100 years of Champaran

AHMEDABAD: It was on afternoon of April 15, 100 years ago in 1917, when thousands of peasants had gathered at

Motihari

railway station in Bihar’s

Champaran

, waiting for a wiry bespectacled man from Ahmedabad who was destined to deliver them from exploitation.

He was not here to lead an agitation. For nearly a year, Bapu and his advocate friends, Braj Kishore Prasad, Rajendra Prasad, Gorakh Prasad, Chandrabhagha Sahay and Babu Dharnidhar had carried out the largest farmers’ survey in Indian history — meticulously recording more than 4,000 testimonies, mainly narrations of the miserable lives that farmers were leading under double-taxation laws.

The handwritten testimonies after 100 years — now in digitized form procured from the

National Archives

— are now being transcribed and turned into eight volumes by the Sabarmati Ashram’s archives department as a tribute how farmers let their voice emerge and peacefully demand their rights. It was this Satyagraha of recording testimonies that had led to enactment of the Champaran Agrarian Act

During the Champaran campaign, Bapu was busy shaping public frustration into a viable political tool. He and his team were recording how farmers were poorly compensated for their indigo crops and if they refused to plant indigo, how they faced double taxation like ‘Sarabhishi’. The British planters used agents who executed the tax law by force and violence.

According to Sabarmati Ashram director, “Gandhi and his advocate friends played the role of listeners. Bapu provided a formal system where peasants could speak freely of how they had suffered. The result was that today we have a detailed record of the relations of peasants with zamindars, relations with British indigo factory owners and the exploitive nature of the land revenue structure,” says Tridip Suhrud.

He adds, “During the Champaran Satyagraha, Bapu showed that for drawing people into a mass movement for freedom it was important to make a discernible and measurable change in their individual lives. Only then can the idea of freedom percolate into them.”

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