Early in June 1920 (so far as I can remember), about two hundred
kisans marched fifty miles from the interior of Partabgarh district to
Allahabad city with the intention of drawing the attention of the
prominent politicians there to their woebegone condition. They were
led by a man named Ramachandra, who himself was not a local peasant. I learned that these kisans were squatting on the river bank, on oneof the Jumna ghats, and, accompanied by some friends, went to seethem. They told us of the crushing exactions of the talukdars, of
inhuman treatment, and that their condition had become wholly
intolerable. They begged us to accompany them back to make inquiries aswell as to protect them from the vengeance of the talukdars, who wereangry at their having come to Allahabad on this mission. They wouldaccept no denial and literally clung onto us. At last I promised to visitthem two days or so later.
I went there with some colleagues, and we spent three days in the
villages far from the railway and even the pucca road. That visit was a
revelation to me. We found the whole countryside afire with
enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement. Enormous gatherings wouldtake place at the briefest notice by word of mouth. One village wouldcommunicate with another, and the second with the third, and so on;and presently whole villages would empty out, and all over the fieldsthere would be men and women and children on the march to themeeting place. Or, more swiftly still, the cry of Sita-RamSita-Ra-
a-a-a-m would fill the air, and travel far in all directions and be
echoed back from other villages, and then people would come stream
ing out or even running as fast as they could. They were in miserable
rags, men and women, but their faces were full of excitement and
their eyes glistened and seemed to expect strange happenings which
would, as if by a miracle, put an end to their long misery.
They showered their affection on us and looked on us with loving
and hopeful eyes, as if we were the bearers of good tidings, the guideswho were to lead them to the promised land. Looking at them andtheir misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and
sorrow shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our
56
petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-
naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and
overwhelming poverty of India. A new picture of India seemed to rise
before me, naked, starving, crushed, and utterly miserable. And their
faith in us, casual visitors from the distant city, embarrassed me and
filled me with a new responsibility that frightened me.
I listened to their innumerable tales of sorrow, their crushing and
ever-growing burden of rent, illegal exactions, ejectments from land
and mud hut, beatings; surrounded on all sides by vultures who preyed
on them zamindar's agents, moneylenders, police; toiling all day to
find what they produced was not theirs and their reward was kicks andcurses and a hungry stomach. Many of those who were present were landless people who had been ejected by the landlords and had no landor hut to fall back upon. The land was rich, but the burden on it was
very heavy, the holdings were small, and there were too many people
after them. Taking advantage of this land hunger, the landlords,
unable under the law to enhance their rents beyond a certain percent
age, charged huge illegal premiums. The tenant, knowing of no other
alternative, borrowed money from the moneylender and paid the pre
mium, and then, unable to pay his debt or even the rent, was ejected
and lost all he had.
This process was an old one, and the progressive pauperization of
the peasantry had been going on for a long time. What had happened
to bring matters to a head and rouse up the countryside? Economic
conditions, of course, but these conditions were similar all over Oudh,
while the agrarian upheaval of 1920 and 1921 was largely confined to
three districts. This was partly due to the leadership of a remarkable
person, Ramachandra.
Ramachandra was a man from Maharashtra in western India, and he
had been to Fiji as an indentured laborer. On his return he had gradu
ally drifted to these districts of Oudh and wandered about reciting
Tulsidas's Ramayana and listening to tenants' grievances. He had little education, and to some extent he exploited the tenantry for his ownbenefit, but he showed remarkable powers of organization. He taught the peasants to meet frequently in sabhas (meetings) to discuss their own troubles and thus gave them a feeling of solidarity. Occasionally huge mass meetings were held, and this produced a sense of power.Sita-Ram was an old and common cry, but he gave it an almost warlike significance and made it a signal for emergencies as well as a bond between different villages.
57
Oudh was a particularly good area for an agrarian agitation. It was,
and is, the land o the talukdars the "Barons of Oudh" they call them
selves and the zamindari system at its worst flourished there. The
exactions of the landlords were becoming unbearable, and the number
of landless laborers was growing. There was on the whole only one
class of tenant, and this helped united action.
India may be roughly divided into two parts the zamindari area
with its big landlords, and the area containing peasant proprietors, but
there is a measure of overlapping. The three provinces of Bengal,
Behar, and the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, form the zamin
dari area. The peasant proprietors are comparatively better off, al
though even their condition is often pitiable. The mass of the peas
antry in the Punjab or Gujrat (where there are peasant proprietors) is
far better off than the tenants of the zamindari areas. In the greater
part of these zamindari areas there are many kinds of tenancies
occupancy tenants, nonoccupancy tenants, subtenancies, etc. The inter
ests of various tenants often conflict with one another, and this mili
tates against joint action. In Oudh, however, there were no occupancy
tenants or even life tenants in 1920. There were only short-term ten
ants who were continually being ejected in favor of someone who was
willing to pay a higher premium. Because there was principally one
class of tenant, it was easier to organize them for joint action.
In practice there was no guarantee in Oudh for even the short term
of the contract. A landlord hardly ever gave a receipt for rent received,
and he could always say that the rent had not been paid and eject the
tenant, for whom it was impossible to prove the contrary. Besides the
rent there were an extraordinary number of illegal exactions. In one
taluk I was told that there had been as many as fifty different kinds of
such exactions. Probably this number was exaggerated, but it is noto
rious how talukdars often make their tenants pay for every special
expenditure a marriage in the family, cost of the son's education in
foreign countries, a party to the Governor or other high official, a pur
chase of a car or an elephant. Indeed these exactions have got special
names motrauna (tax for purchase of motor), hathauna (tax for pur
chase of elephant), etc.
It was not surprising, therefore, that a big agrarian agitation should
develop in Oudh. The agrarian movement was entirely separate from
the Congress, and it had nothing to do with the nonco-operation that
was taking shape. Perhaps it is more correct to say that both these
58
widespread and powerful movements were due to the same funda
mental causes.
What amazed me still more was our total ignorance in the cities of this great agrarian movement. No newspaper had contained a line about it; they were not interested in rural areas. I realized more than ever how cut off we were from our people and how we lived andworked and agitated in a little world apart from them.
( to be edited )
XI
WANDERINGS AMONG THE KISANS
I SPENT THREE days in the villages, came back to Allahabad, and then
went again. During these brief visits we wandered about a great deal
from village to village, eating with the peasants, living with them
in their mud huts, talking to them for long hours, and often addressing
meetings, big and small. We had originally gone in a light car, arid the
peasants were so keen that hundreds of them, working overnight,
built temporary roads across the fields so that our car could go right
into the interior. Often the car got stuck and was bodily lifted out by
scores of willing hands. But we had to leave the car eventually and to
do most of our journeying by foot. Everywhere we went we were
accompanied by policemen, Criminal Investigation Department men,
and a deputy collector from Lucknow. I am afraid we gave them a
bad time with our continuous marching across fields, and they were
quite tired out and fed up with us and the {zsans. The deputy collector
was a somewhat effeminate youth from Lucknow, and he had turned
up in patent leather pumps! He begged us sometimes to restrain our
ardor, and I think he ultimately dropped out, being unable to keep up
with us.
It was the hottest time of the year, June, just before the monsoon.
The sun scorched and blinded. I was quite unused to going out in the
sun, and ever since my return from England I had gone to the hills
for part of every summer. And now I was wandering about all day
in the open sun with not even a sun hat, my head being wrapped in a
small towel. So full was I of other matters that I quite forgot about
the heat, and it was only on my return to Allahabad, when I noticed
the rich tan I had developed, that I remembered what I had gone
59
through. I was pleased with myself, for I realized that I could stand
the heat with the best of them and my fear of it was wholly unjustified.
I have found that I can bear both extreme heat and great cold without
much discomfort, and this has stood me in good stead in my work as
well as in my periods in prison. This was no doubt due to my general
physical fitness and my habit of taking exercise, a lesson I learned
from my father, who was a bit of an athlete and, almost to the end
of his days, continued his daily exercise. His head became covered with
silvery hair, his face was deeply furrowed and looked old and weary
with thought, but the rest of his body, to within a year or two of his
death, seemed to be twenty years younger.
Even before my visit to Partabgarh in June 1920, I had often passed
through villages, stopped there and talked to the peasants. I had seen
them in their scores of thousands on the banks of the Ganges during
the big melasj and we had taken our home rule propaganda to them.
But somehow I had not fully realized what they were and what they
meant to India. Like most of us, I took them for granted. This realiza
tion came to me during these Partabgarh visits, and ever since then my
mental picture of India always contains this naked, hungry mass.
These peasants took away the shyness from me and taught me to
speak in public. Till then I had hardly spoken at a public gathering;
I was frightened at the prospect, especially if the speaking was to
be done in Hindustani, as it almost always was. But I could not
possibly avoid addressing these peasant gatherings, and how could
I be shy of these poor unsophisticated people? I did not know the
arts of oratory, and so I spoke to them, man to man, and told them
what I had in my mind and in my heart. Whether the gathering
consisted of a few persons or of ten thousand or more, I stuck to my
conversational and rather personal method of speaking, and I found
that, whatever might be lacking in it, I could at least go on. I was
fluent enough. Perhaps many of them could not understand a great
deal of what I said. My language or my thought was not simple
enough for them. Many did not hear me when the gathering was very
large, for my voice did not carry far. But all this did not matter much
to them when once they had given their confidence and faith to a
person.
I went back to Mussoorie to my mother and wife, but my mind
was full of the fysans, and I was eager to be back. As soon as I returned,
I resumed my visits to the villages and watched the agrarian movement
grow in strength. The downtrodden %isan began to gain a new confi-
60
dence in himself and walked straighter with head up. His fear of the
landlords' agents and the police lessened, and, when there was an
ejectment from a holding, no other tysan would make an offer for
that land. Physical violence on the part of the zamindars' servants and
illegal exactions became infrequent, and, whenever an instance oc
curred, it was immediately reported and an attempt at an inquiry
was made. This checked trie zamindars' agents as well as the police.
The talukdars and the big zamindars, the lords of the land, the
"natural leaders of the people," as they are proud of calling themselves,
are the spoiled children of the British Government; but that Govern
ment had succeeded, by the special education and upbringing it
provided or failed to provide for them, in reducing them, as a class,
to a state of complete intellectual impotence. They do nothing at all
for their tenantry, and are complete parasites on the land and the
people. Their chief activity lies in endeavoring to placate the local
officials, without whose favor they could not exist for long, and
demanding ceaselessly a protection of their special interests and privi
leges.
Right through the year 1921 I continued my visits to the rural areas,
but my field of activity grew till it comprised the whole of the United
Provinces. Nonco-operation had begun in earnest, and its message
had reached the remotest village. A host of Congress workers in each
district went about the rural areas with the new message, to which
they often added, rather vaguely, a removal of J(isan grievances. Swaraj
was an all-embracing word to cover everything. Yet the two movements
nonco-operation and the agrarian were quite separate, though they
overlapped and influenced each other greatly in our province. As
a result of Congress preaching, litigation went down with a rush and
villages established their panchayats to deal with their disputes. Espe
cially powerful was the influence of the Congress in favor of peace,
for the new creed of nonviolence was stressed wherever the Congress
worker went. This may not have been fully appreciated or understood,
but it did prevent the peasantry from taking to violence.
This was no small result. Agrarian upheavals are notoriously violent,
leading to jacqueries, and the peasants of part of Oudh in those days
were desperate and at white heat. A spark would have .lighted a flame.
Yet they remained amazingly peaceful. The only instance of physical
violence on a talukdar that I remember was when a peasant went up
to him as he was sitting in his own house, surrounded by his friends,
61
and slapped him on the face on the ground that he was immoral
and inconsiderate to his own wife!
There was violence of another kind later which led to conflicts with
the Government. But this conflict was bound to come, for the Govern
ment could not tolerate this growing power of a united peasantry.
The fyisans took to traveling in railway trains in large numbers with
out tickets, especially when they had to attend their periodical big
mass meetings which sometimes consisted of sixty or seventy thousand
persons. It was difficult to move them, and, unheard-of thing, they
openly defied the railway authorities, telling them that the old days
were gone. At whose instigation they took to the free mass traveling
I do not know. Stricter railway control prevented this later.
In the autumn of 1920 a few Jysan leaders were arrested for
some petty offense. They were to be tried in Partabgarh town, but
on the day of the trial a huge concourse of peasants filled the court
compound and lined the route to the jail where the accused leaders
were kept. The magistrate's nerve gave way, and he postponed the
trial to the next day. But the crowd grew and almost surrounded the
jail. The Tysons can easily carry on for a few days on a handful of
parched grain. Ultimately the tysan^ leaders were discharged, perhaps
after a formal trial inside the jail. I forget how this came about, but
for the tysans this was a great triumph, and they began to think that
they could always have their way by weight of numbers alone. To the
Government this position was intolerable, and soon after a similar
occasion arose; this time it ended differently.
At the beginning of January 1921 I received a telegram from
Rae Bareli asking me to go there immediately as trouble was expected.
I left the next day. I discovered that some leading \isans had been ar
rested some days back and had been lodged in the local jail. Remember
ing their success at Partabgarh and the tactics they had then adopted,
the peasants marched to Rae Bareli town for a mass demonstration. But
this time the Government was not going to permit it, and additional po
lice and military had been collected to stop the \isans. Just outside the
town on the other side of a little river the main body of the \isans was
stopped. Many of them, however, streamed in from other directions.
On arrival at the station I learned of this situation, and immediately I
proceeded straight to the river where the military were said to face
the peasants. On the way I received a hurriedly written note from
the district magistrate asking me to go back. I wrote my reply on the
back of it inquiring under what law and what section he was asking
62
me to go back and saying that till I heard from him I proposed to go
on. As I reached the river, sounds of firing could be heard from the
other side. I was stopped at the bridge by the military, and, as I
waited there, I was suddenly surrounded by large numbers of frightened
fysans who had been hiding in the fields on this side of the river. So
I held a meeting of about a couple of thousand peasants on the spot
and tried to remove their fear and lessen their excitement. It was
rather an unusual situation with firing going on against their brethren
within a stone's throw across a little stream and the military in evidence
everywhere. But the meeting was quite successful and took away the
edge from the tysans' fear. The district magistrate then returned from
the firing line, and, at his request, I accompanied him to his house.
There he kept me, under some pretext or other, for over two hours,
evidently wanting to keep me away from the fyisans and my colleagues
in the city.
We found later that many men had been killed in the firing. The
tysans had refused to disperse or to go back, but otherwise they had
been perfectly peaceful. I am quite sure that if I or someone else they
trusted had been there and had asked them to do so they would have
dispersed. They refused to take their orders from men they did not
trust. Someone actually suggested to the magistrate to wait for me
a little, but he refused. He could not permit an agitator to succeed
where he had failed. That is not the way of foreign governments
depending on prestige.
Firing on fysans took place on two occasions in Rae Bareli district
about that time, and then began, what was much worse, a reign of
terror for every prominent tysan worker or member of a fane hay at.
Government had decided to crush the movement.
A little later in the year 1921, Fyzabad district had its dose of wide
spread repression. The trouble started there in a peculiar way. The
peasants of some villages went and looted the property of a talukdar.
It transpired subsequently that they had been incited to do so by the
servants of another zamindar who had some kind of feud with the
talukdar. The poor ignorant peasants were actually told that it was the
wish of Mahatma Gandhi that they should loot, and they willingly
agreed to carry out this behest, shouting "Mahatma Gandhi ty jai"
in the process.
I was very angry when I heard of this, and within a day or two of
the occurrence I was on the spot, somewhere near Akbarpur in Fyza
bad district. On arrival I called a meeting for the same day, and within
a few hours five or six thousand persons had collected from numerous
villages within a radius of ten miles. I spoke harshly to them for the
shame they had brought on themselves and our cause and said that
the guilty persons must confess publicly. (I was full in those days of
what I conceived to be the spirit of Gandhiji's Satyagraha.} I called
upon those who had participated in the looting to raise their hands,
and, strange to say, there in the presence of numerous police officials
about two dozen hands went up. That meant certain trouble for them.
When I spoke to many of them privately later and heard their
artless story of how they had been misled, I felt very sorry for them,
and I began to regret having exposed these simple folk to long terms
of imprisonment. But the people who suffered were not just two or
three dozen. The chance was too good to be lost, and full advantage
was taken of the occasion to crush the agrarian movement in that
district. Over a thousand arrests were made, the district jail was over
crowded, and the trial went on for the best part of a year. Many died
in prison during the trial. Many others received long sentences, and
in later years, when I went to prison, I came across some of them, boys
and young men, spending their youth in prison.
The Indian fysans have little staying power, little energy to resist
for long. Famines and epidemics come and slay them in their millions.
It was surprising that they had shown for a whole year great powers
of resistance against the combined pressure of government and land
lord. But they began to weary a little, and the determined attack of
the Government on their movement ultimately broke its' spirit for the
time being. But it continued still in a lower key. There were not such
vast demonstrations as before, but most villages contained old workers
who had not been terrorized and who carried on the work in a small
way.
Frightened by the agrarian movement, the Government hurried
its tenancy legislation. This promised some improvement in the lot
of the fysan, but the measure was toned down when it was found
that the movement was already under control. The principal change
it affected was to give a life tenancy to the tysan in Oudh. This sounded
attractive to him but, as he has found out subsequently, his lot is in
no way better.
Agrarian troubles continued to crop up in Oudh but on a smaller
scale. The world depression which began in 1929, however, again
created a great crisis owing to the fall in prices.