Louis
Fischer (1896-1970) was born in Philadelphia. He served as a volunteer in the
British Army between 1918 and 1920. Fischer made a career as a journalist and
wrote for The New York Times, The Saturday Review and for European and Asian
publications. He was also a member of the faculty at Princeton University. The
following is an excerpt from his book-The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. The book has
been reviewed as one of the best books ever written on Gandhi by Times
Educational Supplement.
*************
When I first visited
Gandhi in 1942 at his ashram in Sevagram, in central India, he said, “I will
tell you how it happened that I decided to urge the departure of the British.
It was in 1917.”
He had gone to the
December 1916 annual convention of the Indian National Congress party in
Lucknow. There were 2,301 delegates and many visitors. During the proceedings,
Gandhi recounted, “a peasant came up to me looking like any other peasant in
India, poor and emaciated, and said, ‘I am Rajkumar Shukla. I am from Champaran,
and I want you to come to my district’!’’ Gandhi had never heard of the place.
It was in the foothills of the towering Himalayas, near the kingdom of Nepal.
Under an ancient
arrangement, the Champaran peasants were sharecroppers. Rajkumar Shukla was one
of them. He was illiterate but resolute. He had come to the
Congress session to
complain about the injustice of the landlord system in Bihar, and somebody had
probably said, “Speak to Gandhi.”
Gandhi told Shukla he
had an appointment in Cawnpore and was also committed to go to other parts of
India. Shukla accompanied him everywhere. Then Gandhi returned to his ashram
near Ahmedabad. Shukla followed him to the ashram. For weeks he never left
Gandhi’s side.
“Fix a date,” he
begged.
Impressed by the
sharecropper’s tenacity and story Gandhi said, ‘‘I have to be in Calcutta on
such-and-such a date. Come and meet me and take me from there.”
Months passed. Shukla
was sitting on his haunches at the appointed spot in Calcutta when Gandhi
arrived; he waited till Gandhi was free. Then the two of them boarded a train
for the city of Patna in Bihar. There Shukla led him to the house of a lawyer
named Rajendra Prasad who later became President of the Congress party and of
India. Rajendra Prasad was out of town, but the servants knew Shukla as a poor
yeoman who pestered their master to help the indigo sharecroppers. So they let
him stay on the grounds with his companion, Gandhi, whom they took to be
another peasant. But Gandhi was not permitted to draw water from the well lest
some drops from his bucket pollute the entire source; how did they know that he
was not an untouchable? Gandhi decided to go first to Muzzafarpur, which was en
route to Champaran, to obtain more complete information about conditions than
Shukla was capable of imparting. He accordingly sent a telegram to Professor
J.B. Kripalani, of the Arts College in Muzzafarpur, whom he had seen at
Tagore’s Shantiniketan school. The train arrived at midnight, 15 April 1917.
Kripalani was waiting at the station with a large body of students. Gandhi
stayed there for two days in the home of Professor Malkani, a teacher in a
government school. ‘‘It was an extraordinary thing ‘in those days,’’ Gandhi
commented, “for a government professor to harbour a man like me”. In smaller
localities, the Indians were afraid to show sympathy for advocates of
home-rule.
The news of Gandhi’s
advent and of the nature of his mission spread quickly through Muzzafarpur and
to Champaran. Sharecroppers from Champaran began arriving on foot and by
conveyance to see their champion. Muzzafarpur lawyers called on Gandhi to brief
him; they frequently represented peasant groups in court; they told him about
their cases and reported the size of their fee.
Gandhi chided the
lawyers for collecting big fee from the sharecroppers. He said, ‘‘I have come
to the conclusion that we should stop going to law courts. Taking such cases to
the courts does little good. Where the peasants are so crushed and
fear-stricken, law courts are useless. The real relief for them is to be free
from fear.’’
Most of the arable
land in the Champaran district was divided into large estates owned by
Englishmen and worked by Indian tenants. The chief commercial crop was indigo.
The landlords compelled all tenants to plant three twentieths or 15 per cent of
their holdings with indigo and surrender the entire indigo harvest as rent.
This was done by long-term contract.
Presently, the
landlords learned that Germany had developed synthetic indigo. They, thereupon,
obtained agreements from the sharecroppers to pay them compensation for being
released from the 15 per cent arrangement.
The sharecropping
arrangement was irksome to the peasants, and many signed willingly. Those who
resisted, engaged lawyers; the landlords hired thugs. Meanwhile, the
information about synthetic indigo reached the illiterate peasants who had
signed, and they wanted their money back.
At this point Gandhi
arrived in Champaran.
He began by trying to
get the facts. First he visited the secretary of the British landlord’s
association. The secretary told him that they could give no information to an
outsider. Gandhi answered that he was no outsider.
Next, Gandhi called
on the British official commissioner of the Tirhut division in which the
Champaran district lay. ‘‘The commissioner,’’ Gandhi reports, ‘‘proceeded to
bully me and advised me forthwith to leave Tirhut.’’
Gandhi did not leave.
Instead he proceeded to Motihari, the capital of Champaran. Several lawyers
accompanied him. At the railway station, a vast multitude greeted Gandhi. He
went to a house and, using it as headquarters, continued his investigations. A
report came in that a peasant had been maltreated in a nearby village. Gandhi
decided to go and see; the next morning he started out on the back of an
elephant. He had not proceeded far when the police superintendent’s messenger
overtook him and ordered him to return to town in his carriage. Gandhi
complied. The messenger drove Gandhi home where he served him with an official
notice to quit Champaran immediately. Gandhi signed a receipt for the notice
and wrote on it that he would disobey the order.
In consequence,
Gandhi received a summons to appear in court the next day.
All night Gandhi
remained awake. He telegraphed Rajendra Prasad to come from Bihar with
influential friends. He sent instructions to the ashram. He wired a full report
to the Viceroy.
Morning found the
town of Motihari black with peasants. They did not know Gandhi’s record in
South Africa. They had merely heard that a Mahatma who wanted to help them was
in trouble with the authorities. Their spontaneous demonstration, in thousands,
around the courthouse was the beginning of their liberation from fear of the
British.
The officials felt
powerless without Gandhi’s cooperation. He helped them regulate the crowd. He
was polite and friendly. He was giving them concrete proof that their might,
hitherto dreaded and unquestioned, could be challenged by Indians.
The government was
baffled. The prosecutor requested the judge to postpone the trial. Apparently,
the authorities wished to consult their superiors.
Gandhi protested
against the delay. He read a statement pleading guilty. He was involved, he
told the court, in a “conflict of duties”— on the one hand, not to set a bad
example as a lawbreaker; on the other hand, to render the “humanitarian and
national service” for which he had come. He disregarded the order to leave,
“not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher
law of our being, the voice of conscience”. He asked the penalty due.
The magistrate
announced that he would pronounce sentence after a two-hour recess and asked
Gandhi to furnish bail for those 120 minutes. Gandhi refused. The judge
released him without bail.
When the court
reconvened, the judge said he would not deliver the judgment for several days.
Meanwhile he allowed Gandhi to remain at liberty.
Rajendra Prasad, Brij
Kishor Babu, Maulana Mazharul Huq and several other prominent lawyers had
arrived from Bihar. They conferred with Gandhi. What would they do if he was
sentenced to prison, Gandhi asked. Why, the senior lawyer replied, they had
come to advise and help him; if he went to jail there would be nobody to advise
and they would go home.
What about the
injustice to the sharecroppers, Gandhi demanded. The lawyers withdrew to
consult. Rajendra Prasad has recorded the upshot of their consultations — “They
thought, amongst themselves, that Gandhi was totally a stranger, and yet he was
prepared to go to prison for the sake of the peasants; if they, on the other
hand, being not only residents of the adjoining districts but also those who
claimed to have served these peasants, should go home, it would be shameful
desertion.”
They accordingly went
back to Gandhi and told him they were ready to follow him into jail. ‘‘The
battle of Champaran is won,’’ he exclaimed. Then he took a piece of paper and
divided the group into pairs and put down the order in which each pair was to
court arrest.
Several days later,
Gandhi received a written communication from the magistrate informing him that
the Lieutenant-Governor of the province had ordered the case to be dropped.
Civil disobedience had triumphed, the first time in modern India.
Gandhi and the
lawyers now proceeded to conduct a far-flung inquiry into the grievances of the
farmers. Depositions by about ten thousand peasants were written down, and
notes made on other evidence. Documents were collected. The whole area throbbed
with the activity of the investigators and the vehement protests of the
landlords.
In June, Gandhi was
summoned to Sir Edward Gait, the Lieutenant-Governor. Before he went he met
leading associates and again laid detailed plans for civil disobedience if he
should not return.
Gandhi had four
protracted interviews with the Lieutenant-Governor who, as a result, appointed
an official commission of inquiry into the indigo sharecroppers’ situation. The
commission consisted of landlords, government officials, and Gandhi as the sole
representative of the peasants.
Gandhi remained in
Champaran for an initial uninterrupted period of seven months and then again
for several shorter visits. The visit, undertaken casually on the entreaty of
an unlettered peasant in the expectation that it would last a few days,
occupied almost a year of Gandhi’s life.
The official inquiry
assembled a crushing mountain of evidence against the big planters, and when
they saw this they agreed, in principle, to make refunds to the peasants. “But
how much must we pay?” they asked Gandhi.
They thought he would
demand repayment in full of the money which they had illegally and deceitfully
extorted from the sharecroppers. He asked only 50 per cent. “There he seemed
adamant,” writes Reverend J. Z. Hodge, a British missionary in Champaran who
observed the entire episode at close range. “Thinking probably that he would
not give way, the representative of the planters offered to refund to the
extent of 25 per cent, and to his amazement Mr. Gandhi took him at his word,
thus breaking the deadlock.”
This settlement was
adopted unanimously by the commission. Gandhi explained that the amount of the
refund was less important than the fact that the landlords had been obliged to
surrender part of the money and, with it, part of their prestige. Therefore, as
far as the peasants were concerned, the planters had behaved as lords above the
law. Now the peasant saw that he had rights and defenders. He learned courage.
Events justified
Gandhi’s position. Within a few years the British planters abandoned their estates,
which reverted to the peasants. Indigo sharecropping disappeared.
Gandhi never
contented himself with large political or economic solutions. He saw the
cultural and social backwardness in the Champaran villages and wanted to do
something about it immediately. He appealed for teachers. Mahadev Desai and
Narhari Parikh, two young men who had just joined Gandhi as disciples, and
their wives, volunteered for the work. Several more came from Bombay, Poona and
other distant parts of the land. Devadas, Gandhi’s youngest son, arrived from
the ashram and so did Mrs. Gandhi. Primary schools were opened in six villages.
Kasturbai taught the ashram rules on personal cleanliness and community
sanitation.
Health conditions
were miserable. Gandhi got a doctor to volunteer his services for six months.
Three medicines were available — castor oil, quinine and sulphur ointment.
Anybody who showed a coated tongue was given a dose of castor oil; anybody with
malaria fever received quinine plus castor oil; anybody with skin eruptions
received ointment plus castor oil.
Gandhi noticed the
filthy state of women’s clothes. He asked Kasturbai to talk to them about it.
One woman took Kasturbai into her hut and said, ‘‘Look, there is no box or
cupboard here for clothes. The sari I am wearing is the only one I have.”
During his long stay
in Champaran, Gandhi kept a long distance watch on the ashram. He sent regular
instructions by mail and asked for financial accounts. Once he wrote to the
residents that it was time to fill in the old latrine trenches and dig new ones
otherwise the old ones would begin to smell bad.
The Champaran episode
was a turning-point in Gandhi’s life. ‘‘What I did,” he explained, “was a very
ordinary thing. I declared that the British could not order me about in my own
country.”
But Champaran did not
begin as an act of defiance. It grew out of an attempt to alleviate the
distress of large numbers of poor peasants. This was the typical Gandhi pattern
— his politics were intertwined with the practical, day-to-day problems of the
millions. His was not a loyalty to abstractions; it was a loyalty to living,
human beings.
In everything Gandhi
did, moreover, he tried to mould a new free Indian who could stand on his own
feet and thus make India free.
Early in the
Champaran action, Charles Freer Andrews, the English pacifist who had become a
devoted follower of the Mahatma, came to bid Gandhi farewell before going on a
tour of duty to the Fiji Islands. Gandhi’s lawyer friends thought it would be a
good idea for Andrews to stay in Champaran and help them. Andrews was willing
if Gandhi agreed. But Gandhi was vehemently opposed. He said, ‘‘You think that
in this unequal fight it would be helpful if we have an Englishman on our side.
This shows the weakness of your heart. The cause is just and you must rely upon
yourselves to win the battle. You should not seek a prop in Mr. Andrews because
he happens to be an Englishman’’.
‘‘He had read our
minds correctly,’’ Rajendra Prasad comments, “and we had no reply… Gandhi in
this way taught us a lesson in self-reliance’’.
Self-reliance, Indian
independence and help to sharecroppers were all bound together.
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