Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  The same day, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Maganlal that ‘the situation here is more serious than I had imagined. It [the treatment of indentured labourers] seems to be worse than in Fiji and Natal.’ Then he added: ‘I have seen the authorities. They may be thinking of apprehending me.’10

  Gandhi arrived in the district town of Motihari on 15 April. The next morning he set out for a village named Jasaulipatti, where tenants complained about oppression by the planters. The most convenient mode of transport was an elephant. It was a hot day, and Gandhi had never sat on an elephant before. Swaying from side to side, he engaged his companions on the purdah system then widely prevalent in North India. When they defended the purdah, Gandhi called it ‘pernicious’, for it damaged the wife’s health and did not allow her to work alongside her husband.

  The conversation was interrupted by a man on a bicycle, who shouted out to Gandhi that the district magistrate wished to meet him. The messenger identified himself as a police subinspector. Gandhi dismounted, and said he was expecting this. Asking his companions to proceed to Jasaulipatti, he made his way back to Motihari (using a bullock cart procured by the policeman).11

  In the town, Gandhi was served a notice by the DM, telling him to leave the district ‘by the next available train’. Gandhi replied that he would stay, since he had come ‘purely and simply for a genuine search for knowledge’.12 Meanwhile, he wrote to the viceroy that ‘the ryots are living under a reign of terror and their property, their persons, and their minds are all under the planters’ heels’.13

  While this was Gandhi’s first encounter with the sufferings of peasants in India, in South Africa he had fought for the rights of plantation workers. His knowledge of the British legal system and his prior experience with agrarian oppression made the situation in Champaran a perfect test case for him.

  Since Gandhi had declined to leave the district, he was served with a notice to appear before a magistrate on the afternoon of 18 April. His mood was buoyant. To his old comrade Henry Polak (who was then touring India), he wrote: ‘I am recalling the best days of South Africa….The people are rendering all assistance. We shall soon find out Naidoos and Sorabjis and Imams. I don’t know that we shall stumble upon a Cachalia’ (these being his closest associates in South Africa).14

  Gandhi spent the morning of 18 April taking testimonies from indigo cultivators. Shortly after noon he went to the court, where a large and excited crowd had collected. Gandhi was asked to sit in the court’s library while the police secured the building from intrusion.

  At the hearing, Gandhi said he had come to Champaran to render ‘humanitarian and national service’. The ryots had invited him to see how they were ‘not being fairly treated by the planters’. While he had no intention of disturbing the peace, as ‘a self-respecting man’ he was bound to disobey the DM’s order and stay on in the district.15

  Gandhi agreed to the DM’s request to stay in Motihari town and not venture further into the villages. On 20 April, the chief secretary tersely informed the commissioner that he ‘did not go about the matter in the right way’. Gandhi had said he would work with the local authorities; why wasn’t he taken at his word? The lieutenant governor, advised of the situation, advised that the legal proceedings against Gandhi be abandoned.16

  Gandhi was now free to make his inquiries. He based himself alternately in Champaran’s two main towns, Motihari and Bettiah. Some days he ventured into the villages himself. He met many peasants, and also spoke to European planters and factory managers. Everywhere, he was followed by policemen in civilian clothing, who took notes of what he said at his meetings.

  A group of lawyers had arrived from Patna to assist Gandhi. They included Brajkishore Prasad, whose interest in Champaran was of long standing, and Rajendra Prasad, a scholar educated in Calcutta and a rising star at the Bar. They travelled from Patna on 18 April, with Henry Polak, who filled the hours on the train by recounting tales of Gandhi’s ‘doings in South Africa’. The next day, Gandhi’s other great English friend, C.F. Andrews, also arrived in Motihari to check on his new campaign.17

  The Patna lawyers had brought their own servants to cook their meals. These men ate well and they ate late, with nashta (snacks, frequently fried) at dusk, and a full dinner at 11 p.m. Gandhi persuaded the lawyers to dispense with their servants and help with the cooking, and to eat earlier and more frugally too. Seeing Gandhi wash his own clothes, they were forced to follow suit.18

  The coming of these educated Indians enraged the Europeans of the district. The secretary of the Bihar Planters Association wrote angrily to the commissioner that ‘whatever Mr. Gandhi’s real aims may be, there is unfortunately no question as to the objects of the band of disloyal and seditious agitators who are in his train’.19 The local branch of the European Defence Association passed a resolution stating that the presence of Gandhi in the district ‘has been accompanied by unrest and crime’, and that ‘his continued presence is likely to be disastrous to the welfare of the Europeans in Champaran and the welfare of the district’.20

  Two weeks after Gandhi’s arrival, the subdivisional magistrate of Bettiah, W.H. Lewis, observed that ‘by the planters Mr. Gandhi is very naturally regarded as their natural enemy’. But while Europeans may ‘look upon Mr. Gandhi as an idealist, a fanatic or a revolutionary according to our particular opinions’, to ‘the raiyats he is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers. He moves about in the villages, asking them to lay their grievances before him, and he is daily transfiguring the imagination of masses of ignorant men with visions of an early millennium.’21

  IV

  By the end of May, Gandhi had collected almost 7000 testimonies. In early June he travelled to Bihar’s summer capital, Ranchi, to place them before the lieutenant governor of the state. The evidence was overwhelming. On 10 June, a Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee was appointed by the Bihar government. Gandhi was a member, as were four British officers of the Indian Civil Service. The chairman was an official from the Central Provinces.

  Gandhi had now decided to open some schools in Champaran. A range of volunteers came to assist him. Kasturba Gandhi also arrived to join her husband. Her presence attracted the attention of a planter named W.S. Irwin, whose dislike for Gandhi was intense even by the standards of his class. Irwin wrote an angry letter to the Statesman, saying that while Gandhi had promised the commissioner that he would not indulge in public activities, he had been giving contentious speeches on cow slaughter and Hindu–Muslim relations. Meanwhile, claimed Irwin,

  During the absences of her lord and master at Home Rule and such-like functions Mrs. Gandhi…scatters similar advice broadcast, and has recently, under the shallow pretence of opening a school, started a bazaar in the dehat…This is obviously and palpably done to shut down and ruin two neighbouring bazaars belonging to the factory. Can all this above be palpably construed into an honest fulfilment of Mr. Gandhi’s undertaking to Government?22

  Gandhi at once wrote to the Statesman in reply. His speeches, he said, were aimed at stemming strife between religious communities. He invited the planters to assist him in this ‘onerous mission’. He turned then to his ‘innocent wife who will never even know the wrong your correspondent has done her’. If Irwin were to be introduced to her, ‘he will soon find that Mrs. Gandhi is a simple woman, almost unlettered, who knows nothing about the two bazaars mentioned by him’. Her husband added, with an uncharacteristic touch of sarcasm, that ‘Mrs. Gandhi has not yet learnt the art of making speeches or addressing letters to the Press’.23

  V

  The Champaran Enquiry Committee discussed whether sharabeshi (the rent paid in case the peasant grew something other than indigo) was illegal, and whether tinkathia—the mandatory requirement to devote a portion of one’s holdings to indigo—should be abolished. It studied the peasant testimonies supplied by Gandhi, and invited planters to state their case.

&
nbsp; Among the planters who appeared before the committee was W.S. Irwin. ‘If Mr. Gandhi were to remain in this part of the country for the length of time I have (and it is 35 years),’ said Irwin, ‘he would be convinced what a consummate liar the Champaran ryot is.’24 The committee took a different view. The evidence placed before it by Gandhi and his colleagues had demonstrated how the peasants had been exploited and abused for decades. In partial compensation, the committee decided that on existing agreements, sharabeshi would be reduced by roughly 20 per cent. On tinkathia, the demand of the raiyats (and Gandhi) was accepted in toto, and the committee recommended ‘the voluntary system’, in which ‘the tenant must be absolutely free to enter into the contract [with the planters] or to refrain from making it.’25

  The Champaran Enquiry Committee submitted its report—largely favourable to the tenants—on 3 October 1917. Gandhi then proceeded to Motihari to consult with the peasants and their leaders. On 11 October he left Motihari for Bettiah, where he was to spend two days before returning home to Ahmedabad. When his train reached Bettiah station, some 4000 people were waiting to receive him. A police intelligence report takes up the story:

  No sooner the train stopped than people began to shout ‘Gandhiji ki jai’, ‘Gandhi Maharajki jai’. There were bajas [bands] and flags at the station and all men from neighbouring and distant villages including schoolboys and mukhtiars [lawyers] were present. They showered flowers on Mr. Gandhi and garlanded him. There was a red cloth spread at the platform for Mr. Gandhi. Surajmal Marwari of Bettiah had brought his phaeton and a horse of Puran Babu Raj, an engineer, was harnessed. It is not understood how Puran Babu lent his horse and why the railway servants allowed so much rush and show at the station.26

  Gandhi’s first satyagraha in India had been a success. So great had been his impact that, four years after he had left the area, an official touring Muzaffarpur and Champaran found that ‘the name of Mr. Gandhi is still one to conjure with…’27

  VI

  Since his return to India, Gandhi had travelled extensively through the subcontinent, but interacted mostly with townspeople. His stay in Champaran was his first direct experience of peasant life in his homeland. Notably, Gandhi’s campaign improved his standing in the city where he lived, Ahmedabad. The city’s westernized professionals had previously treated him with disdain. Ahmedabad’s doctors, lawyers and professors were attached to two institutions: a discussion group named the Gujarat Sabha and a recreational space called the Gujarat Club. Neither the club nor the sabha had much time for Gandhi; nor, it must be said, he for them.

  The historian David Hardiman writes that ‘before 1917, Gujarat had a reputation in nationalist circles for being a torpid backwater of ideological conservatism’. The Gujarat Sabha was dominated by loyalist lawyers, some of whom took Gandhi to be a ‘misguided religious crank’. Their attitude to him changed dramatically when Gandhi refused to obey the order to leave Champaran in April 1917. When the news reached Ahmedabad, ‘the legal fraternity at the Gujarat Club leapt to their feet’, and decided to have this ‘brave man’ as the next president of their sabha.28

  A leading light of the Gujarat Club was Vallabhbhai Patel. Born in 1875, Patel was the son of a farmer who owned a modest ten acres of land. Because of family and farming duties his attendance at school was erratic, and he only matriculated at the age of twenty-two. He then passed the local bar exam, and became a lawyer in the district towns of Gujarat.

  Patel was keen to qualify as a barrister in England. He finally travelled to London when he was thirty-five; returning with his qualification two years later, he now started practising in Ahmedabad. He prospered professionally as well as socially, spending his evenings at the Gujarat Club. He was playing bridge at the club when he came to hear of Gandhi’s challenge in Champaran.29

  Patel’s career trajectory was rather different from Gandhi’s. Gandhi came from a comfortable and completely urban background; his father and grandfather were chief ministers in princely states. Gandhi was only nineteen when he went to England to qualify as a lawyer, his expenses met by an elder brother. Patel, on the other hand, had to pull himself out of the village, and himself fund his legal education.

  We do not know precisely when Patel and Gandhi first met. It was most likely in August–September 1917. Patel had already served a term as a municipal councillor. Meeting Gandhi took him further away from his work at the bar towards full-time public service.

  Two other Gujarati lawyers also joined Gandhi in the second half of 1917. Their names were Mahadev Desai and Narhari Parikh. They had studied law together in Bombay, and then moved to Ahmedabad to practise. Sometime towards the end of 1915, they came across Gandhi’s ashram manifesto, and sent him a letter criticizing the emphasis on celibacy and on handicrafts. Gandhi invited them for a discussion, after which Narhari Parikh decided to join the ashram school as a teacher.

  Gandhi was happy to have Parikh work with him. But he was keener on Mahadev Desai. Desai was a scholar who had just translated John Morley’s classic work, On Compromise, into Gujarati. He also had a practical side, with a keen interest in cooperative societies. Gandhi asked Desai to come visit him every day. Finally, on 31 August, he told Desai that ‘I have found in you just the type of young man for whom I have been searching for the last two years’. He had discovered ‘three outstanding qualities’ in him, these being ‘regularity, fidelity and intelligence’. ‘I have got in you the man I wanted,’ Gandhi told Desai. ‘The man to whom I can entrust all my work some day and be at ease, and to whom I can rely with confidence.’

  Mahadev Desai was charmed—and persuaded. In November 1917, he joined Gandhi as his secretary, and more. He was constantly at hand, to take notes, to translate Gandhi’s articles from Gujarati to English (and vice versa), to receive guests, and to make travel arrangements.30

  VII

  With more people joining, the bungalow at Kochrab was proving inadequate for the ashram. In the summer of 1917, an Ahmedabad merchant named Punjabhai Hirachand offered a plot three miles north of Kochrab. It was bare and treeless, but large, extending along the banks of the Sabarmati River. Gandhi saw its potential immediately. He was attracted by the proximity to the site of a prison. ‘As jail-going was understood to be the normal lot of Satyagrahis,’ he wrote later, ‘I liked this position.’31

  On one side of the new site was a prison; on the other, a cremation ground, also a place every satyagrahi was bound to visit. The buildings were put in place in the second half of 1917, supervised by Gandhi’s nephew Maganlal. Unlike in Kochrab, the inmates had the space to experiment with farming, weaving and animal husbandry. Their activities were supervised by Gandhi, whom everybody in the settlement called ‘Bapu’, father.32

  In the first week of November 1917, Gandhi organized the first-ever Gujarat Political Conference. Jinnah and Tilak both attended. Asked by Gandhi to speak in their shared mother tongue, Jinnah ‘made a brave show of stammering out his speech in Gujarati’.33 Gandhi thanked him, while (somewhat patronizingly) adding that he should practise speaking in the mother tongue. Jinnah was a member of the Imperial Legislative Council, but if reforms came and a wider franchise was granted, he might, said Gandhi, soon ‘have to approach Hindus and Muslims, Ghanchis, Golas and others not knowing English for votes. He should, therefore, learn Gujarati if he doesn’t know it.’34

  Gandhi began his own speech with a joking reference to the late arrival of Tilak. He invoked the defaulter’s own famous slogan about swaraj (freedom) being his birthright. ‘If one does not mind arriving late by three-quarters of an hour at a conference summoned for the purpose,’ remarked Gandhi, ‘one should not mind if swaraj comes correspondingly late.’

  Gandhi then referred to a petition being prepared for submission to the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu. This articulated the demand of the Congress and the Muslim League for self-government. Thousands of signatures had already been collected
. Gandhi insisted that literacy by itself was not crucial for achieving swaraj: what ‘is essential is the idea itself, the desire itself’. The signatories to the resolution were all city based, and middle class. But, as Gandhi noted, ‘When the peasantry of India understands what swaraj is, the demand will become irresistible.’

  In Gandhi’s view, the movement for swaraj was weak because two major constituencies had been kept away. Since the movement had only men, and no women, ‘the nation walks with one leg only’. Besides, the educated classes had not freely mixed with the peasantry. Gandhi argued that ‘we dare not turn away from a single section of the community or disown any. We shall make progress only if we carry all with us.’35

  Gandhi’s talk drew on his recent experiences in Champaran, where he had discovered the political promise of the peasantry, and witnessed how well-fed and well-dressed lawyers from the cities could be made to mingle with the masses. His convening of the conference, his treatment of Jinnah and Tilak, the contents of his own speech—all reflected a remarkable self-assurance, a growing awareness of his present and future role in the public life of India.

  VIII

  At the conference in Godhra, Gandhi asked the Gujaratis present to tour the countryside and study peasant grievances. The monsoon in 1917 had been late and severe: seventy inches of rain instead of the usual thirty. In the otherwise prosperous district of Kheda, crops had been badly damaged. A local leader named Mohanlal Pandya got villagers to write to the authorities, asking for the postponement of land revenue in view of the failure of their crops. Some 18,000 peasants signed these letters, which were posted on 15 November, the Gujarati New Year’s Day.36

  Gandhi now wrote to the commissioner asking him to suspend land revenue for the year. When the commissioner refused, the peasants started a no-tax campaign. They were encouraged by, among others, Vallabhbhai Patel and the fiery young socialist Indulal Yagnik. The government responded by stiffening its stance, and replaced an officer sympathetic to the peasants with one known to enforce the law more strictly.37