Chapter 2 — ଭାରତରେ ଅସହଯୋଗ ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନ ଓ ଓଡ଼ିଶାରେ ଏହାର ପ୍ରଭାବ

The Non-Cooperation Movement grew out of the disappointments of 1919 and 1920, which the previous chapter described. The Congress spoke of three wrongs that the government had committed and refused to right.

The first was the Punjab wrong. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919 and the martial-law cruelties that followed had been examined by the Hunter Commission, but the Commission only mildly censured General Dyer, the House of Lords praised him and a British public fund rewarded him. Indians concluded that the Empire would never punish its own officers for killing Indians.

The second was the Khilafat wrong. The Treaty of Sevres of August 1920 stripped Turkey of its Arab provinces and threatened the authority of the Sultan-Khalifa, breaking the wartime assurances that British ministers had given to Indian Muslims. The Khilafat Committee of the Ali brothers, Maulana Azad and Hakim Ajmal Khan turned to Gandhi for a plan of action.

The third was the failure to grant Swaraj. The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, embodied in the Government of India Act 1919, had introduced dyarchy in the provinces: subjects such as education, health and local government were 'transferred' to Indian ministers responsible to enlarged legislatures, but finance, police and land revenue were 'reserved' for the Governor and his officials. At the centre there was no responsible government at all, the Viceroy kept his veto and the franchise covered barely three per cent of the population. Indians who had expected self-government as a reward for their war effort found the reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory, and coupled as they were with the Rowlatt Act they looked like a bribe offered with one hand while the other hand held a stick.

Beneath these political grievances lay economic distress. Prices had doubled during the war, the monsoon failed in 1918 and 1920, the influenza epidemic of 1918 killed over twelve million Indians, peasants groaned under revenue and rent, and the soldiers who returned from Europe brought new ideas of equality. The country was ready to act; it needed a programme and a leader.

Gandhi supplied both. In the summer of 1920 he wrote to the Viceroy returning his Kaiser-i-Hind medal and declared that a government that had failed to right the Punjab and Khilafat wrongs had forfeited the loyalty of its subjects, and that non-violent non-cooperation was the only remedy left to a people who would not resort to the sword.

The Khilafat Committee accepted Gandhi's programme of non-cooperation at Allahabad in June 1920 and launched it on 1 August 1920. The Congress had to decide whether to follow. A special session met at Calcutta in September 1920 under the presidency of Lala Lajpat Rai. Gandhi moved a resolution declaring that there was no course left open to the people of India but the adoption of progressive non-violent non-cooperation until the wrongs were righted and Swaraj established. The programme was set out in stages: surrender of titles and honorary offices; refusal to attend government functions; gradual withdrawal of children from government schools and colleges; boycott of British courts by lawyers and litigants; refusal to serve in Mesopotamia; boycott of the elections to the reformed councils; and boycott of foreign goods.

The resolution met strong opposition. C. R. Das, Bipin Chandra Pal, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Annie Besant and Mohammad Ali Jinnah argued that boycotting councils and schools would harm Indians more than the British and that the country was not ready. Motilal Nehru was the only major leader who supported Gandhi from the start. Yet the delegates, especially the younger ones and the Muslims, voted with Gandhi, by 1,886 votes to 884 in the open session, and the resolution passed.

The regular session at Nagpur in December 1920, presided over by C. Vijayaraghavachariar, confirmed the Calcutta decision. C. R. Das, who had come to oppose, was won over and himself moved the main resolution. Nagpur also changed the goal of the Congress: the creed was amended to the attainment of Swaraj by all legitimate and peaceful means, dropping the earlier reference to self-government within the British Empire. The new constitution created a fifteen-member Working Committee, Provincial Congress Committees on a linguistic basis, District and Taluk Committees, and a four-anna membership open to all above twenty-one. Jinnah walked out of the Congress and never returned.

Gandhi told the Nagpur session that if the programme were carried out fully and non-violently, India would win Swaraj within one year. The promise electrified the country, though it was later held against him. The linguistic principle had a special result for Odisha: for the first time the Odia-speaking people, though scattered over three provinces, were given one Congress unit of their own, the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee.

The programme had two faces, a negative or boycott side that withdrew Indian cooperation from the machinery of British rule, and a positive or constructive side that built Indian alternatives. Gandhi insisted that the two must go together.

The boycott programme. (1) Surrender of titles such as Rai Bahadur, Khan Bahadur and Sir, and resignation from nominated seats in local bodies. (2) Boycott of government and government-aided schools and colleges by students and teachers. (3) Boycott of law courts by lawyers, who were to give up practice, and by litigants, who were to settle disputes in private panchayats. (4) Boycott of the elections to the new legislative councils under the 1919 Act, both as candidates and as voters. (5) Boycott of foreign cloth and, in time, of all foreign goods, with public bonfires of foreign clothes. (6) Boycott of official functions and of the visit of the Prince of Wales. (7) Refusal to serve as recruits for the army in Mesopotamia. The later stages, resignation from government service and the police, and non-payment of taxes, were held in reserve to be applied only when the country was ready and disciplined.

The constructive programme. (1) Establishment of national schools and colleges: the Jamia Millia Islamia at Aligarh (later Delhi), the Gujarat Vidyapith at Ahmedabad, the Kashi Vidyapith at Banaras, the Bihar Vidyapith at Patna and the Bengal National College are examples. (2) Panchayats for settling disputes. (3) Popularising the charkha and khadi; every Congress worker was expected to spin daily, and the Congress asked for twenty lakh charkhas by mid-1921. (4) Hindu-Muslim unity, with the Khilafat and Congress volunteers working together. (5) Removal of untouchability. (6) Prohibition of liquor, enforced by picketing toddy shops, which struck at a major source of government revenue. (7) Raising a Tilak Swaraj Fund of one crore rupees, enrolling one crore members and distributing twenty lakh charkhas, the three targets of the Bezwada programme of March 1921.

The movement was to remain strictly non-violent at every stage. Volunteers were organised in corps under the Congress and the Khilafat Committee, and they took a pledge of non-violence. Gandhi wrote that non-cooperation with evil was as much a duty as cooperation with good, and that a people who withdrew their cooperation could make government impossible without firing a shot. The programme was thus a complete attempt to build a parallel national life outside the structures of the Raj.

The year 1921 saw the country in unprecedented ferment. Gandhi and the Ali brothers toured India together, addressing meetings of lakhs of people. The boycott of councils was effective: in the elections of November 1920 only about a third of the voters turned out and in many constituencies the Congress candidates had withdrawn, so that the councils were filled by Liberals and loyalists. Thousands of students left government schools and colleges, particularly in Bengal, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; the national institutions such as the Gujarat Vidyapith and Kashi Vidyapith absorbed many of them. Hundreds of lawyers, including C. R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, C. Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai Patel, Saifuddin Kitchlew and Asaf Ali, gave up their practice.

The economic boycott was the most successful part. The value of imported foreign cloth fell from Rs 102 crore in 1920-21 to Rs 57 crore in 1921-22. Handloom and mill production rose, khadi became the uniform of the Congress worker, and the picketing of liquor shops cut excise revenue sharply in many provinces. Volunteers picketed cloth shops and toddy shops, and traders pledged not to import foreign cloth.

The movement reached the countryside in ways not always intended. In Uttar Pradesh the Kisan Sabhas of Awadh, led by Baba Ramchandra, attacked the oppression of taluqdars; in the Eka movement of Hardoi and Sitapur peasants refused to pay more than the recorded rent. In Malabar the Moplah tenants of Kerala rose against Hindu landlords and the government in August 1921, and the rising turned communal and was crushed with heavy loss of life. Tea-garden workers in Assam left the plantations. In Andhra the forest laws were defied. In Punjab the Sikh Akali movement sought to free the gurdwaras from corrupt mahants. Everywhere the name of Gandhi was invoked, sometimes for demands he had never made.

The government watched, waited and then struck. When the Prince of Wales landed at Bombay on 17 November 1921 the Congress observed a complete hartal; in Bombay itself riots between the crowd and those who had gone to welcome the Prince left fifty-eight dead, and Gandhi fasted in penance. In the following weeks the Congress and Khilafat volunteer corps were declared unlawful, and by the end of December about thirty thousand people were in jail, including C. R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, Maulana Azad and the Ali brothers. Gandhi was almost the only major leader still free. At the Ahmedabad session of December 1921, presided over by Hakim Ajmal Khan in place of the jailed C. R. Das, Gandhi was made the sole executive authority of the Congress.

By the beginning of 1922 the country was tense. The Ahmedabad Congress had authorised Gandhi to start mass civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes, and he chose the small taluka of Bardoli in Surat district, Gujarat, for the experiment, because its 87,000 people had been trained in the constructive programme. On 1 February 1922 he wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Reading, that unless political prisoners were released and the press freed within seven days, he would begin civil disobedience at Bardoli.

Before the week was over, the news came from Chauri Chaura, a village near Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. On 5 February 1922 a procession of Congress and Khilafat volunteers, picketing a liquor shop and a market, was fired on by the police. When the police ran out of ammunition and retreated into the thana, the enraged crowd set the building on fire and killed the twenty-two policemen who were inside, some of them burnt alive.

Gandhi was horrified. He saw in Chauri Chaura the proof that the people had not yet understood non-violence and that mass civil disobedience would end in bloodshed. On 12 February 1922 the Congress Working Committee, meeting at Bardoli, passed the Bardoli resolution suspending civil disobedience and all forms of activity that could lead to violence, and directing Congress workers to concentrate on the constructive programme: spinning, temperance, national schools, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity and the organisation of panchayats. Gandhi fasted for five days in penance.

The decision was bitterly criticised. The jailed leaders, Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das and Lala Lajpat Rai, protested that a national movement could not be stopped because of one incident in a remote village. Young men such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose were dismayed; Bose called it a national calamity. But Gandhi held that a Satyagraha stained with violence was no Satyagraha, and that means were as important as ends.

The government, which had hesitated to arrest Gandhi when he was at the height of his power, now moved. He was arrested on 10 March 1922 and tried at Ahmedabad on the charge of sedition for three articles in Young India. In his famous statement he pleaded guilty, described how a loyalist had become a rebel, and asked for the highest penalty. Judge Broomfield sentenced him to six years imprisonment, adding that if the government later reduced the sentence no one would be better pleased than he. Gandhi was released in February 1924 on grounds of health. The Non-Cooperation Movement was over.

The movement did not win Swaraj in a year, and to that extent it failed. Yet historians regard it as a turning point, and a student should weigh both sides.

Reasons for the withdrawal and failure. The people had not been fully trained in non-violence, as Chauri Chaura showed. The boycott of schools and courts could not be kept up for long; lawyers returned to practice and students to college. The Khilafat cause weakened as Turkey herself moved towards a republic, and it collapsed when the Caliphate was abolished in 1924. The government's mass arrests in December 1921 removed the leadership. Some sections, the big merchants, the zamindars and the Liberal politicians, never joined. And Gandhi's own caution, refusing to let the movement pass to the stage of no-tax until the country was ready, kept the pressure on the government below breaking point.

Achievements. First, the movement made the Congress a mass organisation; peasants, workers, artisans, students, women and Muslims took part in numbers never seen before, and the Congress reached the villages. Second, it destroyed the fear of the government; thirty thousand people went to jail willingly, and prison became a badge of honour. Third, it demonstrated the economic weapon of boycott and the charkha, cutting foreign cloth imports almost by half and giving India the khadi movement. Fourth, it produced national education, the Vidyapiths and the national schools, and a generation of leaders trained in them. Fifth, it created a brief but real Hindu-Muslim unity. Sixth, it awakened the tribal and peasant population and the people of the princely states, and in provinces like Odisha it planted the Congress for the first time.

The movement also had lasting consequences for the strategy of the struggle. Gandhi's method of struggle-truce-struggle was seen for the first time: a mass phase, followed by withdrawal, constructive work and the building of strength for the next round, which came in 1930. The Swarajists, led by C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru, decided in 1923 to enter the councils and wreck them from within, while the No-changers under Gandhi's followers kept to the constructive programme; both streams stayed within the Congress. In Odisha, as the following sections show, the movement created the first provincial Congress, the first national schools and ashrams, the first generation of leaders and the first peasant risings under the Congress banner.

To understand the impact of the movement in Odisha, a student must first picture the province of 1920. There was no province of Odisha. The Odia-speaking people were divided: the coastal districts of Cuttack, Puri and Balasore, with the feudatory states of the Orissa Tributary Mahals, formed the Orissa Division of the province of Bihar and Orissa (created in 1912); Sambalpur had been attached to Bihar and Orissa in 1912 after years in the Central Provinces; Ganjam and the Vizagapatam agency (Koraput) lay under the Madras Presidency; and Odia areas of Midnapore remained in Bengal. This dismemberment was the great grievance of Odia public life, and the Utkal Sammilani founded by Madhusudan Das in 1903 had devoted itself to the demand for union of the Odia tracts, keeping deliberately aloof from the Congress.

The economic condition of the people was miserable. The memory of the Na Anka famine of 1866, which had killed a third of the population of the coastal districts, was still alive. The zamindari settlement burdened the tenants of estates such as Kanika, Aul, Kujang and Parikud with rack-rents, illegal cesses (abwabs) and forced labour (bethi). The salt monopoly had destroyed the traditional salt-making of the coast, and the weavers had been ruined by mill cloth. The feudatory states were under autocratic rajas.

Political consciousness was, however, awakening. Gopabandhu Das and the Satyabadi group had trained a generation of young men in patriotism and service; the weekly Samaj from 1919 carried the news of Punjab and Khilafat to the villages in Odia; and the Rowlatt agitation of 1919 had been observed in Cuttack, Puri and Balasore with hartals and meetings. Gopabandhu, who was a member of the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council from 1917, attended the Calcutta special session of September 1920 and was converted to non-cooperation, resigning his council seat. Other lawyers of Cuttack, such as Gopabandhu Choudhury (then a deputy collector who resigned his post), Bhagirathi Mahapatra, Jagabandhu Singh and Mukunda Prasad Das, joined him.

The Nagpur session of December 1920 was attended by a large Odia delegation. Its decision to organise Provincial Congress Committees on a linguistic basis recognised Utkal as a separate Congress province, and in early 1921 the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee (Utkal Pradesh Congress Committee) was formed with Gopabandhu Das as president. This was the first all-Odisha political organisation committed to the national struggle; it also brought together the Odia territories under three provincial governments in a single political unit, which the Sammilani had demanded for eighteen years.

Gandhi's first visit to Odisha, in the company of Kasturba, Maulana Mohammad Ali and others, was the event that launched the Non-Cooperation Movement in the province. He arrived at Cuttack on 23 March 1921 and stayed for about a week, touring Cuttack, Bhadrak, Puri, Satyabadi, Berhampur and other places.

The great public meeting at Cuttack was held on the dry bed of the Kathajodi river, below the town, because no ground in the city could hold the crowd. Some estimates put the gathering at fifty thousand, the largest ever assembled in Odisha till then, with people walking from distant villages. Gandhi spoke of the Punjab and Khilafat wrongs, of Swaraj within a year, of the charkha and the boycott of foreign cloth, of Hindu-Muslim unity and of the sin of untouchability. He appealed for the Tilak Swaraj Fund, and women came forward to give their ornaments. Gopabandhu Das translated the speech into Odia.

A separate meeting of women was addressed by Kasturba at Cuttack, and a meeting of students called upon them to leave government schools. At Bhadrak a huge gathering welcomed him; at Puri he was pained by the sight of the starving beggars near the temple of Jagannath and by the practice of untouchability at the temple, and he declined to enter the temple till it was open to all, a stand he kept throughout his life. At Satyabadi he saw the open-air school of Gopabandhu and blessed it as a national institution. At Berhampur in Ganjam, then under Madras, Niranjan Patnaik and others organised his reception, and the movement in south Odisha dates from this visit.

The results of the visit were immediate. The Swaraj Ashram was established at Cuttack as the headquarters of the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee. The Tilak Swaraj Fund collections in Odisha reached about a lakh of rupees, a large sum for a poor province. Students left the Ravenshaw College and the government schools; lawyers of Cuttack, Puri and Balasore gave up practice; the charkha appeared in thousands of homes; and Congress committees were formed in the districts. Above all, the Odia peasant had seen with his own eyes the man of whom Samaj had written, and the name of Gandhi became a talisman in the villages, sometimes attached to hopes, such as the end of rent and forced labour, that went beyond the Congress programme.

Gandhi visited Odisha again several times, in 1925, 1927, 1934 (during the Harijan tour, on foot from Puri) and 1938, but the visit of March 1921 was the one that changed the political life of the province.

The movement in Odisha was led by a group of men and women who gave up careers and comfort, and the board expects students to know who they were and what they did.

Pandit Gopabandhu Das (1877-1928), the Utkalmani, was the soul of the movement: founder of the Satyabadi school and of Samaj, first president of the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee, tireless organiser of relief in floods and famines, and the man who took Gandhi's message to the villages. He was arrested in 1922 for a speech at the Kanika peasants' conference and spent two years in Hazaribagh jail.

Gopabandhu Choudhury (1895-1958) resigned as deputy collector in 1921, founded the Alakashram at Jagatsinghpur with his wife Rama Devi as a centre of constructive work, and became the organiser of the Cuttack district, and later the leader of the Salt Satyagraha. Rama Devi (1899-1985) was the first woman of Odisha to come out of purdah into public life, going from village to village to spread the charkha and collect for the Swaraj Fund.

Acharya Harihar Das, Nilakantha Das, Godavarish Mishra and Krupasindhu Mishra, the Satyabadi teachers, carried the movement to Puri district and turned the Satyabadi school into a national school. Jagabandhu Singh, Bhagirathi Mahapatra and Mukunda Prasad Das of Cuttack gave up legal practice. Jadumani Mangaraj and Surendranath Das organised Balasore. In Ganjam, under Madras, Niranjan Patnaik, Biswanath Das and Sashi Bhusan Rath, editor of the Asha newspaper of Berhampur, led the movement; Niranjan Patnaik's khadi centre at Berhampur became famous across south India. In Sambalpur, Laxminarayan Mishra and Bhagirathi Patnaik organised the western districts. Harekrushna Mahtab of Balasore, then a student at Ravenshaw College, left college in 1921 and began the career that later made him Chief Minister of Odisha. Nabakrushna Choudhury also came into the movement at this time. Among Muslims, Maulvi Abdus Sobhan Khan and Mohammad Hanif of Cuttack linked the Khilafat and Congress volunteers.

The poets and journalists gave the movement its voice. Kuntala Kumari Sabat and Gangadhar Meher had already written patriotic verse; Birakishore Das composed the national songs that volunteers sang; and Samaj, Asha and Utkal Dipika reported the arrests and the meetings. Together these leaders built, in a little over a year, a Congress organisation that reached every district of the Odia country.

The movement in Odisha followed the all-India programme but took a local colour in each district.

Cuttack was the headquarters. The Swaraj Ashram in the town housed the Provincial Committee, and district and taluk committees were formed. Students of Ravenshaw College and the Collegiate School left in numbers, and a national school was opened. Foreign cloth was picketed in the Cuttack bazaar, and a bonfire of foreign cloth was held. Volunteers marched to the villages of Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara and Jajpur with the charkha. The Alakashram at Jagatsinghpur became the training centre of the district.

Puri district was the stronghold of the Satyabadi group. The Satyabadi school refused government recognition and became a national school. Meetings were held at Puri, Sakhigopal, Nimapara and Khurda; the toddy shops were picketed; and the Sammilani and Congress workers together organised the peasants of the Parikud and other estates.

Balasore and Bhadrak were strongly affected. Gandhi's Bhadrak meeting of March 1921 had drawn a huge crowd; national schools opened at Balasore and Bhadrak; and Harekrushna Mahtab and Surendranath Das organised the villages of the district, where the memory of the salt-makers' ruin made the anti-government feeling deep. Balasore later became the centre of the Salt Satyagraha.

Ganjam, under the Madras Presidency, was organised by Niranjan Patnaik and Biswanath Das from Berhampur, with a khadi centre, national schools and picketing of liquor shops. The Asha of Sashi Bhusan Rath spread the message in south Odisha, where Congress work had been almost absent before 1921.

Sambalpur and the western districts saw meetings at Sambalpur town, Bargarh and Padampur; Laxminarayan Mishra and others organised the picketing of foreign cloth. In the feudatory states, such as Dhenkanal, Talcher, Nilgiri and Mayurbhanj, the rajas prohibited Congress activity, but the ideas seeped in through students and traders and prepared the ground for the Prajamandal movements of later years.

The government responded, as elsewhere, with arrests. The Congress and Khilafat volunteer organisations were declared unlawful in December 1921. Gopabandhu Das, Bhagirathi Mahapatra, Jagabandhu Singh, Niranjan Patnaik and many others were imprisoned in 1921 and 1922. The number of Odia prisoners was smaller than in Bengal or Bihar, but the movement had created something new: a network of Congress committees, ashrams, national schools and newspapers that survived the withdrawal of 1922 and became the base for the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930.

The most dramatic expression of Non-Cooperation in Odisha was the rising of the peasants of the Kanika estate, a large zamindari in the north-east of Cuttack district (now in Kendrapara), ruled by the Raja of Kanika, Rajendra Narayan Bhanja Deo, who was also a member of the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council and a favourite of the government.

The tenants of Kanika suffered from every abuse of the zamindari system: rack-rents enhanced at every settlement, a mass of illegal cesses (abwabs) levied on marriages, festivals and the Raja's visits, forced labour (bethi) and forced supply of goods (rasad) to the estate, restrictions on fishing in the creeks and on the cutting of grass and wood, and a private police that beat and imprisoned those who complained. The famine of 1866 and the floods of the Brahmani and Baitarani had made the region one of the poorest in Odisha.

When the Non-Cooperation Movement reached the villages in 1921, the peasants of Kanika organised themselves. They took the charkha and the Congress programme as their own, formed a peasant association, and resolved to refuse illegal cesses and forced labour. Their leader was a local peasant, Chakradhar Behera, with support from Congress workers of Cuttack. Meetings were held in the villages, and the Raja's officers were boycotted. The peasants demanded the abolition of bethi and abwabs and a reduction of rent.

The Raja and the government treated the rising as a breakdown of law and order. Armed police were sent, villages were raided, houses were burnt and looted, cattle were seized and hundreds of peasants were arrested. Gopabandhu Das, who visited Kanika and addressed the peasants' conference in 1922 in support of their demands, was prosecuted for his speech and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. The Provincial Congress Committee, following the Bardoli resolution, could not sanction a no-rent campaign, and the peasants were left to face repression alone. The rising was suppressed by the end of 1922.

Nevertheless the Kanika rising had important results. It was the first organised peasant movement in Odisha under the Congress banner and the first to link the grievances of the tenants with the national struggle. It exposed the oppression of the zamindari system in the coastal districts and led, after prolonged agitation, to the amendment of the Orissa Tenancy Act in the following years, which gave the tenants some protection against illegal cesses. It also produced the first generation of peasant leaders in Odisha and made the Congress the party of the peasant in the eyes of the countryside, a position it kept through the Prajamandal and Kisan movements of the 1930s.

The constructive side of the movement, which Gandhi valued above the boycott, took root in Odisha and outlived the political agitation.

Students. The call to boycott government schools was answered by students of Ravenshaw College, the Cuttack Collegiate School, the Puri Zilla School and the Balasore Zilla School. National schools were opened at Cuttack, Puri, Balasore, Bhadrak, Berhampur and Sambalpur. The most important was the Satyabadi Bana Vidyalaya, which gave up government recognition and affiliation and became the national school of Odisha, teaching Odia language and literature, history, spinning and weaving, and physical training alongside the ordinary subjects. Most of the national schools closed within a few years for want of funds and of a route to employment, but they trained a generation of volunteers.

Women. The most striking new feature was the entry of women into public life. Rama Devi came out of purdah in 1921 and toured villages with her husband Gopabandhu Choudhury. Sarala Devi, wife of Bhagirathi Mahapatra, joined the movement, was elected to the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee and later became the first woman member of the Odisha Legislative Assembly. Kokila Devi, Malati Choudhury (a little later), Kuntala Kumari Sabat the poetess and many others followed. Women collected for the Tilak Swaraj Fund, gave their ornaments, took to spinning and attended Kasturba's meetings. In a society where women of respectable families did not appear in public, this was a social revolution.

Charkha and khadi. The spinning wheel entered thousands of homes; khadi centres were opened at Alakashram (Jagatsinghpur), Berhampur and Cuttack; and the weavers of Sambalpur, Nuapatna and Berhampur found a new market for hand-woven cloth. Congress workers had to spin daily, and khadi became the dress of the volunteer.

Untouchability and prohibition. Following Gandhi's refusal to enter the Jagannath temple, Congress workers took up the cause of the untouchables, admitting them to the ashrams and schools, though temple entry was achieved only much later. Toddy and liquor shops were picketed in Puri, Ganjam and Cuttack.

Hindu-Muslim unity. The Khilafat volunteers of Cuttack and Balasore worked with the Congress volunteers, and joint meetings were held at mosques and temples, an example of unity that was remembered later when communal tension rose in other parts of India.

Relief work. The floods of 1921 and 1922 and the recurrent famines of the coastal districts gave the volunteers a field for service; Gopabandhu Das organised relief committees that fed thousands, and this service, more than any speech, won the villages to the Congress.

When Gandhi withdrew the movement in February 1922, the Odia volunteers, like those elsewhere, felt let down; several leaders were in jail, the national schools were struggling and the peasants of Kanika had been crushed. Yet the movement had changed Odisha in ways that lasted.

Political unity of the Odia people. The Utkal Provincial Congress Committee gave the Odia-speaking people of Bihar and Orissa, Madras and Bengal a single political organisation for the first time. The Congress in Odisha thereafter always combined the demand for Swaraj with the demand for a united Odisha province, and it was this combination, carried by Gopabandhu Das, Niranjan Patnaik, Harekrushna Mahtab and others, that led to the creation of the province in 1936.

Birth of mass politics. Before 1921 politics in Odisha was the affair of a few lawyers, landlords and teachers in the Utkal Sammilani. Gandhi's visit, the Kathajodi meeting, the picketing and the Kanika rising brought peasants, students and women into politics. The village had been reached.

New leadership. The movement produced the leaders of the next thirty years: Gopabandhu Choudhury, Rama Devi, Harekrushna Mahtab, Nabakrushna Choudhury, Niranjan Patnaik, Biswanath Das, Nityananda Kanungo, Sarala Devi and many more. Almost every later leader of Odisha's freedom struggle and its first governments entered public life in 1921.

Institutions. The Swaraj Ashram at Cuttack, the Alakashram at Jagatsinghpur, the khadi centres of Berhampur and Cuttack, the national schools and the newspaper Samaj became the permanent infrastructure of the Congress in Odisha, ready for the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 and the Quit India Movement of 1942.

Social change. The entry of women into public life, the attack on untouchability, the spread of the charkha and the boycott of foreign cloth altered social habits. Khadi became a mark of respect; the untouchable was admitted to Congress meetings and ashrams.

Peasant awakening. Kanika began the tradition of peasant agitation in Odisha that continued in the tenancy movements of the coastal estates and in the Prajamandal struggles of the feudatory states.

Limitations. The movement was strongest in the coastal districts and in Ganjam; it barely touched the feudatory states or the tribal areas of the west. It could not sustain the national schools, and it did not persuade the whole of the Utkal Sammilani, whose senior leaders remained aloof. But when Gopabandhu Das died in June 1928, worn out by relief work, the province mourned him as the man who had made Odisha a part of the Indian nation, and that was the true measure of what the years 1920-22 had done.