India's Civil Disobedience - What it meant and how it began?

As a kid I remember reading about Civil Disobedience Movement.  It sounded like a foreign but interesting topic which I never really fully understood.  And to be honest, history as a subject in the school curriculum was just a series of statements taught without any context.  I don't even remember my history class or my history teacher!  

I sailed through the history of India without realizing the struggle, and sacrifice generations before me went through to free India from the chains of colonialism that leeched India for over three hundred years.  Civil Disobedience Movement galvanized the entire nation, and brought the masses from cities to villages, farmers to barristers, and turned scattered disobedience into a national movement.

But, what did Civil Disobedience really entailed?  It's a question I grappled recently when I started reading 'The Man Who Saved India - Sardar Patel - And His Idea of India' by Indic author Hindol Sengupta.  Although the book is a retelling of the story of Sardar Patel, known as the iron man of India; who through his grit helped create the map we're all so familiar with yet it sheds a light on the ground level disobedience that light  

Yet, so little is know of the 'path of resistance that Indians swore allegiance to' thus laying the foundation of civil disobedience.  Henry David Thoreau in his book 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience' begins with a quote that need not be taken lightly, especially in the modern times when activism and rioting seems to be synonymous. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote his famous essay against an unjust but popular war and the immoral but popular institution of slave-owning.  I don't know if Indian leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Sardar Patel were directly inspired by this idea, but they did realize British Raj was a 'cloying display of affection that cloaked the steel of exploitation, simultaneously embracing and rejecting Indian opinion.'

The idea of home rule had already taken some roots in the mind of Tilak and Annie Besant who started the Home Rule League demanding self-government along the lines of Irish Home Rule Movement (which originated way back in 1870s).  Yet India's civil disobedience as a means to achieve this started in Champaran district of Bihar in 1917.  

Let's pause here, because Patel took on British few years before this, when in 1915 Patel clashed with the Ahmedabad Municipality over the issue of 'white residents of the cantonment area receiving clean water regularly, while supply to the rest of the Ahmedabad where Indians lived stuttered.'

The Second Beginning of Civil Disobedience.

'Under the British rule, many farmers in the Champaran district of Bihar were forced to grow indigo in their lands, much to their dismay. To fight this, a money lender named Raj Kumar Shukla reached out to Gandhiji and requested him to come and help them.'  (source: Swarajya Magazine)

You can read more about the details here, but in short Gandhi disregarded the order by the British government to leave Champaran as his 'presence energized the peasants who were forced to grow indigo by the planters.'  Instead Gandhi decided to speak to thousands of peasants and disregarded the government order and plead guilty.  

However, to spread this message far and wide, to the smallest alcove of India, these two men, Gandhi and Patel, went through an internal transformation first.  Both never traveled in first class of Indian railways, Gandhi always in third class and Patel in second class. Patel burnt all his European clothes, socks and hats. He only wore khadi clothes and as did Gandhi. 

Another opportunity to disobey the scravenous British Raj came after the floods in Kheda, Gujarat. In 1899 famine saw the population of Kheda district reduce by 30% to 7 lakhs by 1901.  The floods of 1917 though broke the district again which had just begin to recover.  Gandhi urged the government to postpone (not waive off) the revenue collection, but the British Raj was relentless.  The Raj threatened (and eventually) seized land, cattle, and the ornaments of women!  A few months later the government (i.e. the Colonial British Raj) agreed to Gandhi's term.

These two incidents in the long history of Indian Independence Movement perhaps changed Mohandas to Mahatma.  And also birthed the Iron Man of India, Sardar Patel.  And it help realize the masses that 'there could, actually, be a process, a system through which the real injustices of the British Raj could be countered, resisted and forced to change.'

And, this process was accepted by the masses.  In in 1921 when the Prince of Wales visited India, 'so successful was the boycott of the prince in British-ruled India, and the Civil Disobedience Movement, that the government had to arrest, by conservative estimates, around 30,000 people.'

So how did the masses participate in this process?  There were bonfires of foreign goods. Patel also urged the municipality to throw off government control of primary education and refuse funding.  Although the idea wasn't new, as way back in 1905 when Tilak announced a boycott of British clothes, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar went a step ahead and during Dussehra on October 7, 1905, burnt all the foreign goods and clothes in a bonfire.  Patel also asked students in Gujarat at a meeting to stop attending classes and participate in the satyagraha.

And Gandhi and Patel turned it into a mass movement that culminated in the independence of India (albeit a divided India that was part of the great game by British to safeguard their strategic assets in the continent).

Primary source: Hindol Sengupta's The Man Who Saved India - Sardar Patel.