Vinayak was opposed to the imposition of Urdu in most schools across India, including the Andamans. Otherwise, he was proficient in Urdu; recently, three patriotic Urdu ghazals were discovered in the Andamans, in his own handwriting. They dated back to 1921 when he exhorted the youth to fight the British. One of these ghazals, ‘Yahi Paaoge ’, also managed to reach the revolutionaries of the Kakori Conspiracy through Sachindranath Sanyal. The revolutionaries would sing this often as an inspirational ode. 12 In one of the ghazals, he notes:
Our brave warrior is the slayer of Ravan, Lord Ram
Our proud charioteer is the god of Karma yog, Lord Krishna
O Bharat! What army can stop thy chariot?
Why this delay, awake brothers, we are our own saviours! 13
Similar sentiments are expressed in his Urdu ghazal, ‘Pehla Hafta ’, written before his imprisonment in the Andamans—showing that the long incarceration did little to dampen his patriotic spirit.
On 1 August 1920, came news of Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s death. It was a deep personal loss for Vinayak who considered Tilak his political guru. The grief spilled over even in the Andamans where prisoners refused dinner that evening in honour of the departed hero.
Continuing with his work of reforming the lives of people in the prison and the Andamans, Vinayak then pushed for inter-caste dining. Though he met with stout opposition from orthodox Hindus, Vinayak was able to prevail upon them the need to break the barriers of caste that had crippled Hindu society and disunited it. Dining together on festivals such as Diwali and Dussehra was the first step in shaking the foundations of this well-entrenched social evil. They were to lay the ground for the massive work that Vinayak was to later do in Ratnagiri.
Using his comparative freedom and authority as a foreman, he strove harder for the spread of education among prisoners. To this effect, he urged the authorities and convinced them to start the first primary school on the jail campus for juvenile convicts. An educated political prisoner was appointed as the teacher and Vinayak created the syllabus and teaching methodology. In the true spirit of jail reforms, he propagated to these young convicts the idea of becoming better and patriotic citizens. The scriptures and Hindi too formed part of the curriculum. A similar school was started by him in the oil depot for other prisoners who were unlettered. The same year, in 1920, for the first time, the birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh was celebrated in the jail. Vinayak spoke about the guru and his immense contributions. It was an occasion to create a sense of unity with the Sikh prisoners. Vinayak’s toil and efforts resulted, with time, in the achievement of nearly 80 per cent average literacy among the prisoners. 14 Ten years ago, while he had seen prisoners in the same jail whiling away their free time playing dice, gambling or quarrelling with one another, now most of them spent it productively in teaching, learning, spiritual pursuits and reading books. Writing about this, Vinayak states:
Hundreds of prisoners in the jail showered their gratitude upon me. All of them knew one thing very well, and it was that during ten years of my association with them, I had carried on incessant agitation in the Cellular Jail and outside for giving them an organized existence. I had carried on agitation in the press, through petitions, through civil resistance, through questions asked in the Imperial Legislature at Delhi, through protests, correspondence and personal letters, to draw the pointed attention of India and its Central Government to their condition in the Andamans. And it was my persistence at it that had made the matter a live issue before the Jail Commission. To those who would felicitate me I said, ‘At last the Andamans as a prison-colony is no more, the Cellular Jail is dismantled. This change is not the result of any single-handed endeavour. It is the reward of ten years of continuous and all-sided agitation, to the success of which all of you, and especially the political convicts, have made a tremendous contribution by your trials and tribulations throughout this period. And if it has succeeded even partially, the credit is yours.’ I told them so and offered my sincerest felicitations to them in return. I added how fine it would have been for Mr Barrie to be alive that day. Mr Barrie used to taunt me that all my efforts were to go for naught and add that I was dashing my head against a stone-wall, that [sic] was not the wall that would break, but that my head would break. I could have told him that day as follows: ‘Mr Barrie, my head had received many bruises by my dashing it continuously against your prison-walls. No doubt about it. But behold! The wall of your prison has now been cracked and will soon crumble down. And I am here alive with all the bruises I have received in the fight.’ 15
When the proposal of shutting down Cellular Jail was conveyed to them, Vinayak was quite displeased. He wanted the prison colony to continue as a model for the rest of India, from where the most hardened criminals too could be sent back as better human beings. He wanted the government to continue it as a free colony of prisoners where those on life sentence could also be allowed to marry and have a family. He, in fact, preferred to stay back in the Andaman settlements even if he were to be released.
~
‘The Aafat Called Khilafat’
Back in mainland India, a new movement was brewing. It is important to understand this issue because it sets the context in which Vinayak penned his magnum opus on Hindutva and his belief in the need for Hindu society to organize itself politically. The concept of Hindutva continues to be a contentious one in Indian politics even today.
The pan-Islamic feelings that the First World War created in the minds of several Indian Muslims, with the Ottoman Empire joining the Central forces against the Allied forces has been mentioned earlier. Their natural sympathy was with the Khalifa, the sultan of Turkey, who was also their religious head. But this conflicted with their loyalty as British Indian subjects. Realizing this, the British government assured Turkey of sympathetic treatment at the end of the War. Assurances to this effect were given by the British prime minister, Llyod George, and the president of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson. This instilled some hope among Indian Muslims.
However, these were dashed after the conclusion of the War and the terms of Armistice. Turkey was partitioned—Thrace was presented to Greece and the Asiatic portions of the Turkish Empire passed under the control of Britain and France in the guide of ‘mandates’. The sultan was reduced to a figurehead under the control of a high commission appointed by the Allied powers who ruled the nation in his name. This hugely agitated Muslims in India who felt let down and a storm broke out. An Indian Muslim delegation under Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) travelled to England in 1919 to convince the Turkish nationalist, Mustafa Kemal, not to depose the sultan of Turkey. By 1920–21, he formed a broad coalition with Muslim nationalists such as his brother, Shaukat Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari and others.
Gandhi, who had launched the Non-cooperation movement in 1919 which came to an abrupt halt after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, decided to support them through his tool of satyagraha. This led to the birth of the Khilafat agitation in 1920. Gandhi wrote to the viceroy pleading for a just settlement of the Khilafat problem, going to the extent of placing it on the same level of political importance as home rule in India. He wrote in conclusion: ‘In the most scrupulous regard for the rights of those (Mohammedan) States and for the Muslim sentiment as to their places of worship, and your just and timely treatment of India’s claim to Home Rule lies the safety of the Empire.’ 16 Unsurprisingly, when the All-India Khilafat Conference met in Delhi on 23 November 1919, Gandhi was unanimously elected as its president. It urged the Muslims not to join the public war celebrations if the British failed to solve the Turkey problem. Gandhi urged the conference to consider the feasibility of non-cooperation as a means to compel the British government to redress the Khilafat wrong. The tenets of this included renunciation of honorary posts, titles, memberships of councils, giving up posts under the government, police and military forces and a refusal to pay taxes. 17
As nationalist leade
r Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar mentions: ‘The movement was started by the Mahomedans. It was taken up by Mr. Gandhi with a tenacity and faith which must have surprised many Mahomedans themselves.’ 18 Ambedkar and several others opined that the movement was unsupportable because of the basic fact that the Turks, in whose interest the agitation was being carried out in distant India, ‘themselves favoured a republic and it was quite unjustifiable to compel the Turks to keep Turkey as a monarchy when they wanted to convert it into a republic’. 19 But Gandhi was determined. As he noted in Young India dated 2 June 1920:
If I were not interested in the Indian Mahomedans, I would not interest myself in the welfare of the Turks any more than I am in that of the Austrians or the Poles. But I am bound as an Indian to share the sufferings and trials of fellow-Indians . . . the extent to which Hindus should join hands with the Mahomedans . . . is . . . expedient to suffer for my Mahomedan brother to the utmost in a just cause and I should, therefore, travel, the whole road so long as the means employed by him are as honourable as his end.
Ambedkar explains that the popularly held view that it was the Congress that initiated the Non-cooperation movement is erroneous. He opines that ‘the non-cooperation had its origin in the Khilafat agitation and not in the Congress movement for Swaraj: that it was started by the Khilafatists to help Turkey and adopted by the Congress only to help the Khilafatists: that Swaraj (Self-Rule) was not its primary object, but its primary object was Khilafat and that Swaraj was added as a secondary object to induce the Hindus to join it’. 20
In a timeline that Ambedkar provides, he mentions that it was on 10 March 1920 that the Khilafat Committee met in Calcutta and ratified the concept of non-cooperation in its manifesto with Gandhi in attendance. The All India Congress Committee (AICC) that met in the interim on 30 May 1920 in Benares did not endorse Gandhi’s non-cooperation but merely expressed indignation on the terms of the Turkey agreement, urging the British to revise it. Other important items such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the repeal of the Rowlatt Act and bringing General Dyer and others to justice were the main demands of the resolution. Meanwhile, on 22 June 1920, the Khilafat Committee wrote to the viceroy that they would launch non-cooperation agitation by 1 August if their demands were not met. By 1 August, with no official word from the viceroy, the Khilafat Committee launched the Non-cooperation movement. Gandhi wrote to the viceroy about it and also the return of the medallions he had received for his loyalty to the British troops in the Boer War and the Zulu revolt. In his letter, he wrote: ‘I venture to return these medals, in pursuance of the scheme of Non-cooperation inaugurated today in connection with Khilafat movement.’ 21 No Hindu leader other than Gandhi participated in it and the Congress’s official role in it was uncertain.
It was thereafter that Gandhi persuaded the Congress to join hands with the Khilafat and this was adopted in the Congress session in Calcutta on 4 September 1920. In his speech with which he moved the resolution at the session, Gandhi stated:
The Mussulmans of India cannot remain as honourable men and followers of the faith of their Prophet, if they do not vindicate its honour at any cost. The Punjab has been cruelly and barbarously treated . . . and it is in order to remove these two wrongs . . . that I have ventured to place before this country a scheme of non-cooperation. 22
He, however, did not make it clear why this should be a priority only for the Indian Muslim community when their co-religionists from various parts of the Muslim world were themselves unperturbed by the dissolution of the caliphate. When Turkey itself favoured such a move, and when none of this made anyone in the Muslim world less honourable or disrespectful of their faith or the Prophet, why was such an assumption being made on behalf of only the Indian Muslims. If Punjab was a ‘wrong’ committed by the British (which it was), how was it that a resolution passed in the same city of Amritsar in 1919, barely months after the carnage, vouched for cooperation with the government reforms? The attainment of swaraj was added as a minor adjunct to the Khilafat movement. Ironically, Gandhi had overturned a resolution that he himself had insisted upon in the November 1919 Amritsar session of the Congress favouring cooperation with the British, loyalty to them and ensuring that the Reforms Act of 1919 worked successfully. Other than surrendering titles and giving up posts, withdrawal of children from government schools, boycott of foreign goods, withdrawal from British courts and other such measures were adopted.
The widely held narrative is that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to the birth of the Non-cooperation movement. But as the facts present themselves above, in the Amritsar Congress held in 1919, barely five months after the genocide, Gandhi himself advocated complete cooperation with the British in the wake of the reforms initiated in the royal proclamation and the Government of India Act, 1919. The government had remained studiously silent on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre for eight months and it took them a long time to even constitute an inquiry commission. Their reluctance was there for all to see by the time the Congress met in Amritsar in November 1919. Despite the somersault between the two Congress resolutions, prevailed upon by the same person and with no new facts emerging other than the Khilafat, it denotes the huge sway that Gandhi had begun to influence in the workings of the Congress and in such a short span of time.
Interestingly, it was Gandhi who advocated his favourite mantra of non-cooperation to the Khilafat Committee, got it ratified there, and then prevailed upon the Congress to support the Khilafat and thereby the philosophy of non-cooperation too. It was a political master stroke and a daring attempt by Gandhi. For decades the Congress had tried in vain to enlist the support of Muslims. But with the Congress standing up for their cause, several Muslims and their leaders trooped to it, even though temporarily. It also enhanced the stature of Gandhi as a national leader and catapulted the Congress to a body that went beyond resolutions and conferences, to grass-roots mass movements. Of course, one could quibble on whether making the Khilafat movement a matter of such importance was of any relevance to the cause of Indian freedom. As historian R.C. Majumdar notes:
As to regarding the Khilafat as a matter of life and death to the Muslims, events were soon to prove that it was a rhetoric or hyperbole and can hardly be regarded as a serious fact; for in less than five years the Muslims of Turkey usurped the rights of the Caliph to a far greater degree than the British ever did, and not a leaf stirred in the whole Muslim world outside India. Unless, therefore, we are prepared to believe that the Muslims of India were the only true followers of the Prophet or the most genuine champions of the cause of Islam, it is difficult to understand or explain the weight they attached to the Khilafat question, save on the theory that it was a phase of that Pan-Islamic movement to which the Indian Muslims looked forward as the only guarantee against the influence of a Hindu majority with whom faith had linked them in India. 23
Whether Gandhi latched on to the Khilafat to launch his political career as the leader of mass agitations in India or put the theory of non-cooperation into practice, it did energize the sagging morale of the Congress. But his critics, like R.C. Majumdar, point out that by endorsing such extraterritorial allegiance and ‘by his own admission that the Khilafat question was a vital one for Indian Muslims, Gandhi himself admitted in a way that they formed a separate nation; they were in India, but not of India’. 24 The mixing up of an issue far away from India and relegating the matter of Indian freedom to the background did not appeal to many Indians, especially Hindus.
Bipin Chandra Pal opined that this emergent pan-Islamism that was catching up in India too was ‘the common enemy of Indian nationalism in its truest and broadest sense’. 25 Annie Besant too talks about how ‘the Khilafat was not sufficiently attractive to the Hindus’. 26 Lala Lajpat Rai was more candid in his assessment of the Khilafat movement:
I have no intention of offending anybody’s susceptibilities, but if the existing conditions are properly analyzed, it will be seen that sectarianism and narrow-minded bigotry have been very much strengthen
ed within the last three years. The Khilafat movement has particularly strengthened it among the Mohammedans, and it has not been without its influence and reaction on the Hindus and Sikhs . . . it was unfortunate that the Khilafat movement in India should have taken its stand on a religious, rather than political basis . . . it was still more unfortunate that Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Khilafat movement should have brought religion into such a prominence in connection with a movement which was really, and fundamentally, more political than religious. 27
After his travels in the Muslim countries of Central Asia and Egypt and his interactions with the local Muslims, Lajpat Rai sounded a warning bugle when he said: ‘Indian Muslims are more pan-Islamic and exclusive than the Muslims of any other country of the globe, and that fact alone makes the creation of a united India more difficult than would otherwise be.’ 28
A few sceptic Hindus proposed that in the true spirit of Hindu–Muslim unity, a quid pro quo could be established—that Hindus render their wholehearted support to a cause of Muslim faith, in return for the latter eschewing cow slaughter that was a matter of faith for a vast majority of Hindus and which had caused communal tensions in the past. Gandhi debunked this idea with his hypothesis that ‘the test of friendship is assistance in adversity, and that too, unconditional assistance . . . if the Mahomedans feel themselves bound in honour to spare the Hindu’s feelings and to stop cow killing, they may do so, no matter whether the Hindus cooperate with them or not’. 29
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