David Hardiman interview: How Noncooperation Movement shook the British rule in India

However, despite its historical significance, comprehensive accounts of this movement have been surprisingly scarce. In the book — a companion volume to his previous work of scholarship, The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905-19, in which he explores the nonviolent strand of in the Indian nationalist movement — Hardiman bridges this gap by analysing in detail the climax of the initial wave of resistance in the prelude to India’s Independence. Although the 1920-22 campaign fell short of its goal of immediate self-rule, it undeniably succeeded in severely undermining British authority in India.

Born in Rawalpindi in Pakistan, Hardiman was brought up in England where he graduated from the London School of Economics in 1970 and received his D.Phil. in South Asian History from the University of Sussex in 1975. In this in-depth interview to The Federal, he discusses the strategic unity between the Hindus and Muslims against imperial rule, Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha as well as the diverse approaches within local-level campaigns that were woven into a cohesive nationalist agenda through the process of — what Ranajit Guha termed it as — ‘braiding’, a concerted campaign to convince subaltern classes that the British no longer enjoyed legitimacy and that the people now were “the true bearers of such authority.” Excerpts from the interview:

Could you elaborate on the factors that contributed to Hindu-Muslim unity during the Noncooperation movement? What implications did it have for the communal relations in India post-independence?

The leaders of both the Indian National Congress and the Khilafat Movement understood that the prime focus for their struggle should be against the imperial rulers and that communal divides played into the hands of the British. They, therefore, managed to tolerate their differences at that time. This was not the case later when the Muslim League replaced the Khilafat Movement as the foremost representative of the Muslims of India. The communal violence of the mid-1920s soured the atmosphere, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, had a very fractious relationship with Gandhi, unlike the Khilafat leaders.

You’ve mentioned that the campaign of 1920-22 didn’t achieve immediate self-rule but shook the core of British authority in India. How did it eroded British authority?

In the past, subaltern classes had in general accepted the right of their rulers to rule over them. Protest within such a worldview involved an appeal to the compassion of a supposedly parental authority. Oppressive subordinate officials were typically blamed for exceeding their authority, and the protest was designed to draw the attention of their superior, the ruler, who it was assumed would intervene to rectify the injustice. What the nationalists taught the masses was that they should not accept such an authority — that the British had no God-given right to rule over them. Also, that power rested in the people, and it was the popular will that was the legitimising force. Once this was grasped, the British lost their aura of power. The Noncooperation Movement was above all the moment in which this major shift in mentality occurred in India.

Could you talk about how Gandhi employed the concept of ‘satyagraha’ in this movement? How was it woven into a cohesive nationalist agenda?

Gandhi insisted that the protest had to be strictly nonviolent but understood that the way that people put this into practice would involve much experiment. This was always his way — to let the theory be shaped by the practicalities of evolving situations. It was also clear that different regions and groups would implement their protests in various ways. In some cases, Gandhi felt that such protests were going beyond the boundaries of what he understood as nonviolent, and he accordingly condemned them. This was the case with the Bhils of the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, who carried bows and arrows in their nonviolent protest against local landlords and princes. Gandhi disassociated himself from their movement, even though its leader saw himself as a follower of the Mahatma.

The wide variety of campaigns of protest that I have described in my book were woven into the movement by what I have called — following Ranajit Guha — a process of braiding. This was made possible through a concerted campaign to propagate the message that the British no longer enjoyed legitimacy and that the people now were the true bearers of such authority. This was carried out through newspapers, broadsheets, songs, plays, protest meetings and marches and so on. In this way, the Indian National Congress became seen as the legitimate authority, as it embodied — so it was claimed — the will of the people.

How did the principles and practices of nonviolent resistance evolve between the early 20th century and the Noncooperation Movement?

During the first decade of the twentieth century, campaigns that rejected the use of violence were described as ‘passive resistance’, and this was how the Swadeshi Movement of 1905-10 understood its protest. Gandhi also first used this term in his campaign in South Africa, which took place at the same time, but he soon rejected it in favour of the idea of ‘Satyagraha’, as he insisted that what they were not doing was not ‘passive’ but very active. He only applied the idea of ahimsa, or ‘nonviolence’ to this form of protest after his return to India in 1915. He then experimented with it in local campaigns such as in Champaran District in Bihar and Kheda District in Gujarat, before launching it at a national level in 1919 in the Rowlatt Satyagraha. This movement he considered a failure due to outbreaks of violence, and he was much more cautious when he launched the Noncooperation Movement in the following year.

You were born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and later pursued your academic career in England. How has this unique background and the dual cultural exposure influenced your approach to studying and interpreting Indian history, especially in the context of the Noncooperation Movement? How did you come to be associated with Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies group?

My family, in common with many from Britain, had strong connections with imperial India. My paternal grandfather was an army officer serving in UP in the years before World War I, and we have a report of him suppressing communal rioting in Ayodhya at that time. My maternal grandfather went from Scotland to Calcutta, where he worked in a shipping line that specialised in importing rice from Burma. My maternal grandmother met him in Calcutta when visiting her brother, Sir Campbell Rhodes, who was a leading figure in a managing agency there, and later a member of the all-India assembly representing the Bengal Chamber of Commerce.

My father, John Hardiman, served in the British army in World War II in Europe and North Africa, before being posted to India in 1945. He was based as a Royal Engineer in Rawalpindi. My mother, Margaret, joined him there, and although I was conceived in India (probably, going by the timing, when they were on a romantic visit to Agra), by the time I was born, Rawalpindi was in the newly created Pakistan. My father served briefly under the Pakistan government during the interim period, before returning with us to Britain in May 1948. So, I have no memories of that time, apart from what my parents told me, which included accounts of the horrors of the Partition that they witnessed at first hand.

My maternal grandparent’s house in England was full of Indian artifacts and I was brought up on Rudyard Kipling’s stories — so for me there was always a fascination with India. After I left school, during a gap year before university, I travelled overland to India, and I greatly enjoyed my time there, feeling a deep affinity for the country. I then studied Indian nationalism as a special subject in London University, and in this way developed a strong empathy for that movement and its anti-imperial goals. Being on the political left from my school days in the 1960s, I had no time for the British Empire, being aware of how extractive and damaging it had been to colonised countries. In this, I was inspired by well-known British anti-imperialists such as C.F. Andrews, George Orwell, and Leonard Woolf. I met Ranajit Guha in 1971 when I came to India to carry out research for my doctorate on the nationalist movement in Gujarat, and I felt an immediate connection with his approach to the study of history and the subaltern classes — though we did not start to use that term until almost ten years later, in 1980. I became a part of his group of younger associates, and we worked together in starting Subaltern Studies.

You have written extensively on India. How do you look back at your years as a proponent of the subaltern perspective?

My initial interest was in Indian nationalism: while studying this, I examined peasant participation in the struggle. While carrying out this research, I became interested in the way that religious belief and politics often intersected in India and decided to study a religious-cum-social movement amongst some of the most marginalised people in India, the adivasis. As the written records were limited, I had to travel all over South Gujarat and adjoining areas of Maharashtra to interview those who remembered the movement.

After publishing this research as The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Oxford University Press, 1987), I turned my attention to the Bhils of the Gujarat-Rajasthan region and their social movements. In the process, I came across some fascinating struggles against exploitative usurers that shed a lot of light on the relationship between the adivasis and the usurers. This could involve some surprising beliefs, such as that Baniya usurers were able to control the rain magically to their advantage. After writing about this in a piece in Subaltern Studies V, I decided to look at the relationship between peasants and usurers on a much wider scale.

Ranajit Guha had written of how many popular struggles in India were against the three great exploiters of the people — zamindar, sarkar and sahukar (e.g., landlords, government and usurers). I felt it would be illuminating to examine in depth the history of one such relationship of domination and subordination — that of the peasants and sahukars. I was at that time based at the Centre for Social Studies in Gujarat, and I was able to collect a lot of material from archives in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and New Delhi that I supplemented with interviews from travels all over Western India. The findings were published as Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (OUP, 1996).

Around this time, India Today published a report of an alleged massacre of Bhil adivasis on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border in 1922. Although I was now working in the UK at Warwick University, I then happened to be in Gujarat and felt I should investigate further, as the official records that I had already read had mentioned a ‘fracas’ in which some Bhils had died but gave no indication of the real scale of the killings. I found, as the India Today piece had indicated, a firm memory in the region of such a massacre. I discovered that some Christian missionaries were working in the area at the time, and on my return to the UK, looked up their records, which had a little on the atrocity. My findings were later published as ‘A Forgotten Massacre: Motilal Tejawat and his Movement amongst the Bhils 1921-22,’ in my collection Histories for the Subordinated (New Delhi 2006).

While going through the records of the Church Missionary Society — which were located near Warwick in Birmingham — I found some fascinating material on the medical work in the area and how it intersected with local beliefs about health and healing. The Department of History at Warwick had a thriving History of Medicine centre, and I decided that with such a base, medical missionary work amongst the Bhils would provide an excellent theme for my next research project. At the same time, I continued to work on the adivasis of South Gujarat, some of whom had converted to Christianity after being attracted to it by evangelical faith healers. They were facing harassment and even physical attacks by members of the local Hindu Right, and my research in this case provided a statement of solidarity with them.

This was not the only research and writing I was doing at that time. Ramachandra Guha had persuaded me to write a book on Gandhi and his global legacy for a series he was editing with Oxford University Press in New Delhi. For this, I read on the wider history of nonviolent forms of protest, enabling me to see not only how powerful Gandhi’s influence had been at a global level, but also how successful such resistance was as compared to more violent forms of insurgency.

Although there was a lot of excellent work on nonviolent movements in the post-World War II period, the previous history of nonviolent struggle was, I found, rather poorly covered, and this encouraged me to focus on the way that the theory and practice of nonviolence had evolved in India in the early twentieth century. The result was my two books on this topic: The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom 1905-19 and Noncooperation in India: Nonviolent Strategy and Protest 1920-22. In all these works, I have always done my best to give prominence to what Ranajit Guha has called ‘the small voice of history’ — that is the voice of the most marginalised and oppressed.