A great scholar and intellectual, Gokhale was a modern man who refused to dwell in the greatness of the past. He was thoughtful and compassionate and cared deeply about people. A true democrat, he looked for progress through a parliamentary system where the will of the people was respected. As the historian Bipan Chandra writes, he was one of our greatest parliamentarians and ‘as a speaker he was gentle, reasonable, courteous, non-flamboyant and lucid. He relied primarily upon detailed knowledge and the careful, cool and logical marshalling and analysis of data.’ For Gokhale mere oratory did not solve any problems; you had to work for a lifetime to make a difference. As he once said, he was a practical man.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Every religion that has come into the world has brought the message of love and brotherhood. Those who are indifferent to the welfare of their fellow men, whose hearts are empty of love, they do not know the meaning of religion.
—Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
He would tower over the diminutive Mahatma Gandhi and bend courteously to talk to him. In this six-foot-six gentle giant, a Pathan from that fierce land of guns and blood feuds, Gandhi found a true man of peace. Like the Mahatma, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan believed in non-violence and tolerance of all religions, and his only purpose in life was to help his people. And they returned his love by calling him ‘Badshah Khan’—the King of the Khans.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan did not know the exact date of his birth but it was probably in 1890. He was born into the family of a Pashtun (Pathan) chieftain Behram Khan of the Mohammedzai tribe, in the village of Utmanzai in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). This region, bordering Afghanistan and set high among the western Himalayas, was a poor and backward one. The people survived by primitive agriculture, education was just basic religious lessons at the local madrassa and women, living cloistered in purdah, had no rights at all.
When young Ghaffar Khan was sent to the madrassa to study, he realized that all he was expected to do was memorize the Quran, but the Mullas would not explain the text. As he wrote later, ‘… the Mullas were not aware of the true meaning of religion and very often they insisted that children should not ask any question but should merely devote themselves to learning by rote and recitation.’ He soon shifted to the Edwards Memorial Mission High School to receive a modern education.
For a short while he joined the army but soon resigned, angered by the way Indians were treated by British officers. His family was not pleased, because among the Pashtuns, a commission in the army was considered a matter of supreme good fortune. Ghaffar Khan left for Aligarh for further studies and here he was exposed to modern thinking and the latest events in the nationalist movement. He met many scholars and social reformers, and began to read progressive newspapers like Maulana Azad’s Al-Hilal. As the son of an affluent family he could have remained a scholar, but he took on the challenging task of transforming Pashtun society.
Ghaffar Khan understood early in life that the progress of his people depended on a modern education and opened his first school when he was just twenty. In a deeply conservative society, suspicious of change, he brought the promise of progress and freedom. Over the years he travelled across the region talking to people about the value of education and how it would benefit their lives. He was always a champion of women’s rights and opened schools for both boys and girls. Soon his activities caught the attention of the government and the Mullas, and neither was pleased. It was in the government’s interest to keep a martial race like the Pashtuns in a state of backwardness and poverty, and the Mullas who felt threatened by any form of progress preferred to support the government.
In the 1920s Ghaffar Khan organized demonstrations in support of the Khilafat movement—a largely religious movement aimed at preserving Islamic tenets—and was arrested. He was in various prisons for three years and even here he worked among the prisoners. The wardens, suspicious of his popularity, often kept him in chains in solitary confinement and this affected his health. When he came out of prison he went back to his work of trying to make his people turn away from their preoccupation with violence and vendetta. A devout Muslim who respected all faiths and opposed all forms of religious fanaticism, he tried to make them understand the true meaning of Islam that talks of peace and solidarity among the faithful. He lived a simple, Spartan life and his thoughts and actions very often resembled those of a man he deeply admired—Mahatma Gandhi.
In 1929 Ghaffar Khan formed an organization called Khudai Khidmatgar or the Servants of God. These non-violent revolutionaries also came to be called the Red Shirts because of their uniform. He launched a newspaper Pakhtun in the Pushto language to spread his message. He also began to talk of his dream of an independent land for his people. He met Gandhi and other Congress leaders in 1928 at Lucknow. He had earlier met the leaders of the Muslim League, who were mostly rich landowners, and he was not impressed. He felt that the League was being promoted by the British to divide the nationalist movement.
In the Congress, and especially in Gandhi, he found the values that he cherished—of religious tolerance, non-violence and social reform. He often stayed with Gandhi at his ashram at Wardha and he responded immediately to Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha and said that it was ‘the weapon of patience and righteousness … No power on earth can stand against it.’ He joined the Congress and his party began to attend its annual sessions, where the red shirts of the Khudai Khidmatgar always added a splash of colour to the sea of khadi.
During the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 one of the most effective protests was held in NWFP where for nearly a week the government lost control of Peshawar. The demonstrations were always peaceful and it was here that the soldiers of a Garhwali regiment refused to fire on a peaceful and unarmed crowd. Ghaffar Khan was arrested again and sentenced to three years in jail. Here he taught the Quran to the Hindus and the Bhagavad Gita to the Muslims to show how the message of all religions was the same. He had also discovered the therapeutic value of spinning on a charkha; he said it focused the mind. After the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which secured the release of all political prisoners except those convicted for violence, all the leaders were released from prison except Ghaffar Khan. Gandhi had to personally intervene with Lord Irwin to have his comrade freed.
Ghaffar Khan became a member of the Congress Working Committee but refused the post of president when it was offered to him in 1931. In the 1937 elections to provincial governments, the Khudai Khidmatgar party won the majority of seats in NWFP, proving that the Muslim League did not represent the Muslims there. The government tried to impose its own man as chief minister but failed and Ghaffar Khan’s elder brother Dr Khan Saheb became the head of the government.
During the final negotiations with the Cabinet Mission, Ghaffar Khan was a member of the Congress team with Maulana Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. However, his dream of an independent Pashtun nation was shattered when NWFP was included in Pakistan. The Muslim League called him anti-Muslim and in 1946 he was attacked and hurt so badly that he had to be hospitalized. When a plebiscite was held in NWFP in 1947, his party boycotted it and only seven per cent of the people voted, but the Muslim League declared the election valid. This betrayal of the Pashtun cause is one of the forgotten tragedies of the independence movement.
After 1947 Ghaffar Khan faced many years of house arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Pakistan government, but he was never reconciled to the reality of Pakistan and said, ‘Pakistan was created by the grace of the British, in order that Muslims and Hindus might forever forget that they are brothers.’ His final years were spent in exile in Afghanistan. On 21 January 1988 Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan died at Jalalabad at the age of ninety-eight. The man of the mountains, who was called ‘Frontier Gandhi’ for his courageous non-violence, fought for his people till the end.
Birsa Munda
Maharani raj tundu jana oro, abua raj ete jana.
(Let the kingdom of the queen be ended and our kingdom be established.)
—Birsa Munda
He was the charismatic leader of the Mundas. This tribe lives in the Chhotanagpur region of what is now Jharkhand and they rose up against the oppression of the landlords and the British government at his call. The Mundas fearlessly faced the guns of soldiers with bows and arrows, spears, axes and catapults, as their faith in their leader Birsa Munda was absolute. For the tribal he became Bhagwan, their deity, and they believed he would lead them to freedom.
Birsa Munda was born at Bamba, near Ranchi, on 15 November 1875. It was a Thursday and he was named Birsa after the day as was Munda custom. His father was a sharecropper or ryot. The family lived in a poor house built of bamboo and wandered from village to village in the Chhotanagpur area looking for work. Soon after Birsa’s birth, the family left for Chalkad. His father Sugana Munda had been converted to Christianity much before Birsa’s birth and later became a pracharak of the German missionaries. Birsa grew up like other Munda children, grazing sheep, and is said to have been skilled at playing the flute and the tuila, a single-stringed instrument made from the pumpkin.
The family moved to Ayubhatu in search of work and then Birsa went to live with his elder brother at Kunda Bartoli. After that, probably in Burju, Birsa attended a Christian missionary school for a while and got an elementary education. For a while he even became a Christian, but later he discovered Vaishnavism and became a worshipper of Vishnu. He turned vegetarian, wore the sacred thread and began worshipping the tulsi plant.
Birsa lived at a time of great social and economic tumult among the tribal people of the region. At one time they were free to lead their lives—they cleared the forest for crops and gathered the wealth of the forest like fruits, honey, plants and wood. They had grazing rights on common land that was owned by the whole community. The forests were their home and there was tacit acceptance by local rajas like the Raja of Chhotanagpur that it belonged to the various tribes.
All this changed with the arrival of the British, the officials and the missionaries. The tribal kings and leaders called Sardars were defeated and forced to pay tribute and the government insisted on the imposition of taxes on the tribes. Then the Christian missionaries arrived with their strange social rules and alien culture. Tribal society was comparatively free of caste or religious divisions and everyone, men and women, were equal. The missionaries began converting them by offering converts special privileges; this led to social divisions and much anger and resentment in the villages.
Now the government revenue collectors—the hated thikadars—arrived, followed by moneylenders and landowners who cheated the simple tribal people of their land. The tribes lost the land they had cleared and cultivated because they had no legal papers to prove they owned it and were often reduced to becoming farm labourers and often bonded workers. Many were forced into bonded labour called beth begari and others made to pay exorbitant rents by the mercenary thikadars. The Mundas began to hate and fear the Dikus, the non-tribal people of the area, and one day that anger would make these peaceful people pick up their bows and arrows in sheer desperation.
The Munda uprising was one of many among the tribal people of the region and they died by the thousands. The Santhals rose in 1855–56 and were crushed ruthlessly by the police. Among the Mundas there was first the rebellion led by the Sardars. The Sardars had earlier tried to ally themselves with the missionaries, but disappointed, had turned against them. A young Birsa joined the Sardari agitation, denounced the missionaries and began to believe that all white people—the British and the missionaries—were the same. He was jailed for two years and came out even more of a firebrand; now he claimed he had a revelation from God, which said that the land belonged to the people who cultivated it. Birsa also said that this was the kingdom of the Mundas and no one had the right to impose any taxes on them. The Sardars were against the thikadars but they had always acknowledged the sovereignty of the King of Chhotanagpur—but now Birsa claimed the forests for his people.
Birsa was barely in his twenties when he burst upon the scene claiming to be a messiah, a healer and miracle worker, and was soon being worshipped as ‘Bhagwan’ and ‘Dharti Abba’, the father of the land. His ideology was a mix of his religious beliefs and the economic demands of the people. He was a religious and social reformer, and spoke with surprising maturity for his age. He dismissed superstition and discouraged the Mundas from converting to Christianity as it led to divisions in the Munda society. He asked his followers to give up animal sacrifice, criticized their faith in magic and spirits, and asked them to stop drinking liquor. He wanted them to go back to the old traditions that worshipped the forest and then help him throw out the hated Dikus from their land.
In December 1899, Birsa Munda led the Ulgulan or the Great Tumult, with his followers moving from village to village claiming freedom from the rule of the British Maharani Victoria. They prevented the Forest Department from taking away the village common lands. Then bands of armed tribals attacked the thikadars, burned down churches and fought the police in the Ranchi–Singbhum area. For a while Birsa and his men controlled the land and there was panic in the town of Ranchi as people feared that it was to be the next target of the Ulgulan.
The tribal men and women, armed with just bows and arrows, spears and catapults, fought with unbelievable spirit against the guns of the police and army, but their defeat was inevitable. Nearly three hundred and fifty Mundas were put on trial, three were hanged and forty-four were given jail sentences. Birsa Munda was captured and died in jail a few months later on 9 June 1900. He was only twenty-five years old.
The Great Tumult was over, but Birsa was not forgotten. First, it made the government take the grievances of the Mundas against the thikadars more seriously and also acknowledge their hereditary rights to the forests. A new act, the Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, gave them more rights to the forests and banned bonded labour. It was not a perfect solution but at least the Mundas had some legal rights to their land.
Since then Birsa Munda has become an icon of the tribal people’s fight for their traditional rights, even in modern India. Today his statue stands in the Indian Parliament and he is a legend in the state of Jharkhand. There is also a statue of Birsa in the capital Ranchi and the airport is named after him. What he achieved through his rebellion was that he made the tribal people aware of their rights and give them the courage to stand up and fight for them. Even today a religious sect called the ‘Birsaites’ worships Birsa Munda as a deity.
The Ulgulan was one of the most well known of many such rebellions of peasants and tribal people all across India against the oppressive demands of the British government and the exploitation of zamindars and moneylenders who always had the might of the police on their side. All these agitations were around specific causes, and usually once their grievances were attended to, they died down.
Though influenced by the Sardars, Birsa was not fighting for their cause. He had a mission of his own—to fight for his fellow Mundas. The ideal ‘Munda Raj’, as he saw it, would be possible only if the European officials and missionaries were expelled from the scene. He had no conception of a nation called India, nor was he leading a nationalist movement for the freedom of the country, yet what was unique about Birsa Munda was his ability to organize a rebellion that united his people and made the government listen to their grievances. At the young age of twenty, he had begun to worry the British government quite a bit. He dismissed the suzerainty of the British monarch and the power of the local king, and claimed the land for his people. He showed the way to make the powerful listen to the poor and forgotten tribes. He was the passionate voice of his people and today he is the symbol of the poor and marginalized peasants and tribal people in independent India, inspiring them to find the courage to stand up and fight for their rights.
Sarojini Naidu
With lutes in our hands ever singing we roam, All men are our kindred, the world is our own.
—Sarojini Naidu, The Golden Threshold
I
t was the spring of 1930. As the country watched with bated breath, a thin old man with a big stick, walked for twenty-eight days to pick up a handful of salt on a beach.
Mahatma Gandhi had started the Civil Disobedience Movement with the famous march that ended on the beach at Dandi on 6 April. The next day he was arrested, but it did not end the Salt Satyagraha. Other leaders stepped up to lead protestors who continued to defy the salt law.
On 21 May two thousand freedom fighters marched towards the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat. Leading them was Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian woman president of the Indian National Congress. With her were Imam Saheb, an old comrade of Gandhi from South Africa, and Gandhi’s son Manilal. The British government was ready to block the marchers and the Salt Works was bounded by barbed wire and ranks of policemen armed with rifles and steel-tipped lathis.
This was a welcome the khadi-clad marchers had expected. As they stood facing the police under a scorching sun, they were armed only with their own courage and the determination of their leader. Before they had started Sarojini Naidu had reminded them of Gandhi’s strict instructions—there was to be no violence. ‘You will be beaten, but you must not resist,’ she had said. ‘You must not even raise a hand to ward off a blow.’
A Flag, a Song and a Pinch of Salt Page 7