In August Country

Witness to that exciting busy time when Gandhi pushed the Congress out of a drawing room and put it on a one way trek to the Indian people. Older leaders were swept away in a race towards a far greater dream than mere legislative reform. New individuals seized the Congress baton and ran with it through forests and across rivers, taking with them the fires of full independence: Jawaharlal Nehru, Govind Ballabh Pant, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Purshottamdas Tandon, Rajendra Prasad, JB Kripalani.

Tracing their footfalls to those far locations, five decades later, the sites of satygraha are caught up in the slow tortuous yet incorrigibly democratic path of modernising India. A telephone tower looms over the famous police station at Chauri Chaura. A shopping mall glitters in the Champaran dharamsala where Gandhi once stayed. A profusion of schools, new shops, the ever-present Yamahas and Sumos trundle down the satyagrahis’ procession paths.

To rediscover, to change, to build anew had always been Gandhi’s message. And in the places where he worked and fought, India has rediscovered itself. A tiny spirit, an indefinable zest for change has asserted itself in myriad ways. The names are forgotten but the legacy lives on, not as a monument, but as a living force in which a child in the remotest village, turns his face towards a circling satellite and dreams of newer journeys. Who is that in that little cyber cafe across the fields? Is it a bent old man, in a loin cloth, his glasses perched on his nose, tapping away at a keyboard?

Dandi on Quick March
In Dandi the salt pans have long gone. In their place are prawn farms, smooth roads and a phone in every second home
Ayesha Khan

DANDI is the spirit of freedom on a rain soaked afternoon. This is the place where Mahatma Gandhi picked up a fistful of salt on the banks of the Arabian Sea in defiance of British law. Dandi is a story in resilience. Surprisingly, there are no salt pans, only prawn farms along the trenches lining the Navsari-Dandi stretch. It’s a different Dandi from the one where on April 6, 1930, Gandhi and his followers came, negotiating a kuccha road and a 24 day trek from Sabarmati Ashram to sound a war cry against the tax on the salt.

‘‘It was desolate, cut off by the Arabian sea waters during high tide, the sea was eating it away gradually,’’ remembers Dhirubhai Master, a teacher who was born in 1930, and is the unofficial guide to all visitors.

In 1951 the Dandi Agricultural Co-operative Society decided to build dykes to block the sea water. It was a decision that altered the geography and economy of the coastal village. With the dyke the salt pans have given way to prawn farms.

On the Dandi seafront, 70-year-old Dajibhai Dayalbhai, his 30 year old nephew and others match their steps with the frothy sea waters. ‘‘We have been here since morning. Visitors from Surat and other places come here for a dip and quite often lose some jewellery,’’ says Dajibhai. His find for the day is a white plastic bag, his nephew’s a gold ring and a mangalsutra.

Dajibhai is full of history of the place and Bapu’s role: ‘‘Bapu had come here and filled water from the sea and heated it to make salt.’’ His take on freedom movement is housed in Saifee Villa, which is now managed by State Information Bureau. It was in this bungalow, owned once by Syedna Taher Saifuddin that Gandhi had made a night halt before the Satyagraha. A column inaugurated by former President R Venkatraman in 1988 marks the place where Gandhi had picked up a fistful of salt.

A black fibreglass image of the Mahatma picking up a fistful of salt — a remnant from the float used for the 1998 Dandi March celebrations in Delhi— is now mounted on a platform besides the column. Gandhi later shifted base camp to Karadi village 5 km away, as Dandi was inaccessible, with swampy roads and no communications. A palm leaf thatched hut underneath a mango tree was the centre from which he directed the freedom struggle.

On the way back to Karadi, you can spot a Doordarshan low power transmitter and telephone lines that go to almost every second home in Dandi, still a village with population of 1,200.

‘‘Life definitely is more comfortable,’’ says Kalaben Patel, Dandi village sarpanch. A house named London Bridge and cottages owned by NRI families dot the road to the Gandhi Smarak. ‘‘A replica of the hut that Gandhiji lived in is built each year after monsoon. In the rains it is dismantled,’’ says Shantiben, a sweeper at the Smarak.

In Manipur, a thousand mutinies now
Moirang in Manipur was where the INA first hoisted the Indian flag. Sixty years later the INA memorial is busy defending itself
Samudra Gupta Kashyap

MOIRANG in Manipur was where the Indian flag was first hoisted in 1944 by Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. Sixty years later Manipur is in flames again, this time its anger directed not at any foreign rule but at its own government.

On April 14, 1944, also the Manipuri New Year, the flag was hoisted at Moirang, a town with a population of 2,500. Later an INA Memorial complete with a museum vame up at the spot. Despite being so close to this slice of history, not many children of Moirang have been inside the museum. There’s heavy CRPF security at its gates. The children also don’t remember ever celebrating Independence Day.

‘‘Since I remember, August 15 or January 26, has always been marked with a bandh call by underground organisations. I have only seen such celebrations on television,’’ says Sapam Raju, who is studying at the Industrial Training Institute at Imphal, 45 km away.

The INA memorial has been targetted by militants for long. In fact, in 1993 they managed to blow off the original statue of Netaji that stood outside the museum. Manipur has over 25 militant groups.

The present statue was installed in October 1993, while the mangled remains of the original one lie neglected in the ‘malkhana’ of the local police station. ‘‘It is seized property and can not be removed or disposed off until the case comes to a close,’’ says the officer in-charge of the police station. The main INA memorial structure here is a replica of the original memorial at Singapore, which was subsequently demolished by the British forces.

‘‘People come from all over to see this memorial,’’ said Ph Jugindra Singh (58), caretaker and librarian at the Memorial, who started his career as a volunteer and became a government employee in 1985. Jugindra’s father late Ph Amu Singh was a member of the INA and it was at his initiative that the memorial came up. About half-a-dozen INA veterans still live elsewhere in Manipur.

This week, security at the INA memorial has been even tighter. ‘‘You never know when they will attack this structure,’’ said the CRPF jawan posted at the gate of the Museum.

Moirang is also a centre of Meitei (Manipuri) folk culture and hosts the ancient temple of the pre-Hindu deity Lord Thangjing. There are many in Moirang, still proud of their brush with history. Fourteen year-old Rinku Singh, a Class IX student wants to join the Army and is proud to belong to Moirang.

But for others there are other compelling worries. Ashangbi Devi, a BA final student fears for her future. ‘‘Though I am studying in college, I know there is no future in Manipur. Bomb blasts, arrests and killings are routine.’’

In Moirang, the INA memorial is witness to continuing mutinies.

Kranti dhaba and freedom bhajji
Satara was where a parallel government was set up in 1942. The association lingers on in the names of sugar mills and dhabas
Kavitha Iyer

BESIDES the tarred road, the only relief from acres of young sugarcane comes from rows of nodding sunflowers. And then, a hand-painted signboard: ‘Kranti Dhaba’.

A little over 250 km south-east of Mumbai, revolution is always close. Whether in the temple town of Wai or another 50 km into the heart of Satara district, it pops up unexpectedly in names of people and places, sugar mills named after ‘Hutatmas’ (martyrs) and on boards at roadside stalls peddling paan masala and kaanda bhajji. Until you go further south on National Highway-4.

In the Kranti Nagar locality of Kundal in Sangli, revolution runs down your spine when 83-year-old G D Bapu Laad points to the remains of a stone wall. ‘‘The office of the team leading the Patri Sarkar,’’ Laad says. ‘‘And where you see those houses now, hundreds of my Toofan Sena—literally storm-troopers—would gather.’’

The Patri Sarkar, also called the Prati Sarkar or dummy government, was one of a handful of parallel governments set up across the country in 1942 and the longest surviving of its contemporaries. Its members were mostly peasants inspired by Gandhi’s Quit India call.

He had himself trained nearly 10,000 young men who were the Toofan Sena. Nagnath Naikwadi of nearby Walva had arranged for two Sikh soldiers to train more youngsters in the use of arms. Bullets had been smuggled in from Goa. But spotting a ‘‘gora’’ soldier to spar with was nearly never.

‘‘Everybody who supported the British caught our attention—landlords, informers and other government servants.’’ They were nabbed, bound and beaten on the soles of their feet for hours. ‘‘That was the Patri,’’ Laad says, as he walks to his simple brick and wood home.

‘‘What did farmers and workers get?’’ asks ‘Annasaheb’ Naikwadi, 83, who is a non-member founder of a hugely successful sugar cooperative in Walva. The only answer, he says is Communism.

An uncompromising idealist, he hasn’t stepped into the Hutatma Kisan Ahir sugar factory, named after a Prati Sarkar colleague, since the day the first sugar syrup was boiled there, in 1984. ‘‘He didn’t want to enjoy the fruit of his struggle,’’ says B Dharmadhikari, a Satara-based writer who’s penning a biography of Walva’s favourite grand old man.

After setting up hostels, schools and colleges in Walva, all named after Kisan Ahir or the movement’s leader Nana Patil, Naikwadi’s latest initiative is the expansion of the sugar factory’s capacity.

In Kundal today, practically all the 26,000 residents are busily turning the slumberous village into a small town—building hovels at the outskirts, adding a cemented floor to brick homes and planning a digital photo studio.

But a community of scrap collectors have just ended a meeting near Sagareshwar, where they discussed a charter of demands to climb one rung on the village’s social ladder.

The revolution is near.

Mood Indigo in Gandhi’s karmabhoomi
West Champaran was one of Gandhi’s first political struggles. Now the descendants of indigo farmers run tyre shops and work as journalists
Sagarika Ghose

Bordered by the foothills of the Shivaliks, jungles of the Valmiki Tiger project and fed by the river Gandak, Champaran district in north west Bihar is a stupendously dazzling green. The notoriously precipitous roads of Bihar lurch through beautiful emerald rice fields. An ancient Ashoka pillar rises resplendent against a scowl of cloudy sky. There are shepherds under neem trees, village sarpanches walk past a paved banyan, schoolchildren cycle past filthy gutters in the dreadful morass of the towns of Bettiah and Narkatiaganj. This was once the blue-green land of indigo. This was Gandhi’s first political base where satyagraha first became a national symbol. Yet the Congress is wiped out in Champaran and Gandhi’s first ‘‘karmabhoomi’’ is almost forgotten in the rest of India.

In 19th and early 20th century, Indigo farmers or neel raiyyats toiled under the tinkathia system imposed by viciously exploitative neel sahibs or indigo planters and Champaran always had a long history of anti-planter agitations. One dark night, Rajkumar Shukla, Champaran’s bravest farmer, journeyed to Lucknow to ask a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, recently returned from South Africa and known to be particularly sympathetic to the poor to come to Champaran. ‘‘Please save the peasants of Champaran,’’ Shukla pleaded to Gandhi, ‘‘come to Champaran and see.’’

Mohandas stormed to the rescue. Arriving with Rajendra Prasad, A.N. Sinha and J.B. Kripalani in April 1917, he traveled first by steamer from Patna to Motihari, then by train to Bettiah, and the calm blue fields became sudden battlegrounds. The Gandhians set up camp in Bettiah, listed the grievances of the raiyyats and satyagraha was launched against the cruellest planter of them all, M.C. Amon. So magnetic was the appeal of Gandhi that a wonder-struck SDO of Bettiah wrote in 1917, ‘‘Gandhi is daily transfiguring the imagination of masses of ignorant men with visions of an early millennium.’’ As a result of the protests, the tinkathia system was withdrawn and Amon later escaped. Says Arun Kumar Shukla, a reporter for Hindustan and great grandson of Rajkumar Shukla, ‘‘Champaran will always remain the birthplace of satyagraha in India.’’

Today, in Champaran, indigo is long extinct and the descendants of the old neel raiiyaats run MRF tyre shops or work as journalists. The dharamshala where Gandhi and Rajendra Prsada stayed to document the sufferings of the peasants is a shopping mall. ‘Vande Mataram Bathroom Fittings’, Ladies’N Kids Wear, Monte Carlo, Photostat Digital Studio, RIIT Computer Education and Blackberry’s—Sharp Smooth Sure—flash out in technicolour signboards.

There are new overnight trains from Bettiah to Mumbai and Delhi. The Basic Schools established by Gandhi have fallen into decay, teachers and students barely attend, but in their place are a plethora of DPS schools and Navodaya Vidyalalays.‘‘There is no Gandhian lifestyle left anymore,’’ says Digvijay Kumar Rao, another descendant of a neel farmer who owns a local shop in Bettiah, ‘‘when Gandhi came he had to take an ekka gari to my grandfather’s house. If he had come today, he would have come by Sumo.’’

Vrindavan Village where Gandhi established 28 Basic Schools as part of the plan to establish ‘Buniyaadi shiksha’ at the grassroots, is overseen by a cheerful wizened gnome. Mathura Bhagat is 87 and looked after the Mahatma when he came back to Champaran in 1939.

What is Champaran today? ‘‘There is agony, there is pain, but there is also inspiration,’’ he says. The cradle of ahmisa is ravaged by daily kidnappings, Maoist violence and dacoits. Sowing of crops is sometimes carried out under armed guard. The Congress is in its death throes. Raghunath Jha , MP from Bettiah is in Laloo Prasad Yadav’s RJD, there is only a single Congress MLA in West Champaran and khadigram udyog centers lie rusty and decrepit. ‘‘India may have forgotten Champaran,’’ says Shukla, ‘‘but each of our grandfathers was Gandhi.’’

The turn-off to Chauri Chaura
History turned at this eastern UP town when satyagraha became violent and Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement. Today freedom has brought a daily train to Delhi and mobile telephones
Sagarika Ghose

Chauri Chaura 20 km from Gorakhpur, in a small village in eastern UP, history came to a turning point. 5 February 1922 was a cold day. The Non-Cooperation movement started by Gandhi was proceeding at full pace. In the jaggery and leather market of Mundera Bazaar, flooded with foreign cloth, opium and liquor, satyagrahis shouted slogans and chanted: utho desh vasi, utho shaan se, apne hasti mita do vatan ke liye. At mid-day they gathered in front of the police station. The police fired in the air. Someone was hurt. In the flash of a second, Gandhi was forgotten and the principles of non-violence were embrassingly overthrown. Protestors turned on their heels, burnt the station and killed 19 policemen. A shattered Gandhi called off the 1921 agitation, much to the fury of younger Congress leaders like Nehru and Bose, who wept that an opportunity had been lost. Today, along the main highway of Chauri Chaura, with a new telephone tower guarding the police station, with banners announcing BSNL Scratch cash Card and Essar Sim card, the grandsons of the 1921 satyagrahis wonder if freedom has as yet come to Chauri Chaura.

Chauri Chaura is a single road eastern UP town. The markets turn over brisk business in leather, arhar dal and fodder. Through the mango and ashok trees, the single storied yellow railway station is a busy one, carrying passengers to neighbouring towns of Gorakhpur and Devaria. Dusty sumos hurtle through the central Bhopa Chowk. Yamahas slide past banana stalls, Imran Chicken Corner, Arise Digital Inverter store, Nishad Talkies cinema hall, past mountains of apple carts teetering across a ganda naala. In addition to the J.B. Mahajan Degree College, Chauri Chaura has acquired a Mahila Degree College and there is even a stall selling English newspapers and magazines. Says Gulzar Hussain, great grandson of Lal Mohammad, one of the leaders of the Chauri Chaura satyagrahis. ‘‘The young don’t remember Gandhi and Nehru anymore. They don’t know that its because of Nehru that they can take a direct train to Delhi.’’ The Vaishali Express to Chauri Chaura passes the freedom fighters memorial. 19 of the Chauri Chaura protestors were hanged (Lal Mohammad among them) but hardly anybody glances at the blue tiled monument in their memory. The MLA here is a member of the Samajwadi party, like elsewhere in UP painted statues of Ambedkar shine in the rice and wheat fields and a film poster yells ‘‘Dil Ho Gaya Pardesi’’.

The grave-faced Dukhanti is the grandson of the shopkeeper whose oil cans were looted by the mob to burn the police station in 1922. He still runs the same shop outside the station. ‘‘Our grandfathers would be shocked to see how totally the Congress has declined in UP. To them such a decline would have been unthinkable.’’ Life has taken a turn for the worse in Chauri Chaura. Unemployment is soaring.Industries such as Gorakhpur Fertlisers, Punjab Iron, Kundan Steel Mill, Kripal Steel have all closed down. The brightest students hope for a degree from Textile Engineering Insitute in Mau and perhaps a job in Lucknow or Allahabad. Other great grandsons of the Chauri Chaura satyagrahis sometimes are lucky enough to become drivers or lawyers. Most remain farm labourers around Chauri Chaura, others sell vegetables or pull rickshaws in Delhi. Ali Raza is the mali at the police station. His granfather Mohammad Rafique was also the mali when the station was burnt, but managed to escape.‘‘ One good thing has happened in Chauri Chaura since my grandfathers’ time,’’ he says. ‘‘Lots more girls are going to the degree college.’’