Gandhi & Churchill by Arthur Herman

Author:Arthur Herman [Herman, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780553383768
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-15T13:00:00+00:00

If Irwin and his policemen thought Gandhi’s arrest might end their troubles, as it had done in 1922, they were sorely mistaken. Noncooperation intensified over the next ten months. The coming of the monsoon effectively ended the salt satyagraha.34 But other forms of resistance broke out in every province of India, as tens and even hundreds of thousands joined in. By February 1931 the government could count nearly 24,000 resisters in jail. More than 60,000 were imprisoned over the whole course of the campaign. Some estimates run as high as 100,000.35

Who they were reveals how extensive Gandhi’s activist core had become. Most came from cities like Bombay and the large Hindu provinces. Thanks to Rajaji, the area around Madras had now become a Gandhi stronghold.36 The resisters also tended to be young, sometimes very young. Almost 700 of the 4,700 prisoners in Bengal prisons were under the age of seventeen. Many were also students. In Calcutta their strike forced the university law school to cancel exams. At the Scottish Church College they held the world’s first student sit-in, lying down to form a human blanket in front of the doors so that other students could not go in.37

The other large group were women. Gandhi had come to see them as the heart and soul of his campaign: he believed females had a greater instinct for self-sacrifice than males and “greater courage of the right type.”38 He told the village women in Umber, “If this movement is to succeed, yours will have to be as big a share as men’s if not greater.”39 In his chivalrous way, Gandhi still did not want the women in “the front line,” as it were, where people could get hurt. He wanted male satyagrahis to defend the salt pans and storm the salt works. Instead, he saw women resisters devoting themselves to spinning khadi, boycotting, and picketing. They were to picket liquor stores, among other things, and visit homes of drunkards to plead with them to stop. “I have seen women of the Salvation Army do this,” he said. “Why should not the women of India do the same?”40

Gandhi made alcohol a target of satyagraha not only for moral reasons but because the government relied on a liquor tax for revenue. Narayan Desai remembered joining hands with the ashram women standing outside the Sabarmati village liquor store and chanting, “Drinking has destroyed everything, oh addict. Give it up!” Other ashram women did make it into the front lines. Desai remembered the elderly Gangabehn Majumdar, who had given Gandhi his first charkha and was reputed to be more than a hundred years of age, coming home from an encounter with police with her homespun sari stained pink with blood.41 All in all, Gandhi’s satyagraha gave Indian women a new activist social role, especially as the campaign shifted focus to the cities and the antiforeign boycotts.

Women regularly picketed shops where British-made cloth was being sold. They would follow other women leaving the stores and try to persuade them to return their purchases.

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