Withdrawing association with the government was one canon of the non-cooperation creed. The boycott of foreign cloth was another. Back in 1919, Gandhi had urged that patriots wear Indian clothes. At the same time, he had explicitly ruled out the burning of foreign cloth on the grounds that it would promote ill will against Europeans. But now, pressed by the militants in his ranks, he sanctioned a practice he had previously opposed. The precedent that was invoked was the swadeshi movement of 1905–07, where foreign goods had often been burnt in public meetings.
On 31 July, Gandhi himself inaugurated a nationwide campaign, lighting a bonfire of foreign cloth in Bombay, his act accompanied by shouts and cheers. The crowd was huge: ‘overflowing with men and women dressing handsomely in white khadi caps and khadi clothes, [it] gave one the impression that the entire population of Bombay had assembled there’.
Gandhi told the gathering that ‘we are purifying ourselves by discarding foreign cloth which is the badge of our slavery’. After the meeting, the crowd—men, women and children—went to Chowpatti to pay homage to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had been cremated on that spot a year previously.22
In Bombay and elsewhere, women were particularly active in picketing liquor shops. The temperance campaign, in which Gandhi took a special interest, led to a dramatic fall in the consumption of alcohol and in state revenue from its sale. As a government report mournfully noted, in the financial year 1921–22 the excise revenue of Punjab fell by 33 lakh rupees, of Bihar and Orissa by 10 lakh rupees and of Bombay by 6 lakh rupees.23
These activities were all, so to say, ‘authorized’ by the Congress and in conformity with its creed. But the name and appeal of Gandhi also inspired acts that he and his party would have regarded as transgressive or even wrong. Peasants in the Indo-Gangetic plains refused to pay taxes, saying ‘Gandhi Maharaj’ had told them not to do so. They also travelled ticketless on trains, invoking the same authority. Peasants in the Himalaya broke forest laws and refused to carry the luggage of officials, again using Gandhi’s name. Disenchanted workers in factories were emboldened by the non-cooperation campaign to go on strike.24
VI
Two among Gandhi’s close friends were not entirely sympathetic with his movement. C.F. Andrews wrote that he was ‘supremely happy’ when Gandhi took on evils like drink, drugs and race arrogance. ‘But lighting bonfires of foreign cloth and telling people it is a religious sin to wear it, destroying in the fire the noble handiwork of one’s fellow-men and women, one’s brothers and sisters abroad, saying it would be “defiling” to wear it, I cannot tell you how different all this appears to me.’
Gandhi defended his position. ‘If the emphasis were on all foreign things,’ he told Andrews, ‘it would be racial, parochial and wicked. The emphasis is on all foreign cloth. The restriction makes all the difference in the world.’ Gandhi did not want to shut out such exquisite handcrafted items as European watches or Japanese lacquerwork. But ‘love of foreign cloth has brought foreign domination, pauperism and what is worst, shame to many a home’. Gandhi believed that importing foreign cloth had not only put many weavers out of work, but forced the women in their families into prostitution.25
Joining Andrews in his disenchantment with Gandhi’s methods was their mutual friend Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was travelling in North America in 1921, raising funds for his university, when a recent article by Gandhi was brought to his attention. Entitled ‘Evil Wrought by the English Medium’, it claimed that ‘Rammohun Roy would have been a greater reformer, and Lokmanya Tilak would have been a greater scholar, if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English’. Gandhi argued that ‘of all the superstitions that affect India, none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty, and developing accuracy of thought’. As a result of the system of education introduced by the English, ‘the tendency has been to dwarf the Indian body, mind and soul’.26
Tagore was dismayed by the article, and wrote to C.F. Andrews that ‘I strongly protest against Mahatma Gandhi’s trying to cut down such great personalities of Modern India as Rammohan Roy in his blind zeal for crying down our modern education’. These criticisms, added Tagore tellingly, showed that Gandhi ‘is growing enamoured of his own doctrines—a dangerous form of egotism, that even great people suffer from at times’.
The Mahatma believed that the nineteenth-century reformer Rammohan Roy was limited by his familiarity with English. To the contrary, Tagore argued that through his engagement with other languages, Roy ‘could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the West, not only because his education had been perfectly Eastern,—he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a school boy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be the friend of the West.’27
Andrews shared the letter with the press. The criticisms stung Gandhi, who immediately published a clarification in his journal, Young India. He pointed to his own friendship with white men (Andrews among them), and the hospitality granted to Englishmen by many non-cooperators. Neither he nor his flock were guilty of chauvinism or xenophobia. His defence was then summed up in these words: ‘I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’28
In July 1921, Tagore returned home from his travels. To his dismay, many members of the staff at Santiniketan had enthusiastically embraced the non-cooperation movement, thus giving themselves up to ‘narrow nationalist ideas that were already out of date’.
In the first week of September, Gandhi met Tagore at his family home in Calcutta. They had a long and argumentative conversation. Tagore told Gandhi that ‘the whole world is suffering today from the cult of a selfish and short-sighted nationalism. India has all down her history offered hospitality to the invader of whatever nation, creed or colour. I have come to believe that, as Indians, we not only have much to learn from the West but that we also have something to contribute. We dare not therefore shut the West out.’29
Gandhi’s answer is not recorded. But apparently, Tagore was not satisfied, since he chose to make his criticisms public in the influential Calcutta journal Modern Review. In his recent travels in the West, said Tagore, he had met many people who sought ‘to achieve the unity of man, by destroying the bondage of nationalism’. Then he returned home, to be confronted with a political movement suffused with negativity. Are ‘we alone to be content with telling the beads of negation’, asked Tagore, ‘harping on other’s faults and proceeding with the erection of Swaraj on a foundation of quarrelsomeness’?30
Gandhi responded immediately, defending the non-cooperation movement as ‘a refusal to co-operate with the English administrators on their own terms’. Indian nationalism, he insisted, ‘is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious and therefore humanitarian. India must learn to live before she can aspire to die for humanity. The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cat’s teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice.’31
Tagore’s own elder brother was on Gandhi’s side in this debate. Himself a poet and composer of distinction, Dwijendranath Tagore was a much-loved figure in Bengal, universally known as ‘Bordada’ (elder brother). In September 1920, he had sent Young India an article on the ‘inner meaning’ of non-cooperation. This argued that ‘in this extreme crisis of our country, it is incumbent upon the wisest in the land to stand apart from the blood-sucking influence of the authorities, and with their own exertions and in their own ways to give a full expression to their own ideal’.32
A year later, when his brother was publicly rebuking the Mahatma, Dwijendranath sent Gandhi a short but telling private note:
Dearest and most revered Mahatma,
He is unnecessarily pouring water on the widespread branches of Universal brotherhood leaving its root to wither for want of water. Poor kindhearted Mr Andrews is in danger of being perverted from his course.
To tell you the truth I am sick at heart. You are my only pole star of hope. May God shower blessing on your head day and night.
Your unworthy Bordada
Dwijendranath Tagore33
Another celebrated Bengali who favoured Gandhi over Tagore was the scientist-entrepreneur Prafulla Chandra Ray. Ray called Gandhi ‘a veritable miracle worker—the saviour of modern and builder of future India’. Then he added: ‘There are occasions when silence is golden and speech is but silver. I think Rabindranath would have best consulted the interests of the country if he had followed this precept.’34
Dwijendranath Tagore was a full twenty years older than his brother. At the age of eighty, he surely hoped to see swaraj come before he was gone. P.C. Ray had faced much opposition from British entrepreneurs and British officials in starting his own factories. That the two supported Gandhi so wholeheartedly was proof of their nationalism, and of the Mahatma’s own power to move and to inspire. Their consent, however, perhaps makes Tagore’s dissent all the more noteworthy.
A hundred years on, the Tagore–Gandhi debate still makes for compelling reading. The Mahatma insisted that a colonized nation had first to discover itself before discovering the world. The poet answered that there was a thin line between nationalism and xenophobia—besides, hatred of the foreigner could easily turn into a hatred of Indians of other castes, classes or communities. He was particularly sceptical of the claim that non-cooperation had or would dissolve Hindu–Muslim differences.
VII
In a bid to curb the non-cooperation movement, the government sought to control the press. The first step was to disallow nationalist periodicals from carrying government advertisements. A list of ‘newspapers unsuitable to receive official advertisements and for perusal by Indian troops’ was prepared. More than 300 periodicals were included in this list, including Gandhi’s own Young India and Navajivan, the Bombay Chronicle, as well as journals in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and other Indian languages.35
Despite the ban, these newspapers survived. And the nationalist message was conveyed as much by word of mouth as through print. So the government decided to arrest the non-cooperators. From July 1921, thousands of protesters were booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code. These included Section 121 (waging, or attempting to wage war, or abetting waging of war, against the Government of India), Section 124 (assaulting government officials or otherwise seeking to restrain the exercise of any lawful power), Section 124A (the preaching or practice of sedition), Section 131 (abetting mutiny, or attempting to seduce a soldier, sailor or airman from his duty), Section 150 (hiring, or conniving at hiring, of persons to join an unlawful assembly), Section 151 (knowingly joining or continuing in an assembly of five or more persons after it had been commanded to disperse), Sections 153 and 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc.), and Section 447 (criminal trespass).
In late August, seeking to spread the message of swadeshi and non-cooperation, Gandhi visited Assam for the first time, and then went from there by train to Chittagong and Eastern Bengal. With him was Mohammad Ali. They spoke together at many public meetings, some held in parks, others in mosques.
The eastern tour ended in Calcutta in the second week of September. Here, shops that still stocked goods from abroad were picketed daily by energetic nationalists led by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Gandhi, with Azad next to him, participated in several bonfires of foreign cloth.
While he was in Calcutta, Gandhi got a letter from Shaukat Ali saying he had heard from friends that he and his brother would soon he arrested. On 21 October, the Central Khilafat Committee planned to meet in Delhi. ‘I doubt we will be allowed to attend…’ wrote Shaukat. Yet he was ‘sure our arrest would advance our sacred cause and we have no fear for the future’. Sending ‘his love and devoted affection’, the elder of the Ali Brothers placed his total trust in his Hindu friend. ‘You need no certificate from any of us,’ he remarked, ‘but I must press my honest conviction that there could be no more considerate, insightful and patient chief to lead us than you whom India loves and respects.’36
From Calcutta, Gandhi and Mohammad Ali took a train down the Coromandel coast. On 14 September, they halted at Waltair for a public meeting. Here (as they had anticipated), Mohammad Ali was arrested and taken away by the police. Shaukat Ali, then in North India, was arrested shortly afterwards.
While incarcerating the Ali Brothers, the government stayed their hand as regards Gandhi. In this they were following the advice of the Allahabad Moderate Tej Bahadur Sapru, then law member of the viceroy’s executive council. Sapru argued that the arrest could wait till ‘Mr. Gandhi by some overt act will place himself so much in the wrong that we should be doing the right thing in prosecuting him, or we may reach a stage when a considerable body of opinion will have detached itself from Mr. Gandhi and the situation will then have become easier’.37
After his companion was detained, Gandhi addressed a meeting in Waltair, before carrying on to Madras and further south. In the town of Madurai he took a decision to simplify his dress even further. He would now discard the shirt, and wear a loincloth only.
The idea had been in Gandhi’s mind for some time. He first thought of it in Barisal in Bengal. He finally took the step only in Madurai, when people told him that they had not enough khadi or where khadi was available, not enough money. When he communicated his decision to his co-workers, Maulana Azad understood immediately, but the others, including C. Rajagopalachari, were unhappy. ‘They felt such radical change might make people uneasy, some might not understand it; some might take me to be a lunatic…’ Typically, the opposition made Gandhi even more resolute in his decision.38
VIII
Gandhi had hoped to go on to Malabar, the Malayalam-speaking district of the Madras Presidency. He was stopped from doing so, because a major rebellion had broken out in the district, and martial law had been declared. In the agrarian system of Malabar, the tenants were predominantly Muslim (belonging to a community known as the Moplahs), and the landlords largely Hindu. The Moplahs were a militant lot, who had rebelled several times in the nineteenth century. The present uprising was partly a class war of tenants versus landlords, and partly a religious war, of Muslims versus Hindus.
From September 1921, armed bands of Moplahs began attacking the homes of landlords, torching government offices and police stations, tearing up railway tracks and telegraph lines, and, occasionally, abducting women. Hindus captured by the rebels were offered the choice of Islam or death.
The ranks of the rebels were populated by coolies, cultivators, keepers of tea shops, petty merchants, Koran readers and mosque attendants. At its height, there were nearly 10,000 armed Moplahs on the move. Two brigades of infantry and 700 special police were needed to suppress the rebellion. More than 2000 Moplahs were killed in the exchanges, as well as some fifty soldiers and policemen.39
The Moplah rebellion raised a large question mark over the future of Gandhi’s movement. The uprising was not non-violent, and it had ruptured rather than furthered Hindu–Muslim unity. As the district magistrate of Malabar noted, among the rebels ‘the talk of Hindu–Muslim unity was nonsense and the main idea was the vision of swaraj and Malabar for the Mapilla and the Mapilla alone’.40
Gandhi accepted that the Moplah rebellion was a setback to his struggle. But he did not despair, ‘for the simple reason that no sane Muslim approves of what a few Moplahs have done’. Later, at a public meeting on the Ma
rina beach, Gandhi said the Moplahs ‘have committed a sin against the Khilafat and against their own country’. Yet he hoped ‘that my Hindu countrymen will keep their senses’, since he did ‘not know a single sensible Mussulman who approves either secretly or openly of these forcible conversions…’41
In an article for Navajivan, Gandhi admitted that his recent tour of Madras ‘was something of a disappointment’. The province lagged behind in the production of khadi, the ‘untouchables’ suffered ‘more indignities than they do in almost any other part of the country’, and the Moplah rebellion had undermined his cherished dream of Hindu–Muslim unity. Gandhi was consoled by his growing friendship with C. Rajagopalachari, who accompanied him for much of his tour. Praising Rajaji’s ‘wisdom, integrity and ability’, Gandhi noted that his Tamil colleague had ‘fully understood the meaning of our struggle and, in a moment of crisis, he can be resolute and patient’.42
IX
Gandhi spent October shuttling between Ahmedabad and Bombay, attending to his ashram in the one place and pursuing the non-cooperation agenda in the other. He had taken a vow to spin half an hour every day before lunch, and forgo the meal if he failed to do so. The vow was not binding when he was on a train.43
For most of 1921, Mahadev Desai was away in Allahabad, where he was assisting Motilal Nehru in running a new nationalist paper called The Independent. In his absence, a new recruit named Pyarelal was acting as Gandhi’s secretary. From the Punjab, he had freshly graduated with a degree in English literature. One of Pyarelal’s assets was an excellent memory; he had made it his business to learn entire passages from Gandhi’s writings and speeches.
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