Chapter 1 — ଭାରତୀୟ ଜାତୀୟ ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନରେ ଗାନ୍ଧିଜୀଙ୍କ ଆବିର୍ଭାବ

When Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was thirty years old but weak. From 1885 to 1905 it had been led by the Moderates, men such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta and Surendranath Banerjea. They believed in the justice of the British and used petitions, prayers, resolutions and deputations to London. Their great achievement was to expose the economic drain of India, but their method did not touch the common people.

After the Partition of Bengal in 1905 the Extremists, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh, demanded Swaraj and preached Swadeshi, boycott and national education. Their agitation reached the towns, but in 1907 the Congress split at Surat, and the government crushed the Extremists: Tilak was jailed in Mandalay for six years, Lajpat Rai was deported and Aurobindo withdrew to Pondicherry. A small group of revolutionaries, in Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab, chose the bomb and the pistol, but the mass of Indians was untouched by all this.

Meanwhile the Muslim League had been formed in 1906, and the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 introduced separate electorates, sowing communal division. In 1914 the First World War began. India was dragged into it; over a million Indians served, prices rose sharply, heavy war taxes and forced recruitment burdened the villages, and an influenza epidemic in 1918 killed millions. Discontent was deep but had no organisation.

In 1916, at the Lucknow session, the Moderates and the Extremists reunited and the Congress signed the Lucknow Pact with the Muslim League. In the same years Annie Besant and Tilak started Home Rule Leagues demanding self-government within the Empire, and these leagues carried political education to many towns. Yet none of these efforts had a method by which peasants, workers, women and students could join the struggle without arms.

This was the gap that Gandhi filled. He offered a technique, Satyagraha, that any Indian could practise; he lived simply and spoke the language of the villages; and he linked the political demand for freedom with the everyday grievances of ordinary people. That is why his emergence is treated as a turning point, the beginning of the Gandhian era (1919 to 1947) of the national movement.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, a small princely state on the coast of Kathiawar in Gujarat. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, was the Diwan (chief minister) of Porbandar and later of Rajkot; his mother, Putlibai, was a deeply religious woman whose fasting and vows left a lasting mark on the boy. From his home he learnt the Vaishnava and Jain traditions of Gujarat, which taught vegetarianism, tolerance and ahimsa, the refusal to injure any living being.

As a schoolboy at Rajkot Mohandas was shy and average. Two stories from his childhood shaped him. A play on Harishchandra, the king who never left the path of truth whatever the cost, made him resolve to be truthful. And when he confessed in writing to his father that he had stolen a piece of gold to pay a debt, the father's silent tears taught him that confession and repentance can purify. He was married at thirteen, according to the custom of the time, to Kasturba.

In 1888, at eighteen, he sailed to London to study law, promising his mother that he would not touch meat, wine or women. In England he read the Bhagavad Gita for the first time, in Edwin Arnold's English translation, and the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible; both taught him the ideal of returning good for evil. He was called to the Bar in 1891 and returned to India.

As a lawyer in Bombay and Rajkot he failed; he was too nervous to speak in court. When a Muslim trading firm of Porbandar, Dada Abdulla and Company, needed a lawyer for a case in South Africa, Gandhi accepted a one-year contract and sailed in 1893. He expected to stay a year; he stayed twenty-one.

These early years matter for the chapter because the man who emerged in India in 1915 already carried his tools: the vow as a form of self-discipline, truth as the highest value, the Gita's teaching of action without desire for reward, and a simple, frugal way of living that ordinary Indians could recognise as their own.

South Africa was then a group of British colonies and Boer republics, Natal, the Transvaal, the Cape and the Orange Free State, where about one lakh Indians lived. Most were indentured labourers brought to work on sugar plantations, some were free traders, and all were treated as 'coolies' by the white rulers. Within days of arrival Gandhi met racism personally. At Pietermaritzburg in June 1893 he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment for which he held a valid ticket because a white passenger objected. Shivering in the waiting room that night, he decided not to run away from injustice but to resist it.

When his case ended he was about to return home, but in 1894 Natal proposed a bill to take away the Indians' right to vote. Gandhi stayed, organised a petition with ten thousand signatures and founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. In 1903 he started the weekly Indian Opinion to educate the community. In 1904 he set up the Phoenix Settlement near Durban, a community farm where residents lived simply and shared labour; in 1910 he founded Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg. These were the models for his Indian ashrams.

The struggle sharpened in 1906 when the Transvaal government ordered every Indian to register, give fingerprints and carry a certificate, the Asiatic Registration Act, called the Black Act. At a meeting in the Empire Theatre, Johannesburg, on 11 September 1906, Indians took an oath before God to disobey it and accept the punishment. Gandhi did not like the English phrase 'passive resistance', which suggested weakness, and through a competition in Indian Opinion the word Satyagraha, 'holding firmly to truth', was coined.

The Satyagraha in South Africa lasted from 1906 to 1914. Thousands of Indians, including women, burnt their registration certificates, crossed the Transvaal border illegally, went on strike in the coal mines of Newcastle and marched with Gandhi. Gandhi himself was jailed several times. Finally, in 1914, General Smuts agreed to the Indian Relief Act: the poll tax on ex-indentured labourers was abolished, Indian marriages were recognised and the registration certificates were withdrawn.

Gandhi thus returned to India in 1915 with a proven method, an international reputation, and the blessing of Gokhale, whom he accepted as his political guru. Gokhale advised him to spend one year travelling through India with his ears open and his mouth shut, and Gandhi obeyed.

Gandhi's political method rested on a few clear ideas, and a student must be able to state them exactly.

Truth (Satya). For Gandhi truth was God. Politics, like private life, must be conducted truthfully; a good end never justifies a false means. He said that means and ends are like the seed and the tree; an impure means cannot produce a pure result.

Non-violence (Ahimsa). Ahimsa means not merely refusing to kill, but refusing to hate or wish harm to anyone, including the opponent. It is the weapon of the strong, not of the weak. A Satyagrahi resists the wrong, not the wrongdoer, and tries to convert the opponent by voluntary suffering rather than to crush him.

Satyagraha. Satyagraha is the practical form of truth and non-violence in public struggle. Its steps are: first, study the grievance and state the demand plainly; second, negotiate and try to persuade; third, if persuasion fails, disobey the unjust law openly, without secrecy and without violence; fourth, accept arrest and punishment cheerfully. It differs from passive resistance, which is a weapon of the weak used because they have no arms; a Satyagrahi could use force but chooses not to. It differs from revolution by violence because it does not create hatred, and it can be practised by children, women and the old.

Swaraj. Gandhi's Swaraj meant more than the transfer of power from British hands to Indian hands. It meant self-rule of every individual over himself, the rule of the villages over their own affairs, and the removal of poverty, untouchability and drink. In his book Hind Swaraj (1909) he argued that modern industrial civilisation was itself a disease and that India's strength lay in her villages.

Swadeshi and the charkha. Swadeshi meant the use of the products of one's own country and neighbourhood. Its symbol was the spinning wheel (charkha) and hand-spun cloth (khadi), which gave work to idle villagers, reduced dependence on Lancashire and united rich and poor in one dress.

Sarvodaya and the constructive programme. Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, was Gandhi's social ideal, taken from John Ruskin's book Unto This Last. The constructive programme included Hindu-Muslim unity, removal of untouchability, prohibition of liquor, khadi, village industries, basic education, sanitation and the uplift of women. Gandhi insisted that a movement without constructive work was like a body without a soul.

Gandhi landed at Bombay on 9 January 1915. His work in South Africa was well known, and the government of India awarded him the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal for public service the same year. Following Gokhale's advice he spent his first year travelling third class across the country, visiting Shantiniketan, Haridwar, Rangoon, Madras and many small towns, and studying the condition of the people. He wore the dress of a Kathiawadi peasant, spoke in Hindustani or Gujarati rather than English, and met everyone, from viceroys to sweepers.

On 25 May 1915 he founded the Satyagraha Ashram at Kochrab near Ahmedabad; in 1917 it moved to the bank of the Sabarmati river and became the famous Sabarmati Ashram. Ahmedabad was chosen because it was a centre of textile mills and hand-weaving, where the charkha could be revived, and because Gujarati was his mother tongue. The ashram was a laboratory of his ideals: residents took eleven vows, including truth, non-violence, celibacy, non-stealing, non-possession, physical labour, control of the palate, fearlessness, swadeshi, removal of untouchability and equal respect for all religions. When Gandhi admitted an untouchable family, Dudabhai and his wife Danibehn, wealthy patrons stopped their donations, but Gandhi refused to send the family away.

In February 1916 Gandhi spoke at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University, in the presence of princes covered with jewels, and told them that there was no salvation for India unless they stripped themselves of that jewellery and held it in trust for the poor. The speech shocked the audience but announced a new kind of leader who would speak for the peasant.

Gandhi did not immediately join the Congress politics of the day. He kept away from the Home Rule agitation of Tilak and Annie Besant in 1916, saying that he could not agitate against a government while a war was on, and even helped recruit soldiers for the British army in 1918. Instead he waited for local struggles in which his method could be tested, and three such struggles came to him in 1917 and 1918: Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda.

Gokhale died in February 1915, within weeks of Gandhi's return. Gandhi lost his guide but inherited his respect for facts, his patience and his belief that political work is a form of service.

Champaran is a district in the north of Bihar, at the foot of the Himalayas. Here European planters had for a century forced the tenants to grow indigo on three-twentieths of their land under the tinkathia system (three kathas out of every twenty of a bigha), and to sell it at a fixed low price. When synthetic dyes from Germany made indigo unprofitable, the planters tried to release tenants from the obligation only on payment of heavy compensation, called tawan, and raised rents. Peasants were beaten, their cattle seized, their homes burnt; they had no redress.

A peasant of Champaran, Rajkumar Shukla, met Gandhi at the Lucknow Congress in December 1916 and would not leave him until he agreed to come. Gandhi reached Champaran in April 1917 with a group of local lawyers, among them Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugraha Narayan Sinha and Mazharul Haq; J. B. Kripalani also joined. The Commissioner ordered him to leave the district. Gandhi refused, and on 18 April 1917 stood in the court at Motihari and pleaded guilty of disobeying the order, saying that he had come to serve and could not obey an order that went against his conscience. Thousands of peasants surrounded the court. The government, afraid, withdrew the case. This was the first act of civil disobedience in India.

Gandhi then recorded the statements of about 8,000 peasants, village by village. The volunteers also opened schools, taught sanitation and gave medical help; Kasturba joined this work. The Lieutenant-Governor, Edward Gait, appointed a committee of inquiry with Gandhi as a member. The committee accepted the peasants' case, and the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918 abolished the tinkathia system and ordered the planters to refund a part (25 per cent) of the illegal exactions. Within a few years the planters left Champaran.

The significance of Champaran was enormous. It showed that Satyagraha worked on Indian soil; it showed the government that the peasant, once organised, could not be ignored; it gave Gandhi a team of able lieutenants from Bihar; and it turned him from an outsider into a leader whom the villagers called Bapu and Mahatma. Gandhi wrote that in Champaran he came face to face with God, ahimsa and truth.

The second experiment was in Gandhi's own city. Ahmedabad was the Manchester of India, with dozens of cotton mills. During the plague of 1917 the mill owners had paid a plague bonus of up to 75 per cent of wages to keep workers from fleeing the city. When the plague ended in early 1918 they withdrew the bonus, though the war had raised prices so much that a worker could hardly feed his family. The workers demanded a 50 per cent increase in wages; the owners offered 20 per cent and locked the mills on 22 February 1918.

Anasuya Sarabhai, a social worker whose own brother, Ambalal Sarabhai, was the leader of the mill owners, brought the workers' case to Gandhi. Gandhi studied the accounts and concluded that a 35 per cent rise was just. He advised the workers to strike, but on conditions: no violence, no molesting of blacklegs, no begging, no dependence on charity, and firm adherence to the demand however long the strike lasted. Every day he addressed the workers under a babul tree on the bank of the Sabarmati, and issued a daily leaflet explaining the conditions of a righteous strike.

After two weeks the workers began to weaken and attendance at the meetings fell. Some said that Gandhi and Anasuya ate well while they starved. On 15 March 1918 Gandhi announced that he would take no food until the strike was settled. This was his first fast in a public cause in India. He explained that the fast was not to coerce the owners, who were his friends, but to strengthen the resolve of the workers who had taken a pledge. The fast shook both sides. On the third day, 18 March, the owners agreed to arbitration, and the arbitrator eventually awarded the 35 per cent rise that Gandhi had proposed.

The Ahmedabad struggle had lasting results. It established the principles of the Gandhian approach to labour: workers and employers are not natural enemies, the dispute should be settled by arbitration, a strike must be non-violent and truthful, and the leader must share the workers' hardship. In 1920 this approach produced the Textile Labour Association (Majoor Mahajan) of Ahmedabad under Anasuya Sarabhai, one of the earliest trade unions in India. It also showed that Gandhi could win the loyalty of industrial workers, not only peasants.

Kheda (also written Kaira) is a district of central Gujarat between Ahmedabad and Baroda, inhabited by hard-working Patidar peasants. In 1917 excessive rain destroyed the kharif crop, and prices of essentials had doubled because of the war. Under the revenue rules a farmer whose crop was less than four annas in the rupee (25 per cent of normal) was entitled to a full remission of land revenue, and one whose crop was less than six annas to half remission. The peasants claimed that the crop had failed, but the revenue officers assessed it higher and insisted on full collection, attaching cattle and household goods of those who could not pay.

Local leaders, including Mohanlal Pandya and Shankarlal Parikh, petitioned in vain, and the Gujarat Sabha, of which Gandhi was president, took up the cause. Gandhi's volunteers surveyed the fields village by village and confirmed that the crop had failed. When the Bombay government refused to hear them, Gandhi advised the peasants on 22 March 1918 to withhold the revenue. They took a pledge not to pay until the government granted remission to those who could not pay, and to accept the confiscation of their property rather than break their word.

The struggle was led on the ground by Vallabhbhai Patel, a prosperous Ahmedabad barrister who gave up his practice, changed into the dress of a peasant and toured the villages with Gandhi. This was the beginning of Patel's political life, and Kheda made him the unquestioned leader of Gujarat. Indulal Yagnik, Mahadev Desai and others also worked in the villages. The government responded by seizing cattle, standing crops and even the utensils of the poorest, and some peasants wavered. In one village, Gandhi advised the peasants to harvest an onion crop that had been attached, and Mohanlal Pandya, who led them, went to jail and earned the title 'Onion Thief'.

After four months, in June 1918, the government quietly issued an order that revenue would be collected only from those able to pay, and that the poorer peasants would not be pressed. Gandhi accepted this as the substance of the demand and called off the struggle. The result was not a complete victory, but it was the first peasant no-tax campaign of the Gandhian era, and it taught the peasants of Gujarat the strength of collective, disciplined refusal, a lesson they used again at Bardoli in 1928 and in the Salt Satyagraha of 1930.

Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda were small in scale, but a student should be able to explain why historians treat them as the foundation of Gandhi's national leadership.

First, they tested the method. In each case Gandhi followed the same sequence: careful inquiry into facts, a clear and limited demand, an attempt at negotiation, then open non-violent resistance with acceptance of the consequences. Each ended in a settlement that the other side could accept without humiliation. Satyagraha was shown to be a practical technique, not a mystic idea.

Second, they reached new classes. Before 1917 the national movement was confined to the English-educated middle class of the cities. Champaran involved tenant farmers, Ahmedabad involved mill workers and Kheda involved peasant proprietors. Gandhi had linked the political movement with the everyday economic grievances of the masses. This was the secret of the mass character of every later movement.

Third, they created leaders. Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugraha Narayan Sinha and J. B. Kripalani came out of Champaran; Vallabhbhai Patel, Mahadev Desai, Indulal Yagnik and Anasuya Sarabhai came out of Kheda and Ahmedabad. These men and women formed the backbone of the Congress for the next thirty years.

Fourth, they built Gandhi's image. He lived among the villagers, ate their food, cleaned latrines, taught sanitation and opened schools. The peasants called him Mahatma; Rabindranath Tagore is usually credited with the popular use of the title. No other Congress leader was known so widely in the villages.

Fifth, they demonstrated his moderation. Gandhi accepted partial gains, 25 per cent refund at Champaran, 35 per cent rise at Ahmedabad, an informal concession at Kheda, rather than fight to the finish. The government learnt that he was a negotiator, not an anarchist, and this made it hesitate to crush him.

The government, however, also noted something dangerous: a leader who could call thousands into the street and send them home again at will. When the Rowlatt Act came in 1919, both sides were ready for a national test.

During the First World War the government had ruled by the Defence of India Act, which allowed detention without trial. As the war ended, Indians expected reward for their sacrifice: over a million soldiers, huge war loans, and Gandhi's own recruiting campaign. Instead the government appointed a committee under Justice Sidney Rowlatt to recommend how to fight 'revolutionary crime' in peacetime. On its report the Imperial Legislative Council passed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act in March 1919, popularly the Rowlatt Act, against the vote of every Indian member. It allowed arrest without warrant, detention without trial for up to two years, trial by three judges without a jury and without appeal, and restrictions on the press. Indians called it the Black Act and summed it up as na vakil, na dalil, na apeel (no lawyer, no argument, no appeal).

Gandhi, recovering from a serious illness, saw in the Act an insult to a loyal people and a denial of civil liberty. In February 1919 he formed the Satyagraha Sabha in Bombay, whose members pledged to disobey the Act and similar laws. Since the Act itself gave the citizen nothing to disobey, he called for a nationwide hartal, a day of fasting, prayer and closing of business, as a peaceful protest. It was first fixed for 30 March and then for 6 April 1919; Delhi observed it on 30 March and ten people were killed in police firing.

The hartal of 6 April was the first time an all-India action had been taken by the common people, in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Lahore, Amritsar, Ahmedabad and hundreds of small towns. Hindus and Muslims marched together; in Delhi Swami Shraddhanand addressed a congregation from the pulpit of the Jama Masjid. Gandhi also planned civil disobedience of selected laws, and in Bombay sold banned books, including Hind Swaraj, on the streets.

But the response soon went beyond Gandhi's control. On 9 April he was arrested at Palwal while travelling to Punjab and sent back to Bombay; the news caused riots in Ahmedabad, Viramgam and Nadiad, where Europeans were killed and buildings burnt. In Punjab, the arrest and deportation of the Amritsar leaders Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal on 10 April led to mob violence and the killing of five Europeans, followed by martial law. Gandhi confessed that he had committed a Himalayan blunder in calling people to civil disobedience before they had learnt discipline, and on 18 April 1919 suspended the movement. The Rowlatt Satyagraha did not repeal the Act (it was in fact never used and was repealed in 1922), but it made Gandhi a national leader and set the stage for the tragedy at Amritsar.

Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs, had observed the hartal of 6 April with complete unity. On 10 April 1919 the Deputy Commissioner deported the two popular leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal. A crowd marching to demand their release was fired upon; in the violence that followed, five Englishmen were killed, a bank was burnt and a woman missionary, Miss Sherwood, was assaulted. The civil authorities handed the city to the army under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, who banned all public meetings, but the proclamation was not made known to most of the people.

On 13 April 1919, the day of Baisakhi, the Punjabi new year, about twenty thousand people, many of them villagers who had come to the city for the festival, gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden with only one narrow entrance, to hold a peaceful meeting. Dyer arrived with about ninety soldiers, blocked the entrance and, without any warning, ordered them to fire on the crowd. The firing continued for about ten minutes, 1,650 rounds, until the ammunition was nearly exhausted; the soldiers aimed at the points where the crowd was thickest and at the walls people were trying to climb. The official count was 379 dead and over 1,200 wounded; Indian estimates put the dead at over a thousand. Dyer left without helping the wounded. Afterwards he imposed martial law with humiliating orders: Indians had to crawl on their bellies through the lane where Miss Sherwood had been attacked, public floggings were held and aeroplanes bombed villages in Gujranwala.

The massacre changed the mood of India. Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood in protest on 30 May 1919, writing that the badge of honour made his shame glaring. Gandhi returned the Kaiser-i-Hind medal. Faith in British justice, the foundation of Moderate politics, was shattered.

The government appointed the Hunter Commission in October 1919 under Lord William Hunter; the Congress boycotted it and appointed its own inquiry committee with Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das, Abbas Tyabji and M. R. Jayakar. Before the Commission Dyer stated that he had fired to produce a moral effect throughout the Punjab and would have used the machine guns of his armoured cars if he could have got them in. The Commission censured him mildly and he was merely asked to retire; in Britain the House of Lords praised him and a public fund collected 26,000 pounds for him. This whitewash convinced Indians that they could expect no justice from the Empire, and it drove Gandhi, who had until then called himself a loyalist, towards the demand for Swaraj and the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920.

The Khalifa (Caliph) was regarded by Sunni Muslims as the spiritual head of Islam and the guardian of the holy places of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and for centuries the Sultan of Turkey had held this title. Turkey had fought against Britain in the First World War and was defeated. Indian Muslims, who had fought in the British army on the promise that the Khalifa's position and the holy places would be respected, now feared that the victorious powers would dismember the Turkish Empire and strip the Khalifa of his authority. These fears came true in the harsh Treaty of Sevres (August 1920).

In 1919 the Khilafat Committee was formed in Bombay by the brothers Maulana Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Hasrat Mohani to press the British government to honour its promises. On 17 October 1919 an all-India Khilafat Day was observed. An All-India Khilafat Conference at Delhi in November 1919, attended by Gandhi, decided to withdraw all cooperation from the government if the demands were not met.

Gandhi saw in the Khilafat grievance an opportunity that might not come again in a hundred years: a chance to unite Hindus and Muslims in a common struggle against the same government. He argued that if Hindus supported the Muslims in their hour of religious trouble, the two communities would be bound together for ever. He became the guiding spirit of the Khilafat Committee, and it was the Khilafat Committee, in May and June 1920, that first adopted his programme of non-cooperation in four stages: surrender of titles, resignation from government service, withdrawal from the police and army, and refusal to pay taxes.

The Congress was more cautious. At its special session at Calcutta in September 1920, presided over by Lala Lajpat Rai, Gandhi moved the resolution for non-cooperation on the three issues of the Punjab wrongs, the Khilafat wrong and Swaraj. Despite the opposition of C. R. Das, Bipin Chandra Pal, Annie Besant and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the resolution passed, and it was confirmed at the Nagpur session in December 1920. Jinnah left the Congress after Nagpur.

For about two years Hindu-Muslim unity reached a height never seen before or after: Hindus and Muslims drank water from the same vessels, the Ali brothers and Gandhi toured the country together, and the slogans of Khilafat and Swaraj were raised in one breath. The unity did not last, and when Turkey itself abolished the Caliphate in 1924 the Khilafat cause vanished, but in 1920 it was the bridge that made the first mass movement possible.

Between 1915 and 1920 Gandhi passed from a returned expatriate to the unquestioned leader of the national movement. Several reasons together explain this rapid rise, and an examination answer should be able to list them.

A method for the masses. Satyagraha needed no arms, no money and no education. Anyone could close a shop, refuse a tax, spin cotton or go to jail. For the first time the peasant, the worker, the woman and the student had a role.

Proof of success. Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda were fresh victories at a time when the old Congress had nothing to show. Success attracted followers and silenced critics.

A leader who looked like the people. Gandhi's loincloth, his third-class travel, his ashram, his fasting and his simple Hindustani speech made him a familiar figure in a way that no barrister in a suit could be. Villagers saw him as a saint, a Mahatma, and religious respect became political loyalty.

A national cause. The Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Khilafat wrong gave him issues that touched every province and both major communities. The old leaders had either died (Gokhale 1915, Pherozeshah Mehta 1915, Tilak on 1 August 1920, the very day Non-Cooperation began) or were unable to lead a mass movement.

Organisation. At Nagpur in December 1920 the Congress rewrote its constitution on Gandhi's proposals: a small Working Committee of fifteen to act as an executive, Provincial Congress Committees on a linguistic basis (which is how Utkal got its own Provincial Committee), membership open to anyone paying four annas a year, and Hindustani as the language of proceedings. The Congress changed from an annual debating society into a permanent mass organisation.

Moderation combined with courage. Gandhi never asked for more than he thought the people could do, and he called off action, as in April 1919, when it turned violent. The government found him hard to crush because he was neither a bomb-thrower nor a mere petitioner.

By December 1920 the Congress had accepted his programme of non-cooperation and the goal of Swaraj by peaceful and legitimate means. The next chapter follows this programme into the Non-Cooperation Movement and its powerful echo in Odisha, where leaders such as Gopabandhu Das had already been drawn to Gandhi's ideas.

Although Gandhi's first visit to Odisha came only in March 1921, the ideas of this chapter reached Odisha before he did, and the board expects students to know how the province received them.

The national movement in Odisha before 1920 was weak and divided. The Odia-speaking people were scattered across three provinces, Bengal, the Central Provinces and Madras, and the leading public figure, Madhusudan Das, had devoted his energy to the Utkal Sammilani (founded 1903) and the demand for a united Odisha province, keeping the Sammilani away from Congress politics. The Congress had a small presence in Cuttack through men such as Gopabandhu Das, Madhusudan Das himself, and the lawyers of the town, and the Home Rule agitation of 1916-17 had a few branches.

The turning point was Pandit Gopabandhu Das (1877-1928), the Utkalmani. He had founded the open-air school at Satyabadi (Sakhigopal) in 1909 with Nilakantha Das, Godavarish Mishra, Krupasindhu Mishra and Acharya Harihar Das, where boys were taught under bakul trees to love their land and serve the people, and in October 1919 he started the weekly newspaper Samaj from Satyabadi to carry the message of national awakening to villages. Gopabandhu had already been moved by the Rowlatt agitation and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre; the Satyabadi group discussed Gandhi's writings and welcomed the Khilafat-Congress programme.

When the Nagpur Congress of December 1920 organised Provincial Congress Committees on a linguistic basis, Odisha gained what it had never had: a Utkal Provincial Congress Committee of its own, formed in early 1921 with Gopabandhu Das as its first president. Gandhi's principle of linguistic provinces thus recognised the Odia identity for which Madhusudan Das had fought, and the two streams of Odia politics, the language movement and the national movement, began to flow together.

Gandhi's ideas found ready ground in Odisha for several reasons: the memory of the Paika Rebellion of 1817 and the great famine of 1866 had left deep distrust of British rule; the peasants of the coastal districts and of estates such as Kanika suffered heavy rents and forced labour; and the Satyabadi teachers had already prepared a generation of young men for service and sacrifice. When Gandhi came to Cuttack on 23 March 1921 and addressed a vast crowd on the bed of the Kathajodi river, Odisha was ready for the Non-Cooperation Movement, which is the subject of the next chapter.