pressure on the government; and personally, he was not at all keen on his
son going to jail. The issue became the subject of discord between father
and son – a continuance of earlier disagreements on political matters, but
also the beginning of a greater divergence than had manifested itself
in theoretical disagreements. (The personal angle was not openly put
forward in their discussions with each other; Jawaharlal discovered later
that his father had tried sleeping on the floor to find out what it was like,
deciding that this would no doubt be Jawaharlal’s lot in prison.) But the
political differences between Jawaharlal and Motilal were still rooted in
their earlier disagreements: defying of laws appealed to Jawaharlal, but not
to Motilal, who, even if no longer a Moderate, was still a constitutional
politician and a lawyer at heart. Motilal’s form of political involvement
was to appeal to the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, for
permission to provide legal assistance to the victims of the Act; Jawaharlal,
for his part, joined the Allahabad Satyagraha Sabha.
The Rowlatt Satyagraha was, in retrospect, a small-scale movement,
and one in which Gandhi’s control over his following gave early indica-
tions of imperfection: despite his exhortations to non-violence, there was
some amount of violence, causing Gandhi to call off the movement – in
effect, to disown it, because it was far from clear that all the unrest that
followed his call for satyagraha could be attributed to the call. The
highlight of the Rowlatt Satyagraha was an all-India hartalor general
stoppage of work and closure of all shops on April 6, 1919 – postponed
from March 30. April 6 was a Sunday, as March 30 had been – Gandhi
even asked employees who had to work on Sundays to get their employers’
permission to stay away from work. The Rowlatt Act, ironically, was never
used against anyone (the Act itself was repealed in 1922). Both the Act
and the Satyagraha against it were quickly overtaken by an event that
made the Act seem irrelevant, and its author, Sir Sidney Rowlatt, seem
like a gentle libertarian: the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in Amritsar,
Punjab, on April 13, 1919.
JALLIANWALLA BAGH
On April 13, with the Punjab under martial law, an army unit led
by General Dyer marched through the narrow streets of Amritsar into
Jallianwalla Bagh. There was a large crowd of people in the square,
including village people who had come into the town for the Baisakhi
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 37