Knowledge Nugget: Inside the Champaran Satyagraha for UPSC Exam

Why in the news?

Champaran Satyagraha was launched by Mahatma Gandhi in April 1917. This year marks the 108th anniversary of the movement. It was the first major act of Satyagraha by Gandhi. It is commemorated as an awakening of Indian peasants against the colonial planters and policies in India. To a large extent, it drew inspiration from Gandhi’s South African experience.

In today’s nugget, learn about the historical background leading to the Champaran Satyagraha and its outcome.

Key Takeaways:

1. According to Irfan Habib, “Indigo was a celebrated product of India, down the centuries, raised and processed locally by peasants. But in the 17th century, European-owned slave plantations in the West Indies also began to produce it. When the English conquered Bengal, European indigo planters appeared soon enough. Obtaining zamindaris, they coerced peasants into raising indigo, for the dye to be processed out of the plants in their “factories”.”

2. In the early 19th century, white planters had forced cultivators in this part of present-day northwest Bihar into agreements known as teenkathia, under which they were obligated to grow indigo on 3/20ths of their landholdings.

3. However, a pressing desire of a new nation to make things in Germany led to the production of synthetic dye by Adolf von Bayer (winner of the Chemistry Nobel, 1905). It brought down the price of Bihari indigo and the profitability of its European plantations.

4. Irfan Habib writes that the production of synthetic dye led to the decline in India’s indigo exports from Rs 4.75 crore in 1894-95 to Rs 2.96 crore five years later. As indigo prices and the planters’ profits fell, the planters began correspondingly to increase the rent-burden on the peasants, invoking their rights as zamindars.

5. Alongside these exactions, the planters made full use of the traditional zamindari practice of begar, forced unpaid or ill-paid labour (abwabs), requisitioning at will the peasants’ cattle, plough and carts, or compelling them to provide labour for their plantations.

6. Ashutosh Kumar in the Indian Express writes, “On February 27, 1917, Raj Kumar Shukla on behalf of tenants of Champaran sent a letter to Gandhi requesting him to visit them and see the deplorable condition in which they were compelled to live in. The letter written to Gandhi began with the following lines: ‘Kissa sunte ho roj auron ke Aaj meri bhi daastan suno’ (you listen to the stories of others everyday, do listen to my story today) and then mentions that the peasants of Champaran district of north Bihar are in more pitiable conditions than the Indian brethren and sisters in South Africa.”

Kissa sunte ho roj auron ke Aaj meri bhi daastan suno

7. When Gandhi arrived in Champaran, he was ordered to leave immediately, but he refused, telling the administration that he would rather take the punishment for disobeying the law. Sahid Amin writes, “It was on April 18, 1917 that, standing in a Motihari court room, a young Gandhi stood up to disobey conscientiously the orders passed against him under section 144 of the Cr.P.C. By refusing to vacate Champaran, this 48-year-old novice to Indian politics denied the right of the King Emperor’s Government in India to “sanitise” the poor indigo-growing Bihari peasants from the contagion of speaking truth to power that he had brought along in his wake.”

8. This was a new manoeuvre, and the government, not prepared to use force immediately, took a step back.  E.A. Gait, the Lt. Governor of Bihar and Orissa, along with the Chief Secretary, H. McPherson, held a long meeting with Gandhiji on June 5 at Ranchi. Here, a settlement was worked out. A committee of enquiry was instituted that included Gandhi as a member along with representatives of planters and zamindars, and three British officials.

Testimony of poor Champaran farmers

9. Gandhi went on to present evidence collected from 8,000 farmers, and made out an irrefutable case for the abolition of teenkathia, banning abwab (illegal cesses), and payment of compensation for illegally extracted dues. The government accepted almost all the recommendations of the Inquiry Committee. Based on the report, Champaran Agrarian Act was enacted in 1918.

BEYOND THE NUGGET: Mahad Satyagraha

1. Satyagraha as a tool of protest was used extensively during the freedom movement. One such satyagraha, exclusive of Gandhi, was the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927. B. R. Ambedkar provided the leadership to this movement to assert the right of the untouchables to have access to wells and tanks used by all.

2. This movement is considered to be the “foundational event” of the Dalit movement. This was the first time that the community collectively displayed its resolve to reject the caste system and assert their human rights. Although anti-caste protests had taken place before the Mahad Satyagraha, they were mostly localised and sporadic.

3. According to historian Swapna H Samel, the Mahad Satyagraha (March, 1927)— it was labelled as a “conference”, not Satyagraha, at the time — was attended by around 2,500 “delegates, workers and leaders of Depressed Classes from almost all the districts of Maharashtra and Gujarat”, including “boys of fifteen to old men of seventy”. On March 10, they began a long procession to Chavadar Tank under Ambedkar’s leadership, where he entered the tank and picked up its water with cupped hands.

4. Ishita Banerjee writes, “At the Mahad Conference on 25 December 1927, marked by a pronounced participation of untouchable women, Ambedkar burnt a copy of the Manusmriti as an act of rejecting its implications both for women and for untouchables. All this opened new spaces for women.”

Post read question

1. Which one of the following is a very significant aspect of the Champaran Satyagraha? (2018)

(a) Active all-India participation of lawyers, students and women in the National Movement

(b) Active involvement of Dalit and Tribal communities of India in the National Movement

(c) Joining of peasant unrest to India’s National Movement

(d) Drastic decrease in the cultivation of plantation crops and commercial crops

2. Indigo cultivation in India declined by the beginning of the 20th century because of (2020)

(a) peasant resistance to the oppressive conduct of planters

(b) its unprofitability in the world market because of new inventions

(c) national leaders’ opposition to the cultivation of indigo

(d) Government control over the planters

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