Civil disobedience was fuelled and given momentum by the conjunc-
tural situation of depression-induced peasant poverty; India was by 1930
feeling the onset of the Great Depression. Agricultural prices had already
begun to fall by 1927, devastating for an economy forcibly commercial-
ised before self-sufficiency in food had been achieved, and in which the
revenue and rent demands were set in cash. Cultivators were faced with an
impossible task: their produce was not worth enough on the market
to meet the cash demands, even if they deprived themselves of food to
attempt to sell it to raise money. Moneylenders did not wish to lend on
the security of land, which they felt was not worth enough because of low
prices for agricultural products. Instead, they called in their loans – which
they could only do because peasants were forced to make distress sales of
hoarded gold, the traditional form of savings in countries with uncertain
conditions.
Financial readjustments were of course required in such a situation.
The government realistically recognised that to attempt to collect the
full amount of tax due to them would be impossible and reduced taxation
rates. Not all landlords were immediately willing to pass the relief down
to their tenants, however, and landlord–tenant tensions also created the
conditions for a landscape of political unrest in the countryside, in which
kisan sabhas(peasant associations), krishak samities(peasant committees)
and praja samities(tenant-farmers’ committees) were organised and amal-
gamated into a vibrant movement. But Gandhi’s principle of never pitting
Indian against Indian ruled out no-rent campaigns except in the most
exceptional circumstances; he preferred no-revenue campaigns that
targeted the government as the enemy.
Once again, the visible successes of Gandhian tactics created great
hopes. The trouble was, Muslims did not participate in large numbers
- Gandhi’s Hindu holy man imagery was not particularly conducive
to appealing to a Muslim cultural milieu, even if a Muslim was not
a religious Muslim. Nor did the urban working classes participate. On
the other hand, women, teenagers and students joined in larger numbers
than during the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat agitations of 1920–2. And
once again, Gandhi’s usefulness as a symbol around which to mobilise was
visible. One of the most audacious acts of 1930 was in Chittagong in
Bengal in April, where a group of terrorists led by one Surjya Sen seized
the local armoury and issued a proclamation of independence in Gandhi’s
name, hardly an act of non-violence. Throughout the late 1920s and
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 69