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Unit 10: National Movements and Indian Independence

and drugs boycott was obviously connected with the popular tradition of regarding abstinence as Notes
a virtue and as a symbol of respectability. The depth of this tradition is shown by the fact that
lower castes trying to move up in the caste hierarchy invariably tried to establish their upper caste
status by giving up liquor and eating of meat.
Eastern India became the scene of a new kind of no-tax campaign — refusal to pay the chowkidara
tax. Chowkidars, paid out of the tax levied specially on the villages, were guards who supplemented
the small police force in the rural areas in this region. They were particularly hated because they
acted as spies for the Government and often also as retainers for the local landlords. The movement
against this tax and calling for the resignation of chowkidars, and of the influential members of
chowkidari panchayats who appointed the chowkidars, first started in Bihar in May itself, as salt
agitation had not much scope due to the land-locked nature of the province. In the Monghyr,
Saran and Bhagalpur districts, for example, the tax was refused, chowkidars induced to resign, and
social boycott used against those who resisted. The Government retaliated by confiscation of
property worth hundreds and thousands in lieu of a few rupees of tax, and by beatings and
torture. Matters came to a head in Bihpur in Bhagalpur on May 31 when the police, desperate to
assert its fast-eroding authority, occupied the Congress ashram which was the headquarters of
nationalist activity in the area. The occupation triggered off daily demonstrations outside the
ashram, and a visit by Rajendra Prasad and Abdul Bari from Patna became the occasion for a huge
mass rally, which was broken up by a lathi charge in which Rajendra Prasad was injured. As
elsewhere, repression further increased the nationalists’ strength, and the police just could not
enter the rural areas.
In Bengal, the onset of the monsoon, which made it difficult to make salt, brought about a shift to
anti-chowkidara and anti-Union Board agitation. Here too, villagers withstood severe repression,
losing thousands of rupees worth of property through confiscation and destruction, and having to
hide for days in forests to escape the wrath of the police.
In Gujarat, in Kheda district, in Bardoli taluqa in Surat district, and in Jambusar in Broach, a
determined no-tax movement was in progress — the tax refused here was the land revenue.
Villagers in their thousands, with family, cattle and household goods, crossed the border from
British India into the neighbouring princely states such as Baroda and camped for months together
in the open fields. Their houses were broken into, their belongings destroyed, their lands confiscated.
The police did not even spare Vallabhbhai Patel’s eighty-year-old mother, who sat cooking in her
village house in Karamsad; her cooking utensils were kicked about and filled with kerosene and
stone. Vallabhbhai, on his brief sojourns out of jail throughout 1930, continued to provide
encouragement and solace to the hard-pressed peasants of his native land. Though their meagre
resources were soon exhausted, and weariness set in, they stuck it out in the wilderness till the
truce in March 1931 made it possible for them to return to their homes.
Defiance of forest laws assumed a mass character in Maharashtra, Karnataka and the Central
Provinces, especially in areas with large tribal populations who had been the most seriously
affected by the colonial Government’s restrictions on the use of the forest. At some places the size
of the crowd that broke the forest laws swelled to 70,000 and above.
In Assam, a powerful agitation led by students was launched against the infamous ‘Cunningham
circular’ which forced students and their guardians to furnish assurances of good behaviour.
The people seemed to have taken to heart Jawaharlal Nehru’s message when he unfurled the
national flag at Lahore in December 1929: ‘Remember once again, now that this flag is unfurled,
it must not be lowered as long as a single Indian, man, woman, or child lives in India.’ Attempts
to defend the honour of the national flag in the face of severe brutalities often turned into heroism
of the most spectacular variety. At Bundur, on the Andhra Coast, Tota Narasaiah Naidu preferred
to be beaten unconscious by a fifteen-member police force rather than give up the national flag. In
Calicut, P. Krishna Pillai, who later became a major Communist leader, suffered lathi blows with
the same determination. In Surat, a group of children used their ingenuity to defy the police.
Frustrated by the repeated snatching of the national flag from their hands, they came up with the
idea of stitching khadi dresses in the three colours of the national flag, and thereafter these little,

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