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Gandhi's early satyagrahas, the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh

Gandhian movements, 1917–1922 · Part 1 / 2 · Fact-checked on 8 November 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

Gandhi's years in South Africa and the making of satyagraha, Hind Swaraj, his return in 1915, the three local struggles of Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda, the Rowlatt Act and the first all-India satyagraha, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, martial law in Punjab, and the Hunter Committee and the Congress inquiry that turned Gandhi into a non-cooperator.

Between 1917 and 1922 the national movement changed character. Until then it had been led by educated men speaking mainly to each other, the government and the press; within five years peasants, workers, traders, students and women across India were taking part. The person at the centre of this change was M. K. Gandhi. This chapter follows it in two parts. Part 1 shows where Gandhi's method came from, how he tested it in three local struggles in 1917–18, and how the Rowlatt Act and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 turned him from a loyal cooperator into an opponent of British rule. Part 2 covers the Khilafat question and the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22, the first nationwide mass movement.

Gandhi's political training happened in South Africa, not India. A young lawyer, he went to Natal in 1893 to work on a commercial case for an Indian firm, and soon met open racial humiliation, most famously when he was thrown off a first-class train compartment at Pietermaritzburg. Indians there, mostly indentured labourers and traders, faced special taxes, passes and limits on where they could live and trade. Gandhi stayed to fight these laws. In 1894 he helped found the Natal Indian Congress; in 1903 he started the weekly Indian Opinion; and in 1904 he set up the Phoenix Settlement near Durban, a farm where his co-workers lived simply and shared labour. These years gave him skills in organising, publicity and negotiation.

The decisive struggle began in 1906, when the Transvaal government ordered every Indian to register and carry a pass bearing fingerprints. At a mass meeting in Johannesburg, Indians pledged to disobey the law and accept the penalties. Over the next eight years thousands went to jail. In 1910 Gandhi's German friend Hermann Kallenbach gave land for Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg, where the families of resisters could live. In 1913 the campaign widened against a yearly three-pound tax on former indentured workers and a court ruling that did not recognise Indian marriages; miners struck and Gandhi led a march across the Transvaal border. The settlement with General Smuts produced the Indians Relief Act of 1914, which removed the tax and recognised the marriages. Gandhi left for India in July 1914.

Out of this struggle came the idea of satyagraha, literally ‘holding firmly to truth’. Gandhi coined the word because the English phrase ‘passive resistance’ suggested a weapon of the weak that might give way to force. Satyagraha asked the resister to be active, fearless and non-violent: to refuse to obey an unjust law, to accept punishment without hatred, and to try to change the opponent's heart rather than defeat him. Suffering willingly was itself a form of pressure. The method also needed discipline: a satyagrahi had to be truthful and ready to call off a struggle that turned violent. In 1909 Gandhi set out his wider views in Hind Swaraj, written in Gujarati, which criticised modern industrial civilisation and argued that India's freedom must begin with self-rule over oneself.

Gandhi landed at Bombay on 9 January 1915; the date is now marked as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, honouring Indians abroad. He was already known for his South African work. On the advice of G. K. Gokhale, whom he called his political guru, he spent his first year travelling across India, mostly in third-class railway carriages, and kept away from public controversy. He set up an ashram at Kochrab near Ahmedabad in 1915 and moved it to the banks of the Sabarmati in 1917. At first he took little part in the Home Rule agitation of Tilak and Annie Besant. He preferred to wait for a concrete local grievance on which his method could be tested.

The first test came in Champaran in north Bihar in 1917. European planters there forced tenants to grow indigo on three-twentieths of their land, a practice called tinkathia, and to sell it at prices the planters fixed. When cheaper German dyes cut the demand for indigo, many planters demanded higher rents or lump sums to release tenants from the obligation. Rajkumar Shukla, a local cultivator, persuaded Gandhi to come. When the district authorities ordered him to leave, Gandhi refused and said he would accept the punishment, and the order was withdrawn. With Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Mazharul Haq, J. B. Kripalani and Mahadev Desai he recorded thousands of tenants' statements. The government set up an inquiry committee with Gandhi as a member, and the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918 abolished tinkathia.

Early in 1918 Gandhi turned to a dispute in Ahmedabad's cotton mills. During a plague epidemic the owners had paid workers a ‘plague bonus’ to keep them in the city; when they decided to withdraw it, the workers asked for a wage rise to meet war-time prices. Gandhi studied the figures and advised the workers to strike and demand a 35 per cent increase. He was helped by Anasuya Sarabhai, while her brother Ambalal Sarabhai led the mill owners. When the strikers began to waver, Gandhi went on a fast, his first hunger strike in India. The owners agreed to refer the dispute to a tribunal, which awarded the 35 per cent.

At almost the same time, peasants in Kheda district of Gujarat faced a failed harvest. Under the revenue rules, if the crop fell below a quarter of the normal yield, cultivators were entitled to have the land revenue remitted, but the government insisted that the loss was smaller and pressed for full payment. Gandhi advised the peasants to withhold the revenue and to accept the seizure of their goods rather than pay. Vallabhbhai Patel, then a lawyer in Ahmedabad, gave up his practice to join the campaign, along with Indulal Yagnik and others. After some months the government quietly instructed officials to recover revenue only from those who could afford it, and Gandhi ended the struggle. Kheda brought Patel into national life and showed that peasants could be organised without violence.

The turning point came in 1919. Acting on the Rowlatt Committee's report of 1918, the government passed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, better known as the Rowlatt Act, in March 1919, even though every elected Indian member of the Imperial Legislative Council opposed it; Jinnah, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mazharul Haq resigned in protest. The Act let the government detain suspects without trial and have political cases tried by special courts without the usual right of appeal. Coming just after Indians had supported the war effort, it felt like a betrayal. Gandhi formed a Satyagraha Sabha in February 1919 and called for a nationwide hartal on 6 April. The response was huge, but violence broke out in several cities, and Gandhi, admitting a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’, suspended the satyagraha.

The worst violence came in Punjab, where Lieutenant-Governor Michael O'Dwyer ruled with a heavy hand. On 10 April 1919 two popular leaders of Amritsar, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, were arrested and sent away; crowds protested, some were shot, and in return several Europeans were killed and buildings burned. On 13 April, the Baisakhi festival, thousands gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed ground with narrow exits; many were villagers who had come for the fair and did not know of the ban on meetings. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched in troops and, without warning, ordered them to fire until their ammunition ran low. The official figure was 379 dead; Indian estimates were far higher. Martial law followed, with public floggings and the order that Indians crawl along one street.

News of the massacre spread slowly because of censorship, but its effect was lasting. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in May 1919, and C. Sankaran Nair resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council. In October 1919 the government appointed the Disorders Inquiry Committee under Lord Hunter, with three Indian members. Its report of 1920 criticised Dyer, who was removed from his command and retired, but the Indian members wrote a separate, sharper minority report, and many in Britain, including the House of Lords, praised Dyer. The Congress set up its own inquiry, with Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das, Abbas Tyabji, M. R. Jayakar and Gandhi, which gave a far graver account. The mild official response convinced Gandhi that British rule could not be trusted, and in 1920 he returned the Kaiser-i-Hind medal.

Seen together, the events of 1915–1919 explain why Gandhi became the leader of a mass movement. In South Africa he had built a method; in Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda he showed that it could win concrete gains for peasants and workers and draw in local leaders such as Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel. The Rowlatt Act campaign carried satyagraha to the whole country for the first time, while Jallianwala Bagh and the weak official response destroyed his faith in British fairness. By 1920 the man who had recruited soldiers for the war was ready to lead the Indian National Congress in refusing all cooperation with the government. How he joined this to the Khilafat cause, and what followed, is the subject of Part 2.

Exam traps

• Champaran (1917) was Gandhi's first satyagraha in India; the Ahmedabad mill strike (1918) saw his first hunger strike in India; Kheda (1918) was a revenue campaign of peasants.
• Tinkathia meant growing indigo on 3/20 of the land; the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918 ended it.
• Rajkumar Shukla invited Gandhi to Champaran; Vallabhbhai Patel joined him at Kheda, not Champaran.
• At Ahmedabad Anasuya Sarabhai helped the workers, while her brother Ambalal Sarabhai led the mill owners.
• The Rowlatt Act's official name was the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (March 1919); it allowed detention without trial.
• Jallianwala Bagh (13 April 1919): the firing was ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer; Michael O'Dwyer was the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab.
• The Hunter Committee was appointed by the government; the Congress held a separate inquiry.
• Tagore renounced his knighthood (1919); Gandhi returned his Kaiser-i-Hind medal (1920).

Recap

• South Africa (1893–1914): Natal Indian Congress (1894), Indian Opinion (1903), Phoenix (1904), Tolstoy Farm (1910), Indians Relief Act (1914).
• Satyagraha: truth and non-violence, willing suffering, changing the opponent's heart; Hind Swaraj (1909, Gujarati).
• Return: 9 January 1915 (Pravasi Bharatiya Divas); Gokhale his political guru; ashram at Kochrab (1915), Sabarmati (1917).
• Champaran 1917: tinkathia, Rajkumar Shukla; Gandhi defied the order to leave; Champaran Agrarian Act 1918.
• Ahmedabad 1918: plague bonus dispute; first hunger strike in India; 35 per cent award.
• Kheda 1918: revenue remission after crop failure; Vallabhbhai Patel joined.
• Rowlatt Act, March 1919: detention without trial; Satyagraha Sabha; hartal of 6 April; ‘Himalayan miscalculation’.
• Jallianwala Bagh, 13 April 1919: Dyer's firing; 379 dead officially; martial law; Tagore renounced his knighthood.
• Hunter Committee (October 1919) and the Congress inquiry; Gandhi returned the Kaiser-i-Hind medal (1920).

Practice questions

Sources

• The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919 (the Rowlatt Act); the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918; the Indians Relief Act, 1914 (Union of South Africa) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in
• Report of the Committee appointed by the Government of India to investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, etc. (Disorders Inquiry Committee, Lord Hunter, chairman), 1920; Home Department (Political) records on Champaran, Kheda and the satyagraha of 1919; National Archives of India, Abhilekh Patal — https://www.abhilekh-patal.in
• The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Publications Division, Government of India (volumes covering 1893–1920, including Hind Swaraj, 1909) — https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi-volume-1-to-98.php
• Report of the Sedition Committee (Rowlatt Committee), Government of India, 1918 — https://www.abhilekh-patal.in