Revolt in Its Time
Revolt was active for over two momentous years: from 1928-1930. The mid-and late 1920s were marked by workers’ unrest in Bombay and Calcutta in key industries, the great railway strike and articulated rural discontent in the Andhra region of the Madras Presidency and the United Provinces. These years also saw the determined assertion of a radical anti-untouchability politics in the Bombay province under the leadership of Dr Ambedkar, which directly challenged the Gandhian approach to reform, and threatened to steal nationalism’s moral aura from it. Besides, Congress nationalists had to contend with youthful militancy in Bengal and Punjab. The Young Bengal group and Bhagat Singh’s Hindustan Republican Army (HRA) offered political alternatives that diminished the appeal – at least to the young – of habitual nationalist rhetoric that now appeared wan and discordant.
In the Tamil country, the years 1928-1929 were crucial for other reasons as well. The Devadasi abolition debates, occasioned by Dr Muthulakshmi’s bill that sought to end the practice of dedicating young girls to temples, got under way in 1928. The Tamil cultural world was soon beset with a host of questions to do with social and sexual practices in caste society and the sexual subjugation of women. During the same period, H. S. Gour and Har Bilas Sarda’s legislative efforts to raise the age of consent to conjugal as well as extra-marital sexual intercourse and restrain child marriage respectively incited orthodox opposition and fury in Madras (such fury was not exhibited in other parts of the country). In turn, such fury and ire led to the consolidation of radical opinion on the subject. Tamil radical thought to do with gender benefited too from nationalist horror over the publication of Katherine Mayo’s infamous Mother India (the book was published in 1927) and the subsequent defenses of Hindu culture which followed in the following years. Self-respecters utilized Mayo’s arguments to put forward their distinctive critique of caste and of women’s status in Hindu society.
Tamil publicists and ideologues were also involved at this time in intense debates over the rights of the so-called untouchables to enter temples. Self-respecters were in the forefront of several temple entry struggles and active in other causes to do with opposing and castigating untouchability. They were particularly watchful and critical of moderate reformists who were eloquent on the subject during these years and keenly sensitive to Gandhi’s incredible sophistry in matters to do with the so-called untouchables.
These disparate historical events constellated into a restless and trying historical conjuncture, whose significance was not lost on the nationalist Congress. There were rumblings in its own ranks, expressed best in Jawaharlal Nehru’s call for going beyond a politics of seeking autonomy, home rule or dominion status: in the Madras conference of the Indian National Congress, he insisted that nationalists demand ‘purna Swaraj’. There was discontent of another sort as well, articulated by decidedly ‘Hindu’ Congressmen who were none too happy with attempts to engage the Muslim League’s fears and concerns in the drawing up of a constitutional scheme for Indian governance.
These two tendencies had to reckon with a third: the desire expressed by a section of Congressmen to break with Gandhian Non-cooperation and enter the legislature. High idealism, a barely concealed Hindu nationalism and an articulated desire for political office: to address these disparate interests, Congress had to design a solution that was both ethically credible as well as politically astute.
Gandhi turned out to be the man of the hour. He succeeded in both recognizing and restraining the younger Nehru’s political ardour; he endorsed the Motilal Nehru Committee’s proposals for constitutional reform, even though they did not offer nearly enough to the Muslim League; and outlined the conditions in which Congress nationalists could remain opposed to colonial authority, even while being part of the legislature. He also lent this support to the Child Marriage Restraint Bill. The Calcutta Congress session of 1928 was the battle ground on which this Gandhian consensus was forged: a lofty nationalism was proclaimed, which conceded nothing to the political radicalism of either Young Bengal that was on the nationalist fringe, or the HRA; and which chose to ignore the anti-caste protests in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. Hindu-Muslim unity was loudly and endlessly affirmed, even though Jinnah would denounce Congress’ political reform proposals immediately thereafter; and importantly Congressmen were offered an honourable way of being legislators and opponents of government at the same time.
Gandhi’s moral rhetoric and political acumen won the day for Congress, and it is noteworthy that his political and moral choices were not locked in creative tension, as they had been in the Non-cooperation years, and dovetailed all too easily into each other. In fact, this period saw the beginning of Gandhi’s passive revolution, and one that would unfold in all its detailed brilliance in the years that followed, until the Congress took office in 1937. As Antonio Gramsci noted from a faraway Italian prison, Gandhi’s passive revolution secured for the nationalists their hegemony. Over the next decade, they absorbed restive social and political energies and in some instances accommodated them – the emergence of a socialist group in Congress and Gandhi’s Harijan Sevak Sangh engaged with the opposition, so to speak, and sought to co-opt it. Patriotic rhetoric and moral seriousness that accompanied this cooption helped sustain Gandhi’s passive revolution.
The self-respecters responded to these events in anger and derision. They brought their formidable critique of caste inequities and women’s status as well as their distinct vision of a just and free society to bear on the moment at hand. They noted that nationalism was a slippery and dissembling ideology, and pointed to the manner in which considerations of caste and women’s status mediated nationalist understanding in any given instance. They insisted that political reform was meaningless without social reform and argued that the former achieved its aims through actively retarding the progress of the latter.
In this context, they affirmed the importance of political Non-brahminism and defined its characteristic features. They also proposed their own agenda for social change and progress, which was discussed and resolved at the First Self-respect Conference held in Chinglepet in 1929. The resolutions tabled at Chinglepet expressed an alternative political imagination, and must be read along with the Nehru report, if only to delineate the contours of what was elided and suppressed in nationalist representations.
In its editorials and essays, Revolt captured the intensity of these years and took critical stock of extant political and social debates. In fact much of its content, apart from the regular columns on atheism, science and rationality, comprised views on any or all of these issues. Its genius lay in articulating an analytical framework that integrated diverse historical developments and showed them to be part of a unique and complex conjuncture. Revolt understood too that the possibilities of such a conjuncture stood to be compromised by Gandhi’s passive revolution. Its enduring importance lies in this, that it offered a critical perspective of its time, without the advantage of hindsight.
