Chapter 5 — Indigo

'Indigo' is a non-fiction account by Louis Fischer, excerpted from his book The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. It describes Gandhi's 1917 campaign in Champaran, Bihar, where he challenged the British landlords' exploitative indigo sharecropping system and won a partial refund for the peasants, establishing the first successful act of civil disobedience in modern India.

Rajkumar Shukla was an illiterate but resolute Champaran sharecropper who approached Gandhi at the December 1916 Indian National Congress session in Lucknow. He followed Gandhi everywhere — to Cawnpore, to his Ahmedabad ashram, and finally to Calcutta — for months, until Gandhi agreed to visit Champaran. His tenacity was what brought Gandhi to the district.

Most arable land in Champaran was owned by British landlords and worked by Indian tenants. By a long-term contract, tenants were compelled to plant three-twentieths (15 per cent) of their holdings with indigo and surrender the entire indigo harvest as rent. When Germany developed synthetic indigo and natural indigo lost value, landlords pressured peasants to pay compensation to be released from the arrangement.

Gandhi first visited Muzzafarpur for complete information, then proceeded to Motihari, the capital of Champaran. He began investigating peasant grievances and was served an official notice to quit the district immediately. He signed the notice but wrote on it that he would disobey the order, was summoned to court the next day, and pleaded guilty — triggering a spontaneous mass demonstration by thousands of peasants that forced the authorities to drop the case.

The Lieutenant-Governor of the province ordered the case against Gandhi to be dropped. Civil disobedience had triumphed — the first time in modern India. Gandhi then led a wide-ranging inquiry in which about ten thousand peasants gave depositions. An official commission subsequently compiled crushing evidence against the planters, who agreed in principle to make refunds.

Gandhi explained that the amount of the refund was less important than the fact that the landlords had been obliged to surrender part of the money and, with it, part of their prestige. The settlement proved to the peasants that they had rights and defenders and gave them courage. Events justified him: within a few years the British planters abandoned their estates and indigo sharecropping disappeared.

Gandhi appealed for teachers and opened primary schools in six villages, staffed by volunteers including Mahadev Desai, Narhari Parikh, their wives, and Gandhi's youngest son Devadas. Kasturbai Gandhi taught ashram rules on personal cleanliness and community sanitation. Gandhi also secured a doctor who volunteered for six months; three medicines were used — castor oil, quinine, and sulphur ointment.

When the English pacifist C.F. Andrews offered to stay and help, Gandhi was vehemently opposed, saying that relying on an Englishman showed weakness of heart: 'The cause is just and you must rely upon yourselves to win the battle.' Rajendra Prasad recorded that 'Gandhi in this way taught us a lesson in self-reliance'. The chapter concludes that self-reliance, Indian independence, and help to sharecroppers were all bound together.

Gandhi himself said: 'What I did was a very ordinary thing. I declared that the British could not order me about in my own country.' The episode was the first successful act of civil disobedience in modern India, and it grew out of loyalty to 'living, human beings' rather than abstractions. It showed that British might, 'hitherto dreaded and unquestioned, could be challenged by Indians'.

Louis Fischer (1896–1970) was born in Philadelphia. He served as a volunteer in the British Army between 1918 and 1920, then built a career as a journalist, writing for The New York Times, The Saturday Review, and European and Asian publications. He was also a faculty member at Princeton University. 'Indigo' is an excerpt from his book The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, reviewed by the Times Educational Supplement as one of the best books ever written on Gandhi.

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