India's Struggle for Swarâj (1919-1921).
1. The Roll of Honour.
The present alien government has been declared by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi1) of Gujarat in 1921 to be the rule of Satan. In his weekly, Navajivan (New Life), his daily prayer is thus worded: "May I be thrown into prison or shot dead or India win her freedom!"
Gandhi's attitude is clearly indicated in the following lines: "We are on a footing of war with the British government. We challenge this government because its methods are devilish. We are out to subvert it."
Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali, two brothers, are in prison because they had incited the Indian soldiers against serving in the British Army. The Alis are Mohammedans, and, as stout champions of Pan-Islam are well known in Greek, Italian and French politics.
Chitta Ranjan Das of Calcutta on the eve of his arrest and imprisonment has declared: "The war has just commenced." At the present instance he won fame as the chief organizer of the National Volunteer Corps in Bengal. As barrister at the High Court Das used to earn £ 40,000 a year. But in order to pioneer the boycott of British law-courts he had renounced his profession and taken to whole-time patriotic service.
On the 17th of November 1921 in every city of India, great and small, hartal was practised. That is, there was a complete strike of all sorts, — implying a thorough abstention from daily activity on the part of business men, workers, store-keepers and students. This universal death-sentence, so to speak, was passed by the people on themselves as a protest against the outrageous insult perpetrated on their homeland because on this day the Prince of Wales landed at Bombay.
The boycott of the British government's measures in reception of the Prince is but an aspect of the all-round "non-cooperation" which the Indian people have adopted in their relations with foreign rule. The boycott extends to disobeying in a civil manner every law and regulation which is inconsistent with India's freedom. And the boycotters are ready to suffer for their acts of commission or omission.
In 1921 during five months there were 266 prosecutions in the United Provinces alone and 51 in Madras. In one district in Bihar, viz. in Muzaffarpur, over 100 cases of martyrdom are reported from the nationalist side. Every province (even Assam), each one of the 2153 cities, nay, every important village has its own story of heroic resistance against the foreign coercion and of the will to freedom. In this history of torture on the one hand and self-sacrifice on the other the Mohammedans have come out as brilliantly as the Hindus, the women as honourably as the men.
The year 1921 has ended with prosecutions and imprisonments whose name is legion. In Calcutta the godowns and warehouses have been improvised by the government into prison-houses; and young men of Bengal while inviting incarceration and arrest have found it prudent to carry their own blankets along lest the prison-authorities should not be in a position to furnish the myriads of political prisoners each with a cover.
When men like Lajpat Rai, Motilal Nehru and Bhagavan Das are in prison, when the mother of the Ali Brothers is setting an example to all mothers, when Basanti Devi and Suniti Devi, the wife and sister of C. R. Das are under arrest, the masses can no longer remain blind to the seriousness of the situation. The "leaders" mean what they say! The call for self-sacrifice from such men and women will from henceforth have a special significance to the unlettered peasants and workers. With 1922 thus begins a new chapter in the psychology of relations between the masses and the classes in India.
2. All-round Boycott.
One form of the industrial boycott of England consists in the burning of English goods which is ceremoniously performed at all meetings of public importance. The import of English cotton-goods came down to 25% in 1921 and in the course of a few months over 200,000 new handlooms have been introduced among the people in the villages.
The weavers of Bihar have met in conference to discuss the methods of economic warfare. In a meeting in 1921 about 20,000 persons were present. The same year notwithstanding the immense opposition of the proprietors, backed as they were by the Army and the Police, the congress of workingmen held its meeting at Jharia, a centre of coal-mining. The different workers' organizations were represented by 400 members and the number of visitors came up to 20,000. The working men discussed not only the purely economic questions such as those bearing on their wages, hours of labour, conditions of work and so forth, but also gave their united support to the political movements existing within the country in favour of Swarâj.
The boycott of the universities and schools controlled by the government is no less important an item in the Swarâj struggle. In Bengal alone 50,000 students have severed their connections with these institutions, nick-named golam-khânâs (slave-manufacturing workshops). Many of these young men are employed in patriotic work of one sort or another, for example, in the teaching of cultivators in the villages and working men in the cities.
Not only in Bengal but also in Madras, Orissa, Bihar, Punjab, Bombay and in other provinces national councils of education have been established which are founding vidyâ-pithas (seats of learning) under the people's control in order to teach all that is necessary for modern life in a free state. At the Indian National Congress held in Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat, Gandhi was in a position to welcome the delegates with the statement that he could count 31,000 scholars in the "national schools" of his own home-province.
3. National Organization.
In order to carry on this comprehensive struggle for freedom both in the negative boycott spirit as well as in a constructive manner a national fund has been collected, the present value of which is Rs 11,000,000 (£ 1 = Rs 15).
The beginnings of a Swarâj Treasury, named after the statesman Bal Gangadhar Tilak, have thus been laid. These taxes were realized not only from the intellectual politically-minded middle classes, but also from the merchants and bankers as well as from the proletariat and uneducated masses. India is presenting a united front against the common enemy.
About a generation ago the Indian National Congress started with a membership of less than 500 persons. To-day the number of registered members is 10,000,000. Corresponding to the growth of this central popular assembly there has been an unprecedented development in the provincial conferences as well.
The Anti-British movement in this its present form declared itself on April 6, 1919, the day, on which Rowlatt Act became law. The Act was designed to crush Indian independence in every phase of life and thought. The only reply to this arbitrary and tyrannical legislation was offered by the people through their unarmed riots at Ahmedabad, Bombay, Viramgam, Delhi and Calcutta. At Amritsar more than 1,000 men, women and children were killed by the British army.
The present Indian rebellion is born of the desire for revenge on that atrocious "massacre of innocents." The movement has gained great strength also on account of the Treaty of Sèvres which through British intrigue led to the partition of Turkey and embittered the feelings of Indian Moslems against Great Britain.
4. Ideas of 1905.
All the same the revolution in its present form is not the sudden outburst of the last three years. It is but a natural development of the militaristic uprisings during the War period (1914-1918), in which the nationalists of Young India succeeded to a certain extent in creating the interest of the German General Staff and Foreign Office. All those efforts were rewarded, however, solely with several hundred executions and life-long imprisonments and several thousand internments in Bengal, Punjab and elsewhere. The impact of this activity was felt on public life in Japan and the United States where under pressure of the British Embassy the governments were compelled to bring forward cases against the revolutionists of India allied as they were with the German Empire.
Altogether, however, in the Swaraj rebellion of 1921 one should have to notice the logical and necessary fruition of the ideas of 1905 which have been cumulatively growing in intensity and extensity during seventeen years. For on August 7 of that year Young India had proclaimed not only the boycott of British goods and schools but also the establishment of Swaraj institutions in every walk of life, administrative, legal, educational and what not, as well as the founding of swadeshi i.e. indigenous industries.
That all-inclusive Swadeshi movement brought along with it the system of physical training among young men organized in clubs, known generally as anusilan-samiti. These associations are similar in technique and objective to the Turn-vereine which were founded in Germany under the patronage of Stein and Hardenberg, after the disasters at Jena and Auerstadt (1806). In the natural course of events the bomb also made its appearance as a method in Indian politics (1907).
The ideas of 1905 were however mostly confined within the circle of intellectuals and specially among young men who contributed the martyrs of the period. In 1921 the triumph of Youth is complete,—for the elderly people, the sage and serious men of seventeen years ago have become converts to the enthusiasm and idealism of the young. To-day -again the ideas are shared as much by the mercantile communities and employers of labour as by the peasants and members of trade unions. Besides, during 1905-10 the Swarâj activity inspired the Bengalis, Marathas and Punjabis more intensely than it did the other peoples of India. But the movement has acquired such a powerful momentum that at the present moment the energism of resistance against the hated foreigner pervades the millions in every race, rank, profession and creed.
5. Social Service and Solidarity.
On the one side, the swaraj (self-rule) movement is anti-alien, i.e. anti-British. But on the other side, this ideal of liberty, freedom or self-direction has an "internal use", i.e. a home aspect, as well. The manifold tendencies towards the social equalization of classes and the inner democratic reorganization of the people bespeak such currents in internal swaraj.
Democracy had become manifest in the very first fruits of the ideas of 1905, and in the positive work which they induced. The intellectual classes could not for long remain content with their enterprise among their own peers in cities. The message of Young India—the new cult of freedom they began to carry on the one hand to the villages among cultivators or railway workers and miners and on the other hand to the factory labourers and lower grade artisans of the towns. Thus originated the scholar-organizer-educationist, the travelling teacher or educational missionary movement.
The curriculum of such educational missionaries was simple and rudimentary. Sanitary rules and laws of health, cooperative credit and consumption, methods of agricultural improvement, and a general lift in the economic and social standard,—this is all that the peripatetic pedagogues sought to propagate among their flock: Patriotic efforts sometimes led to the establishment of permanent schools where the children of the poor could be taught for about 2 hours a night free of all costs. Under the auspices of the Ramkrishna-Vivekananda Mission several hospitals have also been founded in different parts of India,—in which medical men who have renounced the profession for personal ends devote themselves entirely to the relief of the destitute, those images of "God in poverty" (Daridra Nârâyana).
Institutions like the Servants of India Society have often sought to entertain the factory workers and mill hands by offering them chances for social intercourse through excursions to the sea-side or other healthy localities. The Arya Samaj of the Punjab, the Brahmo Samaj of Bengal, and the Social Service League of Bombay have all along tried to improve the social status of the "depressed" classes, the "pariahs". In the Social Conference of Madras (1921) C. Rajagopalachariar, although a high caste man, has gone so far in his advocacy of their claims that he has suggested to them the advisability of adopting "passive resistance" against the higher classes, should these latter continue still to be obsessed by their vested interests.
Such are the lines of social service which have served to bring about brotherhood and solidarity between the different orders of the people. And of course the swaraj animus of to-day has its moral backbone greatly strengthened by this communal and fraternizing, although non-political activities of the "upper ten thousands" among the masses.
6. Proletarianism and Class-Struggle.
But all these methods are likely to be described as but the traditional tactics of "bourgeois" democracy. For it is only by such sops to the economically exploited proletariat and socially downtrodden pariah that the masses can be "rallied" to the intellectuals in their nationalistic warfare against the alien Empire.
It is therefore necessary to point out that the homogeneity of interests and the "united front" which have been erected by the patriots of Young India must not be interpreted too liberally. The economic class-struggle is already on among the people although in its initial stages.
By participating in India's combined struggle for self-direction, self-legislation and self-taxation aimed against British administration, industry and commerce the peasants, working men and pariahs are getting used to the fact and ideal of their own rights as human beings, as economic agents and as moral forces. This self-consciousness of the exploited individual in its reactions to the other members of the community, in other words, this class-consciousness as against the actual and potential exploiters existing as they do in the same race, is an outstanding feature in India's public life of the last few years.
The reason is perfectly obvious. Economic determinism, like the law of gravitation, does not know latitude and longitude. If during all the epochs of world-culture previous to the advent of the steam-engine East and West have run parallel in agricultural methods, serfdom, cottage industry, gilds of artisans, usury, local markets and so forth, together with the legal system and social Weltanschauung adapted to such "primitive" or mediaeval industrial organization, it is but natural that "modernism" will also manifest itself in almost identical manner in Asia and Eur-America. The logic of human evolution is inexorable.
The mediaeval Indian industries and handicrafts were crushed during the first four decades of the nineteenth century by the adverse commercial laws of Great Britain. A new industrial England was reared on the grave of old industrial India. But in the course of time about 3,000 modern workshops and factories of large dimensions have grown up on Indian soil. The number of these plants is certainly too small for a vast sub-continent like India. The complete industrialization of the people, such for instance as has taken place in England, the United States and Germany, has consequently been retarded. In any case, however, the little modern industry that there is has brought along with it in India the same Marxian industrial "problem" as in Eur-America.
Strikes are becoming almost a daily phenomenon in the economic system of cities. The demands of the workers in India are the same as those of their comrades in Eur-America, viz. higher wages, shorter hours, and better treatment from employers. Weavers, laundrymen, sailors, railway-workers, jute and cotton mill hands, and miners — all have their own unions. This unionization by arts and crafts is provincialized, i.e. territorialized, for instance, in the Madras, Bombay and Bengal Labour-Boards. These provincial labor-organizations have further been centralized or nationalized under the All-India-Trade-Union-Congress.
Economic warfare is patent likewise in the villages and on the fields and farms. The kishans (cultivators) are organizing themselves into unions known as Kishan-sabhâs. The most prominent of these peasant-associations are to be found in the United Provinces and Bihar. Their chief grievances are high taxes, illegitimate taxes, and arbitrary taxes imposed on them by the landowners. The revolt of the peasants at Rai Bareilly and their demands in conference in Oudh in which 50,000 persons took part (1920) point to the directions in which the wind is blowing.
Since the masses have been denied the privilege of acquiring the rudiments of learning owing to the sinister educational policy of the foreign government the lead in all this revolutionary movement among the working men and peasants has automatically fallen into the hands of the intellectuals. The cooperation between brain and brawn is appreciated not only by the exploited classes but also by the "natural leaders" of the society. This certainly is the consummation of the movement to rally the proletariat to the bourgeoisie for which the politicians have long endeavoured.
The peasants as well as workers share today in the creed of the intelligentszia, viz., that England's hostile policy in regard to Indian finance, agriculture, industry and commerce is responsible for the famines and epidemics as well as for sickliness, premature death, and general cheerlessness of all the sections of the population. Under the leadership of Gauri Shankar Pandit the peasants, as under that of Baptista the working men, have therefore in open assemblies declared themselves in favour of the political swaraj without which the economic salvation, physical energism and moral resurrection of India are understood to be out of the question for any class.
Nevertheless there is no rest for the propertied classes. The owners of mills and landed proprietors as well as the "princes" of semi-dependent India have understood enough from the events of recent years to have their eyes opened. The fact of the awakening of the "teeming millions" as "hands and feet", i.e. as members of an economic system is too patent. The employers and landlords know that the employed and the tenants have economic grievances.
And these economic grievances are not exclusively those for which British capital, commerce and administration are responsible. Indians themselves constitute a class of exploiters. The grievances of the peasants and labourers cannot therefore be assuaged, as it is clear to Indian bourgeoisie, by mere political shibboleths, such for instance, as that a panacea will be brought about as soon as India achieves her freedom from foreign yoke.
The resistance from the exploited classes is tending to assume the same forms in India as in the West. The new problem of capital vs. labour has been introducing complexity in the older simpler problem of India vs. Great Britain. And this "enrichment" of the Indian question has found a substantial feeder in the events and policies of Russia since November 1917.
The "natural leaders" of India are, besides, in constant intercourse with the communists and syndicalists of Eur-America as well as with other "moderate" labour and socialist organizations in the Western world. Proletarianism has, moreover, succeeded in enlisting in its favour the thoughts of a rising school of writers who at the present moment in Hindi language have embarked on creating a special Kishan literature.
The fact that India has begun so late in its political career indicates that in industrialization the people are in a position to derive benefit from the experiences and mistakes of the pioneers. of modern industry in the West. On the other hand, it is evident also that Young India is not enamoured of 1789 nor even of the ideas of 1848 but that while giving them their due in the historical perspective, it is prepared to bestow a part of its serious thoughts on the latest experiment in freedom and democracy that mankind has undertaken in and through the exploits of Russian idealists.2
Notes
- In 1922 Gandhi has been sentenced to imprisonment for six years.↩
- As specimen of Young India's interest in proletarianism may be cited Manabendra Nath Roy and Abani Mukherji's India in Transition (Geneva 1922), which, among other things, seeks to offer an "economic interpretation" of Indian history for the nineteenth century and after.↩