Champaran is the land in north Bihar, bordering Nepal on one side and eastern Uttar Pradesh on the other, which practically made Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi into Bapu or simply Gandhiji to his millions of followers. His Satyagraha in this district made him the Mahatma (great soul) from a mere mortal. Interestingly, Gandhiji himself admits in his autobiography—My Experiments with Truth—that he had never heard the name Champaran before visiting the place in April 1917.
Satyagraha or non violent resistance to an unjust regime, one of the most powerful tools against imperialism in the last century, was experimented for the first time on a large mass scale in Champaran and that is the significance of the district, known for its Buddhist relics, forests, mango orchards and productive agricultural land. It was here that Gandhiji field tested this powerful weapon, which many Gandhians now describe as more powerful than even the atom bomb. Gandhians insist that Satyagraha destroyed the moral fabric of the imperialists to rule in the medium and long term and what began in Champaran was within months replicated in Kheda in Gujarat in 1918 and elsewhere in the country thereafter throughout the freedom struggle till 1947.
As we commemorate 100 years of Satyagraha of the Father of the Nation in Champaran against the British Indigo planters in the hot month of April in 1917, memories associated with the district from childhood onwards come flooding.
I hail from the same district and from a family of Shuklas, though not from the family of Raj Kumar Shukla, whose persistent efforts over a period of time brought the Mahatma to this district. Shukla, a farmer cum money lender, who hailed from a village close to Chanpatia near Bettiah, the headquarter of West Champaran district now, was so relentless in his attempt that Gandhiji promised that he would visit the district from Calcutta. “This illiterate but determined farmer won my heart,” he later wrote in My Experiments with Truth, referring to his meetings with Shukla in the lucknow Convention of the Congress in 1916, Kanpur and then Calcutta from where he left first for Patna by train and then for Motihari in Champaran. In all these meetings, Shukla had only one request—Gandhiji should come to Champaran, feel the pulse of the exploited peasants and take remedial measures.
He did come with his prominent lieutenants Rajendra Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, JB Kriplani and others to oppose the exploitation of the farmers under the Tinkathia system and several other cess and taxes imposed by the then government. In the exploitative Tinkathia system, farmers had been forced to plant Indigo in a part of their land (in 3/20 part of a land) compulsorily for the last almost 60 years. They had to clean the plant which consumed a lot of time, dry it and then finally pack it for use in industrialised Europe. All this was done practically for free as forced labour. Though the farmers had protested twice in the past after organising themselves in the beginning of the century against this exploitative system, they were suppressed by the Police.
Two things happened at the same time. Gandhiji’s Satyagraha forced the British rulers to relent and end the tinkathia system. At the same time, industrial coloring agent, which was cheaper and did not involve exploitation of the peasants, started being used on a much wider scale by the industrialised west. Indigo plantation finally ended in Champaran in 1923 when the demand died down completely and nine sugar mills were opened by the British to keep happy the “White” farmers who had settled in the area through what were called Kothis (Bungalows) as a headquarter, specifically to control Indigo cultivation. Each Kothi had a British owner with retinues, supported by the local police and hundreds of acres of land in its possession where commercial farming of sugarcane started after that of Indigo came to an end.
During his April 1917 stay in Champaran, Gandhiji built the Bhitiharwa ashram, ran a campaign against prevailing practice of untouchability, emphasised on education, cleanliness and health. Helped by wife Kasturba, Gandhiji opened several basic teaching schools. In fact, it was here that the basic schools, imparting skills for livelihood, were opened for the first time on land donated by the prosperous farmers. All the trademark Gandhian activity, which became the hallmark of the Father of the Nation in subsequent period, was started and consolidated here.
When Gandhiji was charged with “creating unrest” following his on the spot assessments of peasant exploitation, talks with the farmers and their mobilisation, there was a massive show of strength in his support which forced the judicial officer to withdraw the case against him in Motihari. By word of mouth, the message had spread that the British were about to jail Gandhiji, triggering an outflow of farmers from every nook and corner of the district to the district court. In a nutshell, the Champaran Satyagraha, even though the word Satyagraha came to be used more frequently during the protest against the Rowlatt Act agitation, triggered the first non-violent struggle anywhere in the world on such a large scale.
Raj Kumar Shukla, the man who brought Gandhiji to Champaran, continued with his efforts of mobilisation of people against the British regime even after Gandhiji left. He participated in the agitation against the Rowlatt Act in 1919 and in the Non-Cooperation movement of 1922. He died at the relatively young age of 54 in 1929, leaving behind a rich legacy for Champaran which the people of the district still remember fondly.
However, much after Gandhiji left Champaran after a successful Satyagraha against the British Indigo planters of the district, the oral tradition glorifying what he did continued for years and decades. He was seen as a messiah whose presence brought a paradigm shift in the politics of the district and the state.
It was this oral tradition which I heard from my great grandfather Pandit Bhola Shukla and my grandfather Satya Narayan Shukla. In this, there are some historical facts, some narration of the events by farmers and the eye-witness accounts. Though my great grandfather was barely into his teens when the Champaran Satyagraha took place in April 1917 and could not have participated, his account from the oral tradition and eye-witnesses was so intense that he kept it narrating decades later. What Gandhiji wore, what he ate, how he travelled by an elephant, bullock cart and a tonga, how he interacted with the villagers and the farmers, how he put up at the Hazarimal dharamshala in Bettiah after coming to Motihari etc.
This oral tradition which my great grandfather and later grandfather narrated also includes tales of so called magical powers of Gandhiji, how the villagers of Champaran then believed that the British were on their way out, how scared they were from the lathi of Gandhiji (though the Mahatma was only 48 years then and did not carry a lathi when he came here), how some women thought he was a saint and could rid them and their family members of problems, vices, diseases and would bring prosperity to their family and the area.
The role of rumour and oral history was extremely important in the making of the Mahatma over a period of time. It is important in any social movement and it was this which helped people of Champaran galvanise themselves in the anti British struggle whole heartedly. All the subsequent protests by Congress and Gandhiji—be it the Non-Cooperation movement in 1922, the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1932 and the Quit India Movement in 1942 found great traction in Champaran and saw maximum arrests. My great grandfather Pandit Bhola Shukla was arrested in 1932 and later in 1942 and served years in British jails. My grandfather Satya Narayan Shukla along with his three brothers was put in jail for several months in 1942 and there was a time during the Quit India Movement when father and all his four sons were in jail and family profession of farming was left for the women of the house to manage.
Post Script: My great grandfather bought a 60 bigha plot (90 acres of land) from a British named Benson around the year 1940 in village Sabeya of Champaran district. Benson was engaged in the cultivation of Indigo before the Satyagraha of Gandhiji and later sugarcane when the first mill was set up. When farming was no longer profitable according to British standards, he gave up and shifted to England after selling his land to different people. I still own 5 acres of that land after several family partitions and the original papers of those period still has Bensons’s name, the indigo cultivator.
