CHAMPARAN
Not everyone in Lucknow thought that, not, at any rate, Raj Kumar Shukla, who grew indigo in north Bihar as a tenant of British planters and sought help against the planters’ oppression. Introduced to Gandhi by Brajkishore Prasad, a lawyer from Bihar, Shukla pressed Gandhi to see for himself the plight of indigo peasants working in Champaran in the foothills north of the Ganges, close to the Nepal border, and not far from Mount Everest.
Encouraged by his instincts, Gandhi indicated willingness to do so. In April 1917, after Shukla had journeyed to Ahmedabad to renew his plea to Gandhi, he was ready to accompany Shukla to north Bihar. En route, in Patna, Bihar’s capital, Shukla took Gandhi to the house of Rajendra Prasad, a lawyer he and other indigo-growers had engaged. However, the lawyer was out of town, and his servants, judging Gandhi to be of low caste, did not allow him to draw water from the well or use the lavatory in the house.
Prasad (1884-1963), thirty-two at the time, a Bihari Kayasth who had performed brilliantly at Calcutta University, would soon become a valuable colleague and in time assume the presidency of the Congress and later (from 1950 to 1962) of the Indian republic. Not finding Prasad, Gandhi contacted the Patna-based Muslim League leader, Mazharul Haq, who had been a fellow student in London.
Haq put Gandhi and Shukla on a train to Muzaffarpur in the north of the province, where they were met in the middle of the night by Kripalani, the history professor who had talked with Gandhi in Santiniketan, and a crowd of students. Though the welcoming party carried lanterns, Kripalani had trouble finding Gandhi because he was travelling third class.
The nub of the peasants’ problem was the so-called ‘tinkathia’ regulation that forced them to grow indigo on part of their land even though its price was falling. Local lawyers, joined shortly after Gandhi’s arrival by Rajendra Prasad and Brajkishore Prasad from Patna, confirmed Shukla’s stories of oppression and coercion.
As had happened before—including in 1894 in Durban, in 1903 in Johannesburg, in 1913 in Newcastle—Gandhi saw an opportunity and instantly went for it. He told the clutch of lawyers from Patna and north Bihar that if they played their part he was willing to stay in the indigo area (about a thousand miles from where he was born, and culturally a different world), make it his home, and fight.
He was not asking Bihar’s lawyers, Gandhi explained, to court imprisonment. But they should be willing to serve without fees as the peasants’ stenographers, taking down their stories and complaints, and also translate for him documents he could not read (in Champaran these were sometimes written in Kaithi or Urdu) or speeches in the local dialect he could not understand.
They agreed, and in so doing became, without realizing it, trainees for leadership in a national movement. Turning down a judicial post he had been offered, Rajendra Prasad said he would be content as a clerk and stenographer. Brajkishore Prasad spoke likewise.
Accepting changes, the lawyers gave up caste rules and ate from a common kitchen: since all were ‘engaged in rendering service’, eating separately made no sense, Gandhi told them (94: 148). Over the following weeks, thousands of statements from the humble were diligently recorded by the elite, under Gandhi’s supervision, in the Champaran district (west of Muzaffarpur town), where much of the indigo was extracted.
Energized by Gandhi’s presence, the peasants acclaimed him as their guide. The planters objected and declared (in line with South African precedents) that Gandhi was ‘An Unwelcome Visitor’. But Gandhi claimed the right to study the peasants’ grievances, and the duty, thereafter, to advise the government. When he saw that the police was tailing him, Gandhi wrote to the district magistrate:
17 Apr. 1917: I observed yesterday that a police officer followed the party all the way… We shall welcome the presence, if we may not have the assistance, of the police in the course of our mission (15:344).
Assuming a right to defend the peasants, the ‘outsider’ Gandhi thus also wants the authorities to assist him to collect facts that could go against them.
On 16 April Gandhi was served with a notice to leave Champaran by the first available train. In a letter to the district magistrate, Gandhi said he intended to disobey the order; and in a letter to the private secretary to the Viceroy, he said he felt obliged to return the Kaiser-i-Hind medal. And on 18 April, in Motihari, headquarters of the district of Champaran, he said in the courtroom:
I have disregarded the order served upon me, not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being—the voice of conscience (15: 345-6).
Gandhi had taken care, through letters, to keep a range of friends in the world outside Bihar posted on what was happening in Champaran—Andrews, Srinivasa Sastri, Malaviya, Polak, Kallenbach, Maganlal in Ahmedabad, and others. Some of these friends were in touch with the press, and at times Gandhi himself was.
The courtroom statement was big news across India. Reading it in Ahmedabad, Rao Saheb Harilalbhai ‘shot up from his chair’ at the Gujarat Club and said to those around him, ‘Here is a man, a hero, a brave man! We must have him as [the Gujarat Sabha’s] president.’ Vallabhbhai Patel and others ‘immediately concurred’.18 There were similar reactions elsewhere. In Bihar, Kripalani asked Gandhi if he could join the ashram, and Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad and several others were captured for life.
The Raj did not jail Gandhi. Not only was the expulsion order withdrawn; Gandhi was allowed to make his own inquiry and later made a member of an official inquiry committee looking into the peasants’ complaints. In October this committee unanimously asked for an abolition of the tinkathia system.
Why did Gandhi succeed? From South Africa Gandhi had brought equipment rare among India’s elite politicians: familiarity with, and understanding of, the poor masses, and similar assets in respect of the white ruling class. On the one hand, he was able to befriend some British planters and officials, even if others remained hostile, and there was sympathy for him in New Delhi.
On the other, he had support from Champaran’s peasants as well as nationwide publicity, which meant that imprisoning or expelling Gandhi seemed riskier to the Raj than yielding to him. Moreover, indigo was losing commercial value worldwide, and the government had less of an incentive to stand up to Gandhi.
Meanwhile, Gandhi had brought Kasturba and other associates to Champaran, taught himself to write letters in Hindi, started schools, and tried to teach improved agriculture and sanitation to Champaran’s villagers. On the last question, a British official called Merriman wrote to Morshead, commissioner of the Tirhut division that included Champaran: ‘Personally, I think that if they are genuinely interested in the matter they profess, they will soon get sick of trying to teach hygiene to the Bihari cultivator.’19
Attacking Gandhi’s mission in a letter in The Statesman of Calcutta, a prominent white planter called Irwin objected to Kasturba’s presence in Champaran. Said Irwin: ‘During the absences of her lord and master at Home Rule and such-like functions, Mrs Gandhi… under the shallow pretence of opening a school, started a bazaar in [a] dehat’ (16: 511-12). In his reply Gandhi said that Irwin had ‘unchivalrously attacked one of the most innocent women walking on the face of the earth (and this I say although she happens to be my wife)’.
Irwin’s letter had also warned of Hindu-Muslim discord if Gandhi continued to speak, as he had done, of his attachment as a Hindu to the cow. Gandhi’s answer revealed one who hoped to win and reform Hindus as well as Muslims.
The ‘Christians and Muslims living in India, including the British,’ he wrote, ‘have one day to give up beef’. But for that to happen Hindus would have to improve their treatment of the cow. Concerned that—‘contrary to the genius of Hinduism’—some Hindus ‘would not mind forcing even at the point of the sword’ the Muslim or the Christian to abandon cow slaughter, Gandhi added that he was committed to show ‘the folly, the stupidity and the inhumanity of the crime of killing a fellow human being for the sake of saving a fellow animal’.20
In September she was released, and in October Edwin Montagu, newly-appointed secretary of state for India, travelled from London to see if Indians could be granted more political opportunities. Tilak, Mrs Besant, Gandhi and Jinnah were among the politicians he met at the end of November. In his diary Montagu wrote that Mrs Besant had ‘the most beautiful voice’ he had ever heard, and that Jinnah was ‘perfectly mannered’ and ‘very clever’ but obstinate.
Recognizing in India an ominous undercurrent of anti-British anger, Montagu also wrote in his diary that it was ‘an outrage’ that a man like Jinnah ‘should have no chance of running the affairs of his own country’. Jinnah would have agreed. Walker, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, told Montagu: ‘[Jinnah] believes that when Mrs Besant and Tilak have disappeared, he will be the leader.’21
As for ‘the renowned’ Gandhi, as Montagu called him, the diary recorded that he ‘dresses like a coolie’ and ‘lives practically on the air’. Apparently Montagu said to Gandhi, ‘I am surprised to find you taking part in the political life of the country.’ Gandhi’s reply, given (as he would later say in a letter to Andrews) ‘without a moment’s thought’, was that he was in politics ‘because without it I cannot do my religious and social work’. Gandhi added to Andrews that he thought ‘the reply will stand good to the end of my life’ (6 July 1918; 17: 124).
In his diary Montagu summed up Gandhi as ‘a social reformer’, yet in some ways at least Gandhi was more practical than his fellow politicians, and keener than them to involve the people. He had, for instance, asked the Congress to collect signatures nationwide for a memorandum to Montagu demanding ‘the early self-government’ that the Congress and the League had asked for in Lucknow.
The Congress accepted this proposal, as also Gandhi’s suggestion that the memorandum should be drawn up in local languages. Thanks to him, there was ‘an outburst of energy’ in the Gujarat countryside, where more than 8,000 signatures were collected by the end of September 1917, a large figure for the time.22
In the first week of November 1917, Gandhi had given politics in Gujarat a new character while chairing, as the head of the Gujarat Sabha, a conference in Godhra in north Gujarat. First, he tore up the draft of the resolution of loyalty to the King with which every political conference in India began. Pointing out that gatherings in England did not pass ‘loyalty’ resolutions, Gandhi declared that ‘loyalty could be presumed until they declared themselves rebels’.
Next, affirming that Swaraj was dependent on ‘widespread peasant backing’, he urged every speaker, including Tilak, who had come from Poona, and Jinnah, who had come from Bombay, to speak in an Indian language. Tilak spoke in Marathi, and the anglicized Jinnah unwillingly ‘stammered out a speech in Gujarati’.23 The ‘pressure’ that Gandhi applied in Godhra would remain for Jinnah an unpleasant memory.24
At Godhra Gandhi went with caste Hindu and Muslim leaders to a meeting where the ‘untouchable’ Dheds were also present. According to a police agent who took notes, Gandhi said: ‘We Hindus and Muslims have become one; here we are in association with this Dhed community.’ The higher castes would become ‘fit for Swaraj’, he said, when they stopped thinking of the Dheds as low (16: 135).
Gandhi may not have known that untouchable leaders in Bombay had told Montagu that they would ‘fight to the last drop of [their] blood any attempt to transfer the seat of authority in this country from British hands to the so-called high-caste Hindus’.25 But, as we have seen, he knew instinctively that Swaraj, caste and the Hindu-Muslim question went together.
Finally, in Godhra Gandhi turned the Gujarat Sabha from a once-a-year gathering into a year-round body. Creating an executive committee of the Sabha, Gandhi persuaded Vallabhbhai Patel, the Ahmedabad-based barrister who was now also an influential member of the city’s municipality, to serve as the committee’s secretary.
Patel’s first task, Gandhi told him, was to seek the help of senior officials for ending ‘veth’—the custom of forced, and usually unpaid, labour in the villages whereby a visiting officer often required a local carpenter to make pegs for the officer’s tent, a potter to provide vessels and fetch water in them, a grocer to supply foodstuffs, a sweeper to clean, and so forth.
Patel made some headway. Though Frederick Pratt, commissioner of the northern division of Bombay presidency and thus the Raj’s principal officer in Gujarat, resented Patel’s ‘interference’, he could not deny the impropriety of veth or prevent the entry into the countryside of Gujarat Sabha volunteers decrying the custom.
By this time Gandhi had enlisted another key aide. A lawyer and writer gifted in both English and Gujarati, Mahadev Desai (1892-1942) was twenty-five and had translated Morley’s On Compromise into Gujarati. Two years after first meeting Gandhi, Desai placed himself at Gandhi’s side.
On 31 August 1917 Gandhi told Desai: ‘I have got in you the man I wanted.’ To Polak he wrote (8 March 1918): ‘Mr Desai… has thrown in his lot with me. He is a capable helper and his ambition is to replace you. It is a mighty feat’ (16: 316). Until his death in detention at the age of fifty, Desai would serve Gandhi as stenographer, typist, confidant, informant, interpreter, editor, helper and friend.
The peasants of Kheda. As 1917 turned to 1918, restive peasants in the district of Kheda presented Gandhi with what looked like an opportunity to present satyagraha to rural Gujarat. Following torrential rains in October 1917 that killed an excellent crop of grain raised after a couple of bad years, two men from the district who had attended the Godhra conference, Mohanlal Pandya and Shankarlal Parikh, sought Gandhi’s help for obtaining a suspension of the land tax.
In India’s vast countryside, the land tax that peasant proprietors paid year by year was the bedrock (and practical proof) of British rule, even as earlier the impost had sustained (and symbolized) Mughal rule. Sometimes, in bad years, the British remitted the tax, but it was theirs to collect or let go.
Kheda’s collector of the land tax was, as everywhere else in India, the Raj’s chief officer in the district and also the district magistrate, reporting to the commissioner of his division of the province (Frederick Pratt in Ahmedabad in this case) or, at times, directly to the provincial government in Bombay. Under the Kheda collector was a mamlatdar in each tehsil of the district, and under every mamlatdar several talatis or village revenue collectors.
It was this network of rulers, from the village talati up to the governor of Bombay presidency, that the Kheda peasants faced. Pandya and Parikh collected signatures from thousands of affected peasants, and the Gujarat Sabha urged the Bombay government to cancel the tax in some Kheda areas and postpone collection elsewhere in the district, but mamlatdars and talatis insisted on immediate payment of the tax. From Champaran, where he was trying to involve peasants in schools, sanitation, clinics and the breeding and care of cattle, Gandhi was summoned to Ahmedabad.
In the first week of January 1918, after he had cross-examined Pandya and Parikh and satisfied himself that the peasants’ hardship was real, Gandhi asked the Gujarat Sabha to consider advising the peasants to suspend payment of the tax until a reply was received from Bombay. But he also laid down two conditions. One was that the Sabha’s executive committee had to agree unanimously to the proposed line of action, and the other was that one of the committee should give ‘all his time to the campaign until it was completed’.26
Though he did not name anyone, Gandhi had in mind the committee’s secretary, Vallabhbhai Patel. He had been wooing Patel, pressing him to dine daily with him in the ashram, congratul
ating him from Champaran on work Patel had done for the municipality, and expressing appreciation for Patel’s refusal to remarry though his wife had died in 1909. The heart of Patel, who nursed a deep bond with the peasants, ‘danced’ at the idea of a satyagraha in his Kheda, but giving up his practice for an indefinite period was a huge risk for his future and that of his two children.
Nonetheless he offered his services, not, he would later insist, ‘on the spur of the moment’ but ‘after mature consideration’.27 Gandhi’s other condition too was met when the lone committee member hesitant about satyagraha chose not to vote against the proposal.
Six years older than Patel and the same age as Gandhi, whom he had met and liked, Frederick Pratt* had served earlier as Kheda’s collector and was fluent in Gujarati. Tough and experienced, he was convinced of the Raj’s benevolence towards Gujarat’s peasants. He told Gandhi:
In India, to defy the law of revenue is to take a step which would destroy all administration. To break this law, therefore, is different from breaking all other laws.28
In the five months of struggle that followed, Pratt was harder on Patel than on Gandhi, whom he called Mahatma Gandhi in some public utterances, and he and the mamlatdars were pretty hard on the peasants. Over 3,000 peasants had signed a pledge not to pay the tax and, despite seizures of property, most had kept it.
Thrilled by aspects of the peasants’ attitude, Gandhi nonetheless questioned whether they had really understood his ‘peaceful war’29—among other things he had heard that women and children had beaten up a mamlatdar who had seized buffaloes. But even as Gandhi wondered about the quality of this satyagraha, the Raj yielded partially and agreed that the impoverished would not have to pay the tax for a year.
As had happened over Champaran and indigo, Gandhi’s relationship with the Viceroy in Delhi, Lord Chelmsford, had again proved helpful. Behind this friendship lay Gandhi’s willingness to support the war effort unconditionally. As he said to Chelmsford, he wanted India to give ‘ungrudging and unequivocal support to the Empire… in the hour of its danger’, which would enable Indians to reach ‘all the more speedily’ the status of Canada and Australia (A 403-5).
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 28