Three Kathas in Every Twenty Went to Indigo. When Gandhi Refused an Order to Leave Champaran in April 1917, the Government Dropped the Case Before Sentence.

On 18 April 1917, in a courtroom in Motihari, Gandhi pleaded guilty to disobeying an order to leave Champaran, a district in northern Bihar, and read the magistrate a statement explaining why he would not go. By the evening of 20 April the case had been withdrawn.

He had come to look into the tinkathia system, under which a tenant had to grow indigo for a European planter on three of every twenty kathas of his land. The inquiry that followed ended in an Act of the provincial council that abolished the system. Gandhi’s whole career has its own piece on this site. This one stays in Champaran, with the government’s files, the committee’s report and Rajendra Prasad’s account.

Three kathas in every twenty

A tenant signed a contract called a satta, promising to grow indigo for the planter’s factory on a fixed share of his holding. The Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee, which investigated in 1917, found the share had once been five kathas in the bigha, a quarter of the land. It fell to four, then in 1868 to three, which gave the system its name (tin is three). A bigha is twenty kathas, so three is 15 percent of the holding. Gandhi’s Autobiography says acre where the committee and Prasad say bigha.

Factories picked the plots. Because the price was fixed per acre whatever the crop turned out to be, the committee noted, a factory had every reason to take the better land. In 1910 the Planters’ Association cut the share to two kathas, a tenth, but the name survived, and Prasad judged that many factories ignored the cut.

German synthetic dye, on the market from the mid 1890s, undercut natural indigo. Champaran grew it on 98,000 acres at the settlement of 1892 to 1899 and on 8,100 in 1914, the committee reported, before wartime prices lifted the figure to 21,900 in 1916. Planters who no longer wanted the crop still wanted what the contract had been worth. From 1911, the committee says, a general move to abandon indigo began, and it took two forms. Some tenants agreed to higher rent, called sharahbeshi, in return for release. Others paid a lump sum, called tawan, in cash or by a money bond at 12 percent interest.

Gandhi’s note to the Bihar government of 13 May 1917 quotes the survey report: on 5,955 tenancies the extra rent came to Rs 31,062 on a previous Rs 53,865. In the north-west, where indigo was never grown, lessees collected abwab, extra dues banned since 1793. One, a so-called irrigation due, ran at Rs 3 to Rs 3-8-0 a bigha, which the committee put at 60 to 100 percent of the rent.

A tenant at the Lucknow Congress

Complaints had reached the government for years. In April 1915 the provincial council voted down a mixed committee of officials and non-officials, with 12 of 16 non-official members present in the majority. At the Lucknow Congress in December 1916, Bihar delegates brought a resolution asking for such a committee again. Prasad records that Rajkumar Shukla, sent by the Champaran tenants, spoke for it, perhaps the first time the Congress had heard a tenant’s grievances from a tenant. Gandhi was in the camp and declined to speak. “I can give no opinion without seeing the conditions with my own eyes,” he told the lawyer Brajkishore Prasad, who moved the resolution. It passed unanimously.

Shukla followed Gandhi to Cawnpore, to his ashram in Ahmedabad and to Calcutta, in Gandhi’s own telling. By Prasad’s dates, Shukla wrote again on 27 February 1917, Gandhi wired him on 3 April to meet in Calcutta, and the two left for Patna on 9 April. At Muzaffarpur on 13 April the Commissioner of the Tirhut Division, L. F. Morshead, advised Gandhi to go away. On the afternoon of 15 April, Magistrate W. B. Heycock reported, Gandhi arrived in Motihari.

The order to leave

Next morning he set out on an elephant for a village where a tenant was said to have been ill-treated. Police officers overtook him and served a notice from Heycock under section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a magistrate’s power to bar a person from a place. It told Gandhi to leave the district “by the next available train.” Morshead’s letter, attached, said he had been told Gandhi’s object was “likely to be agitation rather than a genuine search for knowledge.”

Gandhi answered that day that he could not leave and would take the penalty. A summons under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code, for disobeying a public servant’s order, followed on 17 April.

On 18 April several thousand tenants waited in the compound, and about 2,000 followed him in, breaking panes in the doors. He had no lawyer. His statement said he had come “in response to a pressing invitation” to help tenants who said the planters treated them unfairly, and that he could not obey the order “without doing violence to my sense of duty to those for whom I have come.” He would “submit without protest to the penalty of disobedience,” having disregarded the order, he said, “in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”

Asked whether he pleaded guilty, he said he did. Heycock wrote to Morshead the same day that Gandhi “has pleaded guilty” and, in a postscript, that Gandhi would go to jail rather than pay a fine of even one anna. Prasad adds that the magistrate offered to drop the case if Gandhi left and promised not to return, and Gandhi refused. Sentence was put off to Saturday 21 April.

Four days from notice to climb-down

Sir Edward Gait, the Lieutenant-Governor, was at Puri. On 19 April his government telegraphed that it regretted Morshead had, “in a matter certain to become cause celebre,” acted without first asking the Lieutenant-Governor’s views, and that the “Magistrate should be advised to withdraw order under section 144.” The Chief Secretary, H. McPherson, wrote on 20 April that Morshead “made a mistake in calling upon Mr. Gandhi for credentials” and that the order “was ultra vires,” meaning beyond the magistrate’s legal power. McPherson added that Gandhi “will thus appear to have gained a victory over the local officials,” which the Lieutenant-Governor accepted as unavoidable. Morshead answered that day that his action “was not suitable.”

Chandra and his co-authors write that the Government of India ordered the local government to retreat. The telegrams printed in the Bihar government’s file show Delhi asking on 18 April for a brief report, and Bihar telling Delhi on 19 April that it had already advised withdrawal. Prasad says word of the withdrawal arrived about 7 p.m. on 20 April.

Madan Mohan Malaviya, one of those Gandhi wired, offered to come, and Gandhi told him he was not yet needed, Prasad writes. On 21 April Malaviya telegraphed Gait that he felt sure withdrawal had been ordered and called the treatment of Gandhi “most deplorable.” Almost all the Indian papers, Prasad says, criticised the Commissioner. Gandhi later called the episode the country’s “first direct object-lesson in Civil Disobedience.”

Statements, volunteers and a number that moved

Gandhi told the Bihar lawyers who came to help that he wanted clerks and interpreters, since he could not read Kaithi or Urdu papers. Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, J. B. Kripalani and others took down statements. Rajendra Prasad reached Motihari at 3 p.m. on the day of the hearing and joined them. Gandhi writes that each peasant was cross-examined, anyone who failed was rejected, and a CID officer was always present.

The count shifted. On 13 May Gandhi told the government that nearly 4,000 tenants had been examined, and on 30 May that he had statements from “over 7,000.” Prasad says more than 8,000 full statements, from 850 villages and against 60 factories, had been recorded when the work stopped on 12 June. The editors of the surviving testimonies give 7,000 between 16 April and 13 June. The 8,000, which Chandra and his co-authors repeat, is Prasad’s.

A committee of six

Planters wanted him out, and on 8 June the European Association of Calcutta wrote urging the government to remove him. Gait had already agreed, in talks with Gandhi on 4 to 6 June, to appoint an inquiry with Gandhi as a member. Gandhi accepted on conditions: he could consult his co-workers, stay the tenants’ advocate, and advise them freely if unsatisfied. The resolution of 10 June named F. G. Sly as president, with L. C. Adami, D. J. Reid (the planters’ member on the council), G. Rainy, Raja Harihar Prasad Narayan Singh and Gandhi. Ill health soon put Raja Kirtyanand Singh of Banaili in the Raja’s place. The committee held eight public sittings from 17 July, heard 19 witnesses, among them Shukla, and inspected eight factories.

Signed by all six on 3 October, the report called tinkathia “radically defective in some important respects,” citing the fixed price, the factory’s choice of plots and close supervision by low-paid subordinates. It wanted the system abolished by law and any future indigo grown on voluntary contracts of three years at most. It declared abwab illegal. On sharahbeshi it recorded an agreement signed at Ranchi on 29 September by Gandhi and the managers Hill, Norman and Irwin, cutting the enhancement by 26 percent at Motihari and Peeprah and 20 percent at Turkaulia. For tawan it recommended that 25 percent be repaid to tenants through the Bettiah estate, and all of it where a lease was recent. Kirtyanand Singh dissented from one proposal, on collectors’ power to punish abwab. Gait’s council accepted the report generally on 6 October.

Fifty, forty or twenty-five

A famous story says Gandhi asked the planters for a 50 percent refund and took 25. Louis Fischer tells it in the excerpt NCERT prints in a Class 12 textbook. He says the planters expected a demand for full repayment, Gandhi asked for half, and the planters’ man, in the words of a missionary, J. Z. Hodge, offered 25 percent, “to his amazement Mr. Gandhi took him at his word.” Chandra and his co-authors also say he accepted a 25 percent refund, because even that dented the planters’ prestige.

The printed minutes show a different haggle. Reid suggested, on 11 August, cutting sharahbeshi by a fixed percentage, say 25. Next day Irwin and Norman said 25 was their limit and Hill said 20, and Gandhi said he could not accept 25. By letter on 13 August he said that he was “prepared to accept a reduction of 40 per cent only.” Kirtyanand Singh wrote that Gandhi “evidently believes that 25 per cent remission would be no relief.” The committee papers in the Bihar government’s file record no demand of 50 percent for a tawan refund.

Irwin wrote to the newspapers on 7 October that he had agreed to 25 percent on sharahbeshi on the understanding that tawan was untouched, and that the refund would cost him Rs 80,000. Reid replied that he had told Irwin at Bettiah of the 25 percent refund. On 6 December the Bihar government told Delhi that the other two planters were under no misapprehension, so “Mr. Irwin’s allegation was thus proved to be untrue.”

The Act of 1918 and whose campaign it was

Introducing the Champaran Agrarian Bill on 29 November 1917, the Executive Council member William Maude said “the root of the evil is the tinkathia system.” The planters’ association called on Reid to resign his seat because he had signed the report, and he did. Planters pressed an amendment to keep tinkathia for another two and a half years, Gait told the Viceroy, but the council passed the Bill on 4 March 1918 in the form the select committee had cast it. The Viceroy’s assent was signified in a letter of 26 April.

By Prasad’s summary, the Act voided any condition setting land aside for a particular crop, cut sharahbeshi by 20 or 26 percent, and limited contracts to deliver a set weight of a crop to three years. The Bettiah Raj refunded Rs 1,60,301 of tawan taken by 18 factories (about 1.6 lakh rupees), but nothing could be recovered in villages outside the Raj.

Gandhi’s Autobiography calls Shukla an “ignorant, unsophisticated but resolute agriculturist.” Sumit Sarkar calls him a “prosperous peasant-cum-petty moneylender,” and Mohammad Sajjad notes that Shukla said so himself in his deposition. Sarkar writes that Gandhi’s intervention was indispensable in raising the local issues to the level of all-India politics, yet the evidence shows discontent long before. He cites Jacques Pouchepadass’s phrase “upward pressure from the rural masses themselves.” By Pouchepadass’s analysis as Sarkar summarises it, the key go-betweens were richer peasants, moneylenders, traders and village teachers, rather than the small-town lawyers and the college teacher Kripalani, the men Judith Brown called Gandhi’s “sub-contractors.”

Chandra and his co-authors see Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda as demonstrations of the style Gandhi later took to the national stage, and the Salt March came thirteen years later. How much such campaigns counted in ending British rule is argued in a separate piece.

The editors of the surviving testimonies, Shahid Amin, Tridip Suhrud and Megha Todi, write that “peasants of those times didn’t write, they were written about.” Sajjad, reviewing their first volume in The India Forum, says Gandhi’s accounts never mention the peasant organiser Pir Mohammad Munis and Prasad acknowledges him sparingly, that none of Gandhi, Prasad or Kripalani mentions Batakh Miyan Ansari, and that the schools Gandhi began folded up after 1917. Sarkar likewise finds only three village-level workers still active in May 1918. The first volume of a planned eight was published in 2022 by the Navajivan Trust and the National Archives of India.