one thing was clear; it would be resisted without violence.
The new principle of political and social struggle born in the Empire Theatre soon had a name, Satyagraha, Truth Force. Gandhi organized a boycott of the registration procedures and peaceful picketing of the registration centres. His actions earned him the first of his life’s numerous jail sentences.
While in jail, Gandhi encountered the second of the secular works which would deeply influence his thought, Henry Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience.* Protesting against a US government that condoned slavery and was fighting an unjust war in Mexico, Thoreau asserted the individual’s right to ignore unjust laws and refuse his allegiance to a government whose tyranny had become unbearable. To be right, he said, was more honourable than to be law-abiding.
Thoreau’s essay was a catalyst to thoughts already stirring in Gandhi. Released from jail, he decided to apply them in protest against a decision of the Transvaal to close its borders to Indians. On 6 November 1913, 2037 men, 127 women, and 57 children, Gandhi at their head, staged a non-violent march on the Transvaal’s frontiers. Their certain destiny was jail, their only sure reward a frightful beating.
Watching that pathetic, bedraggled troop walking confidently along behind him, Gandhi experienced another illuminating revelation. Those wretches had nothing to look forward to but pain. Armed white vigilantes waited at the border, perhaps to kill them. Yet fired by faith in him and the cause to which he’d called them, they marched in his footsteps, ready, in Gandhi’s words, to ‘melt their enemies’ hearts by self-suffering’.
Gandhi suddenly sensed in their quiet resolution what mass, non-violent action might become. There on the borders of the Transvaal he realized the enormous possibilities inherent in the movement he’d provoked. The few hundreds behind him that November day could become hundreds of thousands, a tide rendered irresistible by an unshakeable faith in the nonviolent ideal.
Persecution, flogging, jailing, economic sanctions followed their action, but they could not break the movement. His African crusade ended in almost total victory in 1914. He could go home at last.
The Gandhi who left South Africa in July 1914 was a totally different person from the timid young lawyer who’d landed in Durban. He had discovered on its inhospitable soil his three teachers, Ruskin, Tolstoy and Thoreau. From his experience he had evolved the two doctrines, non-violence and civil disobedience, with which, over the next thirty years, he would humble the most powerful empire in the world.
An enormous crowd gave Gandhi a hero’s welcome when his diminutive figure passed under the spans of Bombay’s Gateway of India on 9 January 1915. The spare suitcase of the leader passing under that imperial archway contained one significant item. It was a thick bundle of paper covered with Gandhi’s handwritten prose. Its title Hind Swaraj – ‘Indian Home Rule’, made one thing clear. Africa, for Gandhi, had been only a training ground for the real battle of his life.
Gandhi settled near the industrial city of Ahmedabad on the banks of the Sabarmati River where he founded an ashram, a communal farm similar to those he’d founded in South Africa. As always, Gandhi’s first concern was for the poor. He organized the indigo farmers of Bihar against the oppressive exactions of their British landlords, the peasants of the drought-stricken province of Bombay against their taxes, the workers in Ahmedabad’s textile mills against the employers whose contributions sustained his ashram. For the first time, an Indian leader was addressing himself to the miseries of India’s masses. Soon Rabindranath Tagore, India’s Nobel Prizewinner, conferred on Gandhi the appellation he would carry for the rest of his life, ‘Mahatma’. ‘The Great Soul in Beggar’s Garb’, he called him.
Like most Indians, Gandhi was loyal to Britain in World War I, convinced Britain in return would give a sympathetic hearing to India’s nationalist aspirations. Gandhi was wrong. Britain instead passed the Rowlatt Act in 1919, to repress agitation for Indian freedom. For weeks Gandhi meditated, seeking a tactic with which to respond to Britain’s rejection of India’s hopes. The idea for a reply came to him in a dream. It was brilliantly, stunningly simple. India would protest, he decreed, with silence, a special eerie silence. He would do something no one had ever dreamed of doing before; he would immobilize all India in the quiet chill of a day of mourning, a hartal.
Like so many of Gandhi’s political ideas, the plan reflected his instinctive genius for tactics that could be enunciated in few words, understood by the simplest minds, put into practice with the most ordinary gestures. To follow him, his supporters did not have to break the law or brave police clubs. They had only to do nothing. By closing their shops, leaving their classrooms, going to their temples to pray or just staying at home, Indians could demonstrate their solidarity with his protest call. He chose 7 April 1919 as the day of his hartal. It was his first overt act against the Government of India. Let India stand still, he urged, and let India’s oppressors listen to the unspoken message of her silent masses.
Unfortunately, those masses were not everywhere silent. Riots erupted. The most serious were in Amritsar in the Punjab. To protest against the restrictions clamped on their city as a result, thousands of Indians gathered on 13 April, for a peaceful but illegal meeting in a stone- and debris-littered compound called Jallianwalla Bagh.
There was only one entrance to the compound down a narrow alley between two buildings. Through it, just after the meeting had begun, marched Amritsar’s Martial Law Commander, Brigadier R. E. Dyer, at the head of fifty soldiers. He stationed his men on either side of the entry and, without warning, opened fire with machine-guns on the defenceless Indians. For ten full minutes, while the trapped Indians screamed for mercy, the soldiers fired. They fired 1650 rounds. Their bullets killed or wounded 1516 people. Convinced he’d ‘done a jolly good thing’, Dyer marched his men back out of the Bagh.
His ‘jolly good thing’ was a turning point in the history of Anglo-Indian relations, more decisive even than the Indian Mutiny 63 years before.* For Gandhi it was the final breach of faith by the empire for which he had compromised his pacifist principles. He turned all his efforts to taking control of the organization which had become synonymous with India’s nationalist aspirations.
The idea that the Congress Party might one day become the focal point of mass agitation against British rule in India would surely have horrified the dignified English civil servant who had founded the party in 1885. Acting with the blessings of the Viceroy, Octavian Hume had sought to create an organization which would canalize the protests of India’s slowly growing educated classes into a moderate, responsible body prepared to engage in gentlemanly dialogue with India’s English rulers.
That was exactly what Congress was when Gandhi arrived on the political scene. Determined to convert it into a mass movement attuned to his non-violent creed, Gandhi presented the party with a plan of action in Calcutta in 1920. It was adopted by an overwhelming majority. From that moment until his death, whether he held rank in the party or not, Gandhi was Congress’s conscience and its guide, the unquestioned leader of the independence struggle.
Like his earlier call for a national hartal, Gandhi’s new tactic was electrifyingly simple, a one word programme for political revolution: non-co-operation. Indians, he decreed, would boycott whatever was British: students would boycott British schools; lawyers, British courts; employees, British jobs; soldiers, British honours. Gandhi himself gave the lead by returning to the Viceroy the two medals he’d earned with his ambulance brigade in the Boer War.
Above all, his aim was to weaken the edifice of British power in India by attacking the economic pillar upon which it reposed. Britain purchased raw Indian cotton for derisory prices, shipped it to the mills of Lancashire to be woven into textiles, then shipped the finished products back to India to be sold at a substantial profit in a market which virtually excluded non-British textiles. It was the classic cycle of imperialist exploitation, and the arm with which Gandhi proposed to fight it was the very antithesis of the great mills of the Industrial Revolution that had sired that exploitation. It was a primitive wooden spinning-wheel.
For