In 30 Seconds
Story
The fistful of salt at Dandi was a signal, and what answered it, through 1930 and in a second wave through 1932 and 1933, was the largest and most sustained mass movement the Raj ever faced. The Civil Disobedience movement carried the techniques rehearsed at Bardoli to the scale of the subcontinent, put by the government’s own counts some ninety thousand Indians in prison in its first year alone, brought the women of India into the streets for the first time in their tens of thousands, and though it was suspended without winning its formal demands, it settled, in the only court that finally mattered, the question of legitimacy, whose writ the villages would obey when the two authorities commanded opposite things.
The movement’s repertoire widened week by week from its salt beginning. Along the coasts the illegal pans multiplied and the raids on the salt depots, Dharasana’s the most famous, turned the monopoly into a battlefield of ordered suffering. Inland the campaign found each province’s pressure point, the no revenue pledges of Gujarat, where whole villages of Bardoli and Borsad crossed with their cattle into Baroda territory rather than pay, the no chaukidari tax campaigns of Bihar and Bengal, the forest law satyagrahas of the Central Provinces, Maharashtra and Karnataka, where peasants and tribals grazed cattle and cut wood in defiance of the reserved forests, and everywhere the twin boycotts, of foreign cloth, whose imports collapsed by more than half in the year, the Lancashire looms idled by pickets twelve thousand miles away, and of liquor, the excise revenues bleeding as the picketing of the shops, dangerous, unglamorous work, was taken up above all by women. The women were the movement’s revelation, Sarojini Naidu at Dharasana’s head, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay selling contraband salt on the Bombay exchange’s steps, and behind the famous names the anonymous thousands of housewives, students and grandmothers who picketed, marched, courted arrest and filled the jails, seven year old volunteers and seventy year old matrons alike, a mobilisation that moved even the movement’s critics and changed permanently what public space Indian women could claim.
The state’s answer combined the lathi, the ordinance and the refusal to be provoked into another Jallianwala, and it failed at every level but the physical. Sixty seven ordinances through the movement’s course armed the executive against the press, the pickets and the Congress’s funds, the organisation itself was proscribed, its offices seized, its working committee jailed in relay, and the police methods, the beatings of unresisting volunteers, the firings at Peshawar, Sholapur, where martial law answered a workers’ rising, and Madras, wrote the campaign’s martyrology. Sholapur’s textile workers, Peshawar’s Pathans and the Chittagong raiders the same April told the movement’s breadth, and the United Provinces’ no rent campaign of 1931, sliding toward agrarian revolt, told its depth and its dangers, the Congress leadership once again holding the class question within the national frame.
The movement’s political rhythm was set by the negotiations the next chapters detail, the Gandhi Irwin Pact suspending it in March 1931, the Round Table failure and the new Viceroy Willingdon’s crackdown resuming it in January 1932 under total repression, the Congress illegal, a hundred and twenty thousand arrests in the second wave’s first year, and the long attrition thereafter, individual civil disobedience from 1933, formal suspension in April 1934. On the ledger of demands the result was failure, the eleven points unwon, the salt tax standing, the constitution proceeding on the government’s terms. On every other ledger the decade belonged to the movement. The boycott had hurt British trade where argument never reached, the jail going of ninety thousand had stripped imprisonment of its stigma and rule of its consent, the Congress had sunk its roots into peasant India so deep that the elections of 1937 would reap majorities the movement had sown, and a generation of village India had performed, in its own person, the discovery upon which everything afterward stood, that the Raj could compel obedience only so long as Indians agreed to give it.
