Venu Madhav Govindu - 100 Years of Champaran and a Forgotten Figure
The historical
narrative of the events of 1917 is rather well-known and can be very briefly
summarised thus. Upon arriving in Champaran, Gandhi sought to witness and
understand the state of affairs for himself. Served with an order of externment
from the district, Gandhi introduced a new innovation into Indian public life.
He refused to obey the order and also pleaded guilty to the charge of
disobedience when hauled before the court. The local administration was at its
wits end in the face of this novel approach and was eventually ordered by the
Lieutenant-Governor to withdraw the case against Gandhi. Armed with this moral
victory, Gandhi and his newly found colleagues recorded thousands of statements
from peasants who overcame the fear of reprisals to depose against the
planters. Eventually, an enquiry committee was appointment with Gandhi as a
member, tinkathia was abolished and Gandhi's Champaran satyagraha passed into
legend.
Revisiting Gandhi’s
Leadership: As much as it has been
celebrated in historiography, Gandhi's leadership of peasant causes has also
been denounced and criticised. In a very broad sense, the critics can be
grouped into two categories. The first of such approaches—exemplified by the
Cambridge school—questions the motives of the leaders of the Indian struggle
against British rule. In this view, the primary motivation was not the high
value of a thirst for freedom and justice, but a rather base desire to enhance
ones social and economic standing. For instance, in the case of Champaran it
has been suggested that the upper caste agitators against the planters were
motivated by the desire to be able to freely exploit the hapless peasants on
their own terms. This is a rather derogatory interpretation of the fact that
many individuals gave up comfortable careers, spent years in prison and
subjected themselves and their families to much material privation.
The obverse of this
approach has been a variety of devices employed to diminish the depradations of
colonialism. Thus, in the well-known study Champaran and Gandhi:
Planters, Peasants and Gandhian Politics, the French historian Jacques
Pouchepadass blames Champaran zamindars for setting a bad example. “A planter”,
Pouchepadass argues, “who in England would have been ashamed of the means which
he employed, nonetheless resorted to them in India, because they were common in
the indigenous milieu”. Wholly sympathetic to the poor planters’ predicament,
Pouchepadass goes on to note that “there is no dearth of evidence concerning
the paternal relations existing between the planters and his raiyats, and the
humanitarian assistance which he dispensed to them in times of trial”.
Presumably this fact was so self-evident that he did not deem it necessary to
proffer any evidence for such a claim.
The other approach
that spans the left-subaltern spectrum of historical analysis argues that the
Gandhian mass mobilisation only served to preserve the unequal class structure
in the Indian countryside and thereby nullified the revolutionary potential of
the peasantry. Much as one may disagree with this assessment, it merits a
closer examination than that of the Cambridge School. Although a detailed
analysis of Gandhi's position on zamindari and peasant-landlord relations is
outside our purview here, in Champaran, the goals were of a limited nature. It
must be remembered that as a new arrival on the Indian political scene and an
outsider in Bihar, Gandhi had very limited manpower and resources at his
disposal. In fact, just two months prior to his arrival, Gandhi did not even
know where Champaran was located. While it is true that in the 1930s and 1940s
one sees a great divergence between the conservative Bihar Congress leadership
and the peasant militancy of the Kisan Sabha, it is historically incorrect to
apply this class divide to the Gandhian challenge to European planters in
Champaran in 1917.
There were multiple events
of sporadic protest against the planters in the years prior to Gandhi's arrival
in Champaran, many of which would qualify as subaltern protests from below.
But, independent of the moral undesirability of violent protest without a
coherent objective, it is hardly the case that these constituted a truly
revolutionary scenario in the Bihar countryside. As a new entrant on the Indian
political scene, Gandhi could scarcely be expected to take on the wider and
more serious challenge of entirely reworking the agrarian power structure in
the region. In any event, both schools of critics fail to accord importance to
the many novel ideas that Gandhi introduced into public action in Champaran.
Just to consider one such factor, it is no mean feat to embolden an oppressed
peasantry to testify against the planters at grave risk of personal harm….
Raj Kumar Shukla: Sympathetic as these
portrayals are to Gandhi and India's cause for freedom, they fail to do
adequate justice to the persona of Shukla. Born on 23 August 1875, at the turn
of the century, Shukla worked for a period of four years for the Bettiah
Estate. Contrary to popular perception, Shukla was not always a penurious
peasant. Living in the west Champaran region, he had a substantial
money-lending business, owned a large number of buffaloes and cattle and was a
cultivator of 20 bighas of land in Belwa and Sathi. Shukla's trouble
started with his refusal to pay an illegal irrigation cess that was being
extorted by A C Ammon, the English manager of the Belwa indigo
factory. Ammon decided to teach Shukla a lesson that would act as a deterrent
against further protests. Ammon's lathiyal henchmen
continually harrassed him and also looted and burnt down his house. A number of
frivolous cases were filed against Shukla and fighting them took up a
substantial amount of time and resources. In the process, as intended by Ammon,
Shukla ended up in prison and his personal fortunes went into precipitous
decline. Shukla's story was by no means unique and being at the receiving end
of the animus of the local planter was the fate of many a Champaran resident.
What is unique, perhaps, is the dogged determination and endurance with which
Shukla faced the woes inflicted on him.
The cry for redress
from the Champaran peasantry was mostly ignored by the colonial administration.
Although the educated, urban Indian elite were a bit more sympathetic, their involvement
was also on very limited terms. Similarly the local newspapers were wary of
directly opposing the powerful planters community. In this atmosphere, valuable
support was provided by the Kanpur based newspaper Pratap, which
was published by the nationalist Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi. In any event,
towards the end of 1916, unable to muster adequate local support for action,
Shukla headed to Lucknow for the 31st annual session of the
Indian National Congress. This decision had momentous consequences in the
following year.
As evidenced in his
letters from early 1917, Gandhi's early perception of Shukla was not altogether
positive. Apart from Shukla's inability to answer the many probing legal
questions posed by the Mahatma, their difficulty in communication was also an
important factor. The two men belonged to distinct linguistic backgrounds.
Gandhi spoke Gujarati and, at that point, had limited facility with Hindi.
Shukla was a native speaker of Bhojpuri, a language distinct from Hindi.
Indeed, since Shukla spoke only rudimentary Hindi and could not write in
Devanagari, his well-known letter to Gandhi reminding the latter of his promise
to visit Champaran was actually penned by someone else. That individual was
another champion of Champaran peasants, the largely forgotten Pir Mohammad
“Munis”. A teacher in Bettiah, Munis had written a number of articles in Pratap
from 1914 which vividly portrayed the oppression inflicted by the
planters. Owing to such activities, Munis lost his job, was imprisoned in 1918 and
spent a life in penury… read more:
http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/14/web-exclusives/raj-kumar-shukla-forgotten-champion-gandhis-champaran-%E2%80%9Cmagic%E2%80%9D.html
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