As The Hindu wrote, ‘There was a sensational meeting of the municipal council.’ ‘A number’ of “untouchables”, the paper added, ‘crowded round the meeting hall.’ Inside, a Brahmin deputation pressed its view. The council was evenly divided. C.R. cast the Chairman’s vote to keep the employee in the agraharam. As a result, C.R. would later recall, Brahmin widows ‘cast looks of hatred’ at C.R. A friend asked him, ‘Do you wish to kill my grandmother? She has not eaten for two days.’17
C.R. was unyielding, and after a while the resistance subsided. Hurdles again arose when he wanted to send two ‘untouchable’ students to Salem’s Technical Training School. The Indian headmaster and the European inspector were unwilling to take them but an insistent C.R. again had his way.
Goaded by his conscience, C.R. was taking an attitude in 1917-8 that K. Kamaraj, Chief Minister of Madras from 1954 to 1962, would characterize as ‘revolutionary at that time.’18 Among those offended by it was the Chairman’s father. Discovering once that his grandson Narasimhan, then six, had consumed lemonade in the home of an Anglo-Indian official, violating the caste code, Chakravarti Iyengar berated the boy, but C.R. told Narasimhan, ‘You have done nothing wrong.’
Chakravarti Iyengar wondered whether a priest would preside at his cremation, but there is no record of his asking his son to retrace his steps. In the father’s feelings about his son, pride and admiration outweighed disagreement.
There was no controversy in Salem regarding C.R.’s sense of duty. As unpaid Chairman he was spending six hours a day in the municipal office, forgoing professional earnings, and combining in himself the twin roles of a Municipal Chairman and an executive officer or Commissioner of the future.
A year after C.R. had become Chairman, Legh, the Collector, told the Madras Government that C.R. was giving ‘personal attention to public business,’ and R.A. Graham, Secretary in the Madras Government, minuted ‘the energy and ability of the Chairman’ of Salem municipality.19 Seven months later, at the end of January 1919, C.R. resigned his position.
Attending the council for the last time (he had chaired over fifty of its meetings), C.R. spoke of the ‘liberal and sympathetic attitude’ of Legh, who was leaving Salem. C.R. added that Legh was ‘not one of those who believed that they could not serve under Indian ministers responsible to the people of this country.’ Here C.R. was explicitly anticipating Swaraj, for which, in retrospect, his role at the head of the Salem council was a useful apprenticeship.
By July 1919, the ex-Chairman of the Salem municipality had not only actively joined an agitation against the Raj; his role was known to the Raj’s officials. Nonetheless, in a confidential note to the Government of Madras, Salem’s new Collector, E.A. Davis, wrote that month of C.R. as a person ‘of whose work I have heard nothing but good.’20
Withal, he was a lawyer, though his practice had been curtailed. And it was as a lawyer that he drew attention throughout the South in 1918-9.
Dr P. Varadarajulu Naidu, a popular Tamil speaker, had been arrested and charged with sedition for remarks addressed to a few thousand mill-workers in Madras. C.R. defended Naidu, whose trial commenced in Madura, now Madurai, in September 1918. The large crowd that gathered outside the court was fired at; two were killed. Next day, ignoring a machine-gun placed atop the courthouse and the marching of the military up and down the town, 25,000 assembled to protest.
South India remained interested in the proceedings which lasted until April the following year. Throngs daily waited outside the courtroom and the papers reproduced every word uttered inside.
The sedition law sanctioned prosecution on the recommendation of the Governor-in-Council. The Madura public prosecutor, C. Krishnan Nair, showed the court a telegram from Ooty, the Presidency’s summer capital; that, he said, was the authority for Naidu’s arrest.
‘Does the telegram prove the sanction of the Governor-in- Council?’ C.R. asked Nair. The prosecutor admitted that it did not contain sufficient proof. It was on the case’s merits, however, that C.R. wanted to win. He disputed the text of Naidu’s speech given to the court and, according to The Hindu, ‘showed how the report was inaccurate.’
Quoting other Indian lecturers, C.R. demonstrated that Naidu had ‘treated in far milder language’ than theirs ‘matters of the deepest importance to us.’ Even the Government’s version showed that Naidu had not challenged India’s connection with the Empire; this, C.R. maintained, ruled out sedition.
The day before a three-week vacation, giving the judge a list of witnesses on whom he proposed to rely, C.R. made a plea that the names be kept confidential during the vacation. He feared improper influence on his witnesses.
Judge: It is always my practice to give the list [to the other side].
C.R.: Whatever might be the practice in this court, it should not be held valid in the present case . . .
Judge: I do not see any reason to deviate from the practice.
C.R.: This is the first case of its kind. I do not think Your Honour has decided such cases.
After a marathon defence, C.R. left the ‘judgement in the care of Your Honour’s sense of justice, religion and conscience.’ Though S.V. Nargunam, the magistrate, heard him with courtesy, C.R. did not expect an acquittal. A man like Nargunam, both a judge and a district officer under the Collector, could hardly decide against the Government in a sedition case.
Soon after the trial began, C.R. aired his misgivings. At a Home Rule meeting in Madura, he asked: ‘How could they possibly expect, when the Crown was so directly . . . against the accused person, that the accused person could have a fair . . . trial at the hands of a Magistrate who . . . held the appointment at the pleasure of the Crown?’
The Government wanted to sue C.R. for contempt of court but dropped the idea. It would have alienated the public afresh and added to C.R.’s popularity.
Nargunam pronounced as expected, sentencing Naidu to 15 months’ rigorous imprisonment. An appeal went to the Madras High Court, where three judges, of whom two were British, acquitted Naidu, without discussing his speech, on the technical ground that C.R. had spotted at the outset: lack of proof of the sanction of the Governor-in-Council. The Salem advocate tasted victory and fame.21
As 1919 opened, India seemed a reliable, even if dissatisfied, member of the Empire. The War had ended the previous November. Meeting in Delhi in December, Congress congratulated the King and reaffirmed their loyalty to him.
Anxiety emanated, however, from the recommendations of a committee on sedition headed by an English judge, Sir Sydney Rowlatt. These included, for suspected seditionists, arrests without trial and trials without appeal; a two-year prison term was proposed for offences like carrying a seditious pamphlet.
Their eyes fixed on the Montford Reforms, many Congressmen chose not to see the Rowlatt hazard, but C.R. was perturbed. In January he complained that the proposals ‘have not received a tithe of the attention which the Reform Scheme has been honoured with,’ adding that ‘even our Bar Associations have not thought fit to examine the proposals, which threatened to set aside all legal traditions . . . not temporarily but for all time.’
The remarks were made at Trichnopoly, or Trichy, where he presided at a Home Rule League conference. He anticipated, in his short (and remarkably Gandhi-like) address, many of the key elements, short-term and permanent, of the struggle that was to come. ‘Never allow yourself to be injured or insulted,’ he exhorted. ‘Stand up for your rights always.’ ‘We lost our liberties,’ C.R. added, ‘by reason of weaknesses in national life.’
His most important remark, however, related to what he called ‘this disastrous legislation’ — the Rowlatt proposals. Said C.R.:
The matter is serious enough for an anxious examination of the principles and propriety of opposing it with the entire soul- force of the nation.22 (Author’s italics.)
The Rowlatt sword fell on 6 February 1919. Two Bills were introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi. Non- official members opposed the measure
s with eloquence and logic, but the decision of the nominated majority was a foregone conclusion.
Political India could lament. It could warn. Could it do more? One man had the grit to turn dismay into defiance. Though quite seriously ill at the time, Gandhi decided to pit satyagraha, or soul force, against the Bills: he would refuse, he declared in the second week of February, to obey the Bills if they became law.
A month earlier, C.R., who was yet to meet Gandhi, had asked for the technique that had seemed to work in South Africa to be applied in India. Even before they met each other, the two had embraced the same thought.
In January 1919 C.R. made up his mind to migrate to Madras. Salem limited his growing public role. Many had reminded him of this fact, including Kasturiranga Iyengar, and men such as K.S. Venkataraman who looked up to him. ‘You have won after all,’ he told Venkataraman towards the end of January.
Kasturiranga Iyengar told C.R. that a house in Madras he owned on Cathedral Road was available. Informing Iyengar that he would rent it, C.R. also proposed that Gandhi, who by mid- February was asking for signatories to a pledge of resistance to the Rowlatt Bills, be invited to Madras. Gandhi could stay with him, C.R. added.
Iyengar sent a letter inviting Gandhi, who was glad to get the word. Though, on 24 February, six persons in Ahmedabad, including Barrister Vallabhbhai Patel and Sarojini Naidu, signed the pledge along with Gandhi, and a Satyagraha Sabha had begun functioning in Bombay, top-ranking Congressmen had on the whole avoided him. They were not sure about satyagraha.
Madras offered Gandhi an opening. Though still shaky in health, he decided to take it. He was in Delhi, where he had gone to plead with the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, against the Bills. Consideration of one was postponed, but the other was a sufficient fetter.
Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, was with him on the long journey from Delhi to Madras in the middle of March. On the train Desai informed Gandhi that the man behind the request from the South was C.R. We do not know how Desai knew.
C.R.’s last weeks at Sooramangalam had been busier than ever. He resigned as Municipal Chairman but would return home late, and read. Wanting to draw his attention one night, Papa, then twelve, asked him, ‘Are you reading for a law case?’ Her father smiled and said, ‘I am reading about breaking laws.’
‘We are going to Madras,’ he announced one day. Early in March 1919, accompanied by Papa, Narasimhan, aged nine, Lakshmi, six years old, and Manga’s mother, who had continued to look after Lakshmi, C.R. boarded the train for the Presidency’s capital. His father as well as Krishnaswami, sixteen, and Ramaswami, fourteen, who had to complete the term at Salem College, were left behind with C.R.’s brother Srinivasa. Also left behind was a house slowly rising on C.R.’s plot in the Extension.
Built on two floors and surrounded by coconut and mango trees, the Cathedral Road house in Madras, for which C.R. paid a monthly rent of Rs 230, stood where the Chola Hotel stands today. Two cooks were found. Ghouse brought the car. Bundles of law books were carted from Salem. C.R. furnished his study on the upper floor with a desk and chairs made in the School of Arts; a sculptured chest of drawers with brass handles went against the wall.
Dressed in a rough white handspun and handwoven or khadi kurta and a khadi dhoti and donning the white cap that he had recently designed, a weary Gandhi arrived in Madras on the morning of 18 March. Desai was with him. C.R., who had signed Gandhi’s satyagraha pledge the previous day, stood inconspicuously in the welcoming group at the station.
In the evening the news came that the Legislative Council in Delhi had passed one of the Rowlatt Bills. Only the Viceroy’s assent remained. Then what? Satyagraha, Gandhi had said. Yet how precisely would one disobey the Rowlatt law? An unjust order not to attend a meeting or enter a town could be disobeyed, but the Rowlatt law was a threat, not an order. How did one fight a threat?
Gandhi wrestled with the question. For the first two days of his stay in Madras, Gandhi did not know that the bespectacled lawyer who was around was his host. Informed that the bungalow belonged to Kasturiranga Iyengar, who had sent him the letter of invitation, Gandhi thought he was the editor’s guest.
Correcting Gandhi, Desai also advised him to cultivate C.R., ‘who,’ as Gandhi would recall afterwards, ‘from his innate shyness kept himself constantly in the background.’23 Gandhi acted on Desai’s advice. For three successive days he and C.R. discussed the Rowlatt law.
Word that Lord Chelmsford had signed the Bill was received on 22 March. Early next morning, while, as Gandhi put it, he was still in the ‘twilight condition between sleep and consciousness,’ an idea came to him, as if in a dream. An hour or so later he told C.R. about it:
We should call upon the country to observe a general hartal. Satyagraha . . . is a sacred fight . . . Let all the people of India, therefore suspend their business on that day and observe the day as one of fasting and prayer . . . It is very difficult to say whether all the provinces would respond to this appeal of ours or not but I feel fairly sure of Bombay, Madras, Bihar, and Sind.
C.R. ‘was at once taken up’ with the suggestion of his guest, who drafted a call to the nation.24 Gandhi had found the next step and was at peace. On 25 March, two days after Gandhi left Madras, the city’s Commissioner of Police informed the Government of the opening of a branch of Gandhi’s movement ‘in the home of Mr C. Rajagopalachari, late of Salem.’
He had learnt, the Commissioner added, that a few invited to become secretaries of the Madras branch were ‘reluctant to accept the nomination on some ground or other.’25 This was understandable. Gandhi’s proposal was untried; it could also land sponsors in trouble. It was C.R., ‘late of Salem’, who became secretary of the Satyagraha Sabha of Madras and who moved, at a meeting on 30 March, the resolution asking the South to observe the hartal.
The appointed day, 6 April, was wonder. Nobody knew quite how it all came about. Almost the whole of India, from one end to the other, towns as well as villages, obsorved a complete hartal.
C.R. marvelled. He had not imagined this outcome while proposing Gandhi’s southern visit. Referring to Madras, he wrote in The Hindu (7.4.19): ‘As if by magic the whole city was stilled to prayer.’ In the evening, he added, ‘it was one surging mass of humanity’ from ‘Napier’s Bridge to San Thome’ that gathered on the beach, listening to speeches relayed by human voices from a series of spaced platforms.
An intelligence officer named Moore submitted an identical report to the Government:
All shops, big and small, were closed. Coffee hotels and vegetable and milk-stalls were also not open. Vendors of curd were not seen, and even the women who sell rice cakes in the morning did not do so today.
Moore said, too, that the crowd on the beach was ‘unanimously considered to have been the largest gathering . . . on such an occasion in Madras.’26
A week earlier C.R. had spoken of ‘Mr Gandhi.’ Now he employed a phrase that some, including the poet Tagore, were using — Mahatma. ‘The fiat of the Satyagraha Mahatma,’ said C.R. in The Hindu, (7.4.19), ‘had been observed by all of India, by the high and the low, as if he had all the armies and the police forces . . . of the Indian government behind his word.’ ‘Can soul force,’ he asked, ‘be any longer denied?’
Within days the movement entered another phase — of peaceful and open sale of banned books, provided they were free from violent thoughts. These included the Mahatma’s Hind Swaraj and his translation of Ruskin’s Unto This Last.
In Madras, with C.R.’s help, a sheet that was deliberately unregistered, Satyagrahi, was published. In a leaflet dated 12 May, preserved in the Raj’s archives, C.R. said:
Let it be clearly understood that we would oppose such legislation vesting in the executive Government the absolute right to suspect and imprison without trial even if the Government is democratic and purely Indian, and not bureaucratic and foreign . . .27
C.R. now cut the chains that were tying him. For all their value, the courts were sustaining the Raj. This wa
s Gandhi’s view and in theory C.R. had agreed. Now he ended his practice, before quite beginning it in Madras. The law books carefully brought from Salem were never unpacked.
Also, he would cease wearing his finely textured clothes. Following Gandhi, he and his children would wear khadi, which would spread across India as the livery of revolt and a symbol of identification with the lowly.
When one day a large green roll of coarse thick fabric turned up at home, seven-year-old Lakshmi asked her father if it was a carpet. It was not. She and her sister and brothers were going to be clothed in it.
3
Battle
1919-21
Hindus and Muslims were acting as one — Gandhi was invited to speak in a Bombay mosque, and Swami Shraddhanand, leader of the Arya Samaj, in Delhi’s Jama Masjid. The breadth of opposition hurt the Empire’s prestige, which received a stunning blow in April 1919 in Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs.
The Punjab had been tense for some time. Methods used to recruit soldiers and raise loans for the War had caused resentment. On their part, the British were disposed to believe rumours of an Afghan invasion.
The April hartal, enthusiastically observed all over the province, passed off fairly peacefully in Amritsar, but hostility was in the air. Two Congress leaders, Dr Satyapal, a Hindu, and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, a Muslim, pressed Gandhi to visit the Punjab and be a calming influence.
However, annoyed by the hartal, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Punjab’s Governor, prevented the Mahatma’s entry. On 10 April, Gandhi was taken off his train at the Punjab border and compelled to return to Bombay under escort; for part of the journey he was confined in a goods train.
O’Dwyer also had Satyapal and Kitchlew arrested and removed from Amritsar. A procession of protesters was fired at. In revenge, the infuriated crowd killed five or six Englishmen in their offices, and Miss Sherwood, a schoolmistress, was assaulted.
Rajaji Page 5
