he seldom signed his name in Hindi, very few persons could have attested
to it being his signature. Finally a man was found who did the needful
and swore to it being Motilal’s; he was illiterate, and held the signature
upside down as he examined it.
Jawaharlal himself was released after three months in prison when
someone in authority came to the conclusion he had been wrongly
sentenced: distributing notices for a hartal, the official charge, was not –
then – an offence (it was later to become one). Once released, Jawaharlal
had the privilege of attending Gandhi’s trial – an inspirational moment
of anti-colonial nationalism staged in a courtroom, ranking alongside
Roger Casement’s performance that Nehru had been so inspired by.
Gandhi’s speech reversed roles and put British imperialism itself on trial,
outlining its record in India and tracing his own transition from loyal
subject to seditious outlaw as a moral duty to resist injustice. ‘I am here,
therefore’, he concluded, ‘to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest
penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime,
and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.’^21
Jawaharlal then went back to political work in Allahabad, picketing
cloth merchants who had broken their pledge not to deal in foreign
cloth. (Cloth merchants and businessmen had remained a problem for
the Congress throughout the Non-Cooperation Movement; many cloth
merchants had joined in the boycott due to the conjunctural factor of the
rupee-sterling exchange rate changing from a 2s 4d rupee in December
1919 to a 1s 3d rupee in 1920–1, making their projected purchases far
more expensive and therefore making the boycott a convenient excuse not
to honour their contracts; now, with prices having settled down, this
was no longer the case.) Soon afterwards, he was arrested and charged with
criminal intimidation and extortion, with sedition thrown in for good
measure. He was sentenced to a year and nine months in prison; he had
been out of jail for six weeks. Jawaharlal remained in Lucknow district
gaol until the last day of January 1923, when he was released on a surprise
amnesty. He suspected this was because the Congress was so busy engaged
in mutual squabbles that they were not considered a threat – it seemed,
therefore, that the government thought it might be a good gesture to
make. Gandhi remained in jail until early 1924, when he was released
due to ill health. (It should not seem from this that nationalist prisoners
were able to treat prison as a sort of rest cure in between movements. Some
prisoners were indeed treated well in jail, especially those who were
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 51