Incarnations: India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani

Author:Sunil Khilnani [Khilnani, Sunil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241208236
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-02-24T18:30:00+00:00

As the Swadeshi movement gained traction across India, British administrators scrambled to react and repress. Between the summers of 1906 and 1907, the British prosecuted nine newspapers, and deported several Swadeshi leaders without trial. But this didn’t dampen the movement, so in November 1907 a new anti-sedition law banned meetings of more than twenty people. It would be applied widely to protests considered non-constitutional – as Pillai’s localized movement was – and place many of Swadeshi’s most important agitators in jail.

Around the same time, Pillai finally met his guru, Tilak, at the annual Congress meeting. There, in Surat, a fight broke out between moderates and extremists that descended into haranguing and shoe-throwing, and formally split the party. The extremists, led by Tilak, emerged victorious, and Pillai was given official charge of the South.

Pillai had become a hero of the elite national Congress before he was a local one; his oratory was a bit too lawyerly for popular appeal. But now he was joined in his peripatetic fundraising and swaraj-rallying by a charismatic, once-poor Madras Shaivite preacher and political activist named Subramania Sivam. By 1908, their joint speeches at public meetings were drawing thousands, and Pillai was becoming a genuine political force in the region. Calcutta’s radical press compared his deeds to the struggle in the Transvaal, which was led by another Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi.

In Pillai’s analysis, the British – ‘despicable sinners’ – had divided a once-unified India in order to subdue it. As for the religious and caste divisions that predated the British, he felt these should be set aside in the common cause of swaraj. But in the port area, caste divisions were harder than religious ones to bridge. And in South India, where religious observance ran deep, Brahmin power was considerable. By Pillai’s time, seven out of every ten university graduates were Brahmin, and they held most of the high posts in the Madras provincial administration. Pillai’s caste though not Brahmin, was also a force in the local district administration. Low-caste Tamils were sceptical of an upper-caste movement dominated by Brahmins like Tilak and Vellalars like Pillai – a movement they guessed might mirror the social hierarchies they inhabited.

Pillai’s sharpest challenge on the subject came from low-caste Nadars. Upwardly mobile under the British, they feared a new Indian regime might relegate them to their original work, climbing Palmyra trees and tapping for toddy. According to the British files, one Nadar accused Pillai directly during a speech: ‘If you get swaraj, you will ask us to do menial things.’ Pillai, who once fretted that Tilak would find him too low caste to dine with, seemed hesitant about any caste inclusion that didn’t redound to the benefit of his movement. Like many of the political radicals of the time, he was socially conservative at heart. ‘Union does not mean that we should dine together and embrace each other,’ he said at another point. ‘It will be several years after swaraj is obtained that such things take place.’

Matters of both

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.