which the peasantry lived, both of which were later to be central among
his public concerns. In June 1920, before the call for Non-Cooperation
had been made by the Congress, he was invited to return with them to
the countryside by a group of about 200 kisans(peasants) who had
marched on Allahabad to draw attention to their grievances: oppressive
and inhuman treatment, extortionate taxation and insecurity of tenancy.
Their immediate oppressors were not the British government, but the
Awadh taluqdars, the ‘natural leaders’ of the countryside whom Disraeli
had seen as so important to the continuance of imperial rule after 1857- and whose custom had been the basis of Motilal Nehru’s wealth.
Jawaharlal spent three days in the countryside in Partabgarh, and saw the
conditions in which the peasants lived for the first time. Further excursions
into the countryside and further wanderings among the peasants added
up to useful educational experiences. Previously, he had taken peasants
for granted – they existed, he knew, but their lives did not impinge upon
his own. He discovered, among other things, that police were able and
willing almost routinely to shoot upon peasant gatherings and had few
qualms about the numbers they killed. What surprised him was that the
cities had no idea of the agrarian movement that had started up only a few
miles away – no newspaper, not even the nationalist press, had reported
it. As he now discovered, the agrarian movement was entirely separate
from the Congress. Leadership in Partabgarh was provided by one Baba
Ramchandra, from Maharashtra in Western India, who had been to Fiji as
an indentured labourer and had little formal education. Other regions had
thrown up local leaders as the situation demanded; but those who were
unable to attract and amplify attention at the formal institutional level of
colonial politics were imprisoned in local contexts with little outside
support, fighting the combined and organised forces of their landlords and
the colonial authorities that backed them.
When the Non-Cooperation Movement began, peasants were able to
link up with it and claim the authority of Gandhi for their own agendas.
This was not to the liking of the Congress leadership; but it was at least in
part this leadership who offered Gandhi’s authority to the peasants to
appropriate. Ironically, it was Jawaharlal who found himself taking the
Congress’s message to the kisansin the United Provinces countryside. In
his early days of speaking at public meetings he could sometimes be at a
loss for what to say. But he felt less awkward about speaking in public
before the peasantry, ‘these poor unsophisticated people’, than before other
48 THE YOUNG GANDHIAN