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A Brief History of India - Book Summary - Indian History - Judith Walsh - PART IV, Summaries of Indian History

In India Gandhi would undertake fasts to the death on several occasions, a form of personal satyagraha by which he hoped to win over the hearts of his opponents

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and his religious faith as a modern Hindu. The diverse South African community was made up of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians who came from regions as different as Gujarat and south India. Gandhi led this multiethnic, multireligious community in a variety of protests against British laws that discriminated against Indians. He developed the nonviolent tactic of satyagraha (literally “truth-firmness” or “soul force”) that he would later use in India. “I had... then to choose,” he would later remember, “between allying myself to violence or finding out some other method of meeting the crisis and stopping the rot, and it came to me that we should refuse to obey legislation that was degrad- ing and let them put us in jail if they liked” (Hay 1988, 266). He led nonviolent campaigns in 1907–08 and 1908–11 and a combined strike and cross-country march in 1913–14. It was in South Africa that Gandhi developed the religious and ethi- cal ideas that merged the Western education of his youth with the beliefs and principles of his family’s Hindu religion. By the age of 37, Gandhi had simplified his diet according to strict vegetarian rules, had taken a Hindu vow of celibacy (brahmacharya), and had exchanged his Western dress for a simpler Indian costume, a dhoti (a long cloth wrapped around the lower body), shawl, and turban. In South Africa and later in India Gandhi’s political philosophy would rest equally on the Jaina principle of ahimsa (nonviolence) and on the conviction that the means by which a political goal was achieved was fully as important as its end result. In India Gandhi would undertake fasts to the death on several occasions, a form of personal satyagraha by which he hoped to win over the hearts of his opponents. In 1915, when Gandhi returned to India, he was already famous there. The diversity of the South African Indian community had given him a broader background and experience than that of most national- ist leaders with their more limited regional bases. Nevertheless, Gandhi was not an immediate success in India. His simple dress of dhoti, shawl, and turban made him seem idiosyncratic to Westernized audiences. He spoke too softly and tended to lecture his listeners on the need for Indian self-improvement. His initial speeches to Congress and the Home Rule League were not well received. After his return to India, Gandhi made his base in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, founding there an ashram and traveling by third- class railway coach throughout British India. In the first years of his return he organized a satyagraha against indigo planters in Champaran district in the foothills of the Himalayas, campaigned for a reduction of land revenues in Kheda district in Gujarat, and fasted to compel his

TOWARD FREEDOM

friends and financial supporters, the industrialist Sarabhai family, to pay their workers higher wages. These campaigns gained Gandhi visibility and sympathy within India. But to the more anglicized nationalists he may still have seemed as incomprehensible as he did to Edwin Montagu (1879–1924), the British secretary of state for India, who met Gandhi on a tour in 1917. He “dresses like a coolie,” Montagu wrote in his diary, “forswears all personal advancement, lives practically on the air, and is a pure visionary” (Wolpert 1989, 295).

The Amritsar Massacre

The end of World War I brought with it a new offer of constitutional reforms from the British government, but the reforms themselves were broadly disappointing to almost all factions of Indian nationalists. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms (or the “Montford reforms,” as they are sometime abbreviated) were promised as a move toward responsible government. They were announced in 1917 and implemented two years later in the Government of India Act of 1919. The Montford reforms offered Indians “dyarchy,” a plan under which the government would turn over responsibility for some areas of government—for example, health and education—to provincial legislatures and Indian ministers, while reserving other departments—for instance, police, rev- enue, and law—for the British central government. Indian legislative members would continue to be elected into these provincial govern- ments through the various constituencies established in earlier reforms. From the British perspective the Montford reforms had the advan- tage of bringing elected Indian officials into collaboration with the existing British Indian government, even as they cut off those same offi- cials from the more extreme wing of the nationalist movement. From the nationalist perspective, the reforms ceded little if any real power to Indians. They gave Indian ministers the responsibility for traditionally underfunded departments, while giving them no control over or access to the revenues through which the departments were funded. Congress leaders split over how to respond. Jinnah proposed rejecting Montford outright. Tilak and Besant feuded over the wording and extent of their rejections. The remnants of the old moderate faction considered found- ing a separate party to allow them to accept the reforms. But the unity that factions in the Indian National Congress could not find among themselves, British officials created for them. During World War I the Defense of India Act (1915) had created temporary sedition laws under which, in certain circumstances, political cases could be

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Gandhi and the

Nationalist Movement

Even a handful of true satyagrahis [followers of soul force], well organized and disciplined through selfless service of the masses, can win independence for India, because behind them will be the power of the silent millions.  Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Satyagraha:Transforming Unjust Relationships Through the Power of the Soul” (Hay 1988, 269–270)

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ohandas K. Gandhi led India’s nationalist movement from the 1920s to his death in 1948. Gandhi made nationalism a mass movement in India bringing rural Indians into the Congress Party through his unique combination of Hindu religiosity, political acumen, and practical organizing skills. Between 1920 and 1948 Gandhi led a series of campaigns against the British—the 1920–22 noncooperation movement, the 1930 Salt March, the 1942 Quit India movement—suc- cessfully mobilizing masses of urban and rural Indians in opposition to British rule. Gandhi’s 1920 campaign was a coalition of Hindus and Muslims, but in the late ’20s and ’30s communal violence, conservative Hindu intransigence, and Congress’s own misjudgments split Moham- med Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League from the Congress movement. In the end, it was as much the expense of World War II as Gandhi’s nationalist campaigns that ended British rule in India. But neither the British nor Congress or the Muslim League was able to devise a govern- ment scheme for a free India that would maintain a strong central gov- ernment (an essential Congress demand) and yet provide protection within a majoritarian democratic system for India’s Muslim minority (the Muslim League demand). This failure meant that with indepen-

dence in 1947 also came partition. The division of British India into India and Pakistan caused 1 million deaths and made 10 million Indians refugees. Even as other Indian leaders participated in the detailed nego- tiations of Britain’s 1947 transfer of power, Gandhi worked tirelessly to stop Hindu-Muslim violence. He was assassinated in 1948 by a right- wing extremist who believed Gandhi to be too pro-Muslim.

The Economic Aftermath of World War I

World War I created economic hardships in India that lasted into the 1920s and were worsened by a poor monsoon in 1918 and an influenza outbreak that killed more than 12 million Indians. Prices rose by as much as 50 percent in the immediate aftermath of the war. During 1920–22, rural conditions grew so bad that the Indian government passed legisla- tion capping rents to protect large landowners from eviction. Poorer farmers received little help. Villagers on the edges of the Himalayas set forest preserves on fire in protest. Throughout the Ganges River valley peasants founded Kisan Sabhas (Peasant Societies) through which they organized protests and rent strikes against landlords. Congress took no action in these matters, unwilling to intervene in conflicts that might prove internally divisive while at the same time fearing to antagonize a middle landlord constituency that was a major source of support. Labor strikes were also frequent in the early 1920s. Congress founded the All-India Trade Union in the years after World War I at about the same time as the Communist Party of India (founded by Manabendra Nath Roy [1887–1954] in 1920) began to organize unions in India’s cloth, jute, and steel industries. There were more than 200 strikes in 1920 and almost 400 in 1921. By 1929 there were more than 100 trade unions in India with almost a quarter million members.

Gandhi and the Khilafat Movement

The noncooperation movement of the 1920s marked the start of Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian nationalist movement. After his return to India, Gandhi had attended Congress sessions annually, but his real entrance into Indian nationalist politics came only after the Amritsar massacre, the British violence that followed it, and with his support of the Khilafat movement in the 1920s. The Khilafat movement began after World War I. British (and Allied) plans to carve up the old Ottoman Empire gave rise to a worldwide pan- Islamic movement to preserve the Ottoman sultan’s role as caliph (that is, as leader of the global Islamic community) and Islamic holy places

GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

350-person All-India Congress Committee (AICC) was established with elected representatives from 21 different Indian regions. The elec- tion system was village based, with villages electing representatives to districts, districts to regions, and regions to the AICC. The 15-person Working Committee headed the entire Congress organization. Organizing for noncooperation brought new and younger leaders to prominence, the most important of whom was Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964). Nehru was the son of Motilal Nehru, an Allahabad (United Provinces) lawyer and Congress member who had grown so wealthy and anglicized from his profession that, it was sometimes joked, his family sent their laundry to be washed in Paris. The son was raised at Allahabad within the aristocratic Kashmiri Brahman Nehru family and educated in England at Harrow and Cambridge. He returned to India in 1912 after being called to the bar in London. Nehru was drawn to Congress as the Mahatma (a title meaning “great soul”) took control in the 1920s, deeply attracted to Gandhi’s philosophy of activism and moral commitment. Nehru’s second great political passion, socialism, also began about this same time. In the early 1920s Nehru spent a month traveling with a delegation of peas- ants through a remote mofussil region of the United Provinces. The experience, probably Nehru’s first encounter with rural poverty, filled him with shame and sorrow—”shame at my own easygoing and com- fortable life,” he later wrote, and “sorrow at the degradation and over- whelming poverty of India” (Brecher 1961, 40). Nehru shared his leadership of younger Indian nationalists with a con- temporary, Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945). Bose was also the son of a wealthy lawyer, although his Bengali father practiced in Cuttack, Orissa. Unlike Nehru, Bose had a stormy educational career. He was expelled from an elite Calcutta college in 1916 because he and his friends beat up an Anglo-Indian professor said to be a racist. Bose had finished his college education in a Calcutta missionary college and was then sent to England by his family to study for the ICS examinations. In 1921, hav- ing passed the exams and on the verge of appointment to the service, Bose gave it all up. “I am now at the crossways,” he wrote to his family, “and no compromise is possible” (Bose 1965, 97). He resigned his can- didacy to return to India and join the Congress movement full time. Working under the Bengal politician C. R. Das and supported economi- cally for most of his life by his lawyer brother Sarat, Bose (along with Nehru) became the leader of a young socialist faction in Congress. In 1921 during the noncooperation movement he was imprisoned, released, and then deported to Burma, accused by the British of connections with

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Bengali terrorists. In 1927 on his return to Calcutta, he was elected pres- ident of Bengal’s branch of the Congress Party. A third young man, Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), later known as Maulana Azad, also joined the Congress movement at this time. Maulana Azad came to India at the age of 10, the son of an Indian father and an Arab mother. He received a traditional Islamic education but turned to English education after being convinced of the value of Western education by the writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He took the pen name Azad (which mean “freedom”) while publishing an Urdu journal in his youth. Interned by the British during World War I, he joined both the Khilafat movement and the Congress during the 1920s. He would become one of the staunchest Muslim supporters of Congress in the years leading up to and following independence and partition, serving as Congress president in 1940 and as minister of education after independence.

Noncooperation Campaign (1921–1922)

Gandhi predicted at the 1920 Nagpur Congress session that if noncoop- eration was carried out nonviolently, self-government would come within the year. By July 1921 the movement was fully under way, with Congress calling for the boycott of foreign goods and supporters burn- ing foreign clothes in public bonfires. Only 24 Indians turned in their awards and titles, Gandhi among them, and only 180 lawyers, including Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, gave up their legal practices. But support among students was very strong with almost 100,000 students dropping out of government-controlled colleges to attend new nationalist schools. The boycott of British goods was also effective: The value of imported British cloth dropped by 44 percent between 1922 and 1924. Gandhi traveled the country by rail for seven months, addressing public meetings, overseeing bonfires of foreign cloth, and meeting with village officials to organize new Congress branches. He wrote a weekly column in English for Young India and in Gujarati for Navajivan (New life). Everywhere he went he urged supporters to spin and wear khadi (hand-loomed cloth)—hand-spun and hand-loomed cloth would replace foreign imports—and he designed a Congress flag with the charkha (spinning wheel) at its center. The combined Khilafat and Congress movement brought British India to the edge of rebellion. By the end of 1921 more than 20,000 Indians had been jailed for civil disobedience. The government had banned all public meetings and groups. The Ali brothers and all major Congress

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

But before even that could start, a crowd in Chauri Chaura (United Provinces), seeking revenge for police beatings, chased a group of police back to their station house, set it on fire, and hacked 22 policemen to death as they fled the blaze. Gandhi immediately suspended the Bardoli movement and to the disbelief of Congress leaders, declared noncooperation at an end. “I assure you,” he wrote to an angry Jawaharlal Nehru, still in jail, “that if the thing had not been suspended we would have been leading not a non-violent struggle but essentially a violent struggle” (Nanda 1962, 202). Congress leaders watched helplessly as their movement collapsed around them. “Gandhi has pretty well run himself to the last ditch as a politician,” the viceroy Rufus Daniel Isaacs, Lord Reading, wrote to his son with satisfaction (Nanda 1962, 202–203). One month later Gandhi was arrested and tried for sedition. He made no attempt to deny the charges against him: “I am here.. .,” he told the court, “to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me.... I hold it an honor to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system” (Fischer 1983, 202–203). The judge sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment. Both during and immediately after the noncooperation campaign, British officials authorized several reforms that had long been sought by urban middle-class Indians. The India Act of 1921 made the viceroy’s Legislative Council a bicameral parliament with elected membership. The Tariff Board in New Delhi gave the Indian government the begin- nings of fiscal autonomy. And in 1923, for the first time, the ICS exam- inations were simultaneously held in India and England. In the provincial and municipal elections of 1923–24 Congress candidates gained control of provincial ministries in Bengal and Bombay. A num- ber of Congress leaders became mayors of towns and cities: C. R. Das became mayor of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru of Allahabad, and a west Indian Gandhi supporter, Vallabhbhai (Sardar) Patel (1875–1950), became the mayor of Ahmedabad. Gandhi was released from jail in 1924 for an appendicitis operation but refused to consider further campaigns against the government. Although he accepted the presidency of the 1925 Congress session, his focus was on relief projects and village work. “For me,” he said in this period, “nothing in the political world is more important than the spin- ning wheel” (Fischer 1983, 232). He traveled for much of 1925, now by second-class carriage, raising funds for Congress, promoting spinning and hand-loom weaving, and leading a campaign in Travancore to open

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a temple road to Untouchables. In 1926 he began a practice he would continue to the end of his life: For one day in the week he maintained complete silence. It was not until 1928 that he would again be willing to reenter active political life.

Post-Khilafat Communal Violence

The worldwide Khilafat movement ended in 1924 when the moderniz- ing ruler of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, abolished the Ottoman caliphate. In India, Hindu-Muslim unity did not survive the end of the movement. With the collapse of Khilafat, local Muslim leaders in several provinces declared themselves “caliphs” and led movements to protect Islam, organize Muslim communities, and spread religious propaganda among them. Both Hindu and Muslim groups escalated their provocations of each other in these years, Hindu groups demanding an end to cow slaughter and Muslim groups responding violently when processions or loud music disturbed prayers at a mosque. Electoral politics also con- tributed to communal tensions in these years; separate electorates heightened the awareness of religious divisions. And elections encour- aged Hindu candidates to court the majority Hindu vote. In Bengal even leftist Calcutta politicians, such as Subhas Bose, took strongly pro- zamindar positions to the irritation and disgust of Muslim peasants and tenants.

GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

Gandhi’s “Experiments with Truth”

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ahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, was one of the most influential nationalist books of the 20th century.Written in 1925, when Gandhi was 56, the autobiography appeared in weekly installments in a Gujarati newsletter and was subse- quently translated into English by Gandhi’s nephew. Its chapters covered episodes Gandhi knew would resonate with young Westernized Indians, recalling Gandhi’s early “experiments” with eating meat, his exploration of an anglicized lifestyle while living in England, and his return to Hindu religious practices (celibacy, strict vegetarianism) in South Africa. Gandhi’s quest for a personal and religious identity demonstrated to readers the ultimate “truth” of Hindu religious principles and practices even for Indians living in the modern 20th-century world.

such as Malaviya himself, were members of both organizations. But in 1926 Malaviya and Lajpat Rai organized the Independent Congress Party, a political group through which Mahasabha candidates could contest for election. In the 1926 provincial elections Congress candi- dates lost badly to Mahasabha candidates. And in Muslim separate elec- torates, where Congress Muslim candidates had previously been able to win, in 1926 they won only one Muslim seat out of 39 contested.

All Sons of This Land

In 1927 the British government appointed Sir John Simon (1873–1954) as head of a parliamentary commission that would tour India and make recommendations for future political reforms. From the start, however,

GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

V. D. Savarkar and “Hindutva”

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inayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) became the Hindu Mahasabha’s most prominent spokesman during the 1930s and is today considered the ideological founder of Hindu nationalism. By 1911, because of his associations with terrorist groups from his native Maharashtra, Savarkar had received two life sentences and had been transported to the Andaman Islands. By 1922, through the intervention of Congress leaders, Savarkar was back in India in a prison at Ratnagiri in Maharashtra.There he wrote Hindutva:Who Is a Hindu? Written as a response to the pan-Islamicism of the Khilafat movement, Savarkar defined “Hindutva,” or Hindu-ness, as the ethnic and racial ties binding Indians together. Hindu-ness rested on the three pillars of India’s geo- graphical unity (from the Indus River to the Bay of Bengal), Indians’ shared racial heritage, and Indians’ common culture. The Hindus, Savarkar wrote, were not merely citizens of an Indian state united by patriotic love for a motherland.They were a race united “by the bonds of a common blood,” “not only a nation but a race- jati ” (Jaffrelot 1996, 28). Only Indian Muslims and Christians were not part of this “race- jati. ” They were foreign invaders who shared in no part of Hindu-ness. Released from prison in 1924, Savarkar was kept under house arrest until the 1930s. Once free he became the president of the Mahasabha for seven years in a row.“We Hindus,” he told a Mahasabha convention in 1938, “are a Nation by ourselves” (Sarkar 1983, 356).

the Simon Commission provoked opposition because it included no Indians. Demonstrations followed its members wherever they went, and Congress, the Muslim League, and all but two minor Indian polit- ical groups boycotted its inquiries. To counter any Simon Commission proposals, Motilal Nehru headed an All-Parties Conference in 1928 to which Congress, the Muslim League, and the Hindu Mahasabha sent members. The conference was to develop a separate, Indian plan for constitutional reform. Its members agreed that the overall goal should be commonwealth status within the British Empire, But they could not agree on how minorities would be represented within this government. Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, was willing to give up separate electorates for Muslims; in return, however, he wanted one-third of the seats in the central legislative government to be reserved for Muslim candidates, and he also wanted reserved seats in the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal and the Punjab in proportion to the Muslim percentage of the population in each. (Reserved seats were seats set aside for candidates of a single community but voted on in elections by all Indians.) The Hindu Mahasabha delegates, however, led by the Bombay lawyer Mukund Ramrao Jayakar (1873–1959), absolutely refused seat reservations in the Muslim majority regions. In desperation Jinnah took his proposal to the December session of Congress. “If you do not set- tle this question today, we shall have to settle it tomorrow,” he told the Congress meeting. “We are all sons of this land. We have to live together. Believe me there is no progress for India until the Musalmans and the Hindus are united” (Hay 1988, 227–228). Again Hindu Mahasabha dele- gates blocked the proposal, refused all pleas for compromise, and Congress leaders ultimately yielded to them. The constitutional plan that resulted from these debates was not itself significant. Within a year it had been overturned. Gandhi, who had finally yielded to Congress entreaties and reentered political life, arranged to have Jawaharlal Nehru elected President of Congress in

  1. Nehru and Subhas Bose had formed the Socialist Independence for India League in 1928, and Gandhi wanted to draw Nehru and his young associates back into the Congress fold and away from the grow- ing socialist and radical movements. Under Nehru’s leadership, however, Congress abandoned the goal of commonwealth status, replacing it with a demand for purna swaraj (complete independence). Preparations began for a new civil disobedience movement that would begin under Gandhi’s leadership the next year. But the Congress’s acquiescence in the Mahasabha’s intransigence in 1928 was significant for the effect it had on Jinnah. Jinnah left the

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Britain were 11 percent of all British imports. Indian exports, in fact, were so lucrative that they maintained Britain’s favorable balance of trade in world markets. At the same time private British-run businesses in India remained strong, particularly in the mining, tea, and jute industries. But the Great Depression cut the value of Indian exports by more than half, from 311 crores (1 crore = 10 million rupees) in 1929–30 to 132 crores in 1932–33. Indian imports also fell by almost half, from 241 crores to 133 crores. (Within India, agricultural prices were also devas- tated, falling by 44 percent between 1929 and 1931 and increasing tax pressures on peasant landlords, particularly at the middle levels.) The Indian government could no longer pay the home charges through rev- enues drawn from Indian exports; it now had to pay these charges through gold. Private British companies found direct investment in India less profitable than before 1929 and began to develop collaborative agree- ments with Indian businesses instead. Yet India’s economy remained tied to the empire: The value of the Indian rupee was still linked to British sterling, and India continued to pay home charges—the old nationalist “drain”—to the British government throughout the 1930s. If the worldwide depression weakened older imperial business struc- tures, it strengthened Indian capitalists. In the 1930s Indian industry spread out from western India to Bengal, the United Provinces, Madras, Baroda, Mysore, and Bhopal. By the 1930s Indian textile mills were pro- ducing two-thirds of all textiles bought within India. The growth in Indian-owned business enterprises even affected the nationalist move- ment, as new Indian capitalists contributed money (and their own busi- ness perspective) to Congress in the 1930s. Despite the gains of Indian industrialists, stagnation and poverty char- acterized the Indian economy in the late 1930s. The global depression produced agricultural decline and increased India’s need to import food from other countries. Even though the Indian population grew slowly between 1921 and 1941, from 306 million to 389 million, food produced for local consumption in those years did not match this growth. The per capita national income (the yearly income for each Indian person) was estimated at 60.4 rupees in 1917 and 60.7 rupees in 1947. Over 30 years, the average Indian income had grown less than one-half of a rupee.

Salt March

Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March was the most famous of all his campaigns. It drew participants from cities, towns, and villages all across British India and gained India’s freedom struggle worldwide attention and sympathy.

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At its end, by Congress estimates, more than 90,000 Indians had been arrested. Despite these successes, however, the Salt March did not achieve Indian independence. Congress leaders, such as Nehru, were initially dismayed at Gandhi’s choice of focus for the campaign—the salt tax—but salt was necessary

GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

Salt March crowds, 1930. Gandhi’s second nationalist campaign drew huge crowds in India and worldwide attention.This photograph was taken on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Gujarat as Gandhi spoke to a crowd. (AP/Wide World Photos)

bat. In the Northwest Frontier Province, peaceful demonstrators in Peshawar were killed by police fire, and the army had to be called in to stop the rioting that followed. The 1930 campaign was much larger than the earlier noncooperation movement, reflecting the larger mass basis developed by Congress dur- ing the 1920s. The campaign involved fewer urban middle-class Indians and more peasants. Participation in it was also a greater risk. Police vio- lence was brutal, even against nonviolent protesters, and property con- fiscations were more widespread. Nevertheless the movement saw between three and four times as many people jailed as in 1921, 90, by Nehru’s estimate, the largest numbers coming from Bengal, the Gangetic plains, and the Punjab.

Organizing Women Women were active participants in the 1930 civil disobedience move- ment. Women’s visibility in the campaign was itself a testament to the changes that had reshaped urban middle-class women’s lives over the past century. Women’s active involvement also demonstrated that sup- port for independence was not limited to male family members. Sarojini Naidu was arrested early in the campaign, and Gandhi’s wife, Kasturbai, led women protesters in picketing liquor shops after her husband’s arrest. In Bombay, where the numbers of women protesters were the greatest, the Rashtriya Stree Sangha (National Women’s Organization) mobilized women to collect seawater for salt, picket toddy shops, and sell salt on the street. In Bengal middle-class women not only courted arrest but also participated in terrorist activities. In Madras the elite Women’s Swadeshi League supported spinning, the wearing of khadi, and the boycott of foreign goods, if not public marches. In the north Indian cities of Allahabad, Lucknow, Delhi, and Lahore, middle-class women, sometimes 1,000 at a time, participated in public demonstra- tions, even appearing in public on occasion without veils. Not all hus- bands approved their wives’ activities, however. In Lahore one husband refused to sanction the release of his jailed wife; she had not asked his permission before leaving home.

The Round Table Conferences (1930–1932)

Civil disobedience coincided with the opening of the first Round Table Conference in London. Facing a new Congress campaign and under pressure from a new Labor government, the viceroy Edwin Frederick

GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

Lindley Wood, Baron Irwin (1881–1959), later known as Lord Halifax, invited all Indian political parties to a Round Table Conference in London in 1930. Gandhi and the Congress refused, but 73 delegates came, including the Indian princes, Muslim leaders, Sikh leaders, and representatives of the Hindu Mahasabha. British officials thought that a federated Indian government with semi-autonomous provinces might still allow the preservation of substantial British power at its center. Federation and provincial autonomy also appealed to many con- stituencies attending the first Round Table Conference. For the Indian princes (who controlled collectively about one-third of the subconti- nent), such a federated government would allow the preservation of their current regimes. For Muslim leaders from Muslim majority regions (the Punjab or Bengal, for instance), provincial autonomy was an attractive mechanism through which they might maintain regional control. Even the Sikh representatives and those from the Hindu Mahasabha saw provincial autonomy as an opportunity to preserve local languages and regional religious culture—although whose lan- guages and which religious cultures was never debated. Only Jinnah of the Muslim League at the conference and Congress leaders jailed far away in India were opposed to the plan. Jinnah wanted a strong centralized Indian government, but one within which Muslims (and he as their representative) were guaranteed a significant position. Congress was entirely opposed to federation. They wanted to replace the British in India with their own government, not struggle for political survival in provincial backwaters while the British ruled at the center. Gandhi and Nehru (in separate jails but in communication) had pre- viously refused to end the civil disobedience movement, but now Gandhi suddenly reversed himself, perhaps from fear that the Round Table talks might resolve matters without the Congress or perhaps because enthusiasm was waning by 1931 both among demonstrators in the field and within the Indian business community. Gandhi met Irwin and reached a settlement: the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Civil disobedience would end; he would attend the Round Table Conference; jailed pro- testers would be released; and Indians would be allowed the private consumption of untaxed salt. Indian business leaders—the Tatas in Bombay, the Birlas in Bengal—approved the agreement. For Nehru, Subhas Bose, and the Congress left wing it was a betrayal, an abandon- ment of the campaign in exchange for no constitutional gains at all. Still if Gandhi’s pact with Irwin won no concessions, his meeting with the viceroy served to irritate British conservatives and proimperialists. In Britain Winston Churchill (1874–1965), then a member of Parliament,

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA