Champaran Satyagraha and Bihar's Freedom Struggle

Bihar holds a special place in the national movement because Gandhi's first experiment with satyagraha on Indian soil took place there. In 1917 he came to the indigo districts of Champaran at the request of a cultivator, won the planters' first legal defeat, and left with a method of agitation and a circle of Bihari colleagues who would later lead the Congress. BPSC, BSSC and SSC papers set this chapter as names, years and the technical words of the indigo system, so learn the vocabulary along with the dates.

Why Champaran rose

In the indigo districts of north Bihar, European planters held land on long leases and forced the tenants to grow indigo on a fixed share of their holding. The system was called tinkathia, because the cultivator had to plant indigo on three kathas out of every twenty kathas, that is a bigha, of his land. When German synthetic dye destroyed the market for natural indigo early in the twentieth century, the planters released tenants from the obligation but charged for the release: an enhanced rent known as sharahbeshi and a lump sum called tawan. The cultivators were left paying for a crop they no longer grew.

The satyagraha of 1917

A cultivator of Champaran, Raj Kumar Shukla, met Gandhi at the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1916 and pressed him until he agreed to come. Gandhi reached Patna on 10 April 1917, went on to Muzaffarpur, where J. B. Kripalani was teaching, and then to Motihari, the headquarters of Champaran. He was served an order to leave the district, refused to obey it and offered to accept the penalty; the government withdrew the case, and it was this retreat that gave the movement its moral victory.

Gandhi then recorded the statements of thousands of cultivators. The government appointed the Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee in 1917 with Gandhi as a member, and its findings produced the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918, which abolished the tinkathia system and ordered the planters to refund a part, about a fourth, of the illegal exactions. Gandhi's Bihari associates in this work were Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Ramnavami Prasad, Shambhu Saran and Dharanidhar Prasad, and he also opened village schools at Barharwa, Bhitiharwa and Madhuban, where Kasturba worked on cleanliness and the education of girls.

Bihar through the national movement

In the Non-Cooperation movement students left government colleges and the Bihar Vidyapith was founded in 1921 as a national school; Mazharul Haque gave up his practice and built the Sadaqat Ashram at Patna. During Civil Disobedience in 1930 the salt law was broken at Nakhas Pond in Patna, far from any sea, as a symbolic act. The Bihar earthquake of 15 January 1934 turned Rajendra Prasad into the organiser of the Bihar Central Relief Committee, work that made him a national figure.

The Quit India movement of 1942 was fiercer in Bihar than almost anywhere else. On 11 August 1942 seven students were shot dead while hoisting the national flag on the Patna Secretariat; the Shaheed Smarak before the building commemorates them. Jayaprakash Narayan escaped from Hazaribagh Central Jail on the Diwali night of 9 November 1942 and organised underground resistance, while in Tirhut and Saran local bodies briefly ran a parallel administration. Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who had organised the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1929, became the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha founded in 1936.

People to remember

• Dr Rajendra Prasad, born at Ziradei in Siwan district, president of the Constituent Assembly and the first President of India.
• Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Champaran worker and later the first Deputy Chief Minister and Finance Minister of Bihar.
• Shri Krishna Sinha, who led the 1937 ministry and became the first Chief Minister of Bihar.
• Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, leaders of the Congress Socialist Party formed at Patna in 1934.
• Raj Kumar Shukla, the cultivator whose persistence brought Gandhi to Champaran.