Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition with Some Early Nineteemth Century Documents

DHARAMPAL (1922-2006) authored several books that sought to present different aspects of the Indian society and polity from an Indian perspective. These rigorously documented books disrupted the scholarly consensus about the backwardness and dis-functionality of pre-British India and presented the picture of a society that in fact was highly sophisticated and advanced in its political ideas and arrangements and in its sciences, technologies and education systems. These works are of abiding interest and importance.
In the Dharampal Classics Series, we present his major works in their original authentic version and in an aesthetically rich format. The Series is being brought out by the Centre for Policy Studies, a research institute with which Sri Dharampal was associated for several years, and Rashtrotthana Parishat, an organisation that had the good fortune to host Dharampalji at Bengaluru on several occasions and to introduce him and his work to the Kannada readers.
Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971) is the second of Sri Dharampal's books based on the materials collected in the course of his extensive study in the British archives. It presents documents of an intense civil disobedience struggle that raged in Benaras and several cities of Bihar for nearly two years between 1810 and 1811 against the imposition of a new house tax by the alien British administration. Indians found the tax to be an innovation and therefore obnoxious. The book anchored the Civil Disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi in an older and, till recently, vibrant tradition.

In the course of a preliminary perusal of late eighteenth and nineteenth century British official material on India in 1965, I happened to read of a boycott and consequent organisational steps taken by some village communities during the "Deccan Riots" of 1874 in the districts of Ahmednagar and Poona. The techniques employed by these village communities primarily against the money-lenders but also against all those who sided with the latter seemed essentially identical to those employed in the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements of recent decades. Further search led me to several other apparently similar instances of nineteenth century non cooperation and civil disobedience in different parts of India.
For me this information was wholly unexpected. It not only led to much questioning but also persuaded me to re-read some of the writings of Mahatma Gandhi on the subject. Up to this time, like those I knew. I had taken it for granted that non-cooperation and civil disobedience were of very recent origin in India and owed their practice here to Gandhiji. Again, like many others I had also assumed that while Gandhiji had made them more perfect and effective, he himself had initially derived them from Thoreau, Tolstoy, Ruskin and other Europeans. But re-reading Hind Swaraj, I found Gandhiji observing: "In India the nation at large has generally used passive resistance in all departments of life. We cease to cooperate with our rulers when they displease us."

The ancients held that the highest form of knowledge is self knowledge and that he who achieves that knowledge achieves all. It seems to me that the value of self-knowledge holds good for nations as well. No matter how one defines a nation and it has not been found easy to do it-its essence seems to lie not in its outward attributes but in the mental world of those who comprise it. Of the ingredients of this inner world, the most important is self-image. that is, the image that the people comprising a nation have of them selves and their forefathers.
During the British period the needs of imperialist rule dictated that Indians be pictured as an inferior people in respect to material, moral and intellectual accomplishments. This deliberate denigra tion of the Indian nation was furthered by the incapacity of the foreigner to understand properly a civilisation so different from his own. So, in course of time, as our political subjugation became complete, we happened to accept as real the distorted image of ourselves that we saw reflected in the mirror the British held to us.
Not a small part of the psychological impetus that our freedom movement received was from the few expressions of appreciation that happened to fall from the pens or lips of Western scholars about Sanskrit literature, Indian philosophy, art or science. Sometimes these foreign opinions about past Indian achievements were seized upon and inflated out of all proportion so as to feed the slowly emerging national ethos.

Traditionally, what has been the attitude of the Indian people, collectively as well as individually, towards state power or political authority? The prevalent view seems to be that, with some rare exceptions, people of India have been docile, inert and submissive in the extreme. It is implied that they look up to their governments as children do towards their parents. The text books on Indian history abound with these views.
The past half century or so, however, does not substantiate this image of docility and submissiveness. Many, in fact, regret the supposed transformation. But all, whether they deplore or welcome it. attribute it to the spread of European ideas of disaffection, and most of all to the role of Mahatma Gandhi in the public life of India. According to them, the people of India would have remained inert, docile and submissive if they somehow could have been protected from the European infection and from Gandhi.
The twentieth century Indian people's protest against governmental injustice, callousness and tyranny (actual or supposed) has ex pressed itself in two forms: one with the aid of some arms, the other unarmed. The protest and resistance with arms has by and large been limited to individuals or very small groups of highly disciplined cadre. Aurobindo, Savarkar, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad (to name some), in their time have been the spectacular symbols of such armed protest. Unarmed protest and resistance is better known under the names of non-cooperation, civil disobedience and satyagraha. This latter mode of protest owes its twentieth century origin, organisation and practice to Mahatma Gandhi.