, which mocked Gandhiji’s body and then, within a week, reversed themselves. Reasoning: a foreign magazine changes its line when the story changes; the reversal itself measures the march’s impact. Limit: Time tells us what American readers were being shown. It cannot tell us what any Indian villager thought.

Fig. 11.10

Fig. 11.10 – Congress leaders at Allahabad, 1931.

The road from the Simon Commission to Dandi is set out in Fig. 11.11.

Fig. 11.11

Fig. 11.11 – The Road To Dandi.

11.3.2 Dialogues

The Salt March was notable for at least three reasons.

First, it was this event that first brought Mahatma Gandhi to world attention. The march was widely covered by the European and American press.

Second, it was the first nationalist activity in which women participated in large numbers. The socialist activist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay had persuaded Gandhiji not to restrict the protests to men alone. Kamaladevi was herself one of numerous women who courted arrest by breaking the salt or liquor laws.

That second point deserves a pause. The change did not come from Gandhiji’s own plan; it came because a woman activist argued him out of it. Movements are shaped by the people inside them, and this one had to be pushed.

Third, and perhaps most significant, it was the Salt March which forced upon the British the realisation that their Raj would not last forever, and that they would have to devolve some power to the Indians.

The Round Table Conferences

To that end, the British government convened a series of ‘Round Table Conferences’ in London. The first meeting was held in November 1930, but without the pre-eminent political leader in India, thus rendering it an exercise in futility.

Gandhiji was released from jail in January 1931 and the following month had several long meetings with the Viceroy. These culminated in what was called the ‘Gandhi-Irwin Pact’, by the terms of which civil disobedience would be called off, all prisoners released, and salt manufacture allowed along the coast.

The pact was criticised by radical nationalists, for Gandhiji was unable to obtain from the Viceroy a commitment to political independence for Indians; he could obtain merely an assurance of talks towards that possible end.

Was The Gandhi-Irwin Pact Worth Making? One view: it freed the prisoners, legalised coastal salt-making, and brought the Congress to the table as an equal. Another view: the movement was stopped in exchange for an assurance of talks, not a promise of independence. What would you need to know to decide?

A second Round Table Conference was held in London in the latter part of 1931. Here, Gandhiji represented the Congress.

However, his claims that his party represented all of India came under challenge from three parties. The Muslim League claimed to stand for the interests of the Muslim minority. The Princes claimed that the Congress had no stake in their territories. And the brilliant lawyer and thinker B.R. Ambedkar argued that Gandhiji and the Congress did not really represent the lowest castes.

Fig. 11.12

Fig. 11.12 – The Second Round Table Conference, 1931.

Separate Electorates

The sharpest disagreement at the conference was over separate electorates. Under such an arrangement, a specified group would have seats set aside for it, and only members of that group would vote for those seats. The Depressed Classes — the term then used for the castes subjected to untouchability — would thus elect their own representatives, apart from everyone else.

Gandhiji opposed the demand. His argument was that a separate electorate would freeze the very separation it was meant to protect against.

Source 5 — The Problem With Separate Electorates From: Mahatma Gandhi, stating his arguments against separate electorates for the Depressed Classes at the Round Table Conference “Separate electorates to the”Untouchables” will ensure them bondage in perpetuity … Do you want the “Untouchables” to remain “Untouchables” for ever? Well, the separate electorates would perpetuate the stigma. What is needed is destruction of “Untouchability”, and when you have done it, the bar-sinister, which has been imposed by an insolent “superior” class upon an “inferior” class will be destroyed. When you have destroyed the bar-sinister to whom will you give the separate electorates?”

Source 5 Gandhiji is speaking to a British conference, in a British legal idiom. ‘Bar-sinister’ means a permanent mark of disgrace. His point: fix the stigma, and the separate seats become unnecessary. Limit: he does not say who would protect the Depressed Classes while the stigma lasted.

Ambedkar answered him, and his answer began not with theory but with the condition of the people concerned. He was writing as a member of the Depressed Classes himself, and as a lawyer who had watched every door in society close on them.

Source 6 — Ambedkar On Separate Electorates From: Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, ‘What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables’, Writings and Speeches, vol. 9, p. 312. In response to Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition to the demand for separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, Ambedkar wrote: “Here is a class which is undoubtedly not in a position to sustain itself in the struggle for existence. The religion, to which they are tied, instead of providing them an honourable place, brands them as lepers, not fit for ordinary intercourse. Economically, it is a class entirely dependent upon the high-caste Hindus for earning its daily bread with no independent way of living open to it. Nor are all ways closed by reason of the social prejudices of the Hindus but there is a definite attempt all through our Hindu Society to bolt every possible door so as not to allow the Depressed Classes any opportunity to rise in the scale of life. In these circumstances, it would be granted by all fair-minded persons that as the only path for a community so handicapped to succeed in the struggle for life against organised tyranny, some share of political power in order that it may protect itself is a paramount necessity …”

Set the two arguments side by side. Gandhiji is thinking about the future — about a society healed of untouchability, in which separate seats would only keep the wound open. Ambedkar is thinking about the present — about a community with no land, no independent livelihood and no protection, which cannot wait for the healing of a society that has never yet chosen to heal.

Who Speaks For The Depressed Classes? Gandhiji: separate electorates would fix the stigma in place for ever; destroy untouchability instead. Ambedkar: a community with every door bolted against it needs a share of political power to protect itself now. Both agree: the Depressed Classes were being crushed, and the existing arrangement could not be left as it was.

Q3. Why did B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi disagree about separate electorates?

A. Gandhiji held that separate seats would make the stigma of untouchability permanent, and that the stigma itself had to be destroyed. Ambedkar held that a community so completely dependent and excluded needed political power of its own, at once, to protect itself.

ITQ-3. Read Sources 5 and 6. Write an imaginary dialogue between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi on the issue of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes.

A Hostile Viceroy

The Conference in London was inconclusive, so Gandhiji returned to India and resumed civil disobedience. The new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was deeply unsympathetic to the Indian leader.

In a private letter to his sister, Willingdon wrote: ‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi … At the bottom of every move he makes which he always says is inspired by God, one discovers the political manouevre. I see the American Press is saying what a wonderful man he is … But the fact is that we live in the midst of very unpractical, mystical, and superstitious folk who look upon Gandhi as something holy, …’

This is a private letter, and it shows what a public despatch would have hidden. Willingdon was the head of the government of India, and he thought the people he governed were superstitious and unpractical. Read against the Viceroy’s official correspondence, such a letter tells us less about Gandhiji than about the contempt on which colonial rule rested.

Ministries, And Then A War

In 1935, however, a new Government of India Act promised some form of representative government. Two years later, in an election held on the basis of a restricted franchise, the Congress won a comprehensive victory.

A restricted franchise means that only a small, mostly propertied, minority could vote. The victory was therefore real, but it was won in an electorate that left most Indians out.

Now eight out of 11 provinces had a Congress ‘Prime Minister’, working under the supervision of a British Governor. The quotation marks matter: the Governor, appointed by London, still stood above the elected minister.

In September 1939, two years after the Congress ministries assumed office, the Second World War broke out. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had both been strongly critical of Hitler and the Nazis. Accordingly, they promised Congress support to the war effort if the British, in return, promised to grant India independence once hostilities ended.

Fig. 11.13

Fig. 11.13 – Mahatma Gandhi and Rajendra Prasad, 1939.

The offer was refused. In protest, the Congress ministries resigned in October 1939. Through 1940 and 1941, the Congress organised a series of individual satyagrahas to pressure the rulers to promise freedom once the war had ended.

A Three-Way Struggle

Meanwhile, in March 1940, the Muslim League passed a resolution demanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent.

The political landscape was now becoming complicated: it was no longer Indians versus the British; rather, it had become a three-way struggle between the Congress, the Muslim League, and the British. Every proposal from now on had to satisfy three parties, and each could veto the others.

At this time Britain had an all-party government, whose Labour members were sympathetic to Indian aspirations, but whose Conservative Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was a diehard imperialist. He insisted that he had not been appointed the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

In the spring of 1942, Churchill was persuaded to send one of his ministers, Sir Stafford Cripps, to India to try and forge a compromise with Gandhiji and the Congress.

Talks broke down, however, after the Congress insisted that if it was to help the British defend India from the Axis powers, then the Viceroy had first to appoint an Indian as the Defence Member of his Executive Council. The Executive Council was the Viceroy’s own body of advisers, and the Defence Member controlled the war effort. The Congress was asking for real power now, not a promise of power later.

Fig. 11.14

Fig. 11.14 – Mahatma Gandhi with Stafford Cripps, 1942.

The years of negotiation are set out in Fig. 11.15. Read it against Fig. 11.11: the moment mass action stopped, the story moved into conference rooms — and stalled there.

Fig. 11.15

Fig. 11.15 – Twelve Years Of Talks.

11.4 Quit India

The Third Great Movement

After the failure of the Cripps Mission, Mahatma Gandhi decided to launch his third major movement against British rule. This was the ‘Quit India’ campaign, which began in August 1942.

The name itself was new in tone. Non-cooperation had asked Indians to withdraw from the government; civil disobedience had asked them to break one unjust law. Quit India addressed the rulers directly and told them to go.

Although Gandhiji was jailed at once, younger activists organised strikes and acts of sabotage all over the country. Particularly active in the underground resistance were socialist members of the Congress, such as Jayaprakash Narayan.

In several districts, such as Satara in the west and Medinipur in the east, ‘independent’ governments were proclaimed. The British responded with much force, yet it took more than a year to suppress the rebellion.

A movement whose leader was imprisoned on the first day, and which the state still could not put down for over a year, was clearly not being run from the top.

Satara, 1943 From the late nineteenth century, a non-Brahman movement, which opposed the caste system and landlordism, had developed in Maharashtra. This movement established links with the national movement by the 1930s. In 1943, some of the younger leaders in the Satara district of Maharashtra set up a parallel government (prati sarkar), with volunteer corps (seba dals) and village units (tufan dals). They ran people’s courts and organised constructive work. Dominated by kunbi peasants and supported by dalits, the Satara prati sarkar functioned till the elections of 1946, despite government repression and, in the later stages, Congress disapproval.

Read that box carefully, because it complicates the story. The Satara government lasted three years and ran courts of its own — and it did so despite the disapproval of the Congress. As in 1921, people took the national call and used it for the fight they already had, here against caste and landlordism.

A Mass Movement, And Its Cost

‘Quit India’ was genuinely a mass movement, bringing into its ambit hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians. It especially energised the young who, in very large numbers, left their colleges to go to jail.

Fig. 11.16

Fig. 11.16 – Women’s procession in Bombay.

Fig. 11.16 A press photograph taken from above, framed to show numbers. It shows women marching in public in a movement earlier led by men. It cannot tell you who organised the procession, or what the women in it were demanding.

However, while the Congress leaders languished in jail, Jinnah and his colleagues in the Muslim League worked patiently at expanding their influence. It was in these years that the League began to make a mark in the Punjab and Sind, provinces where it had previously had scarcely any presence.

Q. Why did the League grow strongest in exactly these years?

A. Because the field was empty. The Congress leadership was in prison, its organisation broken up, while the League was free to build in provinces it had never held.

The Leaders In Jail, The League In The Field Quit India begins → the Congress leadership is imprisoned for the rest of the war → the League, left free, builds an organisation in the Punjab and Sind → in the 1946 elections it sweeps the Muslim seats → the political polarisation is complete.

Talks, And An Election

In June 1944, with the end of the war in sight, Gandhiji was released from prison. Later that year he held a series of meetings with Jinnah, seeking to bridge the gap between the Congress and the League.

In 1945, a Labour government came to power in Britain and committed itself to granting independence to India. Meanwhile, back in India, the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, brought the Congress and the League together for a series of talks.

Early in 1946 fresh elections were held to the provincial legislatures. The Congress swept the ‘General’ category, but in the seats specifically reserved for Muslims the League won an overwhelming majority. The political polarisation was complete.

Look at what the result actually measured. Voters in the general seats and voters in the reserved seats were choosing in separate contests. Each community was, in effect, being asked who spoke for it — and each gave a clear answer.

That The Polarisation Was Complete Evidence: the results of the provincial elections held early in 1946. Reasoning: the Congress took the general seats; the League took the seats reserved for Muslims. Two electorates returned two verdicts. Limit: a count of seats records how people voted. It cannot tell us what they feared, hoped or were told when they voted.

The Talks Break Down

A Cabinet Mission sent in the summer of 1946 failed to get the Congress and the League to agree on a federal system that would keep India together while allowing the provinces a degree of autonomy.

A federal system is one in which power is shared between a central government and the provinces, each with its own settled sphere. The Mission’s hope was that enough autonomy for the provinces might make a single India acceptable to the League. It did not.

After the talks broke down, Jinnah called for a ‘Direct Action Day’ to press the League’s demand for Pakistan. On the designated day, 16 August 1946, bloody riots broke out in Calcutta.

The violence spread to rural Bengal, then to Bihar, and then across the country to the United Provinces and the Punjab. In some places, Muslims were the main sufferers, in other places, Hindus.

That last sentence must be read exactly as it stands. Neither community was only a victim and neither was only an attacker. Ordinary people were killed by neighbours in the places where their own community was outnumbered.

Freedom, And Division

In February 1947, Wavell was replaced as Viceroy by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten called one last round of talks, but when these too proved inconclusive he announced that British India would be freed, but also divided.

The formal transfer of power was fixed for 15 August. When that day came, it was celebrated with gusto in different parts of India.

In Delhi, there was ‘prolonged applause’ when the President of the Constituent Assembly — the body of elected members that was to write India’s Constitution — began the meeting by invoking the Father of the Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Outside the Assembly, the crowds shouted ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’.

Fig. 11.17

Fig. 11.17 – Conferring with Nehru and Patel.

Hold on to that caption. The Congress was not one mind. It contained a socialist wing and a conservative wing, and the man they both accepted as arbiter was the one whose name the crowds were shouting outside the Assembly. Where he stood on 15 August 1947 is the subject of the next section.

The five years from Quit India to the transfer of power are set out in Fig. 11.18.

Fig. 11.18

Fig. 11.18 – From Quit India To 15 August 1947.

11.5 The Last Heroic Days

The Man Who Was Not There

As it happened, Mahatma Gandhi was not present at the festivities in the capital on 15 August 1947. He was in Calcutta, but he did not attend any function or hoist a flag there either.

Gandhiji marked the day with a 24-hour fast. In Delhi the Assembly was applauding his name; in Calcutta the man himself refused to eat.

The freedom he had struggled so long for had come at an unacceptable price, with a nation divided and Hindus and Muslims at each other’s throats. He had spent thirty years arguing that Indians of different faiths could win freedom together. Freedom had arrived, and they were killing one another.

Q5. Why was Mahatma Gandhi absent from the celebrations of 15 August 1947?

A. He was in Calcutta, fasting for twenty-four hours. Freedom had come, but with the country divided and Hindus and Muslims killing each other. To him that price made the day an occasion for mourning, not for flags.

Hospitals And Refugee Camps

Through September and October, writes his biographer D.G. Tendulkar, Gandhiji ‘went round hospitals and refugee camps giving consolation to distressed people’.

He ‘appealed to the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Muslims to forget the past and not to dwell on their sufferings but to extend the right hand of fellowship to each other, and to determine to live in peace …’

Note where he chose to be. Not in the new government, not in the Constituent Assembly, but in the wards and the camps, among people who had lost their homes and their families in the violence of Partition.

Fig. 11.19

Fig. 11.19 – On the way to a riot-torn village.

What Gandhiji Did After Partition Evidence: the account of his biographer, D.G. Tendulkar, who followed his daily movements. Reasoning: a biographer working close to his subject records where he went and what he said, day after day. Limit: a sympathetic biography records what its author thought worth keeping. It cannot tell us how the refugees he consoled judged him.

A Promise To The Minorities

At the initiative of Gandhiji and Nehru, the Congress now passed a resolution on ‘the rights of minorities’. The party had never accepted the ‘two-nation theory’ — the claim that Hindus and Muslims formed two separate nations, each needing a state of its own.

Forced against its will to accept Partition, the Congress still believed that ‘India is a land of many religions and many races, and must remain so’.

Whatever be the situation in Pakistan, India would be ‘a democratic secular State where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong’. A secular state, in this sense, is one that does not belong to any religion, and owes the same protection to a citizen of every faith.

The Congress wished to ‘assure the minorities in India that it will continue to protect, to the best of its ability, their citizen rights against aggression’.

The timing of that resolution is the point. It was passed at the very moment when religion had just been made the basis of a new border, and when minorities on both sides were fleeing for their lives.

A Promise To Minorities Then: in 1947 the Congress promised that India would be a democratic secular state, protecting every citizen’s rights whatever their religion. Now: equality before the law and freedom of religion are written into the Constitution as fundamental rights, which a citizen can go to court to enforce.

The Finest Hour, And Its Cost

Many scholars have written of the months after Independence as being Gandhiji’s ‘finest hour’. After working to bring peace to Bengal, Gandhiji now shifted to Delhi, from where he hoped to move on to the riot-torn districts of Punjab.

While in the capital, his meetings were disrupted by refugees who objected to readings from the Koran, or shouted slogans asking why he did not speak of the sufferings of those Hindus and Sikhs still living in Pakistan.

These were people who had lost everything and arrived in Delhi with nothing. Their anger is not hard to understand. What they were demanding was that his sympathy stop at the border.

In fact, as D.G. Tendulkar writes, Gandhiji ‘was equally concerned with the sufferings of the minority community in Pakistan. He would have liked to be able to go to their succour. But with what face could he now go there, when he could not guarantee full redress to the Muslims in Delhi?’

Whose Suffering Should He Speak Of? The refugees in Delhi: we have been driven out of Pakistan; speak of our people’s suffering, not of the Koran. Gandhiji: I cannot ask Pakistan to protect its Hindus while I cannot protect the Muslims of Delhi. Both agree: in 1947 people of both communities were being driven from their homes and killed.

Twenty-Sixth Of January, 1948

There was an attempt on Gandhiji’s life on 20 January 1948, but he carried on undaunted.

On 26 January, he spoke at his prayer meeting of how that day had been celebrated in the past as Independence Day. That was the pledge of 1930, taken in villages and cities at the same minute — and now, eighteen years later, freedom had actually come.

But its first few months had been deeply disillusioning. However, he trusted that ‘the worst is over’, that Indians would henceforth work collectively for the ‘equality of all classes and creeds, never the domination and superiority of the major community over a minor, however insignificant it may be in numbers or influence’.

He also permitted himself the hope ‘that though geographically and politically India is divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and respecting one another and be one for the outside world’.

Gandhiji had fought a lifelong battle for a free and united India; and yet, when the country was divided, he urged that the two parts respect and befriend one another.

The Thirtieth Of January

Other Indians were less forgiving. At his daily prayer meeting on the evening of 30 January, Gandhiji was shot dead by a young man. The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was Nathuram Godse.

He was killed for the belief he had held longest and defended last: that Indians of different faiths could live as one people. He was killed at a prayer meeting, in the open, among ordinary people, which is where he had always been.

Fig. 11.20

Fig. 11.20 – The death of the Mahatma, a popular print.

Fig. 11.20 A print made for sale, to be hung in ordinary homes. It shows how people wished to see him — as a god, holding a divided Congress together. It cannot tell you what happened at the cremation, or what any of the mourners believed.

Grief, And A Comparison

Gandhiji’s death led to an extraordinary outpouring of grief, with rich tributes being paid to him from across the political spectrum in India, and moving appreciations coming from such international figures as George Orwell and Albert Einstein.

Time magazine, which had once mocked Gandhiji’s physical size and seemingly non-rational ideas, now compared his martyrdom to that of Abraham Lincoln. It was a bigoted American who had killed Lincoln for believing that human beings were equal regardless of their race or skin colour; and it was a bigoted Hindu who had killed Gandhiji for believing that friendship was possible, indeed necessary, between Indians of different faiths.

In this respect, as Time wrote, ‘The world knew that it had, in a sense too deep, too simple for the world to understand, connived at his (Gandhiji’s) death as it had connived at Lincoln’s.’

That is a heavy word, connived. Time is saying that a man who insisted on friendship across faiths was killed by a world that had already accepted hatred as normal, and that the world therefore had a share in his death.

The last months are set out in Fig. 11.21.

Fig. 11.21

Fig. 11.21 – The Last Months.

11.6 Knowing Gandhi

There are many different kinds of sources from which we can reconstruct the political career of Gandhiji and the history of the nationalist movement.

This section is not one more chapter of the story. It is a section about how the story was made — and about how a careful reader can tell a fact from a fear.

11.6.1 Public Voice And Private Scripts

One important source is the writings and speeches of Mahatma Gandhi and his contemporaries, including both his associates and his political adversaries.

Within these writings we need to distinguish between those that were meant for the public and those that were not. Speeches, for instance, allow us to hear the public voice of an individual, while private letters give us a glimpse of his or her private thoughts.

In letters we see people expressing their anger and pain, their dismay and anxiety, their hopes and frustrations in ways in which they may not express themselves in public statements.

A Public Speech vs A Private Letter A speech is written to persuade an audience; it shows what the speaker wanted others to believe. A letter is written to one person; it can show what the writer actually felt. Neither is the plain truth.

Where The Distinction Breaks Down

But we must remember that this private-public distinction often breaks down. Many letters are written to individuals, and are therefore personal, but they are also meant for the public.

The language of the letters is often shaped by the awareness that they may one day be published. Conversely, the fear that a letter may get into print often prevents people from expressing their opinion freely in personal letters.

So a letter can be a performance, and the absence of a sentence in a letter can be a decision. Mahatma Gandhi regularly published in his journal, Harijan, letters that others wrote to him. Nehru edited a collection of letters written to him during the national movement and published A Bunch of Old Letters.

Q. If a letter may be published, is it still a private source?

A. Only partly. It still records a private feeling, but the writer knows he may be read by strangers — and writes with that in mind.

One Quarrel, Three Letters

The letters that follow record a real crisis inside the Congress, and they let us watch it from three sides.

In the 1920s, Jawaharlal Nehru was increasingly influenced by socialism, and he returned from Europe in 1928 deeply impressed with the Soviet Union. As he began working closely with the socialists — Jayaprakash Narayan, Narendra Dev, N.G. Ranga and others — a rift developed between the socialists and the conservatives within the Congress.

After becoming the Congress President in 1936, Nehru spoke passionately against fascism, and upheld the demands of workers and peasants.

Worried by Nehru’s socialist rhetoric, the conservatives, led by Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel, threatened to resign from the Working Committee, and some prominent industrialists in Bombay issued a statement attacking Nehru.

Both Prasad and Nehru turned to Mahatma Gandhi and met him at his ashram at Wardha. The latter acted as the mediator, as he often did, restraining Nehru’s radicalism and persuading Prasad and others to see the significance of Nehru’s leadership. In A Bunch of Old Letters, 1958, Nehru reprinted many of the letters that were exchanged at the time.

Source 7 — One Event Through Letters From: A Bunch of Old Letters, edited by Jawaharlal Nehru, 1958 “My dear Jawaharlalji, (Wardha, July 1, 1936) Since we parted yesterday we have had a long conversation with Mahatmaji and a prolonged consultation among ourselves. We understand that you have felt much hurt by the course of action taken by us and particularly the tone of our letter has caused you much pain. It was never our intention either to embarrass you or to hurt you and if you had suggested or indictated that it hurt you we would have without the least hesitation amended or altered the letter. But we have decided to withdraw it and our resignation on a reconsideration of the whole situation. We have felt that in all your utterances as published in the Press you have been speaking not so much on the general Congress programme as on a topic which has not been accepted by the Congress and in doing so you have been acting more as the mouthpiece of the minority of our colleagues on the Working Committee as also on the Congress than the mouthpiece of the majority which we expected you as Congress President to do. There is regular continuous campaign against us treating us as persons whose time is over, who represent and stand for ideas that are worn out and that have no present value, who are only obstructing the progress of the country and who deserve to be cast out of the positions which they undeservedly hold … we have felt that a great injustice has been and is being done to us by others, and we are not receiving the protection we are entitled from you as our colleague and as our President … Yours sincerely, Rajendra Prasad

My Dear Bapu, (Allahabad, July 5, 1936) I arrived here last night. Ever since I left Wardha I have been feeling weak in body and troubled in mind. … Since my return from Europe, I found that meetings of the Working Committee exhaust me greatly; they have a devitalising effect on me and I have almost the feeling of being older in years after every fresh experience … I am grateful to you for all the trouble you took in smoothing over matters and in helping to avoid a crisis. I read again Rajendra Babu’s letter to me (the second one) and his formidable indictment of me … For however tenderly the fact may be stated, it amounts to this that I am an intolerable nuisance and the very qualities I possess – a measure of ability, energy, earnestness, some personality which has a vague appeal – become dangerous for they are harnessed to the wrong chariot (socialism). The conclusion from all this is obvious. I have written at length, both in my book and subsequently, about my present ideas. There is no lack of material for me to be judged. Those views are not casual. They are part of me, and though I might change them or vary them in future, so long as I hold them I must give expression to them. Because I attached importance to a larger unity I tried to express them in the mildest way possible and more as an invitation to thought than as fixed conclusions. I saw no conflict in this approach and in anything that the Congress was doing. So far as the elections were concerned I felt that my approach was a definite asset to us as it enthused the masses. But my approach, mild and vague as it was, is considered dangerous and harmful by my colleagues. I was even told that my laying stress always on the poverty and unemployment in India was unwise, or at any rate the way I did it was wrong … You told me that you intended issuing some kind of a statement. I shall welcome this for I believe in every viewpoint being placed before the country. Yours affectionately, Jawaharlal

Dear Jawaharlal, (Segaon, July 15, 1936) Your letter is touching. You feel the most injured party. The fact is that your colleagues have lacked your courage and frankness. The result has been disastrous. I have always pleaded with them to speak to you freely and fearlessly. But having lacked the courage, whenever they have spoken they have done it clumsily and you have felt irritated. I tell you they have dreaded you, because of your irritability and impatience with them. They have chafed under your rebukes and magisterial manner and above all your arrogation of what has appeared to them your infallibility and superior knowledge. They feel you have treated them with scant courtesy and never defended them from socialist ridicule and even misrepresentation. I have looked at the whole affair as a tragi-comedy. I would therefore like you to look at the whole thing in a lighter vein. I suggested your name for the crown of thorns (Presidentship of the Congress). Keep it on, though the head be bruised. Resume your humour at the committee meetings. That is your most usual role, not that of care-worn, irritable man ready to burst on the slightest occasion. How I wish you could telegraph me that on finishing my letter you felt as merry as you were on that new year’s day in Lahore when you were reported to have danced around the tricolour flag. You must give your throat a chance. Love, Bapu” Discuss: (a) What do the letters tell us about the way Congress ideals developed over time? (b) What do they reveal about the role of Mahatma Gandhi within the national movement? (c) Do such letters give us any special insight into the working of the Congress, and into the nature of the national movement?

Source 7 Three men writing to each other in a quarrel, expecting to be read only by each other. It shows a Congress split between socialists and conservatives, held together by one mediator. It cannot tell you what the workers and peasants they argued about actually wanted.

Notice how much these letters give us that no public statement would. Prasad’s hurt, Nehru’s exhaustion, Gandhiji’s teasing — the sentence about the crown of thorns is a joke and a command at once. Yet Nehru later chose to print them, which means we are reading a private quarrel that its own participant decided the country should see.

11.6.2 Framing A Picture

Autobiographies similarly give us an account of the past that is often rich in human detail. An autobiography is the story of a life told by the person who lived it.

But here again we have to be careful of the way we read and interpret autobiographies. We need to remember that they are retrospective accounts written very often from memory.

They tell us what the author could recollect, what he or she saw as important, or was keen on recounting, or how a person wanted his or her life to be viewed by others.

Writing an autobiography is a way of framing a picture of yourself. A frame does two things at once: it shows you what is inside it, and it decides what is left outside.

So in reading these accounts we have to try and see what the author does not tell us. We need to understand the reasons for that silence — those wilful or unwitting acts of forgetting.

What An Autobiography Leaves Out Evidence: a life story written years afterwards, from the author’s own memory. Reasoning: comparing it with letters, official records and newspapers of the time shows what the author chose to keep and what he dropped. Limit: we can see that something is missing. We can rarely prove whether it was forgotten or deliberately left out.

11.6.3 Through Police Eyes

Another vital source is government records, for the colonial rulers kept close tabs on those they regarded as critical of the government. The letters and reports written by policemen and other officials were secret at the time; but now can be accessed in archives.

An archive is a collection of records preserved by a state or an institution. What was once a confidential file, written so that officials could act on it, is today an open document that a historian may read.

Let us look at one such source: the fortnightly reports that were prepared by the Home Department from the early twentieth century.

These reports were based on police information from the localities, but often expressed what the higher officials saw, or wanted to believe. While noticing the possibility of sedition and rebellion, they liked to assure themselves that these fears were unwarranted.

How A Fortnightly Report Was Made 1. A policeman in a locality watches a meeting, a march or a bazaar and sends in what he sees. 2. His information travels up to officials who have never attended the meeting. 3. Those higher officials write the fortnightly report, province by province, for the Home Department. 4. What they write is shaped by what they saw, and also by what they wanted to believe. 5. The report is stamped confidential and filed, so nobody outside the government reads it. 6. Decades later the file is opened in an archive, and a historian reads it — against its writers’ intention.

If you see the Fortnightly Reports for the period of the Salt March you will notice that the Home Department was unwilling to accept that Mahatma Gandhi’s actions had evoked any enthusiastic response from the masses.

The march was seen as a drama, an antic, a desperate effort to mobilise people who were unwilling to rise against the British and were busy with their daily schedules, happy under the Raj.

That last phrase is the giveaway. A government which is confident that its subjects are happy does not need to send a fortnightly report about them to headquarters.

Fig. 11.22

Fig. 11.22 – Police clash with volunteers in Bombay.

ITQ-4. Can you see any conflict between this image and what was reported in the Fortnightly Reports of the police?

Now read the reports themselves. They were written for officials, by officials, and were never meant to be seen by you.

Source 8 — Fortnightly Reports Of The Home Department (Confidential) From: the confidential fortnightly reports of the colonial Home Department, March and April 1930 “FOR THE FIRST HALF OF MARCH 1930 The rapid political developments in Gujarat are being closely watched here. To what extent and in what directions they will affect political condition in this province, it is difficult to surmise at present. The peasantry is for the moment engaged in harvesting a good rabi; students are pre-occupied with their impending examinations. Central Provinces and Berar The arrest of Mr. Vallabh Bhai Patel caused little excitement, except in Congress circles, but a meeting organised by the Nagpur Nagar Congress Committee to congratulate Gandhi on the start of his march was attended by a crowd of over 3000 people at Nagpur. Bengal The outstanding event of the past fortnight has been the start of Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience. Mr. J.M. Sengupta has formed an All-Bengal Civil Disobedience Council, and the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee has formed an All Bengal Council of Disobedience. But beyond forming councils no active steps have yet been taken in the matter of civil disobedience in Bengal. The reports from the districts show that the meetings that have been held excite little or no interest and leave no profound impression on the general population. It is noticeable, however, that ladies are attending these meetings in increasing numbers. Bihar and Orissa There is still little to report regarding Congress activity. There is a good deal of talk about a campaign to withhold payment of the chaukidari tax, but no area has yet been selected for experiment. The arrest of Gandhi is being foretold freely but it seems quite possible that nonfulfilment of the forecast is upsetting plans. Madras The opening of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign has completely overshadowed all other issues. General opinion inclines to regard his march as theatrical and his programme as impracticable, but as he is held in such personal reverence by the Hindu public generally, the possibility of arrest which he seems deliberately to be courting and its effect on the political situation are viewed with considerable misgiving. The 12th of March was celebrated as the day of inaugurating the civil disobedience campaign. In Bombay the celebrations took the form of saluting the national flag in the morning. Bombay Press Kesari indulged in offensive language and in its usual attitude of blowing hot and cold wrote:”If the Government wants to test the power of Satyagraha, both its action and inaction will cause injury to it. If it arrests Gandhi it will incur the discontent of the nation; if it does not do that, the movement of civil disobedience will go on spreading. We therefore say that if the Government punishes Mr. Gandhi the nation will have won a victory, and if it lets him alone it will have won a still greater victory.” On the other hand the moderate paper Vividh Vritt pointed out the futility of the movement and opined that it could not achieve the end in view. It, however, reminded the government that repression would defeat its purpose.

FOR THE SECOND HALF OF MARCH 1930 Bengal Interest has continued to centre round Gandhi’s march to the sea and the arrangements which he is making to initiate a campaign of civil disobedience. The extremist papers report his doings and speeches at great length and make a great display of the various meetings that are being held throughout Bengal and the resolutions passed thereat. But there is little enthusiasm for the form of civil disobedience favoured by Gandhi … Generally people are waiting to see what happens to Gandhi and the probability is that if any action is taken against him, a spark will be set to much inflammable material in Bengal. But the prospect of any serious conflagration is at present slight. Central Provinces and Berar In Nagpur these meetings were well attended and most of the schools and colleges were deserted on the 12th March to mark the inauguration of Gandhi’s march. The boycott of liquor shops and the infringement of forest laws appear to be the most probable line of attack. Punjab It seems not improbable that organised attempts will be made to break the Salt Law in the Jhelum district; that the agitation relating to the non-payment of the water-tax in Multan will be revived; and that some movement in connection with the National Flag will be started probably at Gujranwala. United Provinces Political activity has undoubtedly intensified during the last fortnight. The Congress party feels that it must do something spectacular to sustain public interest. Enrolment of volunteers, propaganda in villages, preparations for breaking the salt laws on receipt of Mr. Gandhi’s orders are reported from a number of districts.

FOR THE FIRST HALF OF APRIL 1930 United Provinces Events have moved rapidly during the fortnight. Apart from political meetings, processions and the enrolment of volunteers, the Salt Act has been openly defied at Agra, Cawnpore, Benaras, Allahabad, Lucknow, Meerut, Rae Bareli, Farukhabad, Etawah, Ballia and Mainpuri. Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested at Cheoki railway station early on the morning of April 14 as he was proceeding to the Central Provinces to attend a meeting of Youth League. He was at once taken direct to Naini Central Jail, where he was tried and sentenced to six months simple imprisonment. Bihar and Orissa There have been, or are now materialising, spectacular, but small-scale, attempts at illicit salt manufacture in a few places … Central Provinces In Jubbalpore Seth Govinddass has attempted to manufacture chemical salt at a cost many times in excess of the market price of clean salt. Madras Considerable opposition was shown at Vizagapatam to the Police when they attempted to seize salt made by boiling sea water, but elsewhere resistance to the seizure of illicit salt has been half hearted. Bengal In the mufassal efforts have been made to manufacture illicit salt, the main operation areas being the districts of 24-Parganas and Midnapore. Very little salt has actually been manufactured and most of it has been confiscated and the utensils in which it was manufactured destroyed.” Discuss: Read the Fortnightly Reports carefully. Remember they are extracts from confidential reports of the colonial Home Department, and that these reports did not always accept what the police reported from different localities. (1) How do you think the nature of the source affects what is being said in these reports? Write a short note illustrating your argument with quotations from the above text. (2) Why do you think the Home Department was continuously reporting on what people thought about the possibility of Mahatma Gandhi’s arrest? Reread what Gandhiji said about the question of arrests in his speech on 5 April 1930 at Dandi. (3) Why do you think Mahatma Gandhi was not arrested? (4) Why do you think the Home Department continued to say that the march was not evoking any response?

Source 8 Officials writing for other officials, needing to sound in control. It shows what the state watched: salt pans, liquor shops, forest laws, women at meetings. Limit: it records what the police saw and what their superiors preferred to believe — not what villagers thought.

Read the reports twice, and the second reading is the useful one. The first tells you the government thought nothing was happening. The second shows you what it was counting: schools deserted, volunteers enrolled, the Salt Act openly defied in eleven towns of one province, utensils destroyed. The panic is in the detail, not in the summary.

Q4. What can a secret police report tell us that its writer never meant to say?

A. Its fears. The reports insist the march excited little interest, yet they count deserted colleges, enrolled volunteers and towns where the Salt Act was defied. The very act of watching so closely shows a government unsure of the ground under it.

11.6.4 From Newspapers

One more important source is contemporary newspapers, published in English as well as in the different Indian languages, which tracked Mahatma Gandhi’s movements and reported on his activities, and also represented what ordinary Indians thought of him.

Newspaper accounts, however, should not be seen as unprejudiced. They were published by people who had their own political opinions and world views.

These ideas shaped what was published and the way events were reported. The accounts that were published in a London newspaper would be different from the report in an Indian nationalist paper.

You have already seen this in action. The same three weeks of walking produced a Gorakhpur paper describing crowds weeping with love, a Home Department file describing an antic, and an American magazine describing a spindly frame — and then, a week later, a statesman.

Fig. 11.23

Fig. 11.23 – The tree of nationalism.

We need to look at these reports but should be careful while interpreting them. Every statement made in these cannot be accepted literally as representing what was happening on the ground.

They often reflect the fears and anxieties of officials who were unable to control a movement and were anxious about its spread. They did not know whether to arrest Mahatma Gandhi or what an arrest would mean.

The more the colonial state kept a watch on the public and its activities, the more it worried about the basis of its rule.

That sentence is the lesson of this whole section, and it works for every source you have read here. A speech, a letter, an autobiography, a police file, a newspaper — each was made by someone with an interest. The historian’s job is not to find the one source with no interest. It is to read each one knowing what its maker wanted.

11.7 Summary

A Leader Announces Himself
  1. Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, after two decades in South Africa, where he had first forged satyagraha, first promoted harmony between religions, and first challenged upper-caste Indians about their treatment of low castes and women.
  2. The India he returned to was politically active but narrow: the Congress had branches in the towns, and its leaders were lawyers, doctors and landlords.
  3. At the opening of the Banaras Hindu University in February 1916 he told that elite audience that India’s salvation could only come through the farmer, and not through lawyers, doctors or rich landlords.
  4. That speech was both a statement of fact and a statement of intent: he meant to make Indian nationalism representative of the Indian people as a whole.
The Making And Unmaking Of Non-cooperation
  1. Champaran (1917), Ahmedabad and Kheda (1918) marked him out as a nationalist with sympathy for the poor, but all three were localised struggles.
  2. The Rowlatt Act of 1919 gave him an all-India grievance; the bandh, the repression in Punjab and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre made him a truly national leader.
  3. Non-cooperation asked Indians to withdraw from the government’s schools, courts and taxes, and was joined to the Khilafat Movement in the hope that Hindus and Muslims would act together.
  4. The response was unprecedented, but people acted on their own grievances — forest laws, land tax, forced porterage — sometimes in defiance of the local nationalist leadership.
  5. After the burning of the police station at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, Gandhiji called the movement off; he was then tried for sedition and sentenced to six years.
  6. He became a people’s leader through dress, the charkha and a life the poor recognised, but also through careful organisation, work in the mother tongue, and Congress committees built on linguistic regions.
  7. Both poor peasants and rich industrialists supported him, for reasons that were different from, and perhaps opposed to, one another.
  8. After his release in February 1924 he turned to khadi and to the abolition of untouchability, holding that a society divided by caste and religion was not yet fit to be free.
The Salt Satyagraha
  1. The Lahore Congress of December 1929 elected Nehru as President and declared complete independence as its goal; Independence Day was observed on 26 January 1930.
  2. Gandhiji chose the salt monopoly because salt was indispensable in every household, yet no household was allowed to make it.
  3. He walked from Sabarmati on 12 March 1930 and broke the salt law at Dandi three weeks later; nearly 60,000 Indians were arrested in the wake of the march.
  4. The march brought him world attention, brought women into the movement in large numbers, and forced on the British the realisation that they would have to devolve power.
  5. The Round Table Conferences failed. At the second, the Congress’s claim to speak for all India was challenged by the Muslim League, by the Princes, and by B.R. Ambedkar.
  6. Gandhiji held that separate electorates would make the stigma of untouchability permanent; Ambedkar held that a community with every door bolted against it needed political power at once.
  7. The Congress won eight of eleven provinces in 1937, offered support in the war in exchange for independence, was refused, and resigned office in October 1939.
  8. The Cripps Mission of 1942 broke down over the Congress demand that an Indian be made Defence Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council.
Quit India And Partition
  1. Quit India began in August 1942; Gandhiji was jailed at once, yet strikes, sabotage and even parallel governments — as at Satara — kept it alive for more than a year.
  2. While the Congress leaders were in prison, the Muslim League built its strength in the Punjab and Sind.
  3. In the elections of early 1946 the Congress swept the general seats and the League swept the Muslim seats; the political polarisation was complete.
  4. The Cabinet Mission failed, Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 was followed by riots in Calcutta and then across northern India, and Mountbatten announced that British India would be freed and divided.
The Last Heroic Days
  1. Gandhiji spent 15 August 1947 in Calcutta, fasting, and then went among the hospitals and refugee camps, appealing to Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims to live in peace.
  2. The Congress, which had never accepted the two-nation theory, resolved that India would be a democratic secular state protecting every citizen’s rights, whatever their religion.
  3. He was shot dead at his prayer meeting on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, for the belief he had held longest: that Indians of different faiths could live as one people.
Knowing Gandhi
  1. Speeches carry a public voice; private letters carry private thought — but the distinction breaks down, because letters too are written in the knowledge that they may be printed.
  2. Autobiographies are written from memory, and frame a picture of the writer; the historian must ask what has been left outside the frame.
  3. Confidential police and Home Department records tell us what the state watched, and what its officials wanted to believe.
  4. Newspapers are not neutral either: a London paper and an Indian nationalist paper reported the same event differently.
  5. The more closely the colonial state watched the public, the more it worried about the basis of its own rule.
The Chronology Of The Chapter

Fig. 11.24

Fig. 11.24 – Mahatma Gandhi And The Nationalist Movement.

What The Evidence Cannot Tell Us

The peasants who filled the meetings of 1921 and 1930 left almost no writing of their own. We know them chiefly through the police officer who counted them, the newspaper that reported the rumours about them, and the leaders who spoke on their behalf — never in their own voice, and never in their own words.

The sources that survive best are those the state made or the educated wrote: confidential files, letters between leaders, autobiographies, printed newspapers. Each was made by someone with an interest, and none was made to record what an ordinary villager, a mill worker or a woman in a procession actually wanted from freedom.

So when this chapter tells you that hundreds of thousands joined, it can show you that they came. It cannot tell you, for most of them, why.

11.8 NCERT Questions

  1. How did Mahatma Gandhi seek to identify with the common people? (in about 100-150 words)

  2. How was Mahatma Gandhi perceived by the peasants? (in about 100-150 words)

  3. Why did the salt laws become an important issue of struggle? (in about 100-150 words)

  4. Why are newspapers an important source for the study of the national movement? (in about 100-150 words)

  5. Why was the charkha chosen as a symbol of nationalism? (in about 100-150 words)

  6. How was non-cooperation a form of protest? (in about 250-300 words)

  7. Why were the dialogues at the Round Table Conference inconclusive? (in about 250-300 words)

  8. In what way did Mahatma Gandhi transform the nature of the national movement? (in about 250-300 words)

  9. What do private letters and autobiographies tell us about an individual? How are these sources different from official accounts? (in about 250-300 words)

  10. Find out about the route of the Dandi March. On a map of Gujarat plot the line of the march and mark the major towns and villages that it passed along the route.

  11. Read any two autobiographies of nationalist leaders. Look at the different ways in which the authors represent their own life and times, and interpret the national movement. See how their views differ. Write an account based on your studies.

  12. Choose any event that took place during the national movement. Try and read the letters and speeches of the leaders of the time. Some of these are now published. He could be a local leader from the region where you live. Try and see how the local leaders viewed the activities of the national leadership at the top. Write about the movement based on your reading.

11.9 Check Your Concepts

  1. Look again at Fig. 11.20, the popular print of the death of the Mahatma. What does the way the figures are arranged tell us about how people wished to see Mahatma Gandhi? Name one thing this print cannot tell us.

  2. Read Source 8. The Home Department insisted that the Salt March was evoking no enthusiastic response, yet its own reports list deserted colleges, enrolled volunteers and eleven towns where the Salt Act was openly defied. What does this contradiction tell you about the colonial state at that moment?

  3. In 1921 the hill tribes of northern Andhra broke the forest laws, the farmers of Awadh withheld taxes, and the peasants of Kumaun refused to carry loads for officials. What does this variety tell us about the relationship between the national leadership and local movements?

  4. Set out the chain of events that runs from the launch of Quit India in August 1942 to the complete political polarisation revealed by the elections of early 1946. At which point in that chain could the outcome have been different, and why?

  5. Read Sources 5 and 6 side by side. What did Mahatma Gandhi fear would happen if separate electorates were granted, and what did Ambedkar fear would happen if they were not? On what did the two men agree?

  6. Mahatma Gandhi called off Non-cooperation after Chauri Chaura, at a moment when the movement was at its height. Using the chapter, explain what he believed was at stake — and state the strongest objection a critic of that decision could have raised.

  7. The peasants, workers and women who filled these movements left almost no writings of their own. Which sources in this chapter allow us to hear them at all, and what is the limit of each of those sources?