PART FOUR
THE GANDHIAN INTERLUDE

Ten
The Rise of the Gandhians

The crisis of World War I created new strains for the political system of Surat City. The colonial administration now encroached more directly than ever on the lives of Surtis, threatening their livelihoods and their social reputations and disarming many of their traditional techniques for defending themselves against the demands of the state. On the one hand, government became more foreign, more difficult to manage, than ever before. On the other, the importance of dealing with the administration and its actions became greater than at any other time in the city's history under British rule. Yet most Surtis still did not conceive of entry into the civic arena as a possible, effective, or moral recourse to their wartime difficulties; they contested imperial and municipal policy through everyday methods of resistance outside public politics, methods that had proved increasingly ineffective in wartime. The home rulers had been unable to capitalize fully on the dissatisfactions of the population, largely because they had failed to fashion an appeal capable of prompting local residents to abandon their cautious resistance. Politics in the city thus continued to run in two distinct channels: an elite current characterized by constitutional principle in the outer arena of local politics, and an underclass current, informed by precolonial idioms, at work in the city's inner domains.

In early 1919, however, a new set of political aspirants rose to prominence in Surat. These men and women, who were disciples of Mahatma Gandhi, introduced a novel language into local politics. Like the home rulers, they viewed themselves as public-spirited reformers, as leaders of the people, and as nationalists. But they transformed the meaning of these central concepts of civic politics through creative, syncretic juxtapositions with notions rooted in local conceptions of reli-

giousness and honor. Armed with this powerful rhetoric, the Gandhians attempted to break down the conceptual walls between the inner and outer arenas of local politics, to smash colonially derived assumptions about the political world, and to persuade many city dwellers that it was not only possible to oppose the government and make it bend to their wishes but also a moral imperative to do so. The new language empowered the Surtis, providing them with a sense that they could achieve some resolution of their wartime crises through a political movement whose immediate goal was an end to colonial rule in India.

Mahatma Gandhi and Gandhian Discourse

The idiom employed by the new figures who rose to power in Surat after World War I owed its origins to one exceptionally imaginative and innovative figure: Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi had developed his novel form of political reasoning outside India during a period of roughly five years, 1905–10, when he was leading the Indians of South Africa in protests against the white government. At this time Gandhi was wrestling with two different quandaries. The first was his personal quest for spiritual truth, a quest which had led him to study the scriptures of the major world religions and to embrace an ascetic life involving celibacy, radical simplification of his diet, and the renunciation of his bourgeois household for a communal, rural life at Tolstoy Farm. The second was his inability to check the racialist policies of the South African administration toward the Indian community. Since 1894 Gandhi had taken up the grievances of his followers largely through constitutional means, appealing through petitions to the English Parliament and the government of India and stressing the rights of Indians as citizens of empire in an effort to bring pressure on the local governments of South Africa. But these techniques had proved futile in halting the growth of discriminatory legislation and treatment. Parliament was, for the most part, unwilling to interfere in the affairs of territories that were being granted increased powers of self-government. Then, with the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, all metropolitan influence was formally ended, and power came to rest entirely with a set of whites fiercely determined to check any inroads into their power. While the Indian community was becoming increasingly powerless and vulnerable, the faith in the evolutionary march toward progress and representative government—a faith that had animated Western political theorists, colonial ideologues, and Indian nationalists alike—became increasingly difficult to sustain.^[1]

Because of the exclusionary policies of South African governments, Gandhi had never been implicated in the structures that he was trying

to confront and was thus not subject to the political and psychic constraints on his counterparts in India. Almost uniquely among South Asian leaderships of the time, he was in a position to reject many of the basic premises on which European rule had been constructed and legitimized. As the obstacles placed in the way of his community grew greater, Gandhi broke decisively from any rhetorical dependence on the principles of constitutional justice and the British sense of fair play and arrived at a new political language and a novel conception of social realities that partly resolved both his central quandaries. Suddenly he came to view the two processes of attaining spiritual knowledge and acquiring political efficacy as one and the same. The key, he now believed, lay in a new technique of resistance that he labeled satyagraha (literally, holding on to the truth). Simply described, satyagraha involved deliberate, nonviolent defiance of laws considered unjust. But to Gandhi, this technique was more than a set of tactics; it was a form of struggle requiring strict adherence to the highest moral principles. He defined those principles with a vocabulary grounded in the idiom of Hindu religion: ahimsa (nonharm to living creatures), tapas (self-suffering or penance), tyag (renunciation), and dharma (duty). The search for personal salvation and religious truth (satya ), he now concluded, was the same as the struggle to better the human condition. "For me," he later wrote, "there is no distinction between politics and religion."^[2]

By linking two previously discrete forms of discourse, Gandhi was able to forge a new political logic that departed radically from the conventions and assumptions of public culture. He directly challenged the moral ascendancy of progress and constitutionalism. In his most systematic treatise, Hind Swaraj, he rejected the major measuring rods that most colonial apologists and Indian nationalists had employed in asserting or accepting the superiority of British civilization: modern medicine, law, the Pax Britannia, Western technology, industrial growth, English education, and representative government. These Western institutions, he argued, were responsible not for civilization at all but for materialism, self-indulgence, dependence upon machines, poverty, and contentiousness, both in their land of origin and now in India. Continued emulation of these ideals would reproduce an "Englistan" or "English rule without the Englishman," once independence was achieved. Gandhi reserved special scorn for British representative institutions. Parliament, he insisted, "is like a sterile woman and a prostitute."^[3] Its members acted only under pressure from the electors and their parties rather than on the strength of their convictions. Voters, too, frequently shifted their views on important national questions, often in response to newspapers or to powerful orators. Citi-

zens were more concerned with their "rights" (by implication, their selfish interests) than with their duties (dharma ) to their society. Moreover, the right to vote had been acquired through violent movements, which tainted its accomplishment. Since democracy involved such a sharp disjunction between personal morality and political action, its adoption by India would entail the country's ruin.^[4]

Questioning the desirability and inevitability of evolutionary change, Gandhi rejected the fundamental myths upon which colonialism had been based. At the same time, he constructed his own countermyth, one built around the assumption that Indian civilization had an intrinsic superiority which contact with England was beginning to undermine. This superiority he found in essences that Orientalists had often employed in their own characterizations of the subcontinent: spirituality, antimaterialism, the importance of custom rather than law in conflict resolution, the principle of nonviolence, and the belief in the social duties inherent in a person's inherited social place.^[5] But he turned upside down the colonial-nationalist assumption that these qualities were a sign of India's weakness and backwardness, suggesting instead that they were the source of a very special greatness. "A nation with a constitution like this [India's] is fitter to teach others than to learn from others," he argued, at once giving the word constitution a novel twist and reshaping the meaning of political education.^[6] He similarly transformed the concept of the nation, defining the Indian nation less in terms of an overarching political integration than of supposedly shared cultural essences such as the religious temperament of its population, its capacity to absorb and reconcile people of different faiths, and the distribution of key pilgrimage sites in different corners of the subcontinent.^[7]

At the heart of Gandhi's new philosophy was the concept of swaraj (self-rule), a word Indian nationalists had often employed as an equivalent for independence. For Gandhi, however, the term suggested not only national self-rule but also personal self-restraint. True swaraj, he insisted, involved refraining from a wide variety of selfish attitudes: the desire to accumulate wealth and property, the willingness to engage in bitter legal disputes, and the eagerness to emulate Western institutions and behaviors.^[8] The ideal public worker, the satyagrahi, was essentially a sannyasi (ascetic), who willingly gave up commitments to family and kin for the sake of the nation and humanity. Only by exercising personal self-restraint on a massive scale could Indians become truly "free."

In redefining terms that had long been part of public politics by linking them with concepts grounded in Hindu religious discourse, Gandhi fashioned new political principles that both the British rulers and the leaders of Indian politics found disturbing. Even his closest

mentor in the Congress, the moderate G. K. Gokhale, considered Gandhi's views so at odds with his own notions of common sense that he asked Gandhi to spend his first year back in India traveling around the country, "with his ears open but his mouth shut."^[9] But though the English-educated elite in India greeted him skeptically, his new political approach had proved a powerful one in contributing to the formation and growth of Indian movements against the South African state, both because it challenged the assumption of moral superiority upon which racialism was predicated and because it had a special potency for his Indian followers. It was only after he had created this new language for talking about justice and political action that he was able to channel the Indians of South Africa into a series of powerful movements that achieved some limited yet still remarkable successes.

In Surat residents had long followed Gandhi's doings, through the newspapers and through stories carried back to the city by emigrants to South Africa returning to Gujarat. Even before he achieved any significant influence in the Indian National Congress, Gandhi enjoyed a local reputation as a person of extraordinary qualities. In 1916, when he visited Surat for the first time, the welcome he received rivaled anything granted to a visiting governor or viceroy. Huge crowds gathered at the train station to gain his darshan (a viewing) before escorting him through the city's streets in a triumphant procession. Neighborhood groups, business firms, and public organizations repeatedly stopped the progress of Gandhi's carriage in order to garland the great visitor and present him with addresses. Expressions of reverence for Gandhi as a person of great self-control and spirituality issued from many groups, including both extremists and moderates. The Gujarat Mitra, the most prominent vehicle of educated opinion in the city, paid close attention to how Gandhi traveled (in third class), to what he wore (a swadeshi cap, dhoti, and shirt, with a white blanket for a cover) and to what he ate and drank (bananas, peanuts, red grapes, coconut milk, a lemon, and water), remarking at his tremendous simplicity on each score. M. M. Rayaji, soon to become a key figure in Surat's Home Rule League, referred to Gandhi as a sannyasi who had devoted his whole life to deshseva (service to the country). All speakers at local public meetings used honorifics of religious derivation in referring to him: deshbhakt (literally, devotee to one's country), karmavir (one brave in following the path of karma, i.e., action), or mahatma (a great spiritual teacher).^[10]

Yet despite these efforts to make sense of Gandhi through recourse to the vocabulary of Hindu belief, the presence of the Mahatma had not yet provoked serious rethinking of the dominant conceptions of local politics. The leaders of the municipality and the Surat District Asso-

ciation were too caught up in the structures and assumptions of the civic arena to imagine a more thoroughgoing application of Gandhian principle. After the Mahatma departed from the city, political discussion and debate fell back easily into their old linguistic and ideological confines. Local politicians essentially ignored the radical vision of Hind Swaraj, which, if applied literally, would have led to direct challenges to institutions and values that they held dear. They reconciled their reverence for Gandhi with their attachments to colonially derived principles and institutions only by continuing to maintain a sharp distinction between the domains of religion and politics. Gandhi the great spiritual teacher and Gandhi the leader of South African Indians could arouse universal admiration, but Gandhi the challenger to civil society could be conveniently overlooked.

It was thus left to a new political elite, one with little previous access to local power, to appropriate and apply Gandhian discourse in a way that seriously threatened the existing political order.

The Rise of the Gandhian Elite

The Gandhian elite of postwar Surat was a diverse set of men and women, none of whom enjoyed any significant political authority before 1919. Members of the new elite had neither been prominent participants in the civic arena nor leaders in the politics of local communities. All desired to have greater influence over the society in which they lived, but like Gandhi during his formative period in South Africa, they enjoyed a certain degree of freedom from the constraints of working within well-established political roles and a well-defined political idiom. Only they were able to break out of the mold imposed by existing political rhetoric and to innovate with a new political idiom based on the Mahatma's thought.

The persons who composed the Gandhian elite were of three different kinds of social origin. First, there were Surti traders, some of whom had built prosperous commercial enterprises but still lacked the status of the city's greatest sheths. Dahyabhai Sundarji Desai, for instance, was a cotton merchant who had achieved considerable success during the war, rising to a position of leadership in the cotton merchants' mahajan. Desai, however, was a relative newcomer to the city and carried little weight outside his occupational group before 1918. Chimanlal Chhabildas Chinai, a Dasha Porvad Vaniya, had had a somewhat checkered career dealing in precious metals and had also spent some time in South Africa, where he had worked as a clerk in an Indian firm. During the noncooperation period, he became a journalist, writing biting articles attacking the British that eventually led to his arrest.

Second, there were English-educated professionals, persons who were little different in social background from the leaders of civic politics but who had not held elected position or exercised much influence in local public associations. M. K. Dixit, who would become president of the municipality during the noncooperation movement, was a Nagar Brahman doctor, with medical training from England. His friend, M. M. Mehta, like Dixit, in his forties, had been a health officer in municipal service before resigning for private practice in the first few years of the twentieth century. Both had supported Tilak as volunteers during the Surat Congress of 1907, but they were otherwise inconspicuous in public life. A younger man, Champaklal Ghia, was a Modh Vanik doctor who entered the Gandhian elite by dramatically resigning his appointment in government service in 1920. The wives of several of these men, especially Gunavantbehn Ghia, also became significant public leaders during the noncooperation period.

The figures most responsible for shaping the new syncretic idiom in Surat, however, were men with rural origins, many with little English education. For the most part, they belonged to one of the two dominant landed groups of South Gujarat, the Kanbis (or Patidars) and the Anavil Brahmans. Of these, the most significant were Dayalji Desai, an Anavil youth, and the Kanbi brothers Kalyanji and Kunvarji Mehta.^[11] Compared with the politicians who dominated the municipality, all three young men had modest education. Kunvarji had been to school up to the seventh standard, Dayalji up to the vernacular final, while Kalyanji had a brief college education. All had served as minor government employees for some time. Dayalji had worked in the revenue office of Surat District before resigning in 1912; Kunvarji and Kalyanji had both taught primary school in Varad, a village in Bardoli Taluka. In 1909, Kunvarji quit his job, moving to Surat to take up a small business. His brother soon followed him to the city and began to teach high school.

Like many other young Indians who had acquired some schooling, Dayalji, Kunvarji, and Kalyanji were eager to make their mark on society. They did so first as promoters of education in their communities. In 1906 Dayalji founded the Anavil Ashram, where he ran a school and hostel for young Anavil boys and girls who came to Surat for schooling. In 1911, Kunvarji started a similar boarding house for Kanbi school-children, which became known as the Patidar Ashram. Both institutions attracted rural youth eager to gain sufficient education to win employment as teachers or clerks or to meet immigration requirements in South Africa.^[12] The organizers of the ashrams thus developed access to a committed group of caste fellows with extensive rural connections.

Using these new institutions as their base, the three rural youth be-

came involved in efforts to improve the status of their castes through social reform. Dayalji and Kunvarji both founded journals in which they urged the Anavils and Kanbis, respectively, to give up "corrupt" customs such as alcohol consumption, child marriage, and after-death feasts. All three helped organize caste associations and conferences in hopes of raising their communities' moral standards. Kunvarji encouraged the adoption of high-caste, Sanskritic behavioral norms, urging Kanbi women to observe four-day pollution periods during menstruation, organizing Vedic rituals for Kanbi marriage ceremonies, and performing sacred-thread rites in his ashram. He and his brother carried on their activities as Patidars rather than as Kanbis, thus staking a claim to the higher status that the former name implied.^[13] The Mehtas and Desai developed their ashrams into centers for propagating piety and spiritual devotion, spending as much as an hour daily on religious instruction.^[14]

As their reforming efforts widened, the ashramites began to develop new expressive modes for describing and defending their activities, modes that linked the idiom of Sanskritization and the language of public reform. The founders of the Patidar Ashram saw their activities among the Kanbis as part of the process of political education. In setting forth the purpose of the Patidar Yuvak Mandal (Patidar Youth Association), they stated: "Besides providing living arrangements for students who particularly go on to higher education after primary schooling so that there will be more education in the community, the purpose of this institution is to supervise . . . the students' behavior, education, and health, to help them in their physical, mental and moral development so that they become a boon in the future to their jat, jnati, and society and thus to prepare them as exemplary citizens. "^[15] An article in Patel Bandhu, the Patidar caste journal, similarly claimed: "The Yuvak Mandal has been formed for spreading education among the Patidars, for social reforms, for abolishing harmful customs and traditions in the caste, for mobilising and cultivating public opinion and for protecting the interests of the farmers."^[16]

The two brothers and Dayalji also began to associate themselves with nationalist activities. They became involved in the boycott of foreign goods during the Bengal partition movement of 1905-7 and attended the Surat Congress of 1907 as followers of Tilak. When Karsukhram Vora formed the local branch of the Home Rule League in 1916, they were among the first to join. During an influenza epidemic in 1918, the Anavil and Patidar ashrams provided many of the volunteers for a Home Rule League inoculation program that stretched from the city to some of the remotest areas of the district. Slowly, they gained acceptance from the leaders of public life.

Yet the ashramites remained on the periphery of the civic arena.

They had never run for the municipal council, and they held no office in any important public institution. Certainly their position in the local Congress and Home Rule League was not prominent. Their names are absent from available lists of speakers, chairs, and introducers of resolution at public meetings before 1918. They were young men who wished to take leading roles in shaping society, but who had not yet received sufficient recognition to satisfy their personal ambitions or their social objectives.

Following Gandhi became a natural extension of their activities. Gandhi's conceptual linking of public work with personal moral reform, of anticolonial protest with the quest for religious truth, of commitment to civic service with the renunciatory behavior of the sannyasi, carried several steps further sociopolitical notions they had already been developing. His model of political leadership provided an ideal they were better suited to emulate than the dominant figures of Surat's public life, all of whom were partly locked into well-established political styles. They readily adopted Gandhi as a spiritual mentor and actively sought his sponsorship. Gandhi visited the Patidar Ashram and addressed members of the Yuvak Mandal during his first trip to the city. Later that year, he gave a recommendation to Kunvarji Mehta, who was traveling to South Africa to raise funds for his ashram.^[17] Gandhi seemed impressed with the simplicity of life and the dedication to service that he found at both local ashrams, expressing at one point that he felt as if he were "in the midst of my own family members. . .. I have high expectations from these two organizations."^[18] Such plaudits encouraged Kunvarji, Kalyanji, and Dayalji to devote themselves further to Gandhi and to reshape their institutions to approximate more closely the ascetic and service-oriented ideals that he had set before them.

In 1919, when Gandhi announced his intention to launch a nationwide satyagraha against the Rowlatt Bills, the ashramites suddenly thrust themselves into places of great political prominence. This development was somewhat ironic since the issue of the bills itself was one that involved constitutional principle and thus fell entirely within the usual purview of the English-educated elite. The bills, which gave government extraordinary powers to deal with political crimes, seemed to the leaders of public life a violation of the civil liberties to which every citizen of the empire was entitled; the passage of the bill over the unanimous opposition of Indian members on the Imperial Legislative Council seemed an affront to the principle of popular representation. What gave the Rowlatt Satyagraha its novel character, however, was the mode of protest Gandhi had designed to defy the bills. The movement required a core group of activists to take a special, sacred, oath to disobey the laws in the spirit of truth and nonviolence, and it involved the par-

ticipation of the larger population in a day of mourning (shauk ), purification (atmashuddhi ), and penance (tapascharya ), symbolized in fasting, bathing in the holy river Tapi, and closing shops. On the morning of 6 April, the day chosen for this statement of defiance, the chief satyagrahis, each clothed in the garb of a Hindu ascetic, bathed at the riverside, then offered prayers that the laws would be withdrawn. The satyagrahis then led a huge procession through the streets, terminating at the local Home Rule League office, now named the Satyagraha Mandir (Satyagraha Temple).^[19]

Established public leaders felt a certain ambivalence about taking part in these activities. Most felt reverence for Gandhi, and all were eager to bring an end to the Rowlatt Bills; the satyagraha's association with Gandhi and its religious idiom offered them an opportunity to reach out to large numbers of people more effectively than they had been able to do through their specialized appeal. Yet many were apparently uncomfortable with the possibility of arrest and with the intrusion of ascetic-devotional elements into a movement that to them involved only secular principle. Moderate politicians all abstained from observing the occasion. Even the home rulers were standoffish. The first four persons to take the satyagraha oath were Kalyanji, Dayalji, Narmadashankar Pandya, and Ratilal Desai, all young men associated with the two ashrams. Only at the last moment was Dayalji able to persuade Dahyabhai Desai, president of the league, to take the oath and wear the special dress he had prepared.^[20] Several members of the league took the pledge only after hearing of Gandhi's arrest and deportation from the Punjab. Others never adopted the oath, maintaining an uneasy coexistence with the movement. The ashramites, by contrast, felt no hesitation about participating in all the rituals of rebellion the satyagraha involved, and thus suddenly moved to the political foreground.

The tensions between Gandhian principle and the conventions of municipal and national politics, however, became fully apparent only over the next two years. During this time, the ashramites and their allies pressed the implications of their rhetoric as they associated with the national movement of noncooperation. Virtually all the politicians accustomed to operating in a constitutional vein, by contrast, adjusted awkwardly to the new politics, almost unable to make sense of developments in a world they had once dominated.

The Rhetoric of Gandhian Politics

The Changing Meaning of Public Leadership

The decolonization of the language of Surti politics involved two different, but interlinked, processes. On one hand, the Gandhians re-

jected the common assumptions of public life, offering radically new understandings of the key terms of discussion and debate in the municipal-national arena. On the other, they injected into public culture a vocabulary that had previously been irrelevant to the civic polity, one originating particularly in the domains of religious practice and personal honor. Through these twin processes, the Gandhians created forms of expression that could only appear absurd to those who conceived of politics through the established paradigms of public culture.

The ways in which the Gandhians defied the usual conventions of civic politics can best be explored by contrasting their rhetoric and actions with those of their opponents in specific political battles. Three conflicts with the leaders of Surat's Home Rule League serve this purpose well. The language of shock and bewilderment that the home rulers employed as they sought to preserve their own idea of appropriate political behavior is particularly valuable in highlighting the disconcerting character of the Gandhian political style and idiom.

The first of these conflicts centered on the imperial peace celebrations held in the city in December 1919. More was at stake in the disagreements over the celebrations than the observance of a single event; the real issue was the importance of the principle of loyalty. Despite the aggressiveness of their nationalist stance, the home rulers still retained a commitment to the empire and had always sought to demonstrate their loyalty. Expressions of loyalty had indeed been critical to the logic of their political claims: if they were faithful subjects, then surely they were entitled to the same rights that any other citizen of the empire enjoyed. As municipal councillors, they had organized addresses for visiting governors and had participated in a number of other imperial rituals. Thus when the government announced its intention to hold celebrations of the peace in Europe, they enthusiastically agreed to take part. In November, Surat's municipal council, which was dominated by the home rulers, overwhelmingly passed a motion to spend 3,000 rupees on fireworks, illuminations, and the distribution of sweets to schoolchildren in celebrating the peace in Europe.^[21]

The municipal resolution ran directly counter to Gandhi's call to abstain from the peace celebrations as a protest against government's failure to redress Indian grievances against the Rowlatt Bills, the investigation of the massacre of several hundred Indians by the British army in the Punjab, and, especially, the treatment of the sultan of Turkey after the end of World War I (known as the Khilafat wrongs). In urging this step, the Indian leader was implicitly suggesting a major break with accepted political convention. Loyalty, implied Gandhi, was no necessary attribute of those who took part in politics but was a conditional sentiment, dependent upon the empire's fulfilling its moral obligations to

the Indian citizenry. In Surat, the followers of Gandhi pressed forward this logic, announcing that they would organize a boycott of the festivities. A few weeks before the ceremonies, Kunvarji Mehta formed a ratepayers' association to protest the allocation of public funds for the occasion. Kunvarji and his supporters urged local citizens to show their respect for the Mahatma and the feelings of Muslims hurt by government's policies toward the Turkish sultan by observing a period of mourning during the celebrations planned by the government and the municipality.

The home rulers were stunned by this departure from accepted practice and were somewhat at a loss how they should respond. Dahyabhai Desai stated privately that Gandhi "could not have been in his proper senses" to have advocated boycott of the celebrations and that the Mahatma was trying to "appeal to the masses above the heads of educated Indians . . . who, he knows, would not take any notice of it." Even if Gandhi were to write him directly, he insisted, he would not change his position, since the Khilafat question had nothing to do with the peace celebrations.^[22] The home rulers not only allowed the municipality to carry on with its program; they even organized their own special observance on the side to distribute sweets to school children.

When the day of the ceremonies finally arrived, however, the counter-observance organized by Kunvarji and his supporters proved far more successful than the observances planned by the local council, the collectorate, and the home rulers. The Bombay Chronicle reported that the city's streets were nearly deserted at the time of the central festivities. In the view of the Gandhians, they had convincingly demonstrated the antipathy of the people to holding celebrations when Indians were suffering terrible injustices.^[23]

After the peace celebrations, the followers of the Mahatma went on to reject other imperial rites and to design their own modes of ritual life for Surat. The new forms of ceremony challenged the primacy of loyalty in the civic arena, substituting the value of commitment to the Congress and to the nation.^[24] The leaders of the Home Rule League, on the other hand, were unable to conceive of nation and empire as in competition for the sympathies of the local citizenry. They clung tenaciously to ceremonial forms that had, by 1920, effectively been stripped of their symbolic power for most local residents.

Somehow, the breach between the two groups of nationalists over the issue of the celebrations was repaired, only to develop into a more serious rupture in late 1920. In this second conflict the issue was Gandhi's noncooperation program itself, which had won formal sanction at the special Calcutta Congress in September. This program issued logically from the arguments Gandhi had first set forth in Hind Swaraj. Noncooperation involved the resignation of titles and the boy-

cott of courts, government schools, and legislative councils, all of which symbolized, according to the Mahatma, a dangerous tendency of Indians to imitate Western norms slavishly. Gandhi visualized this campaign as a gigantic movement of renunciation which would bring British rule quickly to an end. His followers in Surat took up the cause of noncooperation immediately after the Calcutta sessions, arguing that participation in provincial elections, courts, and government-funded educational institutions was a sign of complicity with the British.

To many local politicians, however, the systems of education, law, and self-government were the essential building blocks of India's development. The role of each should be expanded, not restricted. As long-time advocates of constitutional advance, the home rulers of Surat were particularly perturbed by the decision to boycott the legislative councils. Several members of the league, including Dahyabhai Desai, had been interested in seeking positions on the Bombay council, assuming that they could use elected office to pursue greater self-governing rights for India. After hearing of the Calcutta Congress's decision, Dahyabhai, Karsukhram Vora, and M. M. Rayaji all vigorously objected to the council boycott scheme.^[25] When Gandhi and his followers captured the national Home Rule League in Bombay, changing its name to the Swarajya Sabha (Hindi for Home Rule League) and altering its constitution to allow it to serve as a vehicle for noncooperation, Dahyabhai responded indignantly by expelling all those in Surat who agreed with these changes. In defending his ruling, made without taking a formal vote, Desai argued that the league was a legal and constitutional organization and could not include those who advocated extralegal, nonconstitutional means. Rayaji, supporting Desai's decision, denied the conflation of religion and politics embodied in the new Congress campaign: "Though I have complete respect for Gandhi, I must say that ordinary morality (samanya niti ) and politics (rajniti ) are completely separate."^[26]

Willing to view the councils as expendable, and conceiving of the national struggle as entirely interconnected with questions of "ordinary morality," the Gandhians ignored these arguments and continued to pursue their agenda. After being expelled from the league branch, they founded their own local chapter, calling it the Swarajya Sabha, and used it to organize attacks against the home rulers.^[27] They accused Dahyabhai Desai of being "autocratic" in his rulings and objected strenuously to his defiance of the decisions of the national body. This pressure undoubtedly had serious effects, since Dahyabhai and his compatriots, fearful of being stigmatized as opponents of the Congress, eventually decided not to pursue positions on the council. But they remained indignant about the Congress's order to abstain from the elections and legislative politics.

Several months later, as elections for the municipality approached, a third serious conflict, involving similar principles of public politics, led to the complete severing of ties between the chief home rulers and the Gandhians. Again the issue revolved around noncooperation. In February 1921, the officers of the local Swarajya Sabha, eager to give some concrete, dramatic expression of support for the resolutions drafted at the Calcutta and Nagpur Congresses, announced that they would mount a slate of candidates in the upcoming municipal elections. Once in office, these men would maintain noncooperation by refusing all government finance and supervision of the city's primary schools. The action at once endangered two of the dearest values of the English-educated elite: education and representative government. The policy of "nationalizing" Surat's educational institutions would first create great difficulties for financing local schools, which received one-half of their funds from government grants. It would also inevitably lead to the suspension of the local municipality since the provincial administration would never tolerate the elimination of its control. The Surtis would thus lose, at least temporarily, the constitutional powers they had taken decades to acquire.

For the home rulers, the election challenge presented a dilemma. They seemingly had either to go along with the noncooperators and sabotage their pet scheme of universal free and compulsory primary education or to oppose the effort and gain reputations as enemies of the Congress campaign to gain self-rule. Out of frustration, they instead chose a third course: outright withdrawal from the civic arena. Soon after the Swarajya Sabha had declared its intention to capture the municipality, seventeen councillors, mostly members of the league, announced in a manifesto to the voters of Surat that they would not pursue office in the upcoming campaign and elucidated their reasons for not running. In this document, they offered a spirited defense of their policies on education to the citizens of the city:

The prosperity of every country depends upon education, and especially requires that everyone should learn to read and write. According to this principle, every civilized country has made education universal and compulsory. The Surat Municipality, taking advantage [of new education laws] at the first opportunity, was the first in all of India to adopt the scheme [of universal and compulsory primary education]. As a result, 5,000 new students are now going to schools. . .. In order to meet [the rising costs of education] it is our opinion that, rather than ending government aid and rather than having the government fund half the total expenditures now incurred by the municipality on primary education, we should obtain three quarters of our funding from the government. We have even already asked for greater funding. [Emphasis mine]^[28]

The manifesto also reaffirmed the councillors' commitment to constitutional procedure. "It is not right," they stated, "for us to break the laws framed by the government under which municipalities exercise their authority and under which we have entered the municipality as your representatives." In a somewhat tortuous, legalistic language, they argued: "It is dishonest to accept laws and take advantage of their provisions in order to enter the municipality on the one hand, and on the other to break those very same laws once in the municipality. By breaking this one set of laws, moreover, it wil become necessary to continue breaking laws on other municipal matters. We are sad to acknowledge that a time will come when we will have lost those rights of local self-government we now enjoy and that the municipality, after it is suspended, will cease to be an instrument of the people and will become one of the government."^[29]

Finally, the councillors announced that because they did not want to create unnecessary divisiveness in the city or to be stigmatized for blocking the attainment of swaraj within one year, they would leave the field open to the noncooperators. This obviously was a painful decision, one that reflected an attempt to achieve some psychological resolution between their commitment to urban progress and their devotion to India and the Congress. The home rulers, however, continued to challenge the Gandhians to explain how they were going to finance local education. A letter to the Gujarat Mitra from Kanaiyalal Desai, a local landowner and member of the league, was particularly passionate:"Your acts," he objected to the Gandhians, "are a blow to the 'democratic form of government.' Instead of demonstrating our worthiness for swarajya, they show us to be unworthy. In a representative government, even when those holding office change, they can't just completely alter the established ways of conducting business."^[30]

These arguments failed to persuade local noncooperators to change their course. Inspired by Gandhian principle, they were little concerned about whether education in Surat followed the standards set by "civilized countries" or whether constitutional rules would be violated. They objected to the assumption that India needed to prove its worthiness for self-rule; indeed they rejected the entire notion of the devolution of power. Their goal now was simply to bring about the end of British rule within the year. Refusing to consider any alteration of their plans, they announced their own candidates for the council, then campaigned vigorously in the final weeks before the April voting. After winning thirty-seven of the fifty council seats—ten of the remaining seats were nominated by government—they claimed to have won a decisive popular mandate for nationalizing the municipality. M. K. Dixit and M. M. Mehta were chosen president and vice president, and all

councillors not elected on the Swarajya party ticket were removed from municipal committees.

Once in power, the Gandhians immediately challenged the established protocol of council proceedings. In their first motion, they voted to approve funds for the presentation of an address to Mahatma Gandhi, defending this clear violation of law by questioning: "Why should a popular municipality hesitate to present an address to a leader of the people?"^[31] Council discussion, conducted largely in English before 1920, now was exclusively carried on in Gujarati. Following the example of Ahmedabad and Nadiad municipalities, the noncooperators proceeded to implement their plans to bring national education to the city. They refused all government funds and rejected all government supervision. When the Bombay administration warned the councillors that their actions would lead to the imposition of direct government control over the schools, they responded by holding huge public meetings to rally support. Here they contended in their resolutions that democratic principles required the defiance of colonial law: "Whereas they were unable to modify their educational policy after ascertaining the wishes of the ratepayers, the accredited representatives of the ratepayers could not find it in their hearts to impose their will on their constituencies."^[32] A similar motion was passed in the council halls, confirming the municipality's "sacred duty to give effect to the explicit mandate of its electorate" and inviting government "to recognize the principle of making the municipalities true self-governing institutions by reducing to the lowest possible extent official or external control or interference."^[33]

A chess match of move and countermove ensued, with the Gandhians repeatedly outmaneuvering government. The provincial administration had intended to strike the first blow by wresting control of the schools from the municipality. But before it was able to accomplish this, the council transferred 40,000 rupees of its funds to the Rashtriya Kelavani Mandal (National Education Society), an organization headed by Dr. Dixit, to finance national primary schools free of government control. When Frederick Pratt, commissioner of the Northern Division, tried to pressure two Bombay banking institutions into stopping payment of this money, the noncooperators threatened to provoke a financial crisis by spreading the news that the banks had failed to cash the checks of an important municipal institution. The banks quickly paid the 40,000 rupees to the mandal.

The government responded to this clearly illegal action by deciding to seize the municipal schools and to suspend the council and appoint a Committee of Management in its place. At this point, the Gandhians had nothing to lose from a campaign of noncooperation with the mu-

nicipality. In a series of public meetings on the streets of Surat, they urged citizens to pay no direct taxes whatsoever to the committee. This campaign proved so successful that it eliminated nearly half the local body's revenues for almost two years. Urban services, especially road repair and sanitation, were drastically curtailed. The Universal Free and Compulsory Education Act effectively became a dead letter. Several times as many children between six and twelve attended the Rashtriya schools as the government-controlled ones. Many others went to no schools at all.^[34]

In each of these three conflicts, the noncooperators through their words and through their actions demonstrated a readiness to depart from established paradigms of local politics. On each occasion, they questioned a key value of public culture—devotion to empire, constitutionalism, and universal and compulsory primary education—for the sake of their national goals. In attempting to wreck the provincial councils and the local municipality, they showed a willingness to sacrifice the most intense of all commitments of the English-educated elite, its adherence to representative institutions. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, they were easing civic discourse away from its moorings in evolutionary thought, offering a political language in which service to the nation, the people, and public good was radically dissociated from the notions of loyalty, progress, the law, and responsible self-government. They posited a new patriotism and a new form of popular leadership that rejected liberal discourse as the standard by which a people's capacity for self-rule was to be assessed. Caring little about whether the rulers of India would deem their actions proper behavior, the noncooperators felt free to step outside established conventions and understandings. They thus could offer interpretations of familiar words and symbols that were shocking, even incomprehensible, to those who had previously dominated public politics. One might say that they continued to employ the vocabulary of public politics but had rejected its grammar.

But such a conclusion is perhaps too sharply stated. There still were important areas in the rhetoric and actions of the new leadership that clearly demonstrate the continued hold of colonial conceptions. The Gandhians were as yet unable to imagine a complete dismantling of important aspects of public culture. Their difficulties in conceiving of an entirely new political order can sometimes be seen in minor details of their symbolic behavior, such as the minutiae of ritual observance. On one of his visits to Surat, local bands offended Gandhi by playing "God Save the King," apparently unconscious of the song's imperial meanings.^[35] But other signs of continuity can also be noticed in some very central behaviors. In developing national schools, for instance, the non-

cooperators basically followed an old curriculum based upon English models. Besides injecting a bit of cotton spinning and hymn singing into the daily routine, little new subject matter was taught. This issue was certainly symptomatic of a larger problem. While individual actions taken by the Gandhians defied common understandings of the political world, the challenge to public life was never as complete as that envisioned in Hind Swaraj. Critiques of key values of public culture—education, representative government, and progress—often were implicit. Once noncooperation slowed, it was easy for values that had not been explicitly challenged to reassert themselves.

In the enthusiasm of the noncooperation years, however, many participants might have seen such imperfections in the new counterhegemony merely as signs of a consciousness only beginning to take shape. Most local participants in the movement, including both leaders and followers, genuinely believed that they were forging an India that would be dramatically different from that in which they were then living.

Sacred Metaphor

The radicalness of the noncooperators' language, however, stemmed not just from its rejections and redefinitions of the established vocabulary of public politics; it issued also from the infusion into civic discourse of the potent terminology of devotional Hinduism and mercantile prestige. Gandhian rhetoric at once sacralized politics and politicized religion. While giving participation in municipal and national politics a holy and honorable significance, it injected into religious faith the idea of service to the people and the nation. By joining together two idioms that had previously been distinct, the Gandhians attempted to demystify the sterile, esoteric language of public culture, rendering it accessible and evocative to most local citizens. Moved by this powerful new rhetoric, many residents of the city came to view involvement in noncooperation as an imperative involving their most deeply held moral convictions.

The key to the success of the noncooperators lay in their ability to generate and employ expressions with a metaphor-like function. As anthropologists and historians have now begun to recognize, metaphor can play a critical role in reshaping perceptions of reality. By bringing together concepts drawn from distinct conceptual domains, metaphors create mental linkages between concepts that are difficult to understand, unfamiliar, and distant and those that are easily comprehensible and evoke powerful feelings of passion, anger, or excitement. In the process, metaphors transform understandings of both sets of princi-

ples. Richard Brown has argued: "It [metaphor] demands that we say 'no' to preordained categories; it also requires us to rearrange cognition into new forms and associations. . .. By transferring the ideas of one system or level of discourse to another . . . metaphor allows each system to be perceived anew from the viewpoint of the other."^[36] Metaphor may be particularly significant during times of rapid change, since, as Brenda Beck has pointed out, it "is one of the simplest and most important mechanisms by which a shared mental code can be kept in touch with what lies 'out there.'"^[37] Because metaphors often challenge entrenched ways of conceiving social and political phenomena, they are typically associated with persons outside existing power structures who have yet to develop strong commitments to established procedures and principles.^[38]

Many of the expressions employed by local noncooperators were not technically metaphors, since these expressions were often meant quite literally. But like metaphor, Gandhian rhetoric created powerful cognitive associations between terms drawn from two previously distinct idioms: the distant, baffling, and emotively neutral language of public politics and the more immediate, emotionally charged language of Hindu and Jain religious experience. Through this creative appeal, the Gandhians forged powerful psychic connections between critical indigenous values and the notion of nationalism.

Sacred metaphor did not always have to assume verbal form. Often, it was inherent in the very gesture and ceremony of Gandhian politics. Under the noncooperators, the key form of collective ritual remained the public meeting. Public gatherings, however, differed significantly from those that had previously taken place. Meetings held under the auspices of the Surat District Association, the Home Rule League, and other prewar and wartime public associations had been affairs organized chiefly by the English-educated elite to draw up petitions to the provincial administration on issues of civic or national significance. The audience present on such occasions generally was quite small. Speakers who addressed these meetings often cared little about developing an appeal that would address the feelings of the larger population; most instead conformed closely to the staid language of constitutional principle. Attendees could express agreement with the speaker by clapping, by shouting "hear, hear" or "shame," and by signing petitions, but otherwise they did not participate. For the most part, public meetings were means of presenting a cause to the colonial rulers rather than a method of stirring popular enthusiasm.

Under the noncooperators, a bit of this older ritual form remained. Meetings still began with the nomination and the seconding of a chair.^[39] Occasionally, motions condemning some government action

were proposed, seconded, and approved. Now, however, public meetings increasingly resembled an assembly of devotees gathered to hear the teachings of a bhakti saint. The very place of these meetings was imbued with sacred symbolism. The noncooperators abandoned such profane locations as the Naginchand Jhaverchand Hall and the Victoria Gardens—where most public gatherings had taken place in the past—for the Dacca Ovara, the huge grounds alongside the banks of the holy river Tapi. Attendees generally left their everyday clothes behind for the more ascetic garb of khadi. Often, before any speeches were given, participants sang kirtans (hymns) written in the style of traditional devotional songs. Even the method noncooperators used in calling public meetings and of signaling the audience to be quiet—by blowing conch shells—was consciously adapted from the Hindu epics.

The speeches made on such occasions were rarely concerned with framing the appropriate language of petitions. Instead speakers concentrated on generating emotional responses and political action from those present. While many earlier public meetings had been conducted in English, Gujarati now became the exclusive language of gatherings (except when Urdu was used before largely Muslim audiences). Equally significant, the form of public address underwent a drastic change. Speakers shifted their emphases away from elucidating constitutional principle to teaching moral truths. Most speeches in public meetings dealt little with wrongs committed by the government; the majority were sermon-like talks on the spiritual and political principles espoused by the Mahatma such as ahimsa, satya, tyag, and tapasya. Dayalji interrupted one talk on how India had lost its independence 150 years earlier to issue a lengthy exhortation to his audience on the inappropriateness of yelling "shame."

Brothers, we should not say "shame." According to Gandhi's teachings, we should exercise control over our emotions in meetings like this. Our battle is one of satyagraha, not of duragraha [obstinacy, persistence in bad conduct]. The man who remains firm in satya does not lose his temper. He who loses his temper, defeats himself. . .. The way to break the chains that have been imposed upon a free people by these laws is not through the use of cannons or guns, but through atmik bal [soul force]. In the Treta yuga [the age of Treta in Hindu mythology], people would pray whenever a calamity struck. As a result Ramchandraji was born. A people who have faith in God can only be successful. God has caused Gandhi to be born for this reason. We should behave according to whatever teachings Gandhi gives us.^[40]

This didactic style, imparting religious truths, making analogies to Hindu epics, invoking the authority and charisma of the Mahatma, marked a sharp departure from the rhetoric of pre-Gandhian politics.

For most Surtis, the new idiom had an immediacy and a power absent in parliamentary tradition and civic debate.

Within this larger style, it is possible to discover core rhetorical motifs clustering around certain key "metaphors." Each of these motifs played a major persuasive function in deflating colonial hegemony and offering powerful new cultural meanings that would inspire or even coerce participation in public politics. An exploration of the central motifs reveals how each worked to accomplish important persuasive objectives.

Duty (dharma, kartavya, faraj)

Perhaps the most central motif in the rhetoric of local Gandhians was the notion of dharma, or duty. Over and over again, speakers at public meetings stressed that the Surtis' dharma was involved in the struggles to redress the Punjab and Khilafat wrongs and to bring an end to colonial rule. Satyagraha was a dharmik battle.^[41] It was the sacred duty of the municipality to refuse government money for local primary schools.^[42] To wear khadi (homespun cloth) was to protect one's svadharm (self-duty) for Hindu and Muslim alike.^[43] It was the desh dharma (nation duty) of Hindus to support Muslims in the Khilafat movement.^[44] Immediately after receiving word that the noncooperation resolution had been approved at Nagpur, students of the Sarvajanik High School passed a resolution which read: "In order to honor the invitation [avahan; literally, invocation of a deity to enter its shrine] of the Indian National Congress for the purpose of attaining independence, this meeting of Sarvajanik High School students resolves that as long as this school does not become national [i.e., by refusing government grants and control], we will consider it our desh dharma not to set foot in it."^[45]

The very idea of a desh dharma extracted the notion of duty from its most common loci—the smaller descent-based local communities that had been the most important arenas of social action and identity for most residents—and reattached it to the wider collectivities of the public and the nation. This new construction created the possibility of a direct, unmediated identification with Surat and with India. As it moved to the domain of public politics, the word dharma continued to carry with it the meaning of a sacred and inescapable set of ethical obligations incumbent on individuals by virtue of their position in life. Having been born Indians, it suggested, Surtis had no other choice but to participate in the national cause if they were to remain morally upstanding persons. The term had an almost coercive quality; it attempted to preempt the possibility not only of opposition but also of apathy and inaction. And, of course, it imparted to nationalist behavior an intensely religious significance.

The Gandhians also linked dharma to the nation and the public good by a different, less direct means—by attempting to redefine the social duties of particular local castes and communities to include activities in support of the Congress. After the Calcutta meetings, the Patidar Yuvak Mandal, headed by Kunvarji, resolved that it was the "duty (faraj ) of the Patidar caste as one part of the Indian nation" to participate in noncooperation for the "honor (man ), prestige (pratishtha ) and welfare (hit ) of the country."^[46] Kalyanji insisted in a 1921 public gathering that Muslims, too, were not exempt from their religious obligations to India: "If you are a true Muslim, you cannot wear foreign cloth on your body. You may say Allah-o-Akbar, you may recite prayers, and you might be called a Muslim, but I would not consider you a Muslim."^[47] In other words, to be an acceptable member of one's own community, one must devote oneself to the larger collectivity of Indians. Such oratory obviously drew upon "primordial" loyalties in creating a sense of nationalism. But in a manner less commonly recognized by scholars, it had a reciprocal transformative effect on the primordial identification itself. Patidarness and Muslimness were now bound up in patriotism. Here again the Gandhians were attempting to create a sense of the inescapability of involvement in noncooperation.

The duties of women (stridharma ), too, were a common theme in the persuasive efforts of local Gandhians. Noncooperators were the first in the city to make any special attempt to draw women into public politics. They attempted to capitalize on Gujarati ideals of womanhood that attributed to females the responsibility for acting as guardians of family honor. They urged women to attend general public meetings. They also arranged separate public meetings for women, sometimes bringing in female leaders of national importance such as Kasturba Gandhi (the Mahatma's wife) for the occasion. Speakers often were unrelenting in insisting that women had duties to perform in the noncooperation movement, particularly in wearing and making homespun cloth. "Just as it is woman's work to decorate the home," argued one female noncooperator, "so it is also the work of women to make khadi soft and beautiful."^[48] In a visit to Surat in June 1922, Kasturba Gandhi harangued an all-female audience on its social obligations:

It is true that one of our duties (kartavya ) is to nourish and care for our families, but along with that we have duties to God. Without God what would come of the world? . . . We women should disperse the clouds that have settled over India. The women of Japan cut their own hair for use as rope to pull guns. The women of Germany made bullets for men to employ in war. We only need to sit at home and spin khadi. . . . Men are wearing khadi, but in order to encourage them, you, too, should wear khadi. Women in the Punjab have come to consider the

work of spinning entirely their own obligation (faraj ). As a result, men will be able to do other [national] tasks.^[49]

This appeal, of course, hardly posited a transformation of the character of family relations. Instead it suggested that a logical extension of women's roles in the home was involvement in the production of khadi. Such involvement, the Gandhians argued, was a major contribution to the nationalist struggle, in part because it was important in its own right, in part because it freed men to engage in other forms of struggle. The noncooperators of the 1920s had yet to envision any significant scope for women's involvement except as helpmates of men, spinners of yarn, and attendees at meetings. So the vocabulary of dharma clearly established new limits on the Surtis even as it projected itself into new domains.^[50]

Honor and Shame (abru, svaman, pratishtha, and sharam)

Questions of reputation had always been closely tied in mercantile culture to the notion of social duty. It was through enacting dharma that business firms and families achieved their places of credit and status. Failure to fulfill one's duty, on the other hand, could bring stigmatization and even social ostracism. In redefining dharma so that it would pertain to the national arena, the Gandhians essentially preserved this linkage. They invoked the vocabulary of honor and shame in spurring local residents to abandon their nonassociation with public politics. In soliciting money for national primary schools, they appealed to the traders' sense of abru (reputation), which had always depended upon the willingness to donate material resources to sacred causes.^[51] They stressed that the boycott of provincial elections and other forms of noncooperation with government were matters of personal and national self-respect (swaman ).^[52] They suggested that the arrest of Indian leaders was an insult (apman ) to the people of Surat.^[53] And they insisted over and over again that wearing or not wearing khadi was a matter of honor or shame.^[54]

Through such language, the noncooperators created a cognitive association between the idea of involvement in Congress politics and the local preoccupation with respectability. Like other Gandhian "metaphors," this motif accomplished two persuasive objectives. It promoted a sense of identification with country by suggesting that family honor and shame were dependent upon noncooperation—that is, it brought the vocabulary of credit and honor into the realm of civic politics. At the same time, it injected matters of national significance into the local politics of reputation. Members of Brahman-Vaniya society could now bring their credit and respectability within Surat into doubt by voting

in provincial elections, by sending their children to government-funded schools, or by failing to wear khadi on public occasions. Those who did not observe Gandhian strictures might become subject to serious social sanctions similar to those faced by persons who had violated the injunctions of a mahajan or caste organization.

Evocation of shame became a regular theme in public speeches. As in the polemic of Hindu religious teachers, the leaders of noncooperation regularly berated their audiences for failure to observe expected behavioral standards. Asking attendees at one meeting to throw their foreign caps into a bonfire, Kunvarji Mehta commented: "It is sad to observe that, in this city, where there are so many learned persons, black caps [i.e., foreign-made caps] can be seen, while in villages with populations of ten thousand people not a single black cap is in sight."^[55] On the anniversary of Tilak's death, Dr. Dixit similarly criticized those dressed in foreign clothes, suggesting that this behavior disgraced the memory of the deceased leader: "Those who have respect for Lokamanya Tilak should wear khadi . . .. I am ashamed that even in today's meeting, some individuals are wearing foreign caps which are simply a sign of slavery upon our heads."^[56] When Vallabhbhai Patel, Gandhi's most important lieutenant, visited Surat in 1921, he devoted nearly his entire public speech to criticisms of local citizens for failure to live up to his wide-ranging moral expectations, including political fearlessness and the willingness to adopt khadi, abstain from drink, and contribute large amounts of money to the Tilak Swaraj Fund.^[57] While to outsiders to Gujarati culture, this aspect of the Gandhian appeal might seem quite unappealing, local residents often responded strongly to such speeches, for instance, by contributing their foreign caps and cloth to bonfires or by coming forward to donate money to various Congress funds.

Playing upon gender sensitivities and identities was also very much part of the nationalist rhetoric. In August 1921, Kunvarji Mehta pricked the masculine sense of pride and called upon female concerns with family honor when he lectured a crowd on swadeshi: "If, as in ancient times, when the Rajput women did not let men return home from battle unless they had achieved victory, today's women would not let their men into their homes if they did not wear pure khadi, then . . . everyone would certainly consider it his duty to wear khadi. "^[58] Manibehn Patel (Vallabhbhai's daughter) prodded female sensibilities in scolding an audience of women in 1922: "It's shameful that there are marriages with foreign clothes. Though some khadi weddings have occurred, these are very few . . .. When our brothers go to jail why don't we feel as if we have been struck on our own chests? They undergo tremendous difficulties while you just engage in various pleasures (mojshokh )."^[59]

Of course, repeated resort to this sort of persuasive technique was risky. The boundary between shaming a potential follower into action and insulting him or her was a fine one. When enthusiasm for noncooperation began to wane in 1923 and 1924, the Gandhians, still certain that they were on the right path to truth, drew increasingly on the shame motif in hopes of restirring the Surtis into action. Instead the effort backfired, intensifying the emotional distance of local residents from the movement.

Renunciation, Sacrifice, and Purification (tyag, bhog, balidan, and atmashuddhi)

At the core of the idea of noncooperation were the ascetic notion of renunciation (tyag ) and the devotional concept of sacrifice (bhog ). The central acts of noncooperation—the resignation of titles, the boycott of legislative councils, courts, and government schools, the abandonment of foreign cloth—were all described by Gandhi in renunciatory terms. Local followers of the Mahatma, too, drew upon this vocabulary with considerable frequency. "Khadify the country and renounce (tyag karva ) foreign cloth," one urged.^[60] "It is necessary," pleaded a major Congress leader, using the rhyming phraseology of Vallabhacharya devotionalism so often invoked during these years, "to continue devoting our bodies, mind and wealth (tan, man, ane dhan ) in service (seva ) to our country."^[61] "You and everyone in India need to be ready to sacrifice (bhog apva ) everything," insisted Vallabhbhai Patel on his visit, "in order to obtain independence."^[62] "The struggle against municipal taxes is an oblation (balidan ) to the country," asserted M. K. Dixit in early 1923, a time when government had begun to seize the property of recalcitrant taxpayers.^[63]

By invoking the vocabulary of Hindu-Jain asceticism and worship, the Gandhians hoped to foster an attitude of religious intensity that would overcome the aversion of most Surtis to political risk taking. Employing the renunciation motif was a means of encouraging selflessness in the face of very real potential sacrifices. One's property, one's children's education, and even one's employment were characterized—at least metaphorically—as worldly attachments which might have to be given up for the sake of higher spiritual-national goals. As a teacher at a national girls' high school stated: "Children and wealth are not necessary for the attainment of immortality; only renunciation is needed."^[64] By suggesting that religious principles of the highest order were at stake, noncooperators also provided participants with a sense of moral ascendancy over the British, who were portrayed in profane and worldly terms. Renunciatory rhetoric thus contributed mightily to undermining imperial authority and to promoting a willingness to confront government. The obscure logic of constitutionalism could hardly

move residents to confront the state in the manner these powerful appeals made possible.

Closely related to the theme of renunciation was the concept of selfpurification (atmashuddhi ). In classical Hindu philosophy, acts of renunciation and penance (tapasya ) were techniques of purification. Through self-suffering, one freed oneself from attachments to the body and the material world, which were responsible for impurity. Local Gandhians, following the Mahatma's example, repeatedly drew upon the vocabulary of purity and pollution in describing satyagraha and the sacrifices that came with it as steps leading toward an internal self-cleansing. Students who chose not to take their matriculation examinations at government schools, too, were performing penance (prayaschit ).^[65] If women awoke to the cause of patriotism, argued Gunavantbehn Ghia, the leading female noncooperator in Surat, then "men with a purified spirit (pavitra bhav ) would become the disciples (chelas ) of Gandhi [and participate in the national struggle]."^[66] At one meeting, a Jain priest from a local shrine sermonized: "At first you may not really like wearing khadi since you may find it rough and ugly in appearance, but [with time] its internally purifying (antarshuddhi karvavali ) character will make the thoughts of your mind pure (pavitra )."^[67] Ritually, this theme was symbolized by the purificatory baths that often preceded public meetings and processions.

The idiom of purity and pollution further encouraged nonattachment to family and worldly possessions that might inhibit the willingness to engage in bold action.^[68] Here again, there was sometimes an effort to preempt the possibility of noninvolvement. In an astonishing speech in Surat during the height of the noncooperation movement, Vallabhbhai Patel warned: "If you don't do your duty because you think someone else would do it [for you], you will have to bear the consequences of your impure action."^[69] Use of the purity motif suggested a whole series of political conclusions: that the continued acceptance of British rule polluted India and its people, that wearing foreign clothes or continued participation in legislative councils and governmentfunded schools was a worldly attachment that perpetuated impurity, and that undoing India's condition of impurity required acts of penance (much as an individual who violated caste strictures might have to undergo a series of purificatory rites). Noncooperators regularly stressed the atonement and self-purification that would accrue to those who distanced themselves from colonial institutions and commitments. In the speech that led to his arrest, Dayalji had suggested that if the people of Surat were successful in ousting the British, "then we would atone (prayaschit kari le ) to a certain extent for the sins (pap ) our ancestors committed due to the lack of foresightedness."^[70]

In Surat's antiliquor movement, the boundary between militant protest and efforts to promote social purification completely disappeared. This was a campaign designed both to hurt government revenues—which depended upon the sale of liquor-shop contracts and a sales tax on alcohol—and to eliminate drinking, deemed unclean and socially denigrating to Surat and India. Kunvarji Mehta and several other ashramites, following the example of religious reformers who had preached temperance in Gujarat for centuries, encouraged local groups of low status, particularly in the countryside, to abandon drink and thus to adopt the norms of Brahman-Vaniya society.^[71] In Surat itself, the noncooperators organized picketing at government auctions of liquor-shop contracts, pleading to bidders: "Give up sinful money, depend on money that is pure."^[72] At the 1921 auctions, a band of 175 picketers marched on the collectorate, forcing the bidders to wait inside for hours. Most of the tenders offered during the years of noncooperation were substantially below earlier bids.^[73]

Mythological Motifs

Analogies to myth, particularly to the great Hindu epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, were a fourth feature of the rhetoric of Gandhians during the period between 1920 and 1924. Repeatedly likening the trials and tribulations of mythological figures to the difficulties facing India in the twentieth century, the noncooperators attempted to create a sense that the people of India and Surat were living in a time that required extraordinary actions. If the country was going through a moment in its history analogous to those experienced by the greatest heroes in the most sacred of Hindu texts, they insisted, then to do nothing was preposterous. Dayalji Desai, the most adept of local noncooperators in creating mythological metaphor, regularly drew upon the epics in his appeals to public gatherings. In a meeting in 1922, for example, he alluded to the Ramayana in stressing the urgency of political action: "When Lord Ramchandraji was ready to go to paradise, he called the people of Ayodhya and said to them: 'Whoever wants to come with me should prepare themselves and bathe in the Ganges.' Not a single person was left behind. Similarly Mahatma Gandhi is now inviting you (avahan kare chhe ) to independence, saying 'come with me.' If we do not go with him now, the time will never come again."^[74]

Such arguments again attempted to eliminate the possibility of aloofness from the Congress cause. They provided those ready to make sacrifices for the nation with a sense of involvement in a privileged, sacred, and magical moment on a historical scale that reached back into mythological time. They also isolated those who remained apathetic or

who opposed noncooperation as obstacles to the creation of a new society of mythical proportions.

Mythological metaphor also contributed to drawing the lines between right and wrong in the contemporary struggle in particularly stark terms. In one of his most powerful speeches, Kalyanji Mehta defined the government as a modern Ravana (the demonic villain of the Ramayana ) while terming noncooperation itself an avatar (incarnation) of Ram.^[75] One local journalist, urging Surti citizens to join the movement, likened the role of the people to that of the army of monkeys that had helped Ram defeat Ravana.^[76] Others paralleled the current struggle to the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the two archopponents of the Mahabharata, implicitly associating the British with the former and the nationalists with the latter.^[77] The repeated references to the struggle as a dharmik yuddh (religious war) also made unmistakable allusions to the martial character of the two epic works and left little doubt which side was in the right.

When the movement began to lose momentum, recourse to mythology became an important method of attempting to restir confidence in eventual victory. After Gandhi was arrested, Kalyanji in one meeting during July 1922 first praised the Mahatma for his willingness to go to jail for the country, then reminded attendees that Krishna, the Mahabharata' s hero, had also undergone a whole series of tribulations before achieving his final success.^[78] On another occasion, Pragji Khandubhai Desai told stories of Rana Pratap, a king of North Indian legend and history, who had similarly experienced great trials before gaining his throne.^[79]

Finally, myth set before the Surtis the ideals of courage and commitment that were needed for success. Since this theme leads into the question of how the noncooperators constructed Gandhi himself, I turn now to examine the metaphors involved in the making of the Mahatma.

The Mahatma (darshan and man)

Gandhi undoubtedly was the most powerful of all symbols in the noncooperation movement. As we have seen, the Mahatma already enjoyed a reputation as a person of special qualities in the city years before his direct involvement in Congress affairs. But Gandhi's charisma was not simply inherent in his personality; it was a cultural construct, and like all cultural constructs, it needed to be reproduced over and over again in order to maintain itself. Local noncooperators astutely recognized the tremendous potential appeal the Mahatma carried for the Surtis and repeatedly drew upon and reinforced his saintly, almost supernatural image.^[80]

The most effective mode of tapping the Mahatma's authority was to bring him to the city. Kalyanji, Dayalji, and Kunvarji tried to convince Gandhi to visit Surat as frequently as possible. These visits—a half dozen between 1919 and 1922—were occasions for a tremendous outpouring of popular emotion. Thousands would struggle to gain the Mahatma's darshan at the train station or at public meetings. The ashramites in the city paid great attention to Gandhi's program in order to give him the greatest possible exposure. His tour of Surat usually involved lengthy processions, frequent garlanding at strategic points along his route, addresses by the municipality and public associations, openings of khadi shops and national schools, speeches to groups of women and students, huge public meetings, and a number of smaller events both to project Gandhi's greatness and to capitalize upon it. Local newspapers—both Gandhian and non-Gandhian—recorded the events that occurred during his stay in copious detail. Even the Gujarat Mitra, with its moderate reputation, ran articles that strengthened Gandhi's image, referring to the Mahatma on one occasion as "the matchless soul-renouncer and practitioner of penance" and as an "avatar of Harishchandra."^[81]

When Gandhi was not physically on the scene, the noncooperators made sure that he was present symbolically. They organized innumerable occasions to pay him homage. "Gandhi days" became monthly events after the Mahatma was arrested in 1922. Perhaps the most remarkable celebration devoted to the Mahatma was a Gandhi jayanti (anniversary of a great person) held in October 1921. Noncooperators announced their intention to model the occasion specifically after Divali, the most important holiday of the Hindu calendar. Long before the celebration, local tailors had been set to work preparing khadi clothes for participants. When the propitious day arrived, citizens awoke early to gather in the city square. Municipal councillors distributed sweetmeats to thousands of children enrolled in the national schools, who had been granted a day off from their classrooms. The gathering then proceeded through the streets of the city, symbolically escorting two large carts that carried framed pictures of Gandhi, one with a spinning wheel to which puja had been performed, the other covered with khadi cloth. The huge procession—so long that it was impossible to see from one end to the other on the bending city streets—traveled through neighborhood after neighborhood, with residents shouting praises of Gandhi, garlanding his picture, and depositing foreign clothes on the carts as the procession moved on. Householders and shopkeepers hung banners carrying nationalist slogans and wreaths bedecked with pictures of the Mahatma outside their homes and shops. At the Jhampa Bazaar, a bonfire of foreign caps was held. Finally after nearly four

hours the procession ended up back in the city square. One elderly man later told Dr. Dixit that in his eighty years he had never seen such a procession.^[82]

The public speeches associated with such occasions often focused more on reciting Gandhi's virtuous qualities than on criticizing British rule or colonial policy. On the evening of the jayanti, for instance, Dayalji gave a lengthy eulogy to the Mahatma:

If there is any principle that has been especially impressive in Gandhi's life, it is that he has given up any sense of his own ego (hunpanun ). He has no attachments (mamatva ) for anything of the household or the world, but is attached simply to doing service (seva ) for the public (jansamaj ) and for God. Today every caste pays homage to him (temne man ape chhe ). He possesses no less compassion (daya ) or self-control (tap ) than the best Brahman; no less bravery than a Kshatriya; his Vaishya-like wisdom has gone into every act we have undertaken up to this point; and he possesses devotion to service like a Shudra. . .. We should take full advantage of the fact that we have been granted such a great person as our leader after a period of many hundreds of years. If we put aside our duty, then it will be considered a great mistake.^[83]

Shivaram Iyer, principal of a national girls' school in Surat, employed metaphors with particular resonances for women in offering speech of praise to the Mahatma:

The kind of devotion (bhakti ) and inclination for service (seva ) that a chaste and dutiful wife has toward her husband is the kind of devotion and inclination that Gandhi has toward the motherland. As the greedy think of money all the time, so Gandhi thinks of service all the time; just as a mother worries about the welfare of her child, so Gandhi worries about the condition of lakhs of people both day and night; the root of all these qualities is renunciation (tyag ).^[84]

Noncooperators frequently told stories from Gandhi's life as illustrations of his greatness. Often these took on a mythical quality or assumed the aura of morality tales. Dayalji especially liked to relate incidents from Gandhi's childhood while illustrating the qualities he believed local citizens should possess. In a speech he gave in April 1922, for instance, he likened the youth of Gandhi to that of the hero of the Ramayana:

Just as Ramchandraji was an ideal son, ideal father, king and householder, and was without equal in ingenuity and bravery, so Mahatma Gandhi, from his childhood, has also developed his character extraordinarily in every possible direction. His equals are Christ and Buddha from thousands of years ago. No other equal may come for another two thousand years. The foremost mantra of his life is satya. Even from childhood he has been an observer of truth. When he was studying in high school,

he ate meat on one or two occasions due to the company of bad friends. When he came home he told his mother that he was not going to eat. When she asked why, he couldn't tell her the truth. As a result, he thought, why should I do things that I can't be truthful about with my mother?^[85]

Such language served several political ends simultaneously. First, it reconfirmed Gandhi's specialness in the eyes of Surtis, perpetuating his reputation as a leader of tremendous stature. The noncooperators furnished residents with a sense of privilege in having such an extraordinary leader. In fashioning Gandhi into the Mahatma, they attempted to render his authority superior to that of either the British or the established leaders of public life and thus break the hold of deference that these figures exerted. Congress leaders regularly exhorted Surtis to "pay respect (man apo )" to Gandhi or to "follow the mantra" of the Mahatma when they appealed for support for wearing khadi, boycotting government-funded schools, or abstaining from provincial elections.^[86] At times noncooperators suggested that Gandhi's claims to the support of his followers were inviolable. Stated Manibehn Patel at a meeting after Gandhi's arrest: "If you have any feelings about the ruin of our country and about the hardships that the Mahatma has to bear, if you consider Gandhi like a revered god (pujya dev ), then you should do what he feels is important."^[87]

Second, this language provided models of political behavior for the Surtis to emulate. Noncooperators considered Gandhi to embody in saintly form all the qualities they were asking local citizens to adopt in their public behavior: truth, renunciation, penance, and devotion. Each resident of the city, by striving to fashion him- or herself in the image of the Mahatma, could also work toward personal self-perfection and national liberation. While describing Gandhi's charismatic qualities, local congress leaders were often suggesting very concrete courses of action for local residents to take, actions that involved taking on some of the Mahatma's virtues.

Third, praise of Gandhi constituted a claim of the local noncooperators, as the chief interpreters of his message, to the allegiance of the citizenry. Establishing reputations as disciples of the Mahatma was critical to the perpetuation of the Gandhians' own authority. Because the noncooperators devoted so much of their symbolic activity to making such a claim, the motif of discipleship and devotee, too, requires further examination.

Followership (chelas, bhakti, sanyasis, satyagrahis, sevaks)

Noncooperators consciously cultivated self-images as devotees of the Mahatma. In their public work, they regularly referred to themselves as chelas (disciples) of Gandhi who were intensely committed to their

spiritual teacher. This imagery was explicitly set forth in one of Kalyanji's poems, "We Satyagrahi Chelas. "

We are the satyagrahi chelas of the guru Gandhiji;
Ready to die are we, for the sake of preserving our vow.
Gandhi has given the mantra by which we all must live and die;
We all should transcend our difficulties, and never fear the suffering.^[88]

One way in which the ashramites embodied the role of devotee was through the organization of bhajan mandalis, small groups which would travel around the city singing songs of praise to Gandhi and of commitment to the nationalist cause, much in the same vein as adherents to Vallabhacharya or Swaminarayan devotionalism. Residents at the Patidar Ashram in fact take credit for originating the idea of prabhat feris (morning rounds) of bhajan singers that later became part of the general Congress repertoire all over India. Kalyanji Mehta would gather urban youth and students living in the Anavil and Patidar ashrams early in the morning, then would lead the group through the city to wake residents with their singing. Their songs generally were written in the style of traditional devotional hymns but contained considerable nationalist content. Kalyanji himself wrote a number of songs delineating the central values involved in the struggle.^[89]

Noncooperators also took on the role of followers of a great religious figure through acts of renunciation that suggested a willingness to absorb themselves in the way of life advocated by their leader. A single act of sacrifice, such as resignation from government service, could instantly elevate a person to leadership among local Gandhians, as in the cases of Champaklal Ghia and Sayyid Ahmed Edrus.^[90] Others went even further by fashioning themselves as political sannyasis ready to perform selfless service for their people and their country. In 1920, at a Congress gathering in the nearby city of Bharuch, Dayalji and Kalyanji both informed Gandhi that they were ready to dedicate their lives to the nation.^[91] They donated all their personal wealth to the Tilak Swaraj Fund as an expression of their commitment to the Mahatma. Dayalji, whose wife had died several years earlier, became recognized as a brahmachari (celibate person) with special ascetic powers. Both leaders further simplified the lives of students at their ashrams as they converted these institutions into symbolic centers of nationalist politics.

Most of the Gandhians ennobled self-sacrifice in their words and their actions. Kalyanji, drawing heavily upon the nautical imagery prevalent in bhakti hymns, expressed an intense willingness to undergo suffering for the sacred cause in one of the most effective of his poems:

We are the servants of India, we carry the banner of satya.
Against oppressive injustice, we hold our heads up high.

Let there be rains of oppression, let daggers pierce our hearts.
We leave our cares for the dream world, for the sake of our native land.

The multitudes of slaves believe in the laws of slavery.
Even in temples of God they accept slavery's fetters.
But we are the chelas of Christ and Gautam Buddha.
We will throw ourselves before the cannon balls.

Let the seven seas swell with the fire from below.
Seizing the oars of truth, we have sailed upon the high seas.
Our guides are Gandhi and Shraddhanand Swamiji.
Navigating by the pole star, we will steer our ship to safety.. . .

If we die fighting with truth, the door is open to heaven.
If we live and win in the end, falsehood will be confined to hell.
Effortlessly, the roaring cannons will stop.
And our chains will be broken by the spirit of our truth-penance.

What care have we of death from prison torture?
Brave men in the battle of truth have not heard the word defeat.
Awakening from our ashes, armies of armies will arise.
From every drop of blood, brave sons will be born.

From the force of our fierce penance, the black stones will melt.
Showers of heart-felt love will extinguish the burning world.^[92]  

The ultimate expression of renunciation and penance was to undergo imprisonment for the national cause. Those who willingly performed the jailyatra (pilgrimage to jail) rose quickly in prominence and power in local public life. When Dayalji was arrested in 1922, huge crowds gathered to see him off to prison. Speakers at a huge meeting after his arrest praised him for his atmabal (soul force) and termed his arrest a deshyagna (desh = country; yagna = sacrificial rite).^[93] The noncooperators' newspaper, Navayug, eulogized Desai in words that conflated the imagery of nationalism with that of Hinduism: "O son born of a heroic mother, who having imbibed the teaching of the guru, Gandhiji, to destroy the depraved power in the country, and having fully realized the principles of non-violence and love of humanity, offered the sacrifice of self to the tyrannical administration."^[94]

When Kalyanji was arrested on the day of Dayalji's release a year later, the same newspaper addressed the Patidar leader in a similar vein: "O you dweller in the jail, who have met the deadly dagger of 124-A [the statute under which Kalyanji was arrested], with a smiling face and naked breast. When the lion of Gujarat [Dayalji] returns today, go to the place of all divine avatars from Lord Sri Krishna to Mahatma Gandhi [i.e., jail]. Is not that temple of salvation dearer than bearing the cutthroat system of administration."^[95]

In drawing upon devotional and renunciatory motifs as they defined their own political identities, the noncooperators laid claim to an au-

thority that they believed superseded the profane conception of civic leadership. They offered to the Surtis a new model of the public servant—that of satyagrahi, a person who did not make sharp distinctions between personal and political morality, and who immersed him- or herself totally in the struggle for social justice and human welfare without thought of personal gain. In theory, such public workers were free from commitments to colonial institutions and to principles which inhibited India from reaching a more complete national liberation. Thus, for the noncooperators, the process of self-legitimation was interconnected with the effort to decolonize public culture and to define a new political order.

Taken together, these six rhetorical motifs contributed greatly to the subversion of political conceptions that had ruled municipal and national politics before 1918. But by positing a single overarching set of values through this syncretic language, the Gandhians were also challenging the dominance of the patron-client idiom that had been successfully used by dominant public figures in cultivating the support of local citizens. In short, they sought to end the politics of bilingualism, to erase linguistic barriers between the inner and outer domains of politics that obstructed the genuine participation of Surat's residents in public life.

Conclusion

The ability of Surat's Gandhians to free themselves from the constraints of established forms of political discourse stemmed to a great extent from the very different relations they sought to develop with their two relevant audiences, the Anglo-Indian ruling group and the residents of Surat. As men and women with no previous experience working in colonial institutions, they had never developed commitments to the principles and assumptions of civic politics. In reaching positions of power, they—unlike the urban leaderships before them—had little interest in bargaining with the civil administrators of the district or the province. They instead wished to embarrass and expose the colonial rulers. Thus, in their speeches and their actions, the Gandhians showed little hesitation in openly violating the standards of decorum accepted by Britishers and elite politicians alike. At the same time, believing that only massive participation in acts of noncooperation could bring colonial rule to an end, they genuinely sought to bring Surat's underclasses fully into the civic arena. The Gandhians generated a powerful oratory that rendered civic politics accessible and emotive to the Surtis, providing them with a sense of meaning and identity in the national struggle. Through recourse to indigenous notions of duty,

shame and honor, renunciation and purity, leadership and followership, they sought to create among the city's residents a feeling that their moral self-worth was inextricably tied to involvement in the noncooperation movement.

The Gandhians thus were able to create a genuine alternative to the idiom and political principles that had sustained the civic order in Surat before 1918, one that reflected a serious effort at the decolonization of local culture. Their syncretic idiom smashed the usual presumptions inherent in the established discourses of power; it demystified public politics for many citizens by infusing into the rhetoric of the civic arena a potent indigenous vocabulary. It thus came to inform a powerful movement against British rule that drew thousands of residents into its fold.

Yet, ultimately, Gandhian discourse failed to supplant completely either the older public discourse from the civic arena or precolonial idioms from the city's inner arenas. Indeed, by 1925, Gandhian politics had temporarily run its course; the politics of bilingualism had been effectively restored. Only traces of the rhetoric of noncooperation remained in local politics. Control over the civic arena was reassumed by elite politicians who operated within liberal democratic discourse and who concerned themselves more with influencing the ruling group than with mobilizing the larger population. The colonial hegemony returned to the city, in part because of defects that had always been present in noncooperation, in part because of hidden strengths in colonial rule.

Eleven
The Restoration of Hegemony

At the height of noncooperation, nationalist claims that India could attain swaraj in the very near future must not have seemed farfetched to many residents of Surat. Local Gandhians had shaken the civil order repeatedly by boycotting provincial elections, by seizing power in the local municipality and turning the council into an instrument of national education, and by organizing a no-tax campaign that effectively paralyzed the Committee of Management. Huge, khadi -clad crowds regularly gathered by the banks of the Tapi whenever Congress leaders visited the city, creating an atmosphere of near millennial expectations. The support of Muslims and Hindus for each others' causes within this vast movement seemed to defy British claims that the two communities were incompatible. Seemingly Gandhian rhetoric had brought about a major shift in conceptions of politics at both an elite and a popular level. Surtis may not have been certain about what kind of new world they were creating, but they seemed sure that they were bringing an end to the old one.

Yet by 1925 noncooperation had collapsed. The underclasses slowly abandoned the movement, leaving a Congress leadership still committed to the attainment of swaraj but divided on how that goal was to be reached. The most critical section of this leadership decided that national objectives could be obtained only by a return to self-governing institutions—the provincial legislature and the municipality—and to the constitutional idiom associated with these institutions. Bilingual politics were restored, with subaltern groups deprived of access to the public arena except as dependents of those elite figures able to manage the subtleties of constitutional politics. Most ominously for Gandhian ideals, Hindu-Muslim unity broke down, leaving members of both communities with a heightened sense of religious consciousness and with a

determination to get their rightful share of political spoils, if need be at the expense of each other.

The ultimate failure of Gandhian principle in becoming accepted as a dominant political logic and the renewed importance of public and communalist reasoning stemmed largely from the resilience of the imperial order. While the formal power of British administrators had been considerably reduced as a result of political reforms undertaken during and after World War I, colonialism still maintained a pervasive, often invisible, influence over urban society. Local life and politics had become so bound up with institutions associated with British rule that most residents of the city were unwilling to cut themselves off from these institutions entirely. As Surtis carried out their day-to-day political struggles within the structures of the Raj, they reinforced the ascendancy of a representative and a communal order, sometimes unwittingly. Through the political practice of the 1920s, languages of power appropriated from the colonial rulers consolidated themselves as "common sense," while Gandhian cultural meanings increasingly seemed "romantic" and "utopian."

Underclass Withdrawal from Noncooperation

The collapse of noncooperation resulted from three related but separable developments: (1) the underclass withdrawal from the movement, (2) an elite return to constitutional politics, and (3) the rise of communal politics and the growing feeling among Muslims of exclusion from the people and the nation. In this chapter, I explore the first two of these issues. The development of communalism will be the subject of the final chapter.

In order to understand why the Surtis drew away from noncooperation, it is first important to appreciate the character of popular involvement in Congress politics at the height of the movement. An examination of the nature of support for Congress between 1920 and 1923 reveals important strengths of noncooperation in the city, but it also exposes limitations in the nature of popular participation.

At the height of noncooperation, the nationalist leadership was extremely successful in involving large numbers of people in the politics of the civic arena for the first time. By making public politics accessible and emotive, by deflating the authority of the British and older urban elites, by creating an atmosphere of impending change, local Gandhians temporarily gave residents of extremely diverse social backgrounds a sense that areas of their lives that had increasingly slipped beyond their control were again manageable—given the proper forms of political action. Participation in the public sphere ceased to be simply an elite

or a high-caste phenomenon. To varying degrees, noncooperation embraced middle-caste residents as well as the Brahman-Vaniyas, artisans and petty traders as well as merchants and urban professionals, women and children as well as adult males. The movement even penetrated into some of the poorest and lowest-status communities in the city. Only two somewhat overlapping sectors of Surti society, the Parsis and government servants, held aloof.

One clear indicator of the success of the Gandhians lay in their short-term ability to oust their competitors from power. By the end of 1920, noncooperation had isolated the moderates and the home rulers. Both groups now stood outside the Congress, leaving control of the national organization entirely to those who supported the Calcutta program. In the municipal campaign of 1921 the noncooperators also achieved total victory. This election, the first in which all twenty-seven thousand urban taxpayers were eligible to vote, gave thirty-seven of forty elected seats to the Swarajya Sabha. Only two Parsis running in predominantly Parsi areas and Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta, the stalwart moderate who sought election in a ward populated largely by government employees and pensioners, won seats from outside the Gandhian ranks. A municipal sweeper of untouchable background, Jamushankar Bhangi, aroused considerable local curiosity after he announced his candidacy and pledged his commitment to the Congress program. But without the backing of the Swarajya Sabha, his campaign was a hopeless cause—he received only seven votes on polling day.

For their part, the noncooperators conducted a novel campaign, issuing a general invocation (avahan ) to the public to attend the polls. They did not visit houses individually or fetch voters in private conveyances as had been the practice in previous elections. Those running on the Congress platform were placed on the ticket for various wards almost randomly, with no serious thought given to their social connections in particular neighborhoods. The traditional style of conducting campaigns through friends, kinsfolk, and caste fellows was temporarily abandoned. Despite these departures from earlier practice, the candidates of the Swarajya Sabha had little difficulty in gaining a huge majority on the municipal council.^[1]

Electoral success, however, sheds little light on levels of sustained political participation or support. In order to develop a more satisfactory measure of popular involvement in noncooperation, we must consider a whole continuum of participatory behaviors, ranging from those that required low levels of commitment to those expressing intense commitments. In general, the Gandhians were very successful in securing support on the lower end of this continuum, but much less so at the higher.

The most apparent and dramatic shift in underclass participation during the noncooperation years was in attendance at public gatherings, particularly meetings and processions. The frequency of public meetings and the numbers present far outstripped the pre-Gandhian period. Noncooperators organized some occasion or other virtually every week between 1920 and 1923, in some cases more often. Prominent Congress leaders with special drawing power—Vallabhbhai Patel, Shankarlal Banker, the Ali brothers, and Gandhi himself—were coaxed to the city as frequently as possible. The large crowds at such occasions were certainly a sign of the enthusiasm, interest, and curiosity that ordinary Surtis held for Congress politics. Presence at meetings, moreover, frequently involved the expression of at least limited commitment to the movement and its leadership. One had to wear khadi —or subject oneself to intense criticism if one did not—and one had to be willing to endure the shame-oriented rhetoric of public speakers. Often audiences responded very concretely to the appeals of speakers by throwing their foreign caps and coats into the bonfires, by signing up as members of the Congress, or by subscribing to Congress funds.

In general, crowd figures averaged ten to twenty times higher during the noncooperation movement than during the home rule era, a time when no expectations—except perhaps of silence—had been placed on attendees. During 1921 and 1922, audiences at most citywide observances attracted three to ten thousand people. When Gandhi came to Surat, of course, the numbers were much higher. On one of his visits, in October 1921, nearly a hundred thousand people from Surat and the surrounding district gathered at the Dakka Ovara to hear the Mahatma speak and gain his darshan. Describing the sea of khadi -clad Surtis present, one journalist wrote that it was "as if 88,000 Hindu holymen had seated themselves by the riverside to perform penance."^[2]

Unfortunately, it is not possible to break down audiences at public meetings by neighborhood or caste. Given the huge size of some audiences, however, it is unlikely that they were composed only of highcaste or prosperous background. And certainly, middle-caste localities were almost as enthusiastic in welcoming processions through their streets as upper-caste neighborhoods. Available figures indicate that the numbers of males at public meetings usually ran about ten times greater than those of women. That several hundred women came to many meetings held by the Congress was itself evidence of a significant change in local public life, which had excluded females entirely before this time. But the inability of the noncooperators to conceive of a place for women beyond wearing and spinning khadi was a serious limitation. Later, during the civil disobedience movement of 1930–34, women did

achieve a somewhat more significant role as picketers and violators of salt laws.

Another novel feature of this period was the involvement of children in public gatherings. On days of national importance, the Rashtriya Kelavani Mandal would grant all primary-age children holidays so that they could join street processions. Thousands often did, adding to the impression of endlessness in the procession. But children, too, were not given the meaningful roles in noncooperation that they would acquire in civil disobedience, when vanar senas (monkey armies) were organized to boycott foreign toy and cloth shops and otherwise pester the local authorities.

In certain kinds of nonconfrontational protest symbolizing the struggle's spirit of renunciation, the Gandhians were also to secure widespread backing. True, no one in Surat chose to resign his title or to withdraw from the legal profession, but these were steps that only members of a tiny elite were in a position to undertake. Other campaigns of renunciatory resistance evoked quite extensive involvement.

Hartals, or business closures, which the Gandhians regarded as acts of mourning, penance, and self-sacrifice, often elicited near-universal adherence. The hartal organized for the Rowlatt Satyagraha, for instance, involved nearly all Hindus in commerce, including prosperous merchants, petty traders, and artisans. Low-caste gardeners, milk sellers, and vegetable hawkers were among those refusing to do business. Even the Machhis, lowly fish sellers living in abject poverty, joined the hartal. Among some of these communities, old group organizations enforced participation. The panch of the barbers, for instance, threatened to fine barbers who served their clients on 6 April. A few horse-cart drivers, largely Muslims, remained on the streets, but the only significant sign of commercial activity was the trade of Parsi government contractors who ran liquor and opium shops.^[3] During the boycott of the peace celebrations later that year, most traders in the city closed their establishments early and retired to their homes. The Bombay Chronicle, a pro-Gandhian newspaper, reported that the main roads of the city looked "almost like a desert,"^[4] though it failed to note that many Parsis had kept their shops open and had participated in the celebrations; the Parsi Panchayat had even organized its own special festivities.^[5]

The boycott of provincial elections in 1920, also championed as a meritorious act of self-denial, achieved extremely widespread compliance in Surat, albeit with an electorate that constituted only about onefifth of the adult male population. The Gujarat Mitra, a progovernment newspaper, admitted that the boycott had "an appreciable hold on the mob" (i.e., those residents with little English education) but claimed

that the "enlightened section of the citizens"—notables, government servants, and educated professionals—generally attended the polls.^[6] The Gandhians organized an extremely effective campaign against the councils, holding public meetings and disseminating handbills widely in the city. They also convinced many middle-caste headmen to impose penalties on community members who attended the polls.^[7] As a result, only a small fraction of the eligible Hindus, Jains, and Muslims voted. In non-Muslim wards, only 20 percent of the electorate cast votes; almost a third of these were Parsis, who turned out in large numbers, almost winning a position in the Bombay legislature for their candidate, Jamshedji Antia.^[8] However, Hindu and Jain government servants and pensioners, who also voted in large numbers, generally threw their support behind Chunilal Gandhi, a moderate and former government lawyer, allowing him to edge out Antia. Neither Antia nor Gandhi would have had much chance to win if not for the boycott.^[9]

The most sustained campaigns of the noncooperation period centered on the movement to nationalize local education. After the Bombay administration wrested control of municipal schools from the noncooperating councillors, the Gandhians urged residents to withdraw their children from government-controlled primary schools and to enroll them in schools started up by the Rashtriya Kelavani Mandal. This, too, was described as an act of renunciation. At one point, in early 1922, only 796 of roughly eight thousand potential primary school students were in attendance at the government schools.^[10] Different social groups tended to comply with the directives of the local Congress in different ways. While high-caste residents sent their sons and daughters to the national schools, children from artisan and petty-trading families more often than not chose to attend no schools at all. Many families of low and middle status took advantage of the inability of local government to enforce the Universal and Compulsory Primary Education Act by putting their children back to work in their shops and small factories. So while five thousand students filled classrooms of the national schools, nearly three thousand children between six and twelve abstained from any formal education whatsoever.^[11]

Most of the money needed to fund the national schools came from local traders. Contributions to national education and other Congress causes often helped local merchants advance their familial prestige and the status of their occupational groups, much as they had achieved the same ends through donations to support temples and holy men in the past. Nationalist rhetoric was successful in stressing the gains to family abru that would ensue from munificence and in casting the Rashtriya Kelavani Mandal as a sacred focus for mercantile gift giving. Local merchants responded to this appeal by giving thousands of rupees to

the Congress organization, allowing it to maintain primary schools for almost five thousand students over several years. Perceiving donations to the Congress as critical to their core values—their religion and their credit—many local merchants found a way to express their dissatisfactions with government policy they could easily reconcile with their own charitable traditions. A number of occupational mahajans, including those of the cotton merchants, grain dealers, and grain merchants, contributed their lagos (cesses), traditionally raised for the support of temples and animal hospitals, to the mandal.^[12] Some contributed money on particularly auspicious occasions such as the marriages of their sons or daughters and the visits of the great nationalists.^[13] Gifts of ornaments and other personal objects became commonplace at public meetings. Clearly the Gandhians were quite effective in forging a cognitive connection between mercantile ethics and financial support for the nationalist cause.

The most powerful challenge to government came in the no-tax movement against the Committee of Management, appointed by the provincial administration after it had suspended the noncooperating municipal council in early 1921. As soon as the committee assumed power, local Gandhians called for a halt to all forms of support for the new municipality, asking all residents to refuse to pay any direct taxes to the local body. In a population that had always offered widespread but usually uncoordinated resistance to municipal taxation, this call evoked a powerful response. Twenty-two of twenty-six thousand citizens on the tax rolls refused to submit their payments, showing their resentment toward the huge increases in direct taxation over the previous decade. Though no effective campaign could be organized against octroi collections, municipal revenues as a whole fell by nearly 50 percent. In order to maintain any civic services, the committee was forced to hire special officers to seize property from refractory ratepayers. Several hundred seizures took place. Tax collections returned to normal only after two years. Some arrears were never recovered.^[14]

All these forms of popular involvement marked a significant departure from the traditional style of civic politics, which had previously required that residents of the city rely on their representatives to take up their concerns. Thousands of residents had engaged in the protests associated with noncooperation, viewing their actions as contributions to a larger movement intended to bring an end to colonial rule. The rationale for participation may have varied from group to group. One suspects that many merchants perceived involvement as a mode of raising their familial prestige and credit, and that members of middle-status groupings, often employing preexisting organizations, may have viewed noncooperation as an opportunity to promote the status of their

entire community. But for all these sections of society, noncooperation seemed an opportunity to overcome their past exclusion from civic politics. Armed with conceptual weapons for making sense of the public sphere, the Surtis were seemingly becoming genuine participants in shaping an alternative order.

Yet despite tremendous enthusiasm for certain aspects of noncooperation, the underclasses always maintained a certain distance from the nationalist leadership even during the most intense moments of struggle. In part this may be because they had been denied any truly creative role in the formulation of the movement's plans and ideology. In contrast to the "mass line" of Mao's revolutionary theory, the Gandhian philosophy of action left limited scope for ideas and policies from below. In Surat, Gandhian principle was articulated largely by a few leaders who believed themselves to be the authoritative interpreters of the Mahatma's teachings. These leaders placed stringent moral controls over participants, such as nonviolence, abstinence from alcohol, and the renunciation of foreign cloth. Persons who departed from the central tenets of the ethical code, for instance, by engaging in petty acts of violence or by acting in an angry fashion at public meetings, risked censorship or ostracism. Dayalji Desai stressed the need for calm and quiet in virtually every public speech he gave during this period. Only certain kinds of actions, the chief leaders of the Congress clearly let their audiences know, could be allowed under noncooperation.^[15]

Thus, though the Gandhian appeal struck powerful chords in local culture, it was never to develop the fully plebeian character that might have ensured its survival. Many residents of the city were hesitant to be absorbed in a form of politics that required its adherents to follow moral codes sent down from above. Response to different aspects of the Gandhian appeal varied considerably. In modes of resistance that involved little danger to their families or their livelihoods, the Surtis generally manifested very high degrees of involvement. But when association meant intense commitments, major sacrifices of group autonomy, or placing family well-being at serious risk, residents were very wary.

All forms of political involvement that generated widespread support in the city shared one feature: none required abandoning the low profile that local traders had previously tried to maintain in their politics. Many of the concrete forms that noncooperation adopted—business closings, withholding tax payments, and avoiding other obligations to government—were based upon well-established strategies of merchant resistance that now had assumed a collective form and had acquired a national and public character through association with Congress agitations. None involved a direct confrontation with government

that would place the artisan or merchant family firm seriously at risk. The one movement that directly and openly challenged colonial legal standards—the no-tax movement against the local municipality—quickly crumbled once the Committee of Management began to send its officers into local homes accompanied by policemen to seize silk clothing and other property. By late 1924, the committee had become so successful in making its collections that, much to its own surprise, it had been able to generate a revenue surplus (though there were considerable uncollected arrears).

In acts that required greater personal visibility, the residents of Surat were at best lukewarm. The Gandhians were particularly unsuccessful in recruiting activists from deep within local society. Only a couple of dozen persons took the oath of satyagraha during the Rowlatt movement. In May 1921, after Dayalji asked for two hundred volunteers to picket country liquor shops at a public meeting, just thirteen persons came forward.^[16] The results were so disappointing that when the bidding for shop contracts began, Kunvarji had to bring in volunteers from the rural town of Bardoli. No doubt, many Surtis, particularly those living in poverty, derived great pleasure from drink and saw little need to support a drive toward purification that would take this pleasure away. But the difficulties in obtaining workers for Congress causes were not confined to the antiliquor campaign. When noncooperators attempted to form a more general corps of activists from the city in early 1922, only seventy-five persons signed up, in contrast to the nearly four thousand Kalyanji had enrolled in Bardoli. Most of these few volunteers came either from the rural students living at the two ashrams or from high-caste youth of high-school and college age.^[17] Despite the urgings of the Gandhians, only a handful of local persons, all in positions of leadership, underwent imprisonment during the noncooperation period. And very few resigned government positions. The few who did, like Champaklal Ghia and Sayyid Ahmed Edrus, were elite figures with assured livelihoods and assured positions of political influence once they left their posts.^[18] By contrast, clerks, policemen, and post-office workers were too dependent on income from government employment to risk this sort of dramatic step. Thus, perhaps the most effective form that a nonviolent campaign might have assumed in Surat—the refusal of the administration's own servants to continue their collaboration—never took shape.

The swadeshi campaign was also very mixed in its achievements. In late 1922, noncooperators organized a boycott campaign involving 139 picketers that prompted all the city's foreign cloth merchants, with the exception of a few Daudi Bohras, to sign a pledge not to sell foreign products for one year. Two months later, however, it was clear that

many cloth traders were continuing to sell foreign goods from their shops.^[19] Most of the local citizenry never fully embraced the cause of khadi. All through the years of noncooperation, speakers at public meetings regularly berated local citizens for putting on homespun clothes only at meetings and in processions but then wearing foreign and millmade clothes at home and at work. The difficulties of the khadi campaign in Surat should have been readily apparent. In a city whose economic vitality depended upon marketing luxury textiles, and where textile manufacture depended heavily upon the import of foreign raw materials and the export of finished products, complete acceptance of the Gandhian creed on cloth would have been remarkable. The local economy had become so interlinked with the larger world economy that total absorption in swadeshi would have seriously endangered family security and well-being.

Though the scheme of national education undoubtedly achieved tremendous successes at its height, it, too, eventually ran aground. Government prosecutions of a few families with children in local schools for violation of the universal and compulsory act certainly had some effect. More significant, however, were the financial problems of the national schools. Cut off from public sources of revenue after the suspension of the noncooperating municipality, the Rashtriya Kelavani Mandal depended upon steady and permanent private contributions. Once the Committee of Management became effective in collecting direct cesses, residents who continued to support the Rashtriya schools found themselves paying double taxation for the schooling of the city's children. Not surprisingly, contributions began to dwindle by 1924, with adverse effects on the standards of primary education. The teachers, restless about poor pay and working conditions in the institutions of national education, gradually returned to the government-funded schools. The Gujarat Mitra sarcastically suggested that the problem had become so serious that "even ladies who had served as water women in the national schools were turned into [school] mistresses."^[20] Slowly upper-caste families began sending their children back to the municipal schools. Education had simply become too important a matter in colonial Surat for business and service families to risk doing without it. Jobs in the post office, railways, and administration depended on schooling, and without literacy, no businessman could hope to survive in a world where commerce increasingly involved dealings with bureaucracy. Thus, with no clear vision of how the livelihoods of urban dwellers could be sustained without the abilities acquired in existing schools, the Gandhian campaign was bound to run into difficulties. By 1925, when the Congress came back to power in the local municipality, even the staunchest noncooperators began to recognize the practical problems

of national education. Led by Dr. Dixit, the local body merged the old municipal schools and the new Rashtriya schools and accepted government funding and supervision.

These cases are merely illustrative of how the dependence of local residents upon colonial institutions eventually undid noncooperation. The saturation of the colonial order in Surat's social life, of course, extended far beyond these few examples. Local bankers now obtained credit from imperial banks; exporters required the cooperation of port authorities; businessmen needed licenses and the use of railway wagons; artisans clamored for the new public utility company to provide electricity in their neighborhoods so that they could mechanize household factories. Many householders relied on the courts in pursuing conflicts over property, commerce, and the use of urban space. As long as the Congress showed little sign of constructing an alternative political system to undermine colonial structures, most residents were simply not ready to persist in forms of social protest that could endanger family statuses and livelihoods.

Gandhian cultural meanings, which in their fullest senses challenged these structures completely, failed to assume the status of a new hegemony. To many residents, no doubt, wholesale embrace of the principles espoused by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj was hopelessly utopian, out of touch with the material circumstances of everyday life. As a result, their participation in noncooperation often proved selective and inconsistent. Once the imminence of swaraj seemed to fade, the Surtis, still averse to taking political risks, became more and more reluctant to undergo the sacrifices that Gandhian politics required. It thus makes little sense to see ordinary city dwellers in Surat as more inherently radical than their elite leaders.

From a nationalist outlook, it is hard to argue that noncooperation achieved any enduring victories. India had not gained redress of the Punjab and Khilafat wrongs, and it had failed to win swaraj within one year. From the perspective of Surat's merchants, petty traders, and artisans, however, the Congress agitations had achieved much. By 1923, the position of municipal commissioner had been eliminated, municipal administration was in a shambles, most municipal bylaws could no longer be enforced, and the Universal and Compulsory Education Act had become a dead letter. Some government controls had been relaxed and others were enforced unevenly. The crisis of World War I had now eased considerably for most residents. To the nationalists, the end of the noncooperation movement marked the beginning of a new period of apathy in Indian political life, when the larger population of the city generally abstained from congress affairs. To the city's underclasses, by contrast, this moment may indicate merely a return to less-

dramatic, everyday methods of defending personal and group interests, such as the uncoordinated efforts of individual families to avoid complying completely with municipal regulations or paying their taxes in full. Subaltern groups seem to have retreated from the civic domain only to refocus their energies on forms of politics separate from campaigns of the Congress and other elite figures. The Surtis thus did not give up their struggles to construct a better life; they only abandoned the sites on which they had fought these struggles—and the national and public meanings they had attached to their efforts—during the noncooperation era.

Yet such popular successes undoubtedly came at considerable cost. The withdrawal of most residents from public life meant that they would have little voice in constructing the larger political order that would follow noncooperation, that their politics would be confined largely to activities that would nibble at the social inequities and hardships produced by the rise of a modern state, and that they would remain dependent on the privileged figures who controlled access to critical positions of power in the legislature and the municipality.

Elite Politics

The return of elite politics to its old constitutional track was both a consequence and a cause of the underclass retreat. As the promise of swaraj faded and as it became clear that the Surtis were gradually dissociating themselves from noncooperation, many of the Congress leaders began to reconsider their political options. Often they felt the need to resume bargaining with their rulers too compelling to continue their efforts to undermine the institutions of local self-government. And as they reentered the politics of legislative councils and municipalities, they often pursued their claims to justice through the idiom of public politics, reproducing conventional civic discourse through their political practice. They now became only representatives of the people, losing their identities as chelas and sannyasis. Abandoning the hard line of noncooperation in turn indicated clearly to the larger population that the achievement of some alternative to the colonial order was unlikely in the near future and that continued participation in the most conspicuous forms of nationalist resistance would probably not bear much more fruit.

The emergence of the Swarajya party during early 1923 opened the first cracks in the Gandhian strategy of noncooperation. Led in the Bombay Presidency by Vithalbhai Patel and M. R. Jayakar, the Swarajists proposed entering the reformed legislative council to pursue a policy of obstructing government from within. When Patel visited Surat

from Bombay in early May to solicit support for his party, a number of local politicians, including some who had been the staunchest supporters of noncooperation only two years earlier, quickly jumped on board. Surat suddenly became the center of Swarajist activity in Gujarat. Dr. Dixit, Dr. Mehta, and Maganlal Vidyarthi, all local noncooperators with sufficient education and professional training to make the shift to a politics based upon the idiom of constitutionalism and progress, assumed important positions in the Gujarat Provincial Swarajya party.^[21] All three planned campaigns to run for provincial office.

Opposition to the Swarajya program came largely from activists who had been arrested and their supporters. In Surat, however, this opposition was muted owing to the intervention of Dayalji Desai, now president of the District Congress Committee. Fearing the potential for a major rupture between local nationalists, Dayalji attempted to cultivate mutual respect among the two factions. With his encouragement, "NoChangers" and Swarajists both appeared in the same public meetings to present their views on entry into the councils while confirming their shared commitment to Gandhi's constructive program, to agitation against the local municipality, and to the national schools. Dayalji even encouraged Vithalbhai Patel to address Surat's citizens from a Congress platform just before the elections.^[22]

In recent years, historians have tended to view the willingness of Congress politicians to back the Swarajya party after 1923 as evidence of a materialistic concern with gaining access to networks of patronage controlled by the provincial legislatures.^[23] Evidence from Surat certainly indicates that an interest in personal political influence was important, but it also suggests that scholars might need to probe further into the question of why this influence was sought. In Surat local Gandhians of all stripes were genuinely flustered by the ability of Liberal politicians to frustrate the Congress cause. Many felt that Chunilal Gandhi, the city's representative in the Bombay council, was partly responsible for the suspension of the noncooperating municipality, the appointment of the Committee of Management, and a variety of other government efforts to suppress the cause of swaraj. As long as persons with little commitment to the Congress program remained in control of the legislatures, they reasoned, government could easily thwart their activities. In entering the Bombay legislature, Dixit, Mehta, and Vidyarthi sought not only to paralyze the colonial government of the province but also to restore the municipality to Congress hands. By gaining control of the council, they believed that they could reinvigorate such efforts essential to attaining independence as nationalizing local schools. They by no means wished to abandon other aspects of the Congress constructive program such as the promotion of khadi and of Hindu-Muslim unity.

But once they decided to reenter legislative politics, the Swarajists found themselves compelled to adhere to political conventions quite different from those that had governed noncooperation. They defended their actions largely in terms of the principles of public discourse, in part because these principles allowed them best to dismiss the claims of their opponents. In the election campaign of September and October 1923, none of the Swarajya party's candidates used Gandhian rhetoric extensively. Each stressed the violations of citizen rights that had occurred under their opposition's tenure of office. According to their arguments, a coterie of Liberals such as Chunilal Gandhi, voted in by tiny minorities of the population during the boycotted elections of 1920, had frustrated the true will of the people. M. M. Mehta, running for Surat's single urban seat, contended that as a result of moderate cooperation with the British in the legislative councils, "the whole country has had to accept increases in the salt tax; citizens in the municipalities of Surat, Ahmedabad and Nadiad have had their rights of self-government taken from them; the birthright of mothers and fathers to educate their children as they wish has been trampled upon; reputable householders have been prosecuted and fined under the compulsory education law; and national schools have been locked up under various government schemes." "It is a duty of the representatives of the people," he insisted, ". . . to attempt to prevent such disastrous developments," thus criticizing the moderates for failing to perform their responsibilities as legislators while claiming that he, if elected, would certainly fulfill his obligations to his voters.^[24] Dixit, running in the rural constituency of South Gujarat, promised in his speeches that the Swarajists would try to regain popular control over municipalities, to free Mahatma Gandhi and other political prisoners from jail, and to fight for independence and other political rights.^[25] For the most part, the rhetoric of both candidates was devoid of the religious allusions they had employed just a year or so earlier. The language of representative government was clearly beginning to reestablish its preeminence in the civic arena.

Such appeals, however, were by themselves hardly sufficient to ensure election victories. After all, the public meetings of the Swarajist candidates, often attended by no more than fifty people, could not hope to reach the entire urban electorate of Surat, now more than seven thousand voters, or the even larger rural constituency. To a great extent the election of 1923 relied on techniques that had often been used in the campaigns of prewar Surat but that had been abandoned during the noncooperation years. Candidates again secured the support of agents—that is, men of local influence—to canvass neighborhoods of the city and persuade voters to attend the polls. On the day of the election, these agents intensified their personal methods of contact-

ing citizens.^[26] With a number of private motor cars and carriages at their disposal, the Swarajists ferried many voters to the polling station at the city castle individually. The district magistrate's remarks that there had been "a great deal of improper influence used in the town," while obviously reflecting a heavy bias against the Congress, confirmed the existence of a second, more personal, idiom of politics operating alongside and supplementing civic discourse, one that the Swarajists used more effectively than the Liberals.^[27] During the next provincial campaign, in 1926, the Gujarat Mitra would remark that these electoral practices had become so engrained that even "a voter only a hundred yards away from the polling station . . . expects a car to be near his door before he thinks of leaving his place for the purpose of voting."^[28] English-educated politicians of every party tended to agree that these methods were necessitated by an electorate "ignorant of the value of the vote" which required further "training" in the proper exercise of democratic government.^[29] No doubt the inaccessibility of constitutional rhetoric for the local population inhibited plebeian participation in the exercise of public power. But no one gave voice to the possibility that the language of liberal representative politics could be as responsible for that as any deficiency in the political education of the Surtis.

As a result of their effective use of this bilingual campaign, the Swarajists won a resounding success in the 1923 election. In Surat City, Dr. Mehta won easily, with 2,433 votes to Chunilal Gandhi's 407 and Jamshedji Antia's 302. Dr. Dixit won one of the two rural seats. Vidyarthi finished far down in the polling, but H. B. Shivdasani, a former assistant collector who had recently resigned his post and who had won the tacit backing of Dayaiji when he signed up as a Congress member, was the leading vote getter in the countryside.^[30] Shivdasani immediately became one of the most vocal and effective members of the Bombay Swarajists in the legislature. Even the old home ruler Kanaiyalal Desai, who finished third in the rural voting, signed the Congress pledge just before the election.

Once in the councils, Mehta, Dixit, and Shivdasani found themselves bound by severe constraints, some of which they had never anticipated. Within the Bombay council, colonial authority was still strong. Under the system of dyarchy that had been created by the MontaguChelmsford reforms of 1919, wide areas of policy were entirely excluded from discussion by the elected legislators. But even in those spheres of policy designated as appropriately within the council's domain, government and its Indian allies retained considerable informal influence. Owing to unevenness in support for the Swarajists elsewhere in the Bombay Presidency and to the abundance of separate electorates and reserved seats for Muslims, non-Brahmans, and a variety of special

interests, the nationalists captured only a minority of the positions on the council. Only persons with "loyal" inclinations—including one Britisher and two Muslims—were selected as ministers. Of course, Dixit, Mehta, and Shivdasani could have chosen—as the all-India program of their party suggested—to resign from the council, but this would again leave them with no influence in such matters as the restoration of Surat Municipality. On issues that concerned them most, their best option seemed to lie in alliance with Bombay Independents and, on occasion, the Moderates. Any partnership in the council, however, required at the very least a relatively civil demeanor, that is, a renewed adherence to the conventions and idiom of parliamentary politics. In the end, to paraphrase David Arnold's work on Madras politics, it was not the Swarajists who captured the legislature but the legislature which captured the Swarajists.^[31]

Members of the new party continued to espouse the ideal of obstruction in principle. Dixit and particularly Shivdasani pestered the governor's ministers with endless questions, which usually had to be sent off to the departments of government for answers; they made long tirades on the budget and on other issues that came before the legislature, whether or not these issues genuinely engaged their interest. And, for a brief period in 1926, they joined the other Swarajists in boycotting the council.^[32] But when matters they considered to be vital arose, such as municipal affairs, they made sure their voices were heard. In March 1924, only a few months after the council began its sessions, Dixit petitioned Gulam Hussein Hidayatullah, the minister of local selfgovernment, to allow new municipal elections in Surat and to bring the Committee of Management's administration to an end.^[33] In July he fought a municipal bill giving government the power to dissolve municipalities and call new elections in addition to the powers of supercession it already possessed. In both cases, he reminded government of its own avowed commitments to the devolution of power. In the July debates, for instance, he argued: "We are now working the new reforms; the ultimate aim of the British government is to give self-government to India, and if you go on adding further powers to the power already possessed by government in dealing with the municipalities which they consider as defaulting, I do not think it will be consistent in spirit so far as the present reforms are concerned."^[34]

This sort of constitutional argument was obviously a major departure from the rhetoric noncooperators had used three years earlier when they had claimed that it was a sinful or adharmik act to participate in the legislature and that boycott of the councils embodied the Hindu ideal of renunciation and self-sacrifice. But now the Congress leaders were addressing a different audience and with different purposes. The

need to influence provincial ministers and to win the support of Independents and Moderates required use of an idiom more at home in the halls of the legislature than on the streets of Surat. Ironically, representation of the people now involved using symbolic skills that uneducated citizens could not hope to master: knowledge of legislative rituals and procedures, familiarity with parliamentary traditions, the ability to speak and think quickly in English and to manipulate legal rules and statistics in debate. In following the conventions of public debate, even for the purpose of contesting colonial policy, the Swarajists in essence conceded that the major issues of provincial politics were going to be fought on the terrain of constitutional and devolutionary principle. At a more implicit level, they agreed to strive for the same kind of polity that their British overlords were now themselves attempting to forge: a liberal, representative order that would pursue the objective of political and economic progress.

Municipal Politics

Municipal politics followed a very similar pattern, with elite leaderships creating political styles that were essentially renegotiated versions of those that had existed before the emergence of Gandhian movements. By 1924, the noncooperators as a whole were convinced that the only way to regain command of the local scene was to wrest control of Surat's municipality from the Committee of Management. The provincial administration, however, determined when elections would occur, waiting until February 1925, almost four years after the last local campaign had taken place (elections in theory were supposed to happen every three years). In the months leading up to this election, the noncooperators became embroiled in a major conflict with the Bombay administration over the election rolls. Requiring all voters to have paid their taxes in full, the provincial government denied the electoral eligibility of thousands of citizens who had not yet paid their arrears by mid-1924. At one point, it appeared that only nine thousand of twenty-nine thousand potentially qualified residents would be eligible to vote. The Congress found itself in the odd position of encouraging those it had once asked not to pay their taxes now to submit their delinquent payments as quickly as possible. One thousand additional householders got on the final electoral roll, but nineteen thousand persons most sympathetic to the nationalists were disenfranchised. Even Dayalji Desai, president of the District Congress Committee, could not vote.^[35]

Under these conditions, it was remarkable that the noncooperators were able to achieve any success. They formed a coalition group, the National party, with a group of independent nationalists such as the

former home rulers Karsukhram Vora and Prasannavadan Desai. In a campaign similar in style and strategy to the provincial elections fifteen months earlier, this "party"—actually a loose alliance with little coherent program—won about twenty-five of the fifty seats on the municipality and successfully placed Dr. Dixit as council president. The National party ousted the noncooperators' most important political enemy, Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta, who had become so unpopular during his tenure as chairman of the Committee of Management that he failed even to capture his seat in the council.

The position of the noncooperators, however, was far weaker than it had been in 1921. They now directly controlled only fifteen seats. Despite the supposed devolution of power to the city, the Bombay administration still nominated ten candidates itself. And it now set up separate electorates for Muslim voters, effectively placing eight more seats beyond the reach of the Congress. Many of the staunchest Gandhians were no longer among those elected. Virtually all the new councillors were drawn from the ranks of the highly educated professionals; with the exception of Kunvarji Mehta, the ashramites were completely missing from the council's membership. There were very few traders as well.^[36]

The hands of the noncooperators were tied by their need for allies and by the practical problems of running a municipality under continued colonial domination. Resolutions offered in the old Gandhian spirit, such as those asking the council to grant further funds to the Rashtriya Kelavani Mandal or to refuse the allocation of moneys to the government-controlled local school board, regularly met with defeat. The difficulties of the congress group in raising funds for the mandal in fact forced Dixit eventually to merge the national primary schools with the municipal schools and to accept government supervision and funding of both, obviously a painful step for a person who had so publicly committed himself to national education.^[37]

After these initial setbacks, the noncooperators increasingly moderated their rhetoric, moving closer to the accepted canons of municipal protocol. "Whatever be the decisions of the municipality," noted the progovernment paper Gujarat Mitra in August, implicitly contrasting the council's behavior with that of the 1921 local body, "it is satisfactory to note that as a whole the discussions are carried on sometimes sensibly."^[38] When the provincial government adopted measures restricting the jurisdiction of the municipality, the council as a whole often agreed to register its objections in purely constitutional terms. After the Bombay legislature proposed a bill that would establish greater control over the executive officers of provincial municipalities, for instance, the Surat corporation sent a resolution to the Bombay administration con-

demning the proposal by a ten-to-one margin. Using a careful, legalistic wording, the councillors directly invoked the lessons of the British tradition of self-government:

That in view of the fact that the whole system of local self-government in England is built upon the principle of the predominance of the elected councillors and their participation in both the deliberative and administrative work by means of the Committee system and the subordination of the paid professional official to the unpaid elected amateur and in view of the fact that "so far as Europe is concerned the development of local self-government has gone furthest in Great Britain" this corporation flatly refuses to believe that this system cannot succeed here. This corporation further declares that this system has never been given a fair trial and there are no proofs of its failure.

The want of rapid progress by municipal bodies in the mofussil is due to the lack of funds [which is] due to the poverty of the people and not to any lack of public spirit on the part of the citizens or their representatives.^[39]

This was the unabashed use of public discourse, implicitly imbued with most of its evolutionary assumptions. What was being contested again was not whether the city should be measured along the scale of progress, but exactly where along that scale it fell. The municipality's members contended that Surat had attained a fairly advanced stage of civic consciousness and thus was entitled to most of the rights enjoyed by the citizens of British cities. They protested what they saw as government efforts to place their city and other cities in the presidency further down the linear path of history. Both government and the councillors were agreed on the general direction of desired change: toward the establishment of representative institutions modeled after those in England. Where they disagreed was over the amount of public spirit already present in the Bombay Presidency.

Just how far the new council could go in conforming to the traditions of prewar municipal practice became apparent in late 1925, when the Bombay administration announced that Sir Leslie Wilson, governor of the province, would visit the city. After the district collector asked the local body whether it wanted to present an address to Wilson, noncooperators on the municipality, led by Champaklal Ghia, at first opposed the measure, feeling that it would be derogatory to the selfrespect of any elected Indian to have to pay homage to a British official. Ghia's supporters, however, were too few to carry the day. Feeling among the councillors ran strong that this was an opportunity to plead for greater government funding and self-governing privileges that could not be missed. By a margin of twenty-five to nineteen, the municipality resolved "to give an address to his Excellency whose

benevolent and progressive administration has created in the people the feeling of love and admiration, stating the several primary wants of the people in connection with the city drainage and general sanitation."^[40] Initially the council rejected the approval of any moneys for the address while approving 301 rupees for an address to Vithalbhai Patel, president of the Bombay legislature. Soon, however, it reversed itself, and approved 601 rupees to cover the costs of the occasion.^[41] The non-cooperators were successful only in excising phrases that smacked of flattery from the wording of the address, making it a polite but undeferential presentation.^[42]

By the time Wilson finally arrived in the city, the municipality had arranged a gala event. With just a few of the most committed congressmen absenting themselves, the councillors greeted the governor at the train station. One member of the local body, accustomed to wearing khadi at municipal meetings, wore a "fine red Surati turban" commonly associated with imperial ceremony. After the usual ritual of handshaking on the railway platform, Dixit, as president of the municipal council, read the address of honor and placed it in a sandalwood box made by local artisans before offering it to the governor. He then presented the governor with a garland decorated with little silk union jacks. Bhimbhai Naik, president of the District Local Board, gave the governor a similar address after Dixit's. In perhaps the most extensive visit ever made by a high-ranking British official, Wilson toured the town, stopping repeatedly to be garlanded and to receive addresses from a wide range of communities, public and educational institutions, and prosperous businessmen. Later he attended an evening party in his honor at the nawab' s palace that was attended by most of Surat's civic leaders.^[43] Clearly the city's leadership was intent on conveying its respect to the visiting dignitary—effectively conferring authority upon him—even though such symbolic action technically violated the proscriptions of noncooperation.

The address of the council, though stripped of the hierarchical embellishments typical of prewar testimonials, was otherwise much like earlier addresses. After welcoming Wilson and his wife to the town, the document set forth a number of local concerns. It began with issues related to the principle of self-government, pleading for establishing a fully elected council and the end of government appointments to Surat's school board. It then put forth a series of claims to public funds. The councillors petitioned the government to provide moneys for local industrial education, building a girls' middle school, and dredging the Tapi River. Most ironically, it asked the governor to help as much as possible in obtaining funds for local primary schools so that universal and compulsory primary education could become a reality in the city.

Throughout the address, the councillors implicitly confirmed their commitment to the principles of civic progress and representative government. The document's claims to justice derived entirely from parliamentary logic.^[44]

Thus at the elite level, the politics of bargaining with the colonial administration had now almost fully replaced the politics of noncooperation. Former Gandhian nationalists, now severely constricted by the institutional context in which they were working, unneled their efforts in directions that allowed them to question the policies of the AngloIndian government and to engage in negotiations over matters ranging from government funds to self-governing privileges but without attacking colonialism directly or challenging the general validity of political models that India had derived from British culture. Dixit and many of his associates were weaned from Gandhian conventions and assumptions, not by any British-directed conspiracy or by personal duplicity, but by the desire to maintain their political efficacy in a context of continued colonial strength.

By the municipal elections in 1926–27, Dixit and the other councillors had become so committed to the ideals of urban development that they began to pursue public policies clearly at odds with the preoccupations of many of their constituents. They imposed new cesses, tried to enforce municipal bylaws, attempted to reinstate universal and primary education, and even began to advocate building a major drainage system in the city that would necessitate significant increases in taxation. All these efforts met with widespread but disorganized resistance in the city. Tax arrears returned to noncooperation levels.^[45] Thousands of parents from artisan and petty-trader backgrounds kept their children out of schools.^[46] Encroachments on public space continued, reaching a total of more than eight thousand at the time of the city survey in 1926.^[47] Hundreds of residents continued to connect their house drains to storm-water drains surreptitiously, in violation of municipal law.^[48] Local feeling against the plans to develop a new drainage system became so strong that councillors put it off, recognizing that their reelection to municipal office was clearly at stake.

The Congress leaders who had come to power in the local council in 1921 by capitalizing on popular resentment against municipal reforming efforts now took up the cause of modernization despite continued antipathy to this agenda. Not surprisingly, Dixit and his supporters failed to retain their control of the council in the elections of 1928. But astonishingly they were replaced by a regime headed by Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta, the once-hated chairman of the Committee of Management. The Mehta council, however, soon proved even more zealous in avowing its commitment to reform. The core concerns of the city dwellers, which were opposed to the ideals of urban progress, contin-

ued to be unarticulated in the civic arena. Open advocacy of such "backward" sentiments was simply not appropriate in public politics; the orthodoxies of civic expression precluded voicing subaltern sentiments there.

By the time of the civil disobedience movement of 1930, Dixit himself was so comfortable working within public discourse, so uncomfortable resorting to the Gandhian idiom, that he was unable to readjust to civil disobedience and the resurgence of the Mahatma in Indian politics. He lost much personal power as a result. Coping with the reality of institutions established by the colonial rulers, one Congress politician after another, inside the city and elsewhere, would either abandon a strict adherence to Gandhian principle or withdraw into constructive work outside the civic domain. No wonder that the Mahatma's visions would be considered utopian and unrealistic by the time independence arrived; processes of negotiation and resistance within colonial structures now worked to allow a liberal representative culture of politics to dominate the civic arena.

What emerged during the 1920s was a strange sort of representative system that could only imperfectly reflect the concerns of urban voters. The only potential candidates available for election—that is, those candidates who fully appreciated the ways in which to manipulate the idiom of democratic rights, municipal regulation, and law—were persons who committed themselves publicly to principles of political and social development in conflict with the core concerns of most local residents. The Surtis could block the advance of progress by voting into power a faction opposed to the one already in office, but they would still be electing an elite with roughly similar commitments. More successfully, they could resist civic policy through small, uncoordinated acts of noncompliance sanctioned by local culture. Such actions could be quite effective in checking individual policies of the municipality or government and in slowing the overall pace of reform. But they were never capable of bringing about a political order based upon an alternative set of principles. The underclasses of Surat were marginal participants in the affairs of the public sphere, checked on the one hand by their lack of access to that arena's critical idioms, on the other by leaderships who conceived of politics in terms that only indirectly and partially addressed the citizenry's material and psychic needs.

Conclusion

To say that the language of Surti politics had come full circle by 1928 would be somewhat simplistic. The boundaries of political debate had changed considerably since before the war: officers of the colonial administration now accepted the notion that Indians would govern them-

selves at some time in the not-too-distant future; local leaderships refused to pay British administrators the social deference that had once been expected; most strikingly, members of Surat's political elite had now become almost full-fledged members of the ruling group. Yet the political rhetoric of the later 1920s was a permutation of prewar public discourse rather than distinctly new; it still bore the stamp of its creation under colonial domination. The notions of progress and representative government had returned to a central place in the public arena, creating a sense of continued movement toward democratic forms of government but in effect excluding most residents in the city from participation. The syncretic rhetoric of the Gandhian period had been abandoned. A form of colonial nationalism had emerged that appeared safe and rational to the British themselves, making possible the establishment of comfortable working relationships between members of the congress and the civil administration.

In this environment, only persons able to command the languages of both the inner and outer domains of the city could have a full voice in local affairs. Others possessed power in the civic arena to the extent they could attach themselves to these English-educated politicians. So while sheth s with money and access to caches of voters might latch on very easily to publicists in the civic arena who would advocate their interests and preoccupations, women, laborers, artisans, and petty traders more commonly found themselves shut out from Surat's key political institutions. Few plebeian elements entered public discourse. A political order based upon bilingualism had now almost fully reconsolidated itself.

Yet there was one sense in which a significant transfiguration had occurred. This was the development during the 1920s of a politics based on the principle of religious community. Bolstered by the resurgence of the constitutional order, communalism would emerge as a form of political expression that would thereafter always threaten both Gandhian visions of Indian society and the civic-representative ideal.

Twelve
The Politics of Communalism

The emergence of communal politics during the 1920s could hardly have been foreseen by the most astute observer of the local scene in the previous decade. During the entire colonial period between 1800 and World War I, there had never been a major incident of communal strife between Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, the most serious episode of violence that one might call communal had been a clash between Shia Muslim Daudi Bohras and Sunni Muslims over a celebration of Muharram in 1910.^[1] In general, both Hinduism and Islam loosely bound a great diversity of social groupings rather than defined coherent communities poised for political action. In the civic arena, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims had ever come together as a community for any purpose whatsoever. "Muslim" politics was the preserve of members of a tiny elite, mostly descendants of the old Mughal nobility, who had sought to perpetuate their niche in the colonial order as the natural leaders of their religious group. These families had founded Muslim political associations, supported Muslim education, and participated in imperial rituals as headmen of their religious group. Just before the war, they had become increasingly interested in pan-Islamic concerns, expressing their concern to the imperial administration, for instance, about the threat to the Ottoman caliph posed by the Balkan wars,^[2] and imploring the government to aid Indian pilgrims traveling on the hajj.^[3] They had not, however, endeavored to organize their coreligionists in their attempts to influence British rulers. Most persons in Surat who professed Islam were as much shut out of Muslim politics as the larger population of the city was excluded from public life.

By the late 1920s, the political scene in Surat had changed radically. Questions of religious community entered the civic arena dramatically. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims built up in the city, culminating

in a series of bloody riots between 1927 and 1929 that left nearly a dozen Surtis dead, causing most politicians in the city to identify openly as representatives of their religious communities. In the aftermath of these riots, the city was so polarized along religious lines that cooperation between the two communities was precluded for the remainder of the colonial era. The politics of the late 1920s undermined the possibility for a truly intercommunal leadership.

Such developments may seem especially paradoxical because this era of communal conflict immediately followed the most intense period of Hindu-Muslim unity in national politics, the noncooperation movement of 1920–24. But on closer examination, this paradox disappears. In a way not intended by the noncooperators, the anticolonialism of Gandhian politics conspired with hegemonic processes associated with colonialism to produce two distinct religious consciousnesses, one Hindu, one Muslim. The sociological understandings that informed noncooperation reinforced colonial discursive assumptions in producing communally oriented loyalties. Ultimately the logic of Gandhian discourse contained within it tendencies that undermined efforts to achieve communal harmony and that deflected attempts to confront the liberal representative order.

World War I and Muslim Politics

The widening of specifically Muslim preoccupations in the civic arena was in part an outgrowth of the wartime crisis. Between 1914 and 1919, many Muslims of Surat, like many Hindus, suffered from inflation, new municipal policies, higher taxes, and restrictions on trade. Perhaps recognizing the saliency of appeals to religious sentiment in the colonial context, Muslim groupings increasingly defended themselves against these intrusive developments by evoking the language of Islamic principle and of community in their petitions to the government. Surat's butchers, upset at new municipal bylaws that would restrict their business activities to well-defined markets, argued that the measures would prohibit acts of sacrifice in homes, thus forcing women living in purdah to abstain from celebrating important Muslim occasions.^[4] Masud Alam Khan, head of the Nawab of Bela family, objected to new housing regulations by suggesting that Muslims might be especially affected: "The Municipal Commissioner is acting against the feelings and sentiments of a large majority of the people of Surat, particularly of the Mahomedan community, in not allowing them to construct or reconstruct privies in the upper floors of their homes." ^[5] Clearly, one way of responding to the intrusion of the provincial and local administrations into previously inviolate areas of local life was to

represent one's own concerns as being the grievance of a religious minority that the British had a special duty to protect.

In some instances, it was possible to detect more narrow personal and group interests underlying the rhetoric of community. But a few municipal measures during these years clearly affected the religious sensibilities of many of the city's Muslims. In 1913, for instance, the local body had passed a bylaw calling for restrictions against overcrowding in cemeteries, for clear demarcation of graves, and for the registration of all burials. The managers of local burial places, whose incomes were directly endangered by the measure, were particularly alarmed by the new regulations. But many other Muslims, fearing that the practice of burying their dead in family graves was in danger, also reacted strongly. Islamic scholars took up the cause, asserting, according to the second-hand account of one British officer, that the "Koran is full of prohibitions against anything like a demarcation of a grave or the counting of the number of graves in a burial ground." ^[6] The heads of the Edrus, Bakza, Nawab of Surat, and Nawab of Bela families eventually persuaded the municipality and the district collector to drop the most worrisome of the new laws.

A more serious instance occurred in 1920 after it was discovered that the municipality had built a public urinal in Kelapith on a location thought to have once been the site of a mosque. A number of leaderships in the city, including members of the gentry, Islamic scholars, and a few Muslim professionals, organized a movement to have the urinal removed and a mosque restored on the spot. At one point in the struggle, Muslim merchants offered to buy the site; on another, the Muslims asked the municipality to grant the community the plot of land. The local body, however, remained largely unresponsive to both approaches. Its intransigence prompted the Muslim community, in a meeting headed by Nasrullah Khan of the Nawab of Surat family and Sheikh Ali Bakza of the Bakza family, to draft a "monster" petition to the council. Containing nearly five thousand signatures, the petition complained that "the religious feelings and susceptibilities [of the Muslims] have been greatly wounded by the majority of the Hindu councillors strongly opposing the granting of the plot of land for the purpose of a mosque." ^[7] When the issue came before the municipality for final consideration, the council agreed not to approve any new construction on the site but referred the matter of how to dispose of the land to the sanitary committee, essentially killing the possibility that a mosque would ever be built there. All the Muslim members of the municipality walked out of the meeting hall in protest. The issue of the Kelapith mosque simmered for months before being overwhelmed by the affairs of the Khilafat movement.

As dissatisfactions with government and municipal policy grew, the most prominent Muslim families found it increasingly difficult to preserve their status as natural leaders through old political methods. The descendants of the Mughal nobility had come to pride themselves on their reputation for loyalty to empire and were extremely reluctant to take actions that could jeopardize their special relations with imperial officials. But many underclass Muslims were no longer content to allow a collaborating leadership to act as community spokesmen. Surat's collector warned provincial officers at the time of the burial grounds movement that "if they are betrayed by their leaders, the mob is quite capable of being stimulated to disorder on the instigation of the persons who derive their profits from these graveyards."^[8] Like other older elites in the city, the Muslim gentry struggled to maintain its credibility in the face of this growing undercurrent of resistance.

These pressures from below made possible serious challenges to the dominance of the Muslim notables from men who had never before exercised any significant influence in the civic arena. While the old elite was drawn exclusively from the ranks of immigrant Muslims, the new contenders included several figures from convert communities. Most prominent among these people were Sheikh Ali Hamdani, a Daudi Bohra trader, and Muhammad Afzal Narmawala, a Patani Bohra and a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University. Both were attracted to the program of the Home Rule League and supported the Lucknow alliance between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. During the later war years, they and their supporters began to organize meetings in Surat to protest government policy on a number of Muslim issues. In November 1917, for instance, they held a meeting attended by perhaps fifteen hundred Muslims to pass resolutions against the arrest of the militant Muslim brothers from North India, Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali, and to organize a chapter of the Muslim League in the city.^[9]

The more established gentry families clearly felt threatened by these activities and redoubled their own efforts to reassert community leadership. In order to deflate the claims of Narmawala and his followers, however, members of the older Muslim elite had to abandon their quiet, deferential political style and show that they, too, commanded the support of their coreligionists. Several days after the meeting to protest the Ali brothers' arrest, Sayyid Ali Edrus, president of the local Anjuman-e-Islam, organized a countermeeting to register community objections to the Congress-League pact and to the activities of the Home Rule League. He later claimed that twenty-three prominent Muslim leaders had called the meeting and that more than two thousand Muslims had supported resolutions introduced there.^[10] The nota-

bles also began to revitalize the Mahomedan Union—which had not met for several years—recruiting new members and raising substantial funds for Muslim education in the city.^[11] They took up such causes as that of the Muslim burial grounds, the Kelapith mosque, Islamic education in primary schools, and orphanages for Muslim children. Seemingly, then, the challenge of Narmawala and his supporters prompted many of the prominent notable families to intensify their efforts to sustain recognition as Muslim leaders. By the beginning of noncooperation, the conflicts of the war period had already led to the heightened significance of religious identity in civic politics.

Gandhian Politics and Islamic Identity

It was in this context, as the rhetoric of religious community began to find a larger and more constant audience in the city, that Gandhian politics began to influence Muslim political action. Though directed toward building united agitation against the British, the noncooperation movement actually strengthened the importance of communal preoccupations for Hindu and Muslim alike, making possible the era of violent conflict of the later 1920s. Acting and thinking politically as members of a religious community, which before the war had not been a reflexive action for most Surtis, quickly became engrained as common sense.

The sharpening of the boundaries between Hindus and Muslims was at least indirectly an outgrowth of the application of Gandhian conceptions to local politics. Through the very attempt to combat negative British characterizations of Indian society, Gandhi was almost compelled to accept some of the categories and assumptions of colonial analysis.^[12] The Mahatma, of course, rejected the imperial premise that religious groupings in India were antagonistic communities inevitably at odds with each other. Hindus and Muslims, he asserted, were the "two eyes of the country"; cooperation between the two was possible if each community would respect the feelings of the other. But in arriving at this counterhegemonic contention, he essentially acknowledged key precepts of colonial discourse: that particular scriptures were the chief defining features of Indian religion, that religious affiliation was the most important sociological principle around which Indian society was organized, that those who belonged to a specific religious grouping shared important common political interests, and that these interests were at least partially distinct from those of persons who professed other faiths. In some of his writings, Gandhi even seemed to accept the notion that religious identity was the most critical source of conflict in Indian society. Hindus, he observed in his journal Young India, tended

to resent the killing of cows by Muslims, while Muslims held similar objections about certain Hindu practices. Only by sincere expressions of mutual respect and self-denial could such differences be overcome. In order to deserve self-rule, Indians would have to manage their antagonisms and prove that they were capable of working with each other.^[13] Whatever the validity of these understandings for the rest of India, they did not at all capture the reality of Surat's society, which had never been organized along the lines of religion (as defined in terms of scriptural communities) and where killing cows or playing music before mosques had not become significant political issues. But since Gandhian thinking informed the shape of local noncooperation in very serious ways, it subtly came to influence self-definitions of political actors in Surat, both Hindu and Muslim.

Gandhi perceived himself to be a leader primarily able to command the support of Hindus, and he eagerly sought out Islamic causes in order to cement a symbolic alliance between his community and the Muslims against the colonial administration.^[14] Soon after his return to India from South Africa in 1915, he developed ties with the Ali brothers and their religious teacher, Abdul Bari of Lucknow. By 1919, the three men had persuaded him that Indian Muslims regarded the Ottoman sultan as the khalifa, that is, as the temporal and spiritual head of the Islamic world, and that the community thus deeply resented the Allies' attempts to dismember the Ottoman Empire. They also provided him with conclusive proof that the British had violated wartime promises to uphold the sultan's authority over the Islamic holy lands of the Middle East. Opposition to British treatment of the khalifa, Gandhi realized, was one he could use to deflate colonial claims to be the protectors of India's minorities and to demonstrate the ability of the country's religious groupings to support each other. Hoping to integrate Muslim politics with the politics of satyagraha, he offered the Ali brothers his help in generating a wider backing for the Khilafat cause. At the same time, he encouraged Muslim leaders to act as spokesmen for their community and to intensify their protests against British policy toward Turkey. Thus, he envisioned a larger movement in which it would be possible for distinct religious groups to fight together under the umbrella of nationalism at least in part for distinct religious causes.^[15]

In Surat, the noncooperators, following the lead of the Mahatma, accepted the importance of the Khilafat issue and granted Muslims a separate place as Muslims within their already powerful movement. The Gandhians in the city perceived themselves as addressing mainly Hindus and Jains. They left the appeal for Muslim support largely to a distinct group of Muslim political leaders who were already eager to challenge the British on the Khilafat issue and who could rouse the

religious sentiment of the community. In a process not unlike colonial efforts to assure Muslims representation on local and provincial bodies, the local Congress created its own informal system of "reserved" places for Muslims and encouraged Muslim aspirants to leadership to take up Islamic issues self-consciously in their politics.^[16]

Activist Muslims led by Muhammad Afzal Narmawala, the proponent of the Muslim League, quickly moved into the slots provided for Muslims within noncooperation. Many had long identified with the plight of the sultan and now found a means of defending their khalifa's position within an already powerful movement squarely located in the civic arena. Narmawala soon developed into one of Surat's leading Khilafatists, becoming increasingly outspoken in his pan-Islamic and anti-British statements. Miasaheb Fejullabhai Hamdani, a Daudi Bohra educationist involved in serious conflicts with the leaders of the Bohra community, was another Muslim leaguer who embraced the Khilafat cause. Narmawala and Hamdani were joined by a number of other persons who had never participated in the municipal-national arena before: merchants, Islamic scholars, and a few others of diverse backgrounds. The most important of these was Sayyid Ahmed Edrus, a member of the so-called lesser branch of Surat's prestigious Edrus family, a family with its own shrine and a reputation for performing miracles. Edrus had been an official in the excise department of the Bombay administration until 1920, when he dramatically resigned his post in protest against British treatment of Turkey.^[17] He quickly assumed a leading role in organizing Surat's Muslims as well as the presidency of the Surat District Congress Committee.

As a gesture of unity with the Hindus, the Muslim leadership chose as president of the local Khilafat committee M. M. Rayaji, a Nagar Brahman and a prominent member of the Home Rule League. Rayaji's main functions in the movement, however, were to secure Hindu support for this Muslim cause rather than to exert an overarching leadership. He clearly directed his appeal on the Khilafat issue to a Hindu audience. "Hindus and Muslims, the two great communities of India," he argued in one public address, "are like two limbs of a body. Just as other parts of the body feel pain when one limb is injured, it is the duty of Hindus to help Muslims when they suffer a blow to their religion."^[18] On occasion, his rhetoric raised questions about the past that some Muslims must have certainly found offensive: "This question [of the Khilafat] is one of religion and religion is dear to every man. . .. Those who know history know that when Muslims attacked Hindu kingdoms, Brahmans and Hindus willingly gave up their lives for the sake of their religion."^[19] Rayaji's tenure as president was also a very brief one. In late 1920, after the Calcutta Congress demanded the boycott of legislative

councils, he abandoned his role on the committee, and like most home rulers, retired temporarily from civic politics. Given the understandings of politics that he entertained as leader of the Khilafat committee, his later reincarnation as the city's most ardent communalist hardly seems surprising. After his departure, leadership of the movement was assumed by a heterogeneous set of Muslim men who occupied a separate place in noncooperation, complementing the Gandhians but remaining distinct from them.

Between 1919 and 1922, Narmawala and the other Muslim activists developed a distinct Muslim political rhetoric that allowed them both to confront British power and to appeal to their coreligionists. Their language was markedly different from that of the Hindu noncooperators. While the Gandhians spoke a Gujarati laced with Sanskrit-derived words, Khilafatists addressed their audiences in Urdu or a highly Urduized Gujarati. The reading of poems in Urdu or Persian on the khalifa was a regular feature of their meetings.^[20] A jari worker, Gani Dahinwala, achieved some local repute as a composer of Urdu poems stressing the obligation of Muslims to support the khalifa.^{[ 21]}

In speeches at public meetings, the Khilafatists emphasized panIslamic ideals, fashioning a universalistic faith that was divorced from the everyday religious practice of most specific Muslim groupings in the city but that nonetheless tapped symbols common to all members of the community. Besides the khalifa, the most important of these symbols was the Quran. Muslim leaders repeatedly drew upon the Islamic scriptures in asserting the justice of their cause. In a talk given on the Khilafat Day held in March 1920, Fejullabhai Hamdani condemned writers in England who had claimed few Muslims really cared about the fate of the sultan, warning that "it is written in the Koran that God's disgrace is on him who is untruthful."^[22] Narmawala, addressing the same meeting, defiantly asserted that it was an inescapable Quranic obligation for Muslims to keep the holy lands of Arabia free from non-Muslim control, even if they had to sacrifice their own lives.^[23] Sayyid Ahmed Edrus employed similar logic in a letter he wrote to the Bombay Chronicle:

Laws of Islam are unalterable and no Muslim can excuse himself from performing what has been imposed on him by God in the Koran, and by the Prophet in Hadith. If . . . [he] does, he ceases to be a Muslim.

Maintenance of the sanctity of jaziratul Arab [the Islamic holy lands] and Khilafat are the religious impositions on Muslims and therefore no Muslim can tolerate subjugation of either by any non-Muslim power.^[24]

The Khilafatists thus formulated a distinct language and distinct moral principles applying only to members of their religious commu-

nity. They shaped an Islam that allowed Muslims to cooperate with Hindus without being completely absorbed by the larger movement.

The distinctive quality of the Muslim political appeal was reflected also in the rituals of noncooperation. In general, the Gandhians and the Khilafatists arranged complementary yet separate observances to reach their communities. Most Surti Muslims did not see Congress ceremonies as occasions for their participation, perhaps because such occasions were so charged with Hindu symbolism. As a result, when speakers at public meetings called out "Vande Mataram, " crowds responded with a resounding cry, but when the same speakers shouted "Allah-o-Akbar, " there was often little response.^[25] There were, however, specific observances designed to foster Muslim support. Foremost among these were the Khilafat Days that Gandhi himself called on several occasions before the formal inauguration of noncooperation. In October 1919, Gandhi urged all Muslims to observe a day of mourning on the 21st and "to fast and pray and suspend all business and close their shops . . . and hold monster meetings and pass resolutions of protest against the contemplated betrayal of Turkey."^[26] Hindus were to play a supporting role by observing a hartal, thus putting a "sacred seal on the Hindu-Muhammadan bond."^[27] In Surat, the Khilafatists stressed Islam-centered concerns in the ceremonies they held to commemorate the occasion. The primary focus of the day for Muslims was a meeting at the Khwaja Dana Saheb mosque. Thousands gathered to pray and to pass resolutions protesting British policy toward Turkey.^[28] The audience at a public meeting held later in the evening, by contrast, was predominantly Hindu.^[29] This first Khilafat Day thus involved two parallel but distinct dramatic performances, both of which demonstrated the unpopularity of British rule.

This first Khilafat Day met with a somewhat mixed popular response, but a second organized the following March proved an unqualified victory for noncooperators eager to gather Muslim support. Virtually all the shops in the city, with the exception of a few tea hotels and a few stores of Parsis, closed down for the day. Muslim horsecarriage drivers, who had not observed the Rowlatt Satyagraha, struck work. Muslims flooded various mosques in the city for afternoon prayers, where their leaders delivered sermons on the state of the Khilafat. A public meeting held in the evening was much more a joint affair than that associated with the first Khilafat Day, since many Muslim leaders gave speeches and many Muslims were in attendance. But Hindu and Muslim speakers appeared to be addressing different audiences in the crowd. The Gandhians present made a few initial comments on the Khilafat question and the need for Hindu-Muslim unity, then went on to discuss home rule and other more general Congress is-

sues. Muslim leaders, on the other hand, were far more passionate in their speeches and stuck more closely to the situation of the khalifa and the holy lands.^[30]

Receptions planned for national-level leaders varied considerably according to the religion of the visitor. Muslim figures were greeted by the Khilafat Committee and by other local Muslim leaders, Hindus by officers of the Congress and municipal councillors. When the Ali brothers stopped in Surat in February 1920, they were garlanded at the station by Khilafatists and by representatives of prominent Muslim business firms. They toured major Muslim localities, pausing often there to be garlanded by heads of various firms and neighborhood organizations. Though the brothers attended the opening of the local Swadeshi store and an intercommunity public meeting, other critical points in their tour were chosen in a clear effort to win Muslim support and to map out a sacred geography that was distinctly Islamic. The highlights of the visit were prayer meetings in the Chok Bazaar mosque and a trip to Rander, a small town close to Surat dominated by its Sunni Bohras.^[31] Hindu leaders visiting the city were escorted to completely different strategic locations, including the Municipality, the Swaraj ashram, and the banks of the holy river Tapi.

Muslims even organized their own prabhat feris (processions) separate from those of Hindus. Sometimes, they would gather at a small mosque in Gopipura, then proceed through the city singing songs with Islamic overtones, before finally ending at the Khwaja Dana Saheb mosque, one of the two most important Islamic shrines in Surat. In contrast to the processions of Hindus, which often assumed a lively character with loud music, drums, cymbals, and exuberant singing, the Muslim processions were marked quietly and with great solemnity. Black banners symbolizing mourning or perhaps a sense of millennial expectation were draped by Muslim shopkeepers along the procession route. Leaders of the community clearly felt that exuberance was inappropriate for Muslims, particularly when their religion was in danger.^[32]

The success of all these rhetorical and ritual efforts in organizing local Muslims was considerable. Thousands of Muslims of diverse backgrounds responded to the Khilafatists' appeals, attending Khilafat ceremonies, giving up foreign dress, and leaving government-funded Urdu schools for national ones. When noncooperators called for the boycott of provincial elections, only twenty-four of approximately fourteen hundred eligible Muslims voted.^[33] Muslim leaders raised thousands of rupees for the Smyrna Relief Fund, which financed the Ali brothers' campaign to bring pressure on the British Parliament.^[34] The Khilafatists successfully isolated the older notable leadership of the community. In 1920, both the Nawab of Surat and the Nawab of Bela con-

sidered running for the provincial council but backed out after realizing that such a step might lead to their social ostracism.^[35] Support for the cause was weak only among the Daudi Bohras, where the da'i, perhaps anxious to maintain his reputation for loyalty as he entered a series of critical legal cases, used his considerable influence to pressure community members to abstain from donating to Khilafat funds.^[36] When Hamdani turned his Bohra English school into a national school, 110 of 140 students withdrew.^[37] Bohra cloth merchants refused to sign a pledge that they would not sell foreign cloth.^[38] But among others who professed Islam, there was an active and fairly consistent backing for noncooperation up to 1922.

The parallel employment of a syncretic Hindu idiom and a scripturalist Islamic rhetoric clearly facilitated widening involvement in the civic arena of groups that had previously been shut out of municipal and national politics by the language of constitutionalism and progress. But this infusion of religious symbolism into public politics also produced a hardening of political identities along religious lines that ended up working against Gandhian purpose. Most obviously, the dual idiom excluded the Parsis, who before the war had made contributions to public life far beyond their small numbers. No doubt the Parsi community would have been difficult to organize for noncooperation in any case. Many Parsis either worked for the government or collected government pensions. The district's liquor shop contractors, who were severely hurt by the Gandhian movement for abstinence, were virtually all Parsis. And as the municipal franchise expanded, members of the community increasingly depended upon government nominations for representation in the council. To counteract such material inclinations, the noncooperators needed to develop a powerful appeal that would clearly bring Parsis within its fold. This both the Gandhians and Khilafatists failed to do. And once Parsis began to hold aloof from public meetings, processions, and hartals, anti-Parsi feeling began to grow in the city, only alienating the Parsis further. Fortunately, Surat—unlike Bombay—never experienced serious anti-Parsi rioting during this time, but the mood of mutual distrust was sufficient to preclude any significant association of the community with the congress cause.

The separateness of Muslim and Hindu symbolic expression within a single movement also produced serious psychic strains among the most active of participants. Even during the noncooperation's strongest moments, some tension existed between the two appeals. Muslim leaders, for instance, had to reconcile militant Islamic rhetoric with the Gandhian principle of ahimsa. Often, they were able to do so only with some awkwardness. During one speech in 1921, Sayyid Ahmed Edrus, addressing an audience of Muslims eager to take some more effective

action on behalf of the khalifa, suggested that Islam required them to be nonviolent in the present but seemingly held out the possibility that this could change in the future. According to one government account, he argued "that jihad was a vital principle of Islam, but it was only permissible under certain conditions and circumstances. At the present moment these conditions were wanting and hence their [the Muslims'] duty was to follow a peaceful, non-violent jihad on the lines of Mahatma Gandhi and in the light of the life of the Prophet. The Koran, he added, condemned all disturbances and he quoted a verse to that effect from the book. . .. He advised the local Mussalmans not to lose their heads and to keep absolutely calm at the present juncture."^[39] On another occasion, a Muslim teacher was less restrained when, after citing verses from the Quran, he reportedly argued that "if . . . anyone interfered with Islam, the Muhammadans would rather be massacred, massacred, massacred, than to forgo the Khilafat."^[40] The meeting's chairman made the teacher sit down, fearing that such language might lead the audience to abandon its calm demeanor and threaten the atmosphere of communal harmony.

Not surprisingly, the Khilafatists were also reluctant to participate in nationalist activities that might alienate Muslims. Ceremonies to commemorate Lokamanya Tilak, a Maharashtrian nationalist with a communalist reputation, were particularly uncomfortable. In 1921, when the local Congress observed the anniversary of the Lokamanya Tilak's death by organizing large processions to the Tapi for bathing, not a single Muslim leader took full part. Narmawala, Edrus, and one other Muslim did come as far as the city square but did not join the crowd in the climactic ceremonies at the riverside. Speakers at public meetings later in the day attempted to deflate the anti-Muslim image of Tilak, but this did little to assuage the serious worries of Muslim participants.^[41]

Within the framework of anticolonial agitations, Muslim leaders remained vigilant in guarding what they perceived to be the interests of their community. In January 1922, Muslim leaders of Surat protested the absence of any Muslim participants in a session of a Congress working committee that had met in the city.^[42] When a Hindu member of the noncooperating municipality moved a resolution in the council that the slaughter of cattle used for farming and for dairy purposes be banned, Khilafatists objected vehemently that this action would alienate their community and cause the breakdown of Hindu-Muslim unity.^[43] The Hindu representatives quickly withdrew their backing for the resolution.

Thus, the Khilafat movement, by calling for the support of Muslims as Muslims in a holy struggle against the British, had clearly strength-

ened the importance of Islamic identity in local politics. Much the same sort of process was occurring among the Hindus, where extensive recourse to devotional and ascetic symbolism also contributed to furthering community awareness. For a brief period of three years, 1919–22, the development of these parallel religious consciousnesses clearly served the purposes of a powerful congress movement. But the cause of khalifa collapsed after 1922 with the deposing of the sultan of Turkey by his own countrymen, leaving Muslim noncooperators stunned and Hindu noncooperators embittered at having supported a cause so alien to their own preoccupations. Little remained to tie the two communities together. Once "normal politics" were revived, religious identifications persisted in civic politics, presenting new constraints and opportunities for local politicians, whether sincere or unscrupulous. By the later 1920s, Hindus and Muslims increasingly turned against each other, often violently.

The Rise of Communal Politics

The reassertion of representative politics after 1923 allowed communal tensions, almost always submerged during the noncooperation years, to come to the surface. Once the centrality of the provincial council and the municipality in local public life were restored, elites in Surat associated themselves increasingly with interest groupings defined by religious affiliation. Competition between rival elites over jobs, municipal funds and projects, and political power—all conducted within the language of constitutionalism and minority rights—seriously intensified during the later 1920s, creating an atmosphere conducive to violent social conflict.

The development of explicitly communal electorates was particularly important in fostering community-based politics. In provincial campaigns, the voting population was divided into non-Muslim constituencies for the city and the district and a Muslim constituency embracing urban Surat and Ahmedabad. Separate electorates tended to ensure that no candidate in general wards would dare dissociate himself from Hindu causes and that Muslim candidates would be committed to the defense of specifically Muslim concerns. Muslim leaders, recognizing they could easily be branded lackeys of the Hindus if they joined the Congress ticket, held aloof from the Swarajya party. Once in the council, elected Muslims tended to align more with government than with nationalists and were able to win power far beyond their numbers. In the Bombay provincial legislature of 1924–26, two of the three ministers chosen by government were Muslims. These two, Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah and Sir Ali Mohammed Khan Dehlavi (brother of the

Nawab of Bela), used their positions repeatedly to frustrate Congress objectives. This in turn led to resentments among Hindu legislators that increasingly assumed a communal tone.

As far as Surat was concerned, the most important policy adopted by the Bombay ministry was its decision to institute separate electorates at the municipal level. Before 1925, provincial government had always guaranteed Muslim representation on the council through the process of nomination, a process that allowed it to continue to select such natural leaders as Sayyid Ali Edrus and the Nawabs of Surat and Bela. The old gentry thus had had little need to reach out to the larger Muslim population of the city; within the council, they pursued a Muslim politics that largely reflected rather limited concerns (two exceptions being the very recent issues of the Muslim graveyards and the Kelapith mosque). Even as the franchise widened in Surat and as the proportion of nominations made by government was reduced, the old notables had not considered advocating separate electorates for Surat, perhaps realizing that such a step would necessitate a transformation in their methods of gaining access to council seats. The decision to create distinct Muslim and non-Muslim constituencies came to Surat largely from outside.

Once this policy was adopted, however, any opposition to it almost inevitably took on a communal character. Immediately after the decision to create separate electorates had been made, Dr. Dixit and Dr. Mehta, two of the city's most prominent noncooperators, sent a letter to the Bombay Chronicle objecting to the measure and to delays in setting up municipal elections. Their letter charged that a "Mahommedan Minister [Hidayatullah], fascinated by that nefarious system of communal representation, which has been condemned by all sides, in his enthusiasm to grant communal representation to the Mahommedan community of Surat, which it believed was not so anxious to get it as the Minister was to give it, is probably responsible for this disastrous delay and its consequential events."^[44] Dixit and Mehta may not have intended any slight to the community as a whole, but the tone of their objections and those of other Congress leaders clearly upset local Muslims, who saw in these complaints attempts to deprive them of their rights. Several weeks after the publication of Dixit's letter, H. N. Jamadar, a former Khilafatist, wrote a passionate response to the Chronicle. "It is painful to see," he argued, referring to the allocation of only eight municipal seats to Muslims, "that even this can not be tolerated by our Hindu neighbors. . .. Let me assure your correspondents that the Mussalmans were always anxious to get it [separate electorates] because of the fact that in the General Constituency they were always at the mercy of their Hindu brothers. I regret to see that your correspon-

dents who are the pillars of the Swarajists in Gujarat should have taken such a hostile attitude toward the Mussalmans." Jamadar argued that swaraj could come only if Hindus showed more tolerance: "I . . . ask your correspondents how they are going to achieve their final object without allowing their co-brothers to enjoy their full communal rights which they are gradually getting through such systems as the communal representations and the like."^[45] Dixit and Mehta apologized for the careless wording of their original letter but continued to insist that separate electorates were anathema to the cause of Hindu-Muslim cooperation.^[46]

Such claims and counterclaims became a regular part of civic politics during the 1920s. With the first municipal campaign under the new election law, the idiom of community concerns assumed new preeminence in the city. On the streets of the city, candidates began to champion the causes of their own communities with increased aggressiveness, knowing that such rhetoric won votes in electorates that coincided with religious groupings. Once in office, Muslim councillors repeatedly appealed to the principle of minority rights, raised fears of discrimination, and evoked the backwardness of their community in calling for greater allocations of political resources and power. Hindu councillors from the Congress party, on the other hand, tended to represent their own opinions as expressing the sentiments of an undifferentiated public or people, but they actually spoke only for Hindus since they were setting themselves against the Muslims' claims to justice. The language of both sides was steeped in the grammar of representative discourse, which allowed for contentions based on both public and communal grounds. As long as the key institutions of the civic polity—the provincial legislature and the municipal council—reinforced religious identification, much local conflict would continue to play itself out in terms of the politics of community. Through this process of defining their interests in terms sanctioned in public culture, one diverse, almost amorphous, group of people—the Hindus—acquired an identity as a majority community that effectively excluded all others from the exercise of power; another almost equally heterogeneous collection of residents—the Muslims—assumed the position of a minority community requiring the protection of government against threats posed by the process of democratization.^[47]

Politicians like Dixit and Jamadar no doubt made unintentional contributions to building a society divided along religious lines despite sincere advocacy of Hindu-Muslim unity. Other figures, however, had little commitment to communal harmony and felt little hesitation about stirring one community's feelings against the other. As politics in the city became increasingly organized around community concerns, and as

communal conflicts grew ugly in other areas of India, raising fears that similar developments might threaten Surat, such persons won more visibility.

Among Muslims, the elite temporarily displaced by Gandhian politics took the lead in defending their community against Hindus. As soon as noncooperation began to wane, members of the gentry began to reassert their claims to Muslim leadership by critiquing the Khilafatists for placing group concerns at risk in the effort to achieve communal harmony and for dissipating funds that had been collected at the height of the movement.^[48] Their effort to resume their leading position in the city often took an anti-Hindu character. During one meeting held in March 1923 under the leadership of Sir Ali Mahommed Khan Dehlavi, Sayyid Ali Edrus, and members of the Nawab of Surat and Nawab of Bela families, a host of resolutions were introduced condemning provocative acts against Muslims in a number of locations around the country and criticizing Arya Samaj efforts to convert Muslims to Hinduism through shuddhi campaigns. Narmawala, the Khilafatist, seeing that the meeting was taking a direction harmful to Hindu-Muslim unity, was able only at the last minute to introduce a resolution expressing pleasure at the settlement of communal disputes in several Indian cities.^[49] But once the cause of the khalifa had crumbled, leaders like Narmawala, Syed Ahmed Edrus, and Fejullahbhai Hamdani really had no powerful Muslim issue with which to mount a counterthrust and became increasingly ineffective figures. The gentry families assumed much of their older preeminence, but their authority was now based less on their loyalty and traditional status—the criteria of natural leadership—than on the assertive advocacy of Muslim interests.

Among Hindus, a similar but more dangerous process began to take shape. Hindu figures who had lost influence during the period of non-cooperation, particularly those drawn from the old Home Rule League, assumed new influence in the city by taking up overtly Hindu causes. Particularly prominent among them were M. M. Rayaji, Karsukhram Vora, and Kanaiyalal Desai, all men with high levels of education who had long been committed to creating a political order based upon the principles of representation and moral and material progress. Within that order, however, such individuals were becoming concerned that minority rights should not be confirmed at the expense of the power and influence of the majority. Vora assumed leadership of the local chapter of the Hindu Mahasabha, a national organization devoted to the pursuit of Hindu interests.^[50] Rayaji, once president of the local Khilafat committee, now became editor of a newspaper called the Hindu, where he called for expanded campaigns to reconvert Muslims to Hinduism,

criticized government for establishing communal electorates and favoring Muslims, lambasted Hindus for weakness in defending themselves against assaults on their dignity and power, and demanded that candidates for municipal election demonstrate what they had done for their community.^[51] The Hindu Mahasabhaites maintained a small but vocal presence in the city, never assuming great political power but placing constant pressure on other politicians to associate with Hindu concerns.

In 1927, the development of this increasingly communal politics in Surat came to a head in the first of a series of bloody Hindu-Muslim riots. The initial catalyst of the violence was the decision by the Mahasabha to organize several ceremonies in celebration of the tercentenary of the seventeenth-century warrior king Shivaji, who had carved out a kingdom in Maharashtra at the expense of Muslim states in North India and the Deccan. The key event in this celebration was to be a procession through the streets of the city held on the day fixed as Shivaji's birthday. The purpose of these observances, according to one sponsor of the festivities held in Bombay, was to commemorate a regional king who symbolized "the common heritage of the Hindus or the Aryan people of Bharat Varsha [i.e., India]"^[52] and thereby inspire pride within the Hindu community. No doubt the event was intended in part as a statement of cultural resistance to continued British rule. But Shivaji was certainly a strange figure to inspire adulation in Surat. He was remembered in local history as a plunderer of the city's merchants, while Muslims saw him as a Hindu who had undermined the stability of Mughal rule. Many deemed the attempt by Vora, Rayaji, and Desai to hold ceremonies in his honor as a deliberate affront to their community.^[53] This the Mahasabhaites denied, arguing there was no anti-Muslim message to the celebrations, only a positive Hindu one. But they made little attempt to adapt their observance to Muslim concerns.

The procession held on the tercentenary morning was not very large, roughly one thousand persons. But it made up for what it lacked in numbers with sheer noise and fanfare. Five different bhajan groups played loud music to accompany the singing of Hindu religious songs by the whole crowd. Hundreds waved pictures of Shivaji and Hindu flags. As the procession approached the market of Burhanpuri Bhagal, Muslims became concerned that the noise would continue unabated in front of two mosques in the neighborhood. A few went up to the Hindu leaders in order to ask them to discontinue the music while passing by the mosques. Dr. Rayaji, intent that his community not show any sign of weakness, refused. At this point, people on the balconies of the two mosques immediately began to shower the procession with brickbats and pieces of metal, while others attacked the crowd directly

with clubs. The police rushed to a confused and already somewhat bloody scene unprepared for action. Without securing a firm promise from Rayaji that the music would cease, they decided to accompany the procession past the mosques. This brought a further hail of stones that injured twenty-two constables and eighteen participants in the celebrations. The police fell back, only to be pursued by a group of infuriated Muslims. In a state of panic, the police opened fire, killing one Muslim and one Hindu and injuring three others. When the district magistrate finally arrived with reinforcements, he found two angry crowds of two thousand people apiece facing each other. Order was restored at the scene, but sporadic violence continued elsewhere in the city for the rest of the day.^[54]

While the riots reflected tensions that had been building in the city for several years, it was their aftermath that really hardened the lines between the two communities. Politicians who had never identified with communal organizations now clearly took sides. "Local Hindus without distinction of caste or creed," led by M. K. Dixit and M. M. Mehta, responded to Dr. Vora's call to honor the dead Hindu youth by participating in a gigantic funeral procession of nearly twenty thousand persons to the cremation grounds.^[55] A similar but smaller procession, attended by all the leading Muslims, was held for the Muslim victim.^[56] Dixit, Vora, Kanaiyalal Desai, and Champklal Ghia all agreed to serve on a committee to establish a memorial fund of 100,000 rupees for the Hindu victim; a similar fund was created among the Muslims under the chairmanship of Sheikh Ali Bakza.^[57] In each case, some of the city's leading advocates of Hindu-Muslim unity had confirmed in this moment of crisis that their primary loyalties lay with their coreligionists.

Many of the elite participants in the processions and in fund-raising efforts may have had no intention of creating further ill will. Indeed Dixit and Bhimbhai Naik (now a member of the legislative assembly) among the Hindus and Sheikh Ali Bakza and Hafizuddin Khan among the Muslims won praise from the district collector for their efforts to restore calm. In their consultations with district officials, however, they acted primarily as negotiators for their respective communities; indeed, they had little choice but to do so if they wished to be consulted since the collector had chosen them precisely because he regarded them as representatives of their groupings.^[58] Only a few of the staunchest Gandhians, most notably Dayalji Desai, adopted a neutral peacekeeping role. But to a great extent, the neutral ground in the formal process of making peace was occupied by the district authorities, while indigenous leaderships found themselves thrust into roles either as Hindu or Muslim leaders. This was certainly one reason why resolving the problem became so difficult.

Among underclasses of the city, the riots had also fostered feelings of mutual distrust and hostility. Muslims were angered that only Muslims were ever brought to trial for the events of the Shivaji tercentenary and that Hindu leaders like Rayaji had gone unpunished for deliberate affronts. Hindus bristled at the fact that unarmed members of their community had been attacked and that the procession had never been allowed to go on to its end. A number of caste panchayats ordered the boycott of the shops and services of Muslims, threatening to fine members up to 11 rupees for each violation. Hindu wedding processions, which had traditionally relied on Muslim bands for their music, now went musicless, often leaving the band members with no means of earning their livelihoods.^[59]

Until September, there was little threat of renewed violence. But supporters of the Hindu Mahasabha then began to plan new celebrations, this time in honor of the elephant-headed deity Ganapati, that would again involve noisy processions with music passing by mosques. The plans again appeared to be deliberately provocative. While Hindu residents revered Ganapati, ceremonies in his honor had generally been small-scale affairs conducted either privately in homes or by small neighborhood groups. Processions to the river to immerse the images of Ganapati had never before assumed a public, city-wide character.^[60] The Mahasabha's leaders, however, now hoped to transform the occasion of the Ganapati observances into a major statement of Hindu pride and defiance (both of local authorities and of the Muslims). Muslims feared the celebrations, because of the possibility that music might again be played in front of the mosques and because of the tradition of anti-Muslim expression associated with the Ganapati celebrations in Maharashtra. Rumors spread that the Mahasabha was planning to import several hundred Maratha toughs into Surat for the festival.^[61]

The district administration, under heavy pressure from Muslims not to allow renewed insults to Islam, responded forcefully to these plans. In late August, several weeks before the Ganapati festival, the police issued orders banning the music of brass bands and drums in processions without special permit, allowing only five cymbals and no other instruments to be played within twenty paces on each side of a mosque, prohibiting playing any music in front of the mosque door, and requiring that processions pass by mosques without stopping. Deeming these orders insults to Hinduism, the Mahasabha called for a general hartal in the city on the day of the observances and resolved not to take the images of Ganapati to the riverside for immersion as long as the restrictions remained. They also organized huge public meetings—one with an estimated twelve thousand participants—to draft petitions of complaint to the district magistrate and to the Bombay government. The

resolution of a meeting of Hindu women, headed by the wives of most of the city's public leaders, argued that "this public meeting of the Hindu ladies of Surat enters their protest against the notification respecting the Ganpati festival . . . in disregard of the long established custom and elementary right of Bhajan Mandalis [religious processions] in Surat to go along public roads with the accompaniment of music and declares that the notification had deeply wounded the religious feelings of Hindu ladies." The women requested the governor of Bombay to "cancel this order and direct the local authorities not to interfere in future with such established customs and established rights of the people."^[62] A petition from another Hindu public meeting suggested that "it seems but reasonable to expect tolerance by one class of citizens for the customs of another class and no Government can tolerate with equilibrium the oppression of the one class at the hands of the other when the former are bonafide exercising their common-law rights enjoyed by them since time immemorial, much less would our benign British Government take any action which would jeopardize such rights."^[63]

Muslims put forward their claims in a similar language, appealing to the sanctity of traditional practice and of community rights, both notions enshrined in colonial discourses about India.^[64] In essence both sides confirmed through their rhetoric and actions that consideration of religious sentiment, now defined largely in oppositional terms, should be the chief criterion of political justice and that the maintenance of communal pride and self-worth should be the central preoccupation of their politics. Less consciously, both sides confirmed that a third party—the "benign British government"—was responsible for settling intercommunity disputes. Thus, as Hindus and Muslims became increasingly hostile to each other, they reinforced the dominance of colonial understandings of India and indeed of colonial power.

District and provincial authorities, recognizing the potential for explosion, refused to relax the restrictions on processions in Surat. For nearly one year, they waited for Hindus and Muslims to arrive at some compromise. Though some Hindus secretly immersed images of Ganapati in their private wells, most kept their images ready for some grander ceremony. Muslims remained vigilant about offenses to their religion, sustaining a steady pressure on the collector not to rescind his orders. In March, the ceremony of Holi went by without any processions. Meanwhile, the Hindu and Muslim press took up the causes of their communities with increasing vehemence and insensitivity. Finally, the next September, the Hindu rank and file took matters in their own hands and took Ganapati processions out in small groups to the river-

side over a period of several days. Violence far worse than that of the previous May erupted, leaving six dead and ninety-three injured.^[65]

With this second round of rioting, the lines were drawn even more sharply than before. Civic leaders like Dixit and Naik, concerned with alienating their Hindu constituencies, drifted closer and closer to the Mahasabha. Muslim politicians correspondingly moved toward the defense of Muslim sentiment. Thus, boundaries that had been drawn during the Khilafat movement were reinforced, hardened, and turned in an antagonistic direction.

The noncooperation movement would not be the last attempt by the Congress to create Hindu-Muslim harmony, but it would be the most successful. When Congress politicians later spoke of representing the people, the public, or the nation, few Muslims considered themselves included because most of those figures had chosen to side with the Hindu community at the critical moment. Necessary to their own survival, most Muslims came to believe, were distinct Muslim organizations and a distinct Muslim political idiom. Even those few who aligned with nationalism in the years before 1947 took great care to maintain a symbolic separateness from their allies.

By 1928 Surti society much more closely approximated colonial renderings of an India torn by irreconcilable religious divisions than ever before. The Gandhian dream of a social order where communities fully respected each other's beliefs now lay in shambles. Moreover, once Hindus and Muslims came to blame each other for their feelings of powerlessness and exclusion, the full dismantling of colonial institutions and values that Gandhi had envisioned in Hind Swaraj became increasingly unlikely. Religious conflict directed attention away from consideration of the sort of polity that Surat should have; it confirmed principles of community rights and interests inherent in the language of civic politics. Once communalism began to intensify in Surat, local politicians tended to focus increasingly on securing the greatest possible material and psychic benefits for their own community within the given civil order rather than on questioning, as Gandhi had proposed, whether that order was legitimate.

The British rulers of Surat did not directly create communalism; the production and reproduction of communal sentiment were largely a product of elite conflicts. But Surti politicians worked within a structure of colonial domination that created great constraints on culture construction, even at moments of resistance. Implicitly recognizing that only certain kinds of rhetoric could influence the process of decision making in a polity based upon representative principle, many elite figures put their claims to justice in religious terms. Gandhi's follow-

ers, too, reinforced the social categories of colonial discourse, even as they attempted to dismantle the myths of British civilization and Indian inferiority.

This is not to say that Hinduism and Islam were as alien to the Surtis as the principles of public and national politics. Indeed, religion had resonances for elites and underclass alike that gave it power never possessed by the language of constitutional justice. But it was by no means inevitable that religion would emerge as the focus of political conflict within the civic arena. It would have been especially hard to predict before the war—let alone before the beginning of British rule—that Muslims in the city, with their own internal diversity, would rally around the cause of a faraway khalifa or that the seventeenth-century raider of Surat, Shivaji, and the elephant-headed figure Ganapati would emerge as the chief symbols of Hindu unity and self-worth in the locality. The Anglo-Indian political order privileged and reinforced rhetorical efforts to develop appeals built around religious solidarity while discouraging attempts to create alternative languages that could challenge the assumptions of colonialism. Local leaderships who pursued their goals within the idiom of communalism often sustained and strengthened their political positions, while those few who fought the general pattern and tried to create some neutral ground became isolated figures without influence. Thus, through everyday political struggles in the institutions of colonial Surat, communally based understandings of the city became received as commonsensical ones, creating the illusion that local society had always been divided sharply along the lines of religion. It was largely as members of communally based collectivities that most Surtis became participants in the public domain.

Conclusion

The innovative contributions of Surti politicians to the language of communal politics are more self-evident than they are in the public discourse discussed in the previous chapter. The vocabulary of Hindu assertion and Muslim defensiveness that emerged in Surat was hardly predetermined by colonial sociological thinking; the politics of religious community no doubt left greater scope for originality in the form of metaphors, myths, and scriptural injunctions than the more derivative constitutional idiom. But the appropriation of public rhetoric and the development of communal appeals were actually related aspects of the same processes: the struggle of local elite figures to fight for justice and to achieve political efficacy within the structure of a liberal political system. In accepting the institutions of local self-government and the civic arena as the loci of their political actions, Surti politicians implicitly

agreed to fight their battles with reference to representative conceptions of politics. The idioms of public opinion and of community rights were both conditioned by colonial understandings that assumed power was to be exercised by representative men whose political role was to advance or guard the interests of their constituencies. Some local figures forged identities as leaders of the people and the nation. Others, feeling excluded from these categories, generated self-images as leaders of religious groups defending their communities' civil rights. Both sets of actors, in applying these models of action to local politics, effectively undermined the consolidation of the more thoroughly counterhegemonic culture proposed by Gandhi; both, too, banished the urban underclasses from an effective voice in shaping the political world that would succeed British rule.

It may seem odd to stop at 1928 in a study of South Asian politics, particularly one that purports to describe forces that were at work in the making of India's postindependence democracy. But in a sense the most decisive period of local politics had already passed. For much of the remainder of the colonial era, politics in Surat continued to work largely within rhetorical and ritual paradigms that had already been established by the late 1920s. By 1928 the principles of modernity and of representative government had become incorporated into the dominant language of politics in the civic domain; the linear view of history had won acceptance by local elites as their chief means for understanding political development. And it was impossible for any local politician to ignore the communal allegiances that divided civic politics.

The civil disobedience movement of 1930–34 would of course mark a new resurgence in popular participation in civic politics and of Gandhian cultural meanings. But in many ways civil disobedience was a fundamentally weaker challenge to the colonial hegemony than noncooperation had been. In Surat, local leaderships would never again press the Gandhian vision to the extremes of the early 1920s. The Congress itself had changed. Figures like Dayalji, Kalyanji, and Kunvarji, men who viewed themselves as the Mahatma's disciples and who had never been swayed by the agenda of progress and liberal representation, were marginalized. Ironically, the Congress leadership was assumed in the 1930s by Kanaiyalal Desai, the home ruler who had objected to noncooperation's attempts to attack the institutions of provincial self-government and of colonial primary education, a man who had sided with the Hindu community during the time of the riots. Ultimately, civil disobedience too ran its course, to be overwhelmed by politics managed by men committed to constitutionalism and urban progress. Gandhian principles, which posed a threat to the assumptions of public discourse, became peripheral in the city's politics. More precisely, as

Partha Chatterjee has put it, "Gandhism, originally a product of an anarchist philosophy of resistance to state oppression, itself becomes a participant in its imbrication with a nationalist state ideology."^[66] To a great extent, a negotiated version of colonial hegemony had become the new hegemony. While this hegemony would of course be continuously renegotiated over time, the most critical formative period in the making of the city's public culture had already passed.