British goods; foreign cloth was burnt in huge bonfires; shops, offices, law courts were closed; and students walked out of their classes. Lawyers like Nehru; Patel and C.R. Das walked away from their law practices forever. Gandhi had made it clear that all the demonstrations had to be peaceful, so when a mob attacked a police station in Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh and twenty-two policemen were killed, he called off the campaign. This was the first time that people from every section of society joined the protests and it also showed the people how firm Gandhi was in his resolve to protest peacefully. The country now learned a few new words. Satyagraha—when you went to battle with truth on your side. This battle was fought through ahimsa— non-violence. Gandhi believed that ‘the strongest physical force bends before moral force when it is used in the defence of truth.’ People had to embrace Swadeshi products made in India and learn to use the charkha, the spinning wheel. The aim was to gain Swaraj—self-rule. For the first time the common man realized that they had the right to challenge the government and that theirs was a just cause. As Gandhi said, ‘What I did was a very ordinary thing. I declared that the British could not order me about in my own country.’ And even the poorest peasant, factory worker and woman in purdah felt they were a part of the movement. The Non- cooperation Movement gave Indians a sense of being one nation, and this was Gandhi’s greatest achievement. Gandhi was arrested, put on trial and in court willingly admitted that he was leading a seditious movement and was prepared to be punished. He said, ‘I hold it an honour to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm in India than any previous system.’ To the amazement of the spectators the judge called Gandhi a ‘patriot and great leader’, but going strictly by the law he had to sentence him to six years of imprisonment. Instead of being dubbed a criminal, Gandhi left the court a hero. The government arrested Gandhi many times after this, but they never put him on trial knowing well how he would transform it into a trial of the government instead.
Gandhi was released after two years and came out to discover growing tensions between Hindus and Muslims. He went on a twenty-one-day fast to restore communal harmony and then decided to concentrate on social reform for a while as he felt the country was not yet ready for another all- India movement. He started a passionate campaign against untouchability. He called the supposed untouchables ‘Harijans’, the children of God. He campaigned for their education and their rightful place in society, and picketed temples that did not allow them inside. In 1933 he stared another ashram at Wardha and left Sabarmati in the hands of Harijans. He also began a new journal called Harijan that replaced his earlier paper Young India. It was only in 1930 that he felt the time was right for another agitation and this was the Civil Disobedience Movement. What amazed most of the leaders was the issue over which he chose to protest—salt! They could not understand why he chose to protest about a small tax, but the master strategist knew the power of the right gesture. The salt tax may have been a tiny amount but even the poorest Indian had to pay it, and as the government held a monopoly on salt manufacture, it could fix the price as it pleased. So this was a protest that was understood by everyone. C. Rajagopalachari, one of the few who immediately gauged Gandhi’s intentions, commented shrewdly, ‘It’s not salt but disobedience you are manufacturing.’ Gandhi’s plan was a brilliant piece of showmanship. He inaugurated the protest with the headline-grabbing march to Dandi. He and seventy-nine supporters, a carefully chosen mix of people from various regions, belonging to different religions and castes, marched from Sabarmati Ashram to the sea beach at Dandi, a distance of 240 miles. The march took twenty-eight days and through it all the country waited keenly to see what the government would do to stop him. The international press picked up the extraordinary story of a man walking to make salt and reports began to appear in European and American newspapers. What was really amusing was that Gandhi himself had not used salt in his food for years!
On 6 March 1930, when Gandhi picked up a handful of salt at Dandi, all across the country people made and sold salt, salt works were picketed, and shops, offices, schools and colleges were closed. Gandhi was soon arrested but the agitations continued; 60,000 people were arrested and the country came to a halt. Amazingly, there was not a single case of violence. Before starting the Satyagraha, Gandhi had politely informed the viceroy Lord Irwin of his plans and Irwin had underestimated the impact of the march. Now Irwin agreed to meet him and the Gandhi-Irwin Pact led to the Satyagraha being stopped. Then Gandhi left for the Second Round Table Conference in London where the future of India was to be discussed. Gandhi went around Britain addressing rallies and the most remarkable was his address to the workers at the Lancashire textile mills. The workers should have been violently against him as they were facing unemployment because of the Indian boycott of foreign cloth. Instead they applauded his persuasive speech and there is a photograph of him, smiling happily, with some women workers, one of whom was is holding his hand! The press followed him everywhere and when he came out of Buckingham Palace after an audience with King George V, a journalist asked him if he had felt inappropriately dressed for the occasion. Gandhi gave his toothy grin and said, ‘The King had enough on for both of us.’ The Second World War began in 1939 and in 1942 the Cripps Mission arrived in India to discuss independence for India after the war. The Congress met in Bombay and passed a resolution demanding that the British ‘Quit India’ immediately. Gandhi was arrested and he and Kasturba (or ‘Ba’ as she was usually called) were interned in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona. Here he endured deep sorrow as Kasturba and his secretary Mahadev Desai died. Gandhi was released in 1944. Independence was now on the horizon but so was the partition of the country, as the Muslim League led by M.A. Jinnah demanded the separate Islamicstate of Pakistan. Violent communal riots broke out and Gandhi spent all his time trying to put out the fire. He was reconciled to the partition of India but it broke his heart—he felt that a lifetime of building bridges between the two communities had come to nothing. So when India
became independent, he was not in Delhi to celebrate but in Noakhali in Bengal, walking from village to village trying to calm the people—an unarmed, unprotected man talking of peace and communal harmony. The viceroy Lord Mountbatten called him the ‘one-man boundary force’ between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi came back to Delhi because Nehru wanted him to go to Punjab, which was in deep turmoil. He again went on a fast and a semblance of peace was restored. Frail, tired and ill, he nearly starved to death. At that time he was staying at Birla House in New Delhi. On 30 January 1948 he left his room leaning on his two ‘walking sticks’, his grand-nieces Abha and Manu, to walk to the prayer meeting in the lawns. A man wearing khaki broke through the surging crowds, bent down as if to touch his feet and then raised a revolver and shot him thrice in the chest. Nathuram Godse thought he was killing a man who favoured Muslims over Hindus. What he did was silence the voice that could have taught India to live in religious harmony in the future. Winston Churchill called Gandhi the ‘seditious faqir’, others dubbed him the ‘saint of the spinning wheel’. Few believed that his Satyagraha could work, but Gandhi proved that one could succeed through non-violent methods if one’s cause was just. Two of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century—Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela—were inspired by him and their successful campaigns for equal rights proved once again that Satyagraha is the path of the most courageous and that violence leads only to an endless cycle of bloodshed. In tribute to his philosophy, the UN General Assembly has decided to observe Gandhi’s birthday as the International Day of Non-violence. He was the most unlikely of leaders. A frail, gentle man with a shy, modest manner who preferred to talk with logic and reason, instead of inflaming passions. His mild exterior hid a will of iron and a shrewd strategic brain that the British learned to respect. Living on a faddish diet of nuts, fruits and goat’s milk, he crammed his days with activities, most of the time in public view. He used to joke that he looked forward to being arrested because the only time he got any rest was in prison.
Gandhi had an unerring understanding of the people of the country and captured their imagination as no other leader had before or since. Villagers came to see him as if they were on a pilgrimage; crowds of thousands waited for hours at railway stations just to catch a glimpse of him. His most prized possession was a battered watch and he was precise, organized and so disciplined that he could exhaust even much younger leaders with his energy. Most who met him trusted him implicitly because they sensed his selfless love for people and few around the world ever challenged the befitting title that made Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi so uncomfortable —Mahatma.
Aurobindo Ghose Swaraj is neither a colonial nor any other form of government. It means the fulfilment of our national life. That is what we seek. —Aurobindo Ghose The boy grew up as a little sahib. Even though they were Bengalis, the Ghose family lived like the English. The children wore frilly shirts and trousers, sat down to meals at a dining table laid with knives and forks and had a governess who taught them the ways of those to the manor born. The family lived in many Bengal towns where they mixed only with Europeans and the children were kept away from any Indian influences. As a matter of
fact, the boy learnt to speak only a little Bengali and broken Hindi from the family butler when he was five years old. The boy’s anglophile father would have been very surprised if he had known that one day his son would become one of the most fascinating and many-faceted characters of the freedom movement—a writer and poet, a revolutionary dreaming of driving the British out of India, and then a famous Hindu mystic. Aurobindo Ghose was born on 15 August 1872 in Calcutta. His father Krishnadhan Ghose was a doctor in the government medical service and his mother Swarnalata was the daughter of Rajnarayan Bose, a famous Brahmo scholar who believed in religious and social reform. They belonged to a rich zamindar family and Krishnadhan had gone to study in England, defying the caste laws that ordained that you would lose your caste if you travelled across the seas. He came back to India, the perfect brown sahib, completely enamoured of European civilization and convinced of the superiority of the West. So he named his third son Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose! The three older Ghose boys were first sent to a Darjeeling convent to study and then taken to England. Here they stayed in Manchester with a Reverend Drewett and the older boys went to a grammar school. As Aurobindo was only seven, he was tutored at home in the beginning. Their father left strict instructions that the boys were not to mix with Indians. When the boys moved to London to study at St. Paul’s School, the money from India arrived erratically and they were at times close to starvation. Aurobindo remembered facing the English winter without an overcoat and sleeping in an office. They survived for days on a few slices of bread and butter and tea for breakfast and a single penny-roll of bread and sausage in the evening. In spite of such hardships, Aurobindo was a brilliant student, winning many prizes at school and then going to King’s College, Cambridge on a scholarship. He was a budding poet, composing verses in Latin and Greek, and won a Tripos—a three-part degree—in classical languages. It was in Cambridge that, at the age of twenty, Aurobindo first made some Indian friends. He joined a society of Indian students called Indian Majlis and
became its secretary. He even toyed with revolutionary thoughts by joining a secret society rather dramatically called ‘The Lotus and Dagger’ but it didn’t last very long. By this time his father had also become disillusioned with the British and begun sending him newspaper cuttings about British oppression of Indians. Aurobindo’s father wanted him to take the entrance exam for the Indian Civil Service, which he passed easily, but then as he failed to appear for a horse-riding test, he was not admitted into the service. Later he admitted that he had taken the exam only to please his father and was really interested more in ‘poetry and study of languages and in patriotic action.’ Fortunately for him, the ruler of the princely state of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad, was in London at that time and, after an interview, offered Aurobindo a post in the state service. At a time when most princely states were very badly run, Baroda was an exception. Sayajirao often offered jobs to talented and educated Indians and had some of the best schools and colleges in an Indian state. Some years later he would give a scholarship and a job to an untouchable boy named Bhimrao Ambedkar. Aurobindo had left India at the age of seven and came back at twenty- one. He returned in February 1893 on board the ship SS Carthage and immediately faced a family tragedy. His father had been informed by his London bankers that Aurobindo was travelling by another ship, the SS Roumania and that the ship had sunk at sea. The shock had killed his father. Aurobindo Ghose soon joined work at Baroda and became the Gaekwad’s personal secretary. His command of the English language meant that he wrote all the king’s speeches and handled the correspondence with the Government of India. However the young man chafed at having to be at the beck and call of the ruler. After a while Ghose began to teach French and English at Baroda College and would one day become its principal. Many of his students remembered him as a mesmerizing speaker and he became a legend as a teacher. This was the time when he began to discover his motherland, and as is often the case with those who find their roots late in life, his passion was overwhelming. Ghose wanted to know everything about India
immediately. He knew seven languages but could not converse in his mother tongue. So he taught himself Sanskrit, and got teachers to teach him Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati. Crates of books began to arrive from Bombay and his reading spanned everything from the Vedas to the writings of Kalidasa and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. The writer Dinendra Kumar Roy came from Calcutta to teach him Bengali and later wrote about his first view of his very unusual pupil: ‘I had imagined him as a tall, stalwart figure, dressed from head to foot in immaculate European style, bespectacled, with a stern, piercing look and an affected accent, quick-tempered and intolerant. Frankly, I was a little disappointed when I saw him. Here was a shy, dark youth, his gentle eyes filled with dreams, his long, soft hair, parted in the middle and flowing down to the neck. He was dressed in a thick coarse dhoti and close-fitting Indian jacket.’ Ghose had finally become an Indian. Soon Ghose joined the nationalist movement enthusiastically, meeting leaders and attending sessions of the Congress party. He left Baroda and shifted to Bengal where he began to edit the journal Bande Mataram. At that time Bengal was in a ferment of protest over the partition of the province by Lord Curzon and Ghose was one of the most vocal members of the radical group in the Congress, called the Extremists. Their leaders Tilak and Lajpat Rai wanted to start an India-wide agitation in cooperation with the moderate leaders like Gokhale, but their rather excitable band of followers were not interested in any form of compromise. The two groups came into open conflict at the session in Surat in 1907, when after a tumultuous meeting, the party was virtually divided. The young men went on a rampage, shouting down the speakers and even throwing a shoe on to the stage. Tilak failed to control his followers and the session ended with the police clearing the pandal. Many people blamed Tilak for starting the fracas, but many years later Ghose admitted that it was he and his friends who had started it all without Tilak’s knowledge. Meanwhile, Ghose had started the newspaper Jugantar and continued to write a stream of articles criticizing the government and fiery poetry inciting people to join the Swadeshi protests. He also began to teach at the
National College (later, Jadavpur University) that had been set up for students who had been expelled for joining the Swadeshi Movement. He was arrested and charged with sedition for his writings in Bande Mataram but was acquitted. At this time Bengal had become a hotbed of revolutionary activities, with secret societies springing up everywhere. One of them was led by Ghose’s younger brother Barin who began to train young men in the use of arms and making bombs at their family home at Maniktala Gardens. In 1908 two young men—Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose—tried to kill an ICS officer named Kingsford but instead threw the bomb into a carriage carrying two Englishwomen, who were both killed. The police raided the Maniktala house where guns and bombs were found, and Barin and his friends were taken into custody. Ghose was also arrested—even though there was no direct proof of his involvement—and charged with waging war against the King. The penalty for the offence was death. He was in jail for a year before the trial began. The trial came to be known as the Alipur Bomb Case; it was the first revolutionary case in India and it gripped the country. C.R. Das, the most successful barrister in the city, came forward to defend Ghose. In his argument he said about Ghose, ‘… long after the controversy will be hushed in silence, long after the turmoil … he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity.’ Curiously, the judge at the trial, C.P. Beachcroft, had been Ghose’s classmate in Cambridge—he had been beaten by Ghose in Greek but had bested him in Bengali! Ghose was acquitted. The government made it clear that it was very unhappy with the verdict and would arrest him at the first opportunity and deport him. Friends of Ghose like Sister Nivedita—an Anglo–Irish social worker in India—feared for his life and advised him to leave British India and live in a French territory. Ghose first moved to Chandranagar in Bengal and then sailed for the French enclave of Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu. When he landed in Pondicherry on 4 April 1910, he was welcomed by a group of
nationalists who were living there in exile and among them was the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati. Everyone knew of Aurobindo Ghose, the poet of freedom, the firebrand leader, but there was also a spiritual side to his character. He was deeply interested in philosophy and mysticism and he had spent years studying Hindu philosophy and meeting thinkers and yogis. In Pondicherry, Ghose was far away from the hurly-burly of nationalist politics and now he let this hidden side surface. He believed that India’s independence was inevitable and that there were many leaders who could lead the country to Puma Swaraj—complete independence. Now he could withdraw and concentrate on his spiritual journey of thought and meditation. It was the final transformation in an amazing life. First the anglicized sahib who could not even speak his mother tongue became a popular writer and poet in Bengali, whose dreams for his beloved motherland inspired a nation. Then he was the radical revolutionary who approved of violence as a means to gain freedom. And now in his forties, he became a recluse, seeking spiritual truths through meditation—one day he would be called the ‘Sage of Pondicherry’. Aurobindo Ghose—scholar, poet and revolutionary—now became Shri Aurobindo, philosopher and mystic. A new journey into the uncharted waters of the mind had begun.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale We are most of us in India, a somewhat dreamy race … Dreams have their importance in shaping aspirations for the future, but in practical matters, we have to be practical men. —Gopal Krishna Gokhale A teacher of English literature in a school in Poona had to teach a lesson from the biography of the British admiral Nelson. He found it hard to understand as it was full of complex nautical terms. Most teachers would have just looked up the meaning of the words in the dictionary but this teacher was different. On the following weekend he travelled to Bombay to
look at the ships in the docks and asked the sailors a lot of questions. When he explained the lesson he knew exactly what he was talking about and Nelson’s naval feats came alive to his students. This was why Gopal Krishna Gokhale was one of the most popular teachers in the school. Later, when this teacher became a leader of the national movement, he brought this same meticulous and caring diligence to the cause. Gopal Krishna Gokhale was born the youngest son of a poor Brahmin family on 9 May 1866, in the village of Kotluk in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. His father Krishna Rao worked as a clerk and died when Gokhale was only thirteen. Gokhale went to school in Kolhapur and faced a lot of financial hardships as his older brother Govind Rao struggled to support the family on a meagre salary. Gokhale never forgot those days of struggle and it gave him a deep sympathy for the travails of the poor. All his life he was not only involved in the political struggle for freedom but also passionately dedicated to the reform of society so that really deprived people—the poor peasants, the untouchables and women—could have better lives. As a student, Gokhale worked very hard in school and he had such a sharp memory that he amazed his friends by effortlessly remembering long passages from the textbooks. The other boys used to place bets on how many mistakes he would make while recalling the text but then discovered that at one paisa per mistake they did not make much money! Gokhale won a scholarship and graduated from Elphinstone College in Bombay. It was here that he developed a lifelong love of English literature and a deep admiration for western philosophy. He also enjoyed mathematics and that too came of use later when he spoke in Parliament, carefully analyzing the budget of the government. Gokhale was nineteen when he became a teacher at the New English School in Poona started by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, a progressive thinker and social reformer. Gokhale taught English and Mathematics, and he wrote a popular textbook for arithmetic that was translated into many Indian languages. Later when Tilak started Fergusson College, Gokhale began to teach there. He also wrote in newspapers like the
Mahratta, and edited Sudharak. However, much more than teaching, it was political and social work that attracted him. He joined public service organizations like the Sarvajanik Sabha and the Deccan Education Society. Gokhale was against foreign rule, but he also acknowledged that Indians were responsible for much of their misery. He admired western democracy but knew that Indians had to be educated first before they could govern themselves. There was no true equality in a society divided by caste and religion, with the untouchables and women having no rights at all. As most of the people were uneducated, he felt that one of the most important requirements was free primary education, schools for women and the removal of purdah. He got involved in all issues that affected the daily life of the people, like improving sanitation, water supply and irrigation for agricultural land. Gokhale’s mentor and inspiration was the great social reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade. He was a judge in the Poona High Court and, with his wife Ramabai, faced both the opposition of the government and the anger of conservative Hindu society as they started schools for women, encouraged widow remarriage and helped farmers out of the clutches of moneylenders by starting a rural bank. Gokhale so idolized Ranade that he always carried a scarf that Ranade had given him. Once, while on a visit to South Africa, he showed the scarf to Gandhi who offered to get it washed and ironed. Gokhale smiled and said, ‘I can trust your capacity as a lawyer but not as a washerman.’ Gandhi insisted and later won praise for a washing job done well. Gokhale knew that it was the younger generation that could bring change in society and often spoke to students about doing social work. His advice was always sensible and practical: once he told the graduates of Bombay University that they should start public service by first dusting the books in the Royal Asiatic Society Library. He formed the Servants of India Society where he wanted the members to work for all the social causes that were important to him. He gathered a band of dedicated young people who vowed to live simply and work for society. They worked among the poor in cities, travelled to villages to help
farmers and tribal people, and were in the forefront during natural calamities like famines and floods. In this group were men like the educationist Srinivasa Sastri and A.V. Thakkar, who became a beloved social worker people called ‘Thakkar Baba’. Gokhale was called ‘Mahatma’ for his welfare work and this was many years before Gandhiji was given that title. Gokhale’s greatest contribution to national life was as a member of the Indian National Congress. He became the secretary of the Congress at the age of twenty-nine and was elected the president ten years later. In those days the Congress was led by Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea and Gokhale, and their effort was to gain more self-government for Indians. They wanted more Indians in the Indian Civil Service, and also tried to make the British government aware of the unjust policies and high-handed actions of officials through ‘prayer, petition and protest’. Gokhale spoke in the legislative assembly and even travelled to Britain to influence public opinion there. In 1897 he spoke before the Welby Commission, and while facing tough questions from the panel, he used carefully gathered facts and figures to prove that India was being impoverished by colonization. He told the Commission that more Indians should be allowed to join the administrative services like the ICS because British officers came to India only for a few years and then a huge amount of money was spent on their pensions. When someone pointed out how India had benefited economically from the introduction of the railways, Gokhale told them about how village industries like textiles were ruined because cheaper foreign goods were available everywhere. In 1902, after he retired from Fergusson College, he became even busier with his social work at the Servants of India Society and his work as a parliamentarian. As a member of the Legislative Council he was famous for his budget speeches where he would analyse the budget figures with ruthless logic and prove that the government was failing to improve the economic condition of the people. Once when the Finance Member was being praised for having a surplus in the budget, Gokhale proved how it had
come from taxing people into extreme poverty. He had the data to show how taxes went up even during a famine and how India was paying for wars Britain fought elsewhere. His budget speeches became so popular that people waited eagerly every year to read them in the papers. Even the viceroy Lord Curzon acknowledged that Gokhale was a formidable speaker and a powerful advocate of the nationalist cause. Then at the Congress session of 1905 at Benaras, Gokhale was elected the president; he was only thirty-nine. At this session the hottest topic of debate was the partition of Bengal and it brought into focus the contrasting styles of two leaders from Poona—Gokhale and Tilak. Gokhale felt that the country was not ready for any mass movement, that people had to be educated to understand their responsibilities as citizens, and also that Indians had to become more liberal and egalitarian before they could demand self-government. He wanted the campaign for Swaraj to be a constitutional one—through work in the legislatures and petitions to the government. Tilak had no patience with a policy of petitions and prayers, and felt that the time was ripe for a mass protest. He was convinced that the government would listen only if people marched out into the streets, boycotted foreign goods, and refused to pay taxes, work in the administration or join the army, making it impossible for the government to operate. Tilak wanted self- government immediately; Gokhale thought the country was not yet ready for such a big step. They also differed in their attitude to social reform. Gokhale, a truly enlightened and humane person like his mentor Ranade, felt that social and political reform had to go hand in hand. If society was still steeped in untouchability and purdah, and the untouchables and women had no rights, then it was not ready to govern itself. Tilak was convinced that social reform could wait till Indians had gained Swaraj and he was also deeply suspicious of any attempt to change social customs as he thought it was an attack on his religion. In 1907 there was a virtual split in the Congress at its annual session in Surat between the Moderates and the Extremists. Soon after, Tilak was
jailed and deported to Burma and for a while the party went into decline. However, Gokhale’s parliamentarian work continued, especially during the time when the Minto–Morley Reforms were being drafted as he tried hard to obtain greater participation of Indians in government. When these reforms, known as the Government of India Act, were finally announced, he was disappointed with the government’s refusal to give more power to Indians and also deeply distressed when Muslims were given separate electorates so that only Muslims could vote for the candidates for Muslim seats. He knew it was the government’s policy of divide and rule at work here, aimed at weakening the nationalist movement. After a life spent in relentless work Gokhale died on 19 February 1915 when he was only forty-nine. If today we have a working democracy with a constitution that is respected, it reflects Gokhale’s deep faith in the constitutional path to self-government. Unlike leaders like Tilak, he was not a flamboyant mass leader who could give inspiring speeches that stirred people. His was a quieter and much more long-lasting role of constructive work to build a better nation. He was a man much ahead of his times and among the earliest leaders who were firmly of the belief that India had to be a secular democracy where every citizen had equal rights irrespective of caste or gender. Today we take our rights for granted, but in the nineteenth century when Gokhale was talking about equality, this was not such a popular view. At the time when Gokhale died, a new leader was appearing on the horizon with his revolutionary plan of Satyagraha. Gokhale was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s mentor and adviser during his early years. They met first when Gokhale went to South Africa and offered his support for Gandhi’s campaign against racism. There was an immediate meeting of minds, and later when Gandhi returned to India, he was again drawn to the vision that Gokhale had of the future and to his kind and generous nature. He called Gokhale his ‘Rajguru’ and later wrote about the leaders he met at that time, ‘Sir Pherozeshah (Mehta) had seemed to me like the Himalayas, the Lokmanya (Tilak) like the ocean. But Gokhale was the Ganges. One
could have a refreshing bath in a holy river … the Ganges invited one to its bosom.’ In many ways Gandhi’s future strategy was a combination of what Tilak and Gokhale had initiated. Like Tilak, he realized that only a mass movement could succeed in making the government listen to their demands, that just petitions would not work. Like Gokhale, he knew that India could not become a true democracy without equality for all and that social reform was as important as the more dramatic political battle. It was Gokhale who had suggested that before he started anything Gandhi should first travel across the country to understand the realities of the people. So when Gandhi took his political and social message to the villages, he was following Gokhale. There was one difference between Gandhi’s and Gokhale’s vision of the future. Whereas Gandhi was keenest on village economies and village crafts, Gokhale knew a dream of simple living and weaving of khadi was not going to make India prosper. We had to compete with the world and for that just as we needed prosperous villages, we also needed modern industries, science and technology. As he said, ‘Remember that, though there is certain scope for small village industries, our main reliance now— exposed as we are to the world competition—must be on production with the aid of steam and machinery.’ A great scholar and intellectual, Gokhale was a modern man who refused to dwell in the greatness of the past. He was thoughtful and compassionate and cared deeply about people. A true democrat, he looked for progress through a parliamentary system where the will of the people was respected. As the historian Bipan Chandra writes, he was one of our greatest parliamentarians and ‘as a speaker he was gentle, reasonable, courteous, non-flamboyant and lucid. He relied primarily upon detailed knowledge and the careful, cool and logical marshalling and analysis of data.’ For Gokhale mere oratory did not solve any problems; you had to work for a lifetime to make a difference. As he once said, he was a practical man.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Every religion that has come into the world has brought the message of love and brotherhood. Those who are indifferent to the welfare of their fellow men, whose hearts are empty of love, they do not know the meaning of religion. —Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan He would tower over the diminutive Mahatma Gandhi and bend courteously to talk to him. In this six-foot-six gentle giant, a Pathan from that fierce land of guns and blood feuds, Gandhi found a true man of peace.
Like the Mahatma, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan believed in non-violence and tolerance of all religions, and his only purpose in life was to help his people. And they returned his love by calling him ‘Badshah Khan’—the King of the Khans. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan did not know the exact date of his birth but it was probably in 1890. He was born into the family of a Pashtun (Pathan) chieftain Behram Khan of the Mohammedzai tribe, in the village of Utmanzai in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). This region, bordering Afghanistan and set high among the western Himalayas, was a poor and backward one. The people survived by primitive agriculture, education was just basic religious lessons at the local madrassa and women, living cloistered in purdah, had no rights at all. When young Ghaffar Khan was sent to the madrassa to study, he realized that all he was expected to do was memorize the Quran, but the Mullas would not explain the text. As he wrote later, ‘… the Mullas were not aware of the true meaning of religion and very often they insisted that children should not ask any question but should merely devote themselves to learning by rote and recitation.’ He soon shifted to the Edwards Memorial Mission High School to receive a modern education. For a short while he joined the army but soon resigned, angered by the way Indians were treated by British officers. His family was not pleased, because among the Pashtuns, a commission in the army was considered a matter of supreme good fortune. Ghaffar Khan left for Aligarh for further studies and here he was exposed to modern thinking and the latest events in the nationalist movement. He met many scholars and social reformers, and began to read progressive newspapers like Maulana Azad’s Al-Hilal. As the son of an affluent family he could have remained a scholar, but he took on the challenging task of transforming Pashtun society. Ghaffar Khan understood early in life that the progress of his people depended on a modern education and opened his first school when he was just twenty. In a deeply conservative society, suspicious of change, he brought the promise of progress and freedom. Over the years he travelled across the region talking to people about the value of education and how it
would benefit their lives. He was always a champion of women’s rights and opened schools for both boys and girls. Soon his activities caught the attention of the government and the Mullas, and neither was pleased. It was in the government’s interest to keep a martial race like the Pashtuns in a state of backwardness and poverty, and the Mullas who felt threatened by any form of progress preferred to support the government. In the 1920s Ghaffar Khan organized demonstrations in support of the Khilafat movement—a largely religious movement aimed at preserving Islamic tenets—and was arrested. He was in various prisons for three years and even here he worked among the prisoners. The wardens, suspicious of his popularity, often kept him in chains in solitary confinement and this affected his health. When he came out of prison he went back to his work of trying to make his people turn away from their preoccupation with violence and vendetta. A devout Muslim who respected all faiths and opposed all forms of religious fanaticism, he tried to make them understand the true meaning of Islam that talks of peace and solidarity among the faithful. He lived a simple, Spartan life and his thoughts and actions very often resembled those of a man he deeply admired—Mahatma Gandhi. In 1929 Ghaffar Khan formed an organization called Khudai Khidmatgar or the Servants of God. These non-violent revolutionaries also came to be called the Red Shirts because of their uniform. He launched a newspaper Pakhtun in the Pushto language to spread his message. He also began to talk of his dream of an independent land for his people. He met Gandhi and other Congress leaders in 1928 at Lucknow. He had earlier met the leaders of the Muslim League, who were mostly rich landowners, and he was not impressed. He felt that the League was being promoted by the British to divide the nationalist movement. In the Congress, and especially in Gandhi, he found the values that he cherished—of religious tolerance, non-violence and social reform. He often stayed with Gandhi at his ashram at Wardha and he responded immediately to Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha and said that it was ‘the weapon of patience and righteousness … No power on earth can stand against it.’ He joined the Congress and his party began to attend its annual sessions, where the red
shirts of the Khudai Khidmatgar always added a splash of colour to the sea of khadi. During the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 one of the most effective protests was held in NWFP where for nearly a week the government lost control of Peshawar. The demonstrations were always peaceful and it was here that the soldiers of a Garhwali regiment refused to fire on a peaceful and unarmed crowd. Ghaffar Khan was arrested again and sentenced to three years in jail. Here he taught the Quran to the Hindus and the Bhagavad Gita to the Muslims to show how the message of all religions was the same. He had also discovered the therapeutic value of spinning on a charkha; he said it focused the mind. After the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which secured the release of all political prisoners except those convicted for violence, all the leaders were released from prison except Ghaffar Khan. Gandhi had to personally intervene with Lord Irwin to have his comrade freed. Ghaffar Khan became a member of the Congress Working Committee but refused the post of president when it was offered to him in 1931. In the 1937 elections to provincial governments, the Khudai Khidmatgar party won the majority of seats in NWFP, proving that the Muslim League did not represent the Muslims there. The government tried to impose its own man as chief minister but failed and Ghaffar Khan’s elder brother Dr Khan Saheb became the head of the government. During the final negotiations with the Cabinet Mission, Ghaffar Khan was a member of the Congress team with Maulana Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. However, his dream of an independent Pashtun nation was shattered when NWFP was included in Pakistan. The Muslim League called him anti-Muslim and in 1946 he was attacked and hurt so badly that he had to be hospitalized. When a plebiscite was held in NWFP in 1947, his party boycotted it and only seven per cent of the people voted, but the Muslim League declared the election valid. This betrayal of the Pashtun cause is one of the forgotten tragedies of the independence movement.
After 1947 Ghaffar Khan faced many years of house arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Pakistan government, but he was never reconciled to the reality of Pakistan and said, ‘Pakistan was created by the grace of the British, in order that Muslims and Hindus might forever forget that they are brothers.’ His final years were spent in exile in Afghanistan. On 21 January 1988 Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan died at Jalalabad at the age of ninety-eight. The man of the mountains, who was called ‘Frontier Gandhi’ for his courageous non-violence, fought for his people till the end.
Birsa Munda Maharani raj tundu jana oro, abua raj ete jana. (Let the kingdom of the queen be ended and our kingdom be established.) —Birsa Munda He was the charismatic leader of the Mundas. This tribe lives in the Chhotanagpur region of what is now Jharkhand and they rose up against the oppression of the landlords and the British government at his call. The Mundas fearlessly faced the guns of soldiers with bows and arrows, spears, axes and catapults, as their faith in their leader Birsa Munda was absolute. For the tribal he became Bhagwan, their deity, and they believed he would lead them to freedom.
Birsa Munda was born at Bamba, near Ranchi, on 15 November 1875. It was a Thursday and he was named Birsa after the day as was Munda custom. His father was a sharecropper or ryot. The family lived in a poor house built of bamboo and wandered from village to village in the Chhotanagpur area looking for work. Soon after Birsa’s birth, the family left for Chalkad. His father Sugana Munda had been converted to Christianity much before Birsa’s birth and later became a pracharak of the German missionaries. Birsa grew up like other Munda children, grazing sheep, and is said to have been skilled at playing the flute and the tuila, a single-stringed instrument made from the pumpkin. The family moved to Ayubhatu in search of work and then Birsa went to live with his elder brother at Kunda Bartoli. After that, probably in Burju, Birsa attended a Christian missionary school for a while and got an elementary education. For a while he even became a Christian, but later he discovered Vaishnavism and became a worshipper of Vishnu. He turned vegetarian, wore the sacred thread and began worshipping the tulsi plant. Birsa lived at a time of great social and economic tumult among the tribal people of the region. At one time they were free to lead their lives—they cleared the forest for crops and gathered the wealth of the forest like fruits, honey, plants and wood. They had grazing rights on common land that was owned by the whole community. The forests were their home and there was tacit acceptance by local rajas like the Raja of Chhotanagpur that it belonged to the various tribes. All this changed with the arrival of the British, the officials and the missionaries. The tribal kings and leaders called Sardars were defeated and forced to pay tribute and the government insisted on the imposition of taxes on the tribes. Then the Christian missionaries arrived with their strange social rules and alien culture. Tribal society was comparatively free of caste or religious divisions and everyone, men and women, were equal. The missionaries began converting them by offering converts special privileges; this led to social divisions and much anger and resentment in the villages. Now the government revenue collectors—the hated thikadars—arrived, followed by moneylenders and landowners who cheated the simple tribal
people of their land. The tribes lost the land they had cleared and cultivated because they had no legal papers to prove they owned it and were often reduced to becoming farm labourers and often bonded workers. Many were forced into bonded labour called beth begari and others made to pay exorbitant rents by the mercenary thikadars. The Mundas began to hate and fear the Dikus, the non-tribal people of the area, and one day that anger would make these peaceful people pick up their bows and arrows in sheer desperation. The Munda uprising was one of many among the tribal people of the region and they died by the thousands. The Santhals rose in 1855–56 and were crushed ruthlessly by the police. Among the Mundas there was first the rebellion led by the Sardars. The Sardars had earlier tried to ally themselves with the missionaries, but disappointed, had turned against them. A young Birsa joined the Sardari agitation, denounced the missionaries and began to believe that all white people—the British and the missionaries—were the same. He was jailed for two years and came out even more of a firebrand; now he claimed he had a revelation from God, which said that the land belonged to the people who cultivated it. Birsa also said that this was the kingdom of the Mundas and no one had the right to impose any taxes on them. The Sardars were against the thikadars but they had always acknowledged the sovereignty of the King of Chhotanagpur— but now Birsa claimed the forests for his people. Birsa was barely in his twenties when he burst upon the scene claiming to be a messiah, a healer and miracle worker, and was soon being worshipped as ‘Bhagwan’ and ‘Dharti Abba’, the father of the land. His ideology was a mix of his religious beliefs and the economic demands of the people. He was a religious and social reformer, and spoke with surprising maturity for his age. He dismissed superstition and discouraged the Mundas from converting to Christianity as it led to divisions in the Munda society. He asked his followers to give up animal sacrifice, criticized their faith in magic and spirits, and asked them to stop drinking liquor. He wanted them to go back to the old traditions that worshipped the forest and then help him throw out the hated Dikus from their land.
In December 1899, Birsa Munda led the Ulgulan or the Great Tumult, with his followers moving from village to village claiming freedom from the rule of the British Maharani Victoria. They prevented the Forest Department from taking away the village common lands. Then bands of armed tribals attacked the thikadars, burned down churches and fought the police in the Ranchi–Singbhum area. For a while Birsa and his men controlled the land and there was panic in the town of Ranchi as people feared that it was to be the next target of the Ulgulan. The tribal men and women, armed with just bows and arrows, spears and catapults, fought with unbelievable spirit against the guns of the police and army, but their defeat was inevitable. Nearly three hundred and fifty Mundas were put on trial, three were hanged and forty-four were given jail sentences. Birsa Munda was captured and died in jail a few months later on 9 June 1900. He was only twenty-five years old. The Great Tumult was over, but Birsa was not forgotten. First, it made the government take the grievances of the Mundas against the thikadars more seriously and also acknowledge their hereditary rights to the forests. A new act, the Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, gave them more rights to the forests and banned bonded labour. It was not a perfect solution but at least the Mundas had some legal rights to their land. Since then Birsa Munda has become an icon of the tribal people’s fight for their traditional rights, even in modern India. Today his statue stands in the Indian Parliament and he is a legend in the state of Jharkhand. There is also a statue of Birsa in the capital Ranchi and the airport is named after him. What he achieved through his rebellion was that he made the tribal people aware of their rights and give them the courage to stand up and fight for them. Even today a religious sect called the ‘Birsaites’ worships Birsa Munda as a deity. The Ulgulan was one of the most well known of many such rebellions of peasants and tribal people all across India against the oppressive demands of the British government and the exploitation of zamindars and moneylenders who always had the might of the police on their side. All
these agitations were around specific causes, and usually once their grievances were attended to, they died down. Though influenced by the Sardars, Birsa was not fighting for their cause. He had a mission of his own—to fight for his fellow Mundas. The ideal ‘Munda Raj’, as he saw it, would be possible only if the European officials and missionaries were expelled from the scene. He had no conception of a nation called India, nor was he leading a nationalist movement for the freedom of the country, yet what was unique about Birsa Munda was his ability to organize a rebellion that united his people and made the government listen to their grievances. At the young age of twenty, he had begun to worry the British government quite a bit. He dismissed the suzerainty of the British monarch and the power of the local king, and claimed the land for his people. He showed the way to make the powerful listen to the poor and forgotten tribes. He was the passionate voice of his people and today he is the symbol of the poor and marginalized peasants and tribal people in independent India, inspiring them to find the courage to stand up and fight for their rights.
Sarojini Naidu With lutes in our hands ever singing we roam, All men are our kindred, the world is our own. —Sarojini Naidu, The Golden Threshold It was the spring of 1930. As the country watched with bated breath, a thin old man with a big stick, walked for twenty-eight days to pick up a handful of salt on a beach. Mahatma Gandhi had started the Civil Disobedience Movement with the famous march that ended on the beach at Dandi on 6 April. The next day he
was arrested, but it did not end the Salt Satyagraha. Other leaders stepped up to lead protestors who continued to defy the salt law. On 21 May two thousand freedom fighters marched towards the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat. Leading them was Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian woman president of the Indian National Congress. With her were Imam Saheb, an old comrade of Gandhi from South Africa, and Gandhi’s son Manilal. The British government was ready to block the marchers and the Salt Works was bounded by barbed wire and ranks of policemen armed with rifles and steel-tipped lathis. This was a welcome the khadi-clad marchers had expected. As they stood facing the police under a scorching sun, they were armed only with their own courage and the determination of their leader. Before they had started Sarojini Naidu had reminded them of Gandhi’s strict instructions—there was to be no violence. ‘You will be beaten, but you must not resist,’ she had said. ‘You must not even raise a hand to ward off a blow.’ The plan was simple. Small groups of marchers would walk up to the police barricades, try to enter the Salt Works peacefully and go on as far as they were able to walk. All through the morning, bands of freedom fighters strode up to break the police cordon and faced a barrage of lathi blows. They were brutally beaten; many, bleeding from head wounds, fell to the ground. Then groups of volunteers ran up to carry them away to the first-aid station at the back where their wounds were bandaged. Meanwhile, another batch of protestors marched valiantly towards the police. The air was filled with the sickening thud of lathis landing on heads and bodies, cries of pain and the running feet of volunteers. By 11 a.m., 320 protestors had been injured and two killed, but not one freedom fighter had picked up a stone or swung a fist at their tormentors. Among the horrified spectators was an American journalist, Webb Miller, whose report on the Satyagraha at Dharasana was carried in newspapers around the world. He wrote, ‘In eighteen years of my reporting, in twenty countries, during which I have witnessed innumerable civil disturbances, riots, street fights and rebellions, I have never witnessed such harrowing scenes as Dharasana.’
Gandhi’s Satyagraha proved to the world that non-violence was not for the meek or the coward. In fact, it needed more grit and will power than picking up a gun. A non-violent campaign was much more effective in winning the hearts and minds of the people, who after all had only their own courage to draw on. Sarojini Naidu understood this and she made sure the protest at Dharasana stayed peaceful because she knew that such a show of police brutality would not be forgotten—or forgiven. And it wasn’t. It galvanized the nation, as thousands poured out into the streets to join the freedom struggle, while messages of support and sympathy arrived from across the world. You would think that someone who led a march of thousands and kept it peaceful in spite of great provocation would be this cool, tough, no- nonsense woman. What is amazing is that Naidu was also a sensitive writer of passionate, lyrical verses, a flamboyant personality who could charm anyone with her witty conversation, and a charismatic orator. Sarojini Naidu shone among the galaxy of leaders of the Congress party and was one of its most popular spokespersons. Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born in Hyderabad on 13 February 1879, the eldest of the eight children of Aghorenath and Baradasundari Chattopadhyay. Her father was a scientist and educationist who set up the Nizam’s College and pioneered education for women. She grew up in an enlightened household where learning and independent thought were encouraged. Poetry was in Sarojini’s genes as both parents wrote verses and later her brother Harindranath would also win fame as a poet. In her early years it was poetry that absorbed Sarojini. A precocious scholar, she completed her matriculation at twelve. That year she wrote a 1300-line poem titled ‘Lady of the Lake’ in six days and the next year, a poetic drama of 2000 lines! Her writings began to be published and one of them caught the attention of the Nizam who gave her a scholarship for higher studies in Britain. She studied at King’s College, London, and then at Girton College, Cambridge, and impressed many writers and critics with her poetry.
When her first book of poetry The Golden Threshold was published in 1905, it was praised in The London Times and The Manchester Guardian. The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917) followed. After this, as the hectic years of the freedom movement intervened, the poet and balladeer was silent for many years. Her last collection The Sceptred Flute came out only in 1937. The damp and cold English weather led to ill health, so Sarojini returned to India and in 1898 she married Govindarajulu Naidu, a military doctor. The marriage created a sensation not only because an Indian girl was marrying a man of her own choice but also because a Bengali Brahmin was marrying a Telugu of a lower caste. Even her liberal father was not happy with her decision. The Naidus had four children and Sarojini settled down to domestic life. Soon she was one of the most popular hostesses in Hyderabad, legendary for her sparkling parties where guests were welcomed with poetry, music and animated conversation. Family, friends, social success and fame as a poet—for most women of that time such a life would have been enough, but for the restless and gifted Sarojini Naidu, life was just beginning. Her life took a new turn when she met the Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale who encouraged her to get involved in public service. Despite her busy and happy life there must have been a yearning somewhere to do more because she responded immediately to his suggestion that she should meet Mahatma Gandhi. She met Gandhi in 1914 and her life changed. After that her every moment became dedicated to the national movement. She later recalled her first sight of Gandhi, this ‘little man’ with a shaven head, sitting on the floor on a black prison blanket eating squashed tomatoes and olive oil out of a wooden bowl. She had laughed at him, instantly creating a bond with the Mahatma, who always enjoyed a joke. Over the years the Mahatma and Naidu developed an intriguingly colourful relationship where he was leader, guru and also a beloved father figure. She was among the few who could joke and tease him and get away with it, as she knew how to appeal to his sense of humour. She called
herself ‘the licensed jester of the Mahatma’s little court’ and had the audacity to call him ‘Our Mickey Mouse of India’ because of his large ears! A story goes about Gandhi’s insistence on travelling in third-class train compartments and staying in Harijan colonies. Nevertheless, the Congress had to make elaborate arrangements for his visits and once Naidu wryly commented, ‘Bapuji, do you know how much it costs to keep you in poverty?’ For a while Naidu joined Gandhi in South Africa, working among Indians fighting the racist apartheid laws of the government. When she returned to India, she formally joined the Congress and was soon mesmerizing audiences with her powerful speeches. She became an indefatigable speaker, travelling like a whirlwind across the land, addressing huge mass rallies and gatherings of students, women and factory workers. People would come from far only to hear the star campaigner of the Congress. Freedom fighter J. Alva described Naidu addressing a rally: ‘A snap of her fingers and the bustle would be over, a slight look around, she would hold hundreds of mouths shut, that was her commanding influence as “master of the platforms”.’ This relentless travelling was not easy for her as her health was fragile and she often fell ill, yet she soldiered on with indomitable spirit, even going on a triumphant lecture tour of the United States in 1928. Her achievements were remarkable, considering the status of Indian women in the early years of the twentieth century. Most were uneducated, barely able to read and write, they were married as children and spent their lives behind the purdah. Naidu was the finest example of the new Indian woman that Gandhi dreamed about. She was a wife and mother, a poet, and there she stood before a gathering of thousands speaking with passion and confidence. She inspired innumerable women to walk out of their kitchens, join the freedom struggle and hold high the flag of independence. Sarojini Naidu’s unwavering focus was on national unity, religious tolerance and the emancipation of women. The British government had given her the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for her social work, which she returned after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. She spoke fluent Urdu and also wrote
in it. Among her good friends was Mohammed Ali Jinnah when he was a member of the Congress, and she even dedicated a poem to him. She was also a friend and confidant of Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru. She and Nehru corresponded regularly and their letters to each other after he became Prime Minister, show how much he trusted her advice. In 1925, Sarojini Naidu was elected the president of the Indian National Congress, the first Indian woman to hold the post. The only other woman president had been Annie Besant. After her election, Gandhi spoke in her praise and she replied with typical understated wit, ‘In electing me to be the chief among your chosen servants, you have not created a novel precedent. You have only reverted to an old tradition and returned to the Indian woman the classic position she once held …’ She was also one of the founders of the All India Women’s Conference and inspired women like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Kamala Menon. Then in 1930 the Civil Disobedience Movement was launched with that amazing, headline-grabbing march to Dandi. Gandhi had asked her to stay away, but she ignored his request and there are photographs of a smiling Naidu triumphantly marching beside him. Then she led the protest in Dharasana that put the government in a very embarrassing position as it faced worldwide condemnation. Meanwhile, India was in turmoil with protests and demonstrations erupting everywhere. The viceroy Lord Irwin, who had so far ignored every communication from Gandhi, was finally forced to meet him. They signed the Gandhi–Irwin Pact to end the agitation. Soon–after, Gandhi left for the Second Round Table Conference in London and Naidu accompanied him. The final push towards freedom came in 1942 when, at the Bombay session of the Congress, the Party asked the British to quit India. The next day all the leaders were arrested. Gandhi, Kasturba and Naidu were interned in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona. This was a time of great tragedy for Gandhi because both Kasturba and his secretary Mahadev Desai died here. Naidu, herself in bad health, was always by his side, and when Gandhi started a fast, she nursed him with great love and care.
When the long dreamed of Independence finally came in 1947 Naidu watched in horror as the country was divided and millions died in the communal conflagration. She was deeply saddened that all her years of work trying to build unity and religious tolerance had failed so tragically. At the helm of the newly created Pakistan was Jinnah, who had once been her comrade and friend. Nehru as Prime Minister appointed her as the Governor of the largest province in India—Uttar Pradesh. She accepted the post reluctantly, commenting that it made her feel like ‘a wild bird caged’, but with typical discipline began her duties of ‘Governess’ with energy and flair. However, the tragedies were still not over. On 30 January 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. A devastated Sarojini Naidu said in tribute to the man she called ‘friend and master’: ‘This was the only death great enough for him … Time is over for personal sorrow. Time is here and now to stand up and say: We take up the challenge with those who defied Mahatma Gandhi.’ It was Gandhi who had dubbed her ‘Bharat Kokila’, the Nightingale of India, and that vibrant, inspiring voice was quieted on the 2 March 1949 when Sarojini Naidu died at Lucknow and her last rites took place on the banks of the river Gomti. The dreamer of big dreams had once sung: ‘Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken winged bird That cannot fly.’ At a time when the political scene of India was crowded with many great leaders, Sarojini Naidu created a special space for herself through her vivacious personality, energy and passion for the cause. In a sea of sober khadi, she would stand out in her gorgeous silk saris, with flowers in her hair and glittering jewellery, enjoying every fine thing of life—poetry, music, good food and lively conversation. In 1922 she had given up her exquisite silks for homespun khadi, but the sympathetic poet who dreamed of wiping away ‘the sorrows of life with the sorrows of song’ knew well how to celebrate living.
Dadabhai Naoroji The reality is that India, up to the present day, has been governed so as to bring about the impoverishment of the people … Is it necessary that for your benefit, we must be destroyed? —Dadabhai Naoroji In the nineteenth century very few Indians could even imagine a free country called India. Queen Victoria was ruling as the benign Empress and Mother Goddess of her Indian subjects and the sun never set on the British Empire. In 1892, elections were being held in Britain for the House of
Commons, when to everyone’s amazement an Indian won the seat of Central Finsbury in London. Dadabhai Naoroji had fought elections four times as a member of the Liberal Party before finally succeeding. He was the first Indian to become a Member of the British Parliament and stood up in its hallowed halls, the lone voice demanding the rights of the Indian people. The British ruling classes—the politicians, the bureaucracy and the nobility—had for years built up the image of Britain as a benevolent power, bringing civilization and economic benefits to a deprived and barbaric people. Dadabhai Naoroji used facts and figures to prove that British rule was in fact deeply harmful for India as there was no economic development of the country. That it was draining away the wealth of its largest colony and impoverishing its people, and the real picture was one of oppression and exploitation. Dadabhai Naoroji was born on 4 September 1825 into a poor Parsi- Zoroastrian family of priests in Bombay. His father Naoroji Palanji Dordi died when Dadabhai was only four and his mother Maneckbai struggled to bring him up. In spite of being illiterate herself, she ensured that her son received a good education. He studied at Elphinstone College and then began to teach mathematics and philosophy there, to one day become the first Indian professor at his alma mater. Later he would teach Gujarati at the University College in London. Naoroji soon became involved in social reform and what interested him the most was education because he understood that Indians could not fight for their rights without a modern western education. When he began literacy classes for girls, he had to go from house to house convincing parents that educating their daughters would not ruin society and that the girls would not become troublesome rebels just because they knew how to read and write. His efforts were so successful that in a few years the contributions from the public helped him build two schools for girls in the city. One of the biggest benefactors was the Cama family, which owned a successful trading house.
In his long life Naoroji would start at least thirty welfare and political societies. Among them was the East India Association, a predecessor of the Indian National Congress. Then he began to write on politics and social reform in the papers and started newspapers like Rast Guftar (The Truth Teller) that was distributed free, and later The Voice of India. Soon a stream of articles were educating and spreading awareness among readers, and Naoroji became a popular writer. Notably, this was before the Indian Uprising of 1857 and it makes Naoroji one of the first nationalist leaders and social reformers of India. He was a generation older than the next group of leaders like Tilak, Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and M.G. Ranade, all of whom were deeply influenced by his thoughts. In those days India was still under the control of the East India Company. In 1852 its charter came up for renewal with the British government and Naoroji organized a meeting to oppose it. A petition was sent to the British Parliament, pointing out how the officers of the Company Bahadur were systematically bleeding India to enrich themselves; it also gave details of high taxes and bad administration. Even though the charter did get renewed, the petition caught the attention of the politicians and the press in Britain, and it was discussed in parliament and covered in the newspapers. Naoroji realized that Indians had to influence public opinion in Britain to get their grievances heard. The East India Company finally lost its colony in 1858 when the British government took over the administration of India. Very few people questioned the right of the English to rule India in the mid-nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the general view, encouraged by the sahibs, was that British rule was a benevolent one and the government genuinely cared for its Indian subjects. At such a time, Naoroji was going against public opinion and saying that in fact India was being exploited, economically ruined and that the welfare of the people was rarely a concern for the government. Even if some Indians agreed with him, he knew few people in Britain would take him seriously. Just then the Cama family decided to open an office in London and he accepted their offer of a partnership and left for England. Leaving his
family behind, he voyaged to a strange land as the messenger of his people. Soon Naoroji’s London home became a refuge for the young Indian students studying there. Bhikaiji Cama and Mohammed Ali Jinnah worked for him and among those he played mentor to was a shy Gujarati law student who never forgot his kindness and generosity. Mahatma Gandhi later said, ‘Indeed, he was in the place of father to every one of the Indian students … And so Dadabhai became a real “dada” to me.’ From 1855 to 1907 Naoroji led a nomad’s life, commuting between England and India, carrying on propaganda work in London and then coming back to take part in the nationalist movement. He had a sharp business brain and soon Cama & Co. became a profitable concern, but he was unhappy to discover that the company was trading in opium and liquor. As this went against his principles, he quit and set up his own business, Dadabhai Naoroji & Co., in 1859. His business faced some ups and downs but ultimately made Naoroji a rich man, and a lot of his money was used for his social and political work. Among the many political issues that Naoroji took up with the British government was that more Indians be given jobs in the Indian administration, especially in the Indian Civil Service. Leaders like Gokhale would later echo his viewpoint that Indians were perfectly able to run the administration and they understood the problems of the country better than the British. Famines were more frequent during British rule because of the inefficient administration of British officials, and Indians could have helped avert such situations. Naoroji’s first success came in 1866 when nine Indians were appointed to the ICS. Naoroji’s financial acumen and administrative abilities became so well known that in 1874 he was offered the position of the Dewan of the State of Baroda. The Maharaja of Baroda Mulharrao Gaekwad was in trouble with the government because of his misrule and he hoped Naoroji could save him from losing his throne. The British Resident at Baroda was highly displeased and sent many critical reports to the government, but the government was so impressed by Naoroji that the Resident was transferred instead! Within a year the Baroda administration had been cleaned up, but
Naoroji’s honesty and efficiency made the Maharaja unhappy, so Naoroji resigned and returned to Bombay to join the city’s municipal corporation. Naoroji was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, attending its first meeting in 1885. As a shrewd political strategist he recognized quickly that this could be the organization that could lead the campaign to win more political rights for Indians. He became the mentor of younger leaders and members affectionately called him ‘The Grand Old Man’. As he said later in life, ‘Is it vanity that I should take a great pleasure in being hailed as the Grand Old Man of India? No, that title, which speaks volumes for the warm, grateful and generous hearts of my countrymen, is to me, whether I deserve it or not, the highest reward of my life.’ Naoroji was elected thrice as the president of the Congress—in 1886 and 1906 at the sessions in Calcutta and in 1893 at Lahore. In 1893 he returned to Bombay right after winning his seat in the House of Commons and the news had spread like wildfire through the country. The Governor of Bombay was waiting to greet him when his ship docked at the port. Then when he travelled to attend the Congress session, his journey from Bombay to Lahore was like a victory parade, with joyous crowds waiting at every railway station with garlands. The 1906 session in Calcutta was in comparison a sad occasion and fraught with conflict between the Extremists led by Tilak and the Moderate faction of Gokhale, both groups wanting their own candidate as president. Leaders feared that the party would break up; so the eighty-one-year-old Naoroji was requested to accept the post and play peacemaker as he was a friend of both Tilak and Gokhale. The strategy worked, as no Congressman could oppose his election. In his presidential address Naoroji said that Indians could not expect real self-government under the British; he called for Swaraj and endorsed the campaign of boycott and Swadeshi. Naoroji will be remembered most for what came to be called the Drain Theory. He had used his superlative business brain to study the Indian economy carefully and came to the conclusion that the wealth of India was being drained away to make Britain rich. And Naoroji was not just talking
theories—he was giving hard facts and figures that the government could not deny. He collected the economic statistics for years to prove conclusively that colonial rule was systematically impoverishing Indians. Besides, there were very high taxes, especially on agriculture, that had ruined farmers and led to frequent famines, and he had the figures to prove that there were many more famines during British rule than during the rule of the Mughals. Then India was the supplier of raw materials, but Indian industries were not allowed to develop. For example, cotton was imported from India, woven into textiles in the mills of Manchester and then sold back to Indians at high prices. But when an Indian started a textile mill in India, he faced high taxes and a very uncooperative government. This monopoly of trade and industry had ruined the textile industry that during Mughal times was the biggest in the world. According to Naoroji, this now deeply impoverished country had the ‘lordliest and costliest administration in the world’. Officers in India earned much more than their counterparts in Britain and then went home on generous pensions. As a matter of fact, when the Prime Minister of Great Britain earned a salary of Rs 5000 per month, his subordinate, the Viceroy of India, was earning Rs 20,000 a month! Naoroji studied the export-import figures of three decades and showed how India earned a lot from exports but none of the money ever came to the country. Very often it paid for wars that Britain was fighting in other parts of the world. Naoroji published a book about this drain of wealth from India, titled Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India, which became compulsory reading for Indian nationalists. He warned the government that if the economic welfare of the people was ignored, then one day it ‘would drive the people to a boycott not only of the British wares but of the British rule’. He was the only Indian member of the Welby Commission in 1895 that looked into the expenditures of the government in India. Debunking the view that the country would fall apart without British officials, he bluntly told the Commission that all India needed were a British viceroy, governors
and a commander-in-Chief and even those would not be required after a few years. In 1907 the Grand Old Man finally came home and settled in Bombay. He kept a close track of the nationalist movement and his home in Versova saw a stream of visitors seeking his advice on a multitude of matters. He continued to write, and personally replied to every letter he received. He had one of the sharpest constitutional minds in the country and when the Minto–Morley Reforms were being drafted to increase the participation of Indians in the country’s government, he sent ninety pages of suggestions. Naoroji died at the age of ninety-two on 30 June 1917. By then the national movement that he had so carefully nurtured was a well-organized and highly efficient force. Dadabhai Naoroji was always unimpressed by British propaganda about how beneficial British rule had been for India. He opened the eyes of Indians to the reality of colonial rule. If the common man in India became convinced that India deserved to be free, it was because—decades before— a man had the courage to stand up in the heart of British democracy and demand the same rights for his country. Naoroji simply asked the British to show that they believed in the principles of equality by their actions in India. He admired British organizations but was convinced that with education and training Indians could be just as good, thus removing any sense of inferiority. He was one of the first Indians to say that India is for Indians and inspired the generations of nationalist leaders who followed him.
Jawaharlal Nehru Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny … At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes … when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. —Jawaharlal Nehru He was among the rich and light-hearted young men studying at the Trinity College in Cambridge—casual about attending classes, more interested in playing tennis, wearing Bond Street suits and going to see plays in London. Life was so smooth and easy for young Jawaharlal Nehru, and it could have remained that way for the rest of his life. Instead he chose to join an
unequal battle against the biggest imperialistic power in the world and found himself in suffocating jail cells, bitten by mosquitoes, in the company of rats and pigeons, often in solitary confinement. He could have remained the pampered princeling of the Nehru clan, but he chose the pot-holed paths of villages, the heat and dust of public demonstrations, and the blow of police lathis. And he never regretted it. Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14 November 1889 in Allahabad, the eldest child of Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani. Motilal was one of the most successful lawyers in the city and the family lived in great affluence at his mansion Anand Bhawan. It was also a very westernized lifestyle; young Jawaharlal was pampered with grand birthday parties and there is a photograph of him in a velvet suit and straw hat sitting on a tricycle, looking more English than Indian. There was a private swimming pool, a tennis court and a pony. Two governesses and private tutors were in constant attendance. The boy was spoilt, but as the only child in a household of adults, he was also rather lonely. Then in 1905 he was admitted to the English public school Harrow and from there went on to the Trinity College at Cambridge. Jawaharlal was intelligent and well read but not academically ambitious; he ended with a second-class Tripos and then joined the Inner Temple to enter the Bar. The plan was that as a barrister he would join his father’s law practice in Allahabad. He was dreamily drifting through life, letting his father take all the decisions for him. He was quite interested in the political events in India, reading the news avidly, but not seriously involved. As his biographer S. Gopal writes, ‘Jawaharlal had opinions but needed a cause; there stretched before him a future secure but with no purpose.’ Jawaharlal returned to India and was married in 1916 to Kamala Kaul in one of the great society weddings of the year. He had always been interested in politics and had been deeply impressed by Annie Besant. He was furious when she was interned at Ooty by the Madras government and with Motilal started a Home Rule League in Allahabad. As he immersed himself in the Indian political scene, he began to discover his own culture and history. Meanwhile, Motilal had started a newspaper The Independent
and Jawaharlal began to write in it. He attended his first Congress session in 1912 at Bankipore and was rather disappointed to find that it was more of a social gathering, with the delegates all in suits speaking in English, completely out of touch with the real India. His life took on real purpose after the tragedy at Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919. He was a member of the Congress Enquiry Committee led by C.R. Das that travelled through Amritsar and the countryside interviewing people. This was Nehru’s first close encounter with the real India and he was deeply angered by the helplessness of the people against official brutality. Even then, like most of the educated classes he had faith in the fairness of the British judicial system and expected that General Dyer would be tried for his crime. What shocked him much more was that Dyer was never formally punished and was given a hero’s welcome in England. Like many other leaders, he now realized that the days of requesting for favours were gone. The British would never hand them freedom; it would have to be won through sacrifice and struggle. Nehru, now nearly thirty, had finally found the cause he had been seeking. Nehru first met Mahatma Gandhi at the Lucknow Congress in 1916. He found in Gandhi the leader and mentor he would follow till Gandhi’s death. It was a fascinating relationship—between a religious, traditional, economically conservative Mahatma and a modern, agnostic, socialist Nehru. He would often rebel against, hold diametrically opposite views to and disagree with his mentor’s policies, but he never broke away and he was Gandhi’s chosen successor. Gandhi explained this complex relationship the best: ‘It will require much more than difference of opinion to estrange us … He says that he does not understand my language, and that he speaks a language foreign to me … But language is no bar to a union of hearts. And I know this—that when I am gone he will speak my language.’ Nehru now joined the call for Non-cooperation by Gandhi with great enthusiasm and soon became the leader of the campaign in the United Provinces. At this time the peasants of Pratabgarh wanted someone to lead their agitation against the oppression of landlords—of high rents, forced evictions and low pay for labour. They came looking for Gandhi who had
become the messiah of the peasants after Champaran, and found Nehru instead. His travels into the rural heartlands shocked him—he saw the tragic poverty and the indifference of the officials who supported the zamindars and were only interested in collecting taxes. He wrote later, ‘A new picture of India seemed to rise before me, naked, starving, crushed and utterly miserable.’ At that time the Non-cooperation campaign was in full flow and he astutely realized that harnessing peasant grievances to the movement would make it much more effective and widespread. Marching through villages with a towel on his head against the heat, he spoke at kisan sabhas and intervened vigorously in favour of peasants when they were arrested. As a matter of fact, he was ‘acutely embarrassed’ that he was not arrested himself! Gandhi visited the United Provinces in November and the agitation spread throughout the district. The police was out in force and the deputy commissioner tried to make Nehru leave. All the while he was sending reports to The Independent and soon became a national figure. Nehru was now wholeheartedly a part of the freedom movement. A charismatic speaker, he now became one of the Congress party’s key orators and organizers. Just like Gandhi had once wandered the country in the third-class compartment of trains, he now began to explore rural India. He travelled by train, car and horse-carriage, and walked for miles. Once when he missed a train, the stationmaster lent him a trolley to get to the next station, though the poor man lost his job because of this patriotic act. Father and son became ardent followers of Swadeshi. Motilal gave up his law practice and the whole Nehru clan began to wear khadi. Jawaharlal went around collecting foreign cloth to burn in huge bonfires and picketed shops selling foreign goods. He showed true leadership qualities, and his charm and empathy for common people made him immensely popular. He had great oratorical skills and an instinctive talent at building emotional bonds with people that made them trust him. Once when he was addressing a gathering of a thousand people, he was handed an order prohibiting a meeting in the district. Nehru, always, abiding by the law, promptly
marched for four miles to the next district, with the audience happily following behind him, and he held the meeting there. In December 1921 Motilal and Jawaharlal were arrested and sentenced to six months in jail. Released early, when Nehru came out in March 1922, Gandhi had called off the campaign after the episode at Chauri Chaura. Nehru was bitterly disappointed and outspoken in his criticism, but he continued with his public speaking and writings. In May he was arrested again; Anand Bhawan was searched. He refused to plead his case and was sentenced to eighteen months in Lucknow Jail. He spent most of the time reading. There was a lull in the political scene and in April 1923, when Nehru was appointed as the chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board, he got his first experience at governance. He was energetic and honest; everything from sanitation and water supply to education got his attention. He introduced spinning and weaving in schools, and in spite of the disapproval of the British officials, encouraged the wearing of khadi by students and teachers. He did his best to encourage the manufacture and sale of Indian goods by reducing taxes and even the commissioner had to admit that the municipality had functioned very efficiently under Nehru. In 1926 Kamala Nehru was diagnosed with tuberculosis and Nehru with his wife and daughter left for Switzerland. Kamala’s health would remain a source of constant worry through his years of public struggle and long jail sentences. Once her health improved, he took the opportunity to travel through Europe meeting like-minded leaders and intellectuals. In 1927 he spoke at the International Congress Against Colonial Oppression and was given much prominence as a representative of the party fighting the world’s biggest imperialist power. He was attracted to radical and Marxist thoughts and met the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Later he and Motilal visited the Soviet Union and he was impressed by its achievements and felt India had much in common with it. This was the time when he became much more radical in his views and his beliefs began to diverge from those of Gandhi, though Nehru never completely broke away from the Mahatma.
The arrival of the Simon Commission in 1927 once again galvanized the Congress into action. As a general secretary of the party, Nehru too objected to the fact that a commission appointed to decide on the future of India had no Indian member, but he objected more to the assumption that the British Parliament should decide India’s fate. This meant India would be a part of the British Empire forever when he was thinking of independence in the near future. He was one of the earliest leaders to demand independence instead of Dominion Status, and even moved a resolution at Madras in 1927 that no one, not even Gandhi, took seriously. The day the Simon Commission was to arrive at Lucknow, he led a large procession to the Lucknow railway station. The police charged the demonstrators with horses, sticks and spears. Nehru received lathi blows on his back until he was surrounded and shielded by students. The protestors were beaten and trampled but refused to retaliate or move back, and the police was forced to back off. The news of the attack on Nehru led to widespread anger across the country. In 1928 a reluctant Nehru was elected president of the Congress at the insistence of Gandhi who felt it was time for the young to take the lead. Nehru took office at the Congress session at Lahore in December 1929 and with his unerring sense of drama he rode to the venue on a white horse. In his presidential address he spoke passionately about the party’s commitment to Purna Swaraj—complete independence—and this time the party agreed with him. For Nehru the time for compromises and discussions were long gone and he called for a campaign of civil disobedience to be led by Gandhi. He unfurled the tricolour by the banks of the River Ravi and declared 26 January 1930 as Independence Day when people across the country would take an independence pledge. In 1950 the same day would become our Republic Day when the new Indian Constitution would come into force and India would become a secular, democratic republic. Initially Nehru did not quite understand Gandhi’s plan to make salt as an act of civil disobedience. He wrote later: ‘Salt suddenly became a mysterious word, a word of power … we were bewildered and could not quite fit in a national struggle with common salt.’ He began to appreciate
the masterly strategy as he marched along with him for a while. Later he wrote about the experience with great feeling, describing Gandhi as a pilgrim walking fearlessly towards his goal. Then he returned to Allahabad to start the campaign in the United Provinces, and to his delight, Kamala joined him. As they couldn’t manufacture any salt in the landlocked region, they sold contraband salt. The government, which considered him a radical and one of the most dangerous among the Congressmen, was looking for an excuse to stop him. He was arrested soon after for leading a no-rent campaign among farmers in Rae Bareli and sentenced to six months in Naini Jail. ‘Great day!’ he wrote exultantly in his pocket diary as he faced solitary confinement in barracks surrounded by fifteen-feet high walls. It was the walls that disturbed him the most as it cut off much of the sky and the stars that he loved watching at night. He spent his time jogging, spinning on the charkha and reading. There was no electricity, so a punkhawala was assigned to his cell and one day the old man told him that a mango tree outside his hut was full of fruit. Nehru, dreaming of delicious Allahabadi langras, asked him to bring some and the man smuggled in a bunch of wild and very sour mangoes that Nehru dutifully ate with an appreciative smile. The problem was that the man came with more mangoes the next day! Nehru was released in October 1930 and arrested again within ten days. What bothered him the most during these long stays in prison was that it kept him away from his family, especially his young daughter Indira. Their only communication was through letters and now he began to teach her about the history of the world by post. What is truly remarkable is that he was writing mainly from memory as he had few books he could refer to. Writing in an easy, lucid style, he ranged across continents, from the Indus Valley to ancient Egypt and Greece. Later these letters were published as Glimpses of World History and children read and enjoy the book even today. Meanwhile, even the Nehru women—his mother, wife and sisters—had joined the campaign and he was delighted to hear that Kamala had led a demonstration and had said that she was proud to be arrested. But he was very upset to hear that his mother had been badly hurt in a lathi charge. For
a while Motilal joined his son in jail, but already unwell, he soon fell ill and Jawaharlal spent his time taking care of him. They were released because of his illness, but Motilal died on 6 February 1931. His body lay in state in Swaraj Bhawan—once it had been Anand Bhawan, the palatial home that he had given away to the nation. Gandhi now left for the Second Round Table Conference in London. Back home Nehru led another farmer’s agitation in the United Provinces and was arrested again. The government was always looking to constrain him and over the years he would spend time in prisons from Naini and Dehradun to the Alipore Jail in Calcutta and Ahmednagar Fort. Going to the hot and dingy Alipore Jail, he wrote he was going for a ‘rest cure’ to his ‘other home’. During 1920–1945 he spent eleven years in prison and he used much of this time to write books. Between 1934 and 1935 he penned his Autobiography that became a surprise bestseller in Europe. During his longest imprisonment in Ahmednagar Fort from 1942 to 1945—his ninth incarceration—he wrote The Discovery of India, which remains one of the most loved books among Indians. It is a personal response to his country and its people, and often a paean to the beauties of the land. What is even more amazing is that there is no bitterness or anger in his books; instead there is a lyrical elegance in his style: ‘The moon, ever a companion to me in prison, has grown more friendly with closer acquaintance, a reminder of the loveliness of this world … ever changing, yet ever the same.’ In 1935 Kamala’s health deteriorated again and Nehru was allowed to take her for treatment to Europe. However, this time she did not recover and died in February 1936. On his way back to India Nehru had to pass through Rome and was invited by Mussolini, the Italian dictator, for a meeting but he refused. He was deeply disturbed by the growth of Nazism and Fascism in Europe and felt strongly that India should oppose Hitler. One of the few internationalist in the Congress, he even visited the Spanish republicans who were fighting General Franco in Spain. He was in China when the Second World War began in Europe and hurried back to India.
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