Indigo — Class 12 English

An excerpt from Louis Fischer's 'The Life of Mahatma Gandhi', this prose piece recounts the Champaran episode of 1917, a turning-point in Gandhi's life and in the Indian freedom struggle. A poor, illiterate but resolute sharecropper named Rajkumar Shukla follows Gandhi everywhere and persuades him to visit Champaran in Bihar, where peasants were forced under a long-term arrangement to plant indigo on fifteen per cent of their land and surrender the harvest as rent. When the landlords learnt that Germany had developed synthetic indigo, they extorted compensation from the sharecroppers to release them from the arrangement, and those who had already paid wanted their money back. Gandhi began by gathering facts, defied an order to leave the district, and was summoned to court — where thousands of peasants demonstrated in his support, beginning their liberation from fear. The case was dropped, and Gandhi conducted a far-reaching inquiry that produced overwhelming evidence against the planters; he secured a refund of part of the illegally extorted money, the significance being that the landlords had to surrender part of their prestige. Within a few years indigo sharecropping disappeared. Gandhi also worked on the cultural and social backwardness of the villages, opening schools and improving health and sanitation. The episode taught self-reliance: Gandhi refused the help of the Englishman Charles Andrews, insisting the Indians must win the battle themselves. The story shows how Gandhi's politics were rooted in the day-to-day problems of ordinary people.