Journey
The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India
Gandhi's method worked out in South Africa and applied in India for thirty years: a specific grievance, a local base, a refusal that broke a law without hitting anybody, and a willingness to call the whole thing off. Between Champaran in 1917 and Quit India in 1942 it turned a lawyers' congress into a mass organisation.
Stops (15)
- Mohandās Karamchand Gandhi · Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
A Gujarati barrister who spent twenty-one years in South Africa working out a method, came back in 1915 at fifty-five, spent a year travelling India third class before saying anything, and then applied it — Champaran, Kheda, Ahmedabad, Non-Cooperation, salt, Quit India.
- Porbandar · Porbandar — the beginning
A small Kathiawar port where Gandhi was born in 1869 into a family of state officials, in a merchant town whose Jain and Vaishnava culture supplied the vocabulary of vow, fasting and non-injury he later put to political use. He left for London at eighteen and for South Africa at twenty-four.
- Champaran indigo landscape · Champaran, 1917 — the first Indian satyagraha
North Bihar tenants were compelled by their European landlords to plant indigo on a fixed share of their land under the tinkathia system. Gandhi came at a cultivator's insistence, refused an order to leave, collected eight thousand depositions, and got a commission and then an act that ended the system.
- Jallianwala Bagh · Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 — the break
Dyer fired fifty rifles for ten minutes into a walled garden with one narrow exit and killed several hundred people. A public subscription in Britain raised him £26,000. Tagore returned his knighthood and Gandhi, who had supported recruitment for the war three years earlier, concluded that cooperation with the Raj was finished.
- Chauri Chaura · Chauri Chaura, 1922 — the withdrawal
A crowd of Non-Cooperation volunteers, fired on by police, turned and burned the station with twenty-two constables inside. Gandhi called off the entire movement within days, at its height and against nearly every other leader's judgement, and went to prison a month later for sedition. The Congress did not forgive it quickly.
- Vaikom · Vaikom, 1924–25 — the roads
A campaign for the right of avarna castes to use the roads around the Vaikom temple, run for twenty months by Kerala volunteers with Periyar and Gandhi both involved and disagreeing about method and aim. The roads opened. It is the first satyagraha directed at Indian social exclusion rather than at the state.
- Bardoli · Bardoli, 1928 — the tax refusal
Vallabhbhai Patel held eighty-seven thousand Surat cultivators together through land confiscations and attachments until a thirty per cent revenue rise was cut to under seven. The women of the taluka gave him the title Sardar. It was the most complete tactical victory the Congress won between the wars.
- Sabarmati Ashram · Sabarmati, 1917–1930 — the base
Gandhi's ashram on the Ahmedabad riverbank for thirteen years, run on hand-spinning, latrine cleaning and a vow of poverty, and the point from which he set out for Dandi in March 1930 saying he would not return until India was free. He never did return to live there.
- Dandi · Dandi, April 1930 — the salt
Twenty-four days and three hundred and eighty kilometres on foot with seventy-eight companions, ending with a handful of salt-crusted mud at the shore. The law it broke was a revenue monopoly that taxed something anybody could gather; that is exactly why it worked, and some sixty thousand people were arrested in the months that followed.
- Sarojini Naidu · Sarojini Naidu and Dharasana
After Gandhi's arrest she led the raid on the Dharasana salt works in May 1930, where volunteers walked into police lathis in ranks and were beaten down without raising a hand. Webb Miller's wire report of it ran in over a thousand newspapers and damaged British standing abroad more than anything else in the campaign.
- Vallabhbhai Patel · Vallabhbhai Patel — the organiser
The man who ran the machine: Kheda, Bardoli, the Congress's finances and its candidate lists, and after 1947 the absorption of some five hundred and fifty princely states in about two years. He and Nehru disagreed on nearly everything and governed together for three years anyway.
- Gowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan · Gowalia Tank, August 1942 — Quit India
The All India Congress Committee passed the Quit India resolution here on 8 August and Gandhi told the country to do or die. The entire leadership was arrested before dawn the next morning, which is why what followed was the largest and least led uprising since 1857.
- Matangini Hazra · Matangini Hazra — Tamluk, September 1942
A widowed illiterate peasant woman of seventy-three who led six thousand people to take the Tamluk police station and was shot three times while carrying the flag forward. The Tamluk National Government declared weeks later ran the subdivision for nearly two years — one of several parallel administrations Quit India threw up.
- Aga Khan Palace, Pune · Aga Khan Palace, Pune — the detention
Gandhi, Kasturba and Mahadev Desai were held here from August 1942. Desai died within a week and Kasturba in February 1944, in detention, after forty-two years of marriage. Gandhi was released that May on medical grounds and never held office of any kind.
- Sevagram / Wardha · Sevagram — the constructive programme
The Wardha ashram from 1936, and the base for what Gandhi thought was the real work: village industry, basic education in the mother tongue through a craft, sanitation, and the removal of untouchability. He held that the political campaigns without this were theatre, and most of the Congress disagreed with him about it.