Chapter 11 — Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement

Gandhi returned to India in January 1915 after about two decades abroad, mostly in South Africa. On the advice of his political mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he spent a year travelling around British India. His first major public appearance was at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University in February 1916.

Gandhi spent much of 1917 in Champaran, Bihar, seeking security of tenure and the freedom to cultivate crops of their choice for peasants who were being harshly treated by British indigo planters. A peasant from Champaran had approached Gandhi at the Lucknow Congress in December 1916, which led to his involvement.

During the First World War the British had instituted censorship of the press and permitted detention without trial. The Rowlatt Act continued these tough measures on the recommendation of a committee chaired by Sir Sidney Rowlatt. Gandhi called for a countrywide campaign against it, which led to protests across North and West India.

In April 1919, a British Brigadier ordered his troops to open fire on a nationalist meeting in Amritsar. More than four hundred people were killed in what is known as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The protests were particularly intense in Punjab, where many men had served the British in the First World War and felt betrayed by the Rowlatt Act.

Gandhi called for Indians to stop attending schools, colleges, and law courts, and not pay taxes — a renunciation of voluntary association with the British Government. According to official figures, there were 396 strikes in 1921, involving 600,000 workers and a loss of seven million workdays. Hill tribes in northern Andhra violated forest laws, farmers in Awadh did not pay taxes, and peasants in Kumaun refused to carry loads for colonial officials.

In February 1922, a group of peasants attacked and torched a police station in the hamlet of Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, and several constables perished. Gandhi called off the entire movement, stating that no provocation could justify the brutal murder of men who had been rendered defenceless. He was subsequently arrested in March 1922 and charged with sedition; Judge C.N. Broomfield sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment.

Salt was indispensable in every Indian household, yet people were forbidden from making it even for domestic use and were compelled to buy it from shops at a high price. Gandhi described the salt monopoly as a fourfold curse — it deprived people of a village industry, caused wanton destruction of property that nature produced in abundance, involved national expenditure on that destruction, and levied a tax of more than 1,000 per cent on a starving people. Its deep unpopularity made it an ideal target to mobilise a wider discontent against British rule.

On 12 March 1930, Gandhi began walking from his ashram at Sabarmati towards the ocean. He reached his destination, Dandi, three weeks later, making a fistful of salt and thereby making himself a criminal in the eyes of the law. He had given advance notice of the march to Viceroy Lord Irwin.

The Salt March was notable for three reasons. First, it was the event that first brought Gandhi to world attention, with widespread coverage in the European and American press. Second, it was the first nationalist activity in which women participated in large numbers; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay persuaded Gandhi not to restrict the protests to men. Third, it forced the British to realise that their Raj would not last forever and that they would have to devolve some power to Indians.

Gandhi was released from jail in January 1931. The following month he had several long meetings with Viceroy Lord Irwin, which culminated in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. By its terms, civil disobedience would be called off, all prisoners released, and salt manufacture allowed along the coast. Radical nationalists criticised the pact because Gandhi could not obtain a commitment to political independence, only an assurance of talks towards that possible end.

After the failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942 — talks broke down when the Congress insisted on the appointment of an Indian as Defence Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council — Gandhi launched the Quit India campaign in August 1942. Although Gandhi was jailed at once, younger activists organised strikes and acts of sabotage all over the country. In Satara in the west and Medinipur in the east, independent governments were proclaimed. It took more than a year for the British to suppress the rebellion.

On 15 August 1947, Gandhi was in Calcutta and observed a 24-hour fast rather than attend independence celebrations, grieving the partition and communal violence. Through September and October he visited hospitals and refugee camps. There was an attempt on his life on 20 January 1948. On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was shot dead at his daily prayer meeting by Nathuram Godse. Tributes came from across the political spectrum, including from international figures such as George Orwell and Albert Einstein.

The chapter uses four main types of sources: public writings and speeches of Gandhi and his contemporaries, as well as private letters such as those in Nehru’s A Bunch of Old Letters; autobiographies, which are retrospective and reflect what the author chose to remember or reveal; government records including confidential fortnightly reports of the colonial Home Department; and contemporary newspapers in English and Indian languages, which must be read critically since they reflected their publishers’ political opinions.

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