Gopal Krishna Gokhale Asked the Viceroy's Council to Cut the Salt Duty on 26 March 1902, Founded the Servants of India Society on 12 June 1905, and Became the Man Gandhi Called His Political Guru

On 26 March 1902, in his first budget speech to the Viceroy’s Imperial Legislative Council, Gopal Krishna Gokhale said he could not “conscientiously join in the congratulations” offered to the Finance Member on a surplus of seven crore rupees (70 million). Such surpluses were “a double wrong to the community,” he told the Council. Three years later, on 12 June 1905, he founded the Servants of India Society at Poona, whose members took seven vows and spent five years in training.

Gandhi called Gokhale his political guru. At the funeral, according to Bipan Chandra and his co-authors, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leader of the Congress Extremists, spoke of “this diamond of India, this jewel of Maharashtra, this prince of workers.” The sources here are Gokhale’s printed speeches, the Society’s own constitution, Gandhi’s writings and two early biographers: Srinivasa Sastri, a member and later president of the Society, and the English writer John Hoyland. Where they differ, each claim carries a name.

A Life Member at Fergusson College, and Ranade’s pupil

Both Sastri and Hoyland give Gokhale’s birth as 9 May 1866 at Katluk in Ratnagiri district, to poor parents. Natesan, the Madras publisher who edited the speeches, writes that he took his degree in 1884 and at once joined the Deccan Education Society as a Life Member. The Society’s college in Poona, Fergusson College, opened on 2 January 1885, Natesan adds.

The Society had been set up in 1884 by the men who started Poona’s New English School. Fergusson College’s own history page names Tilak, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, Mahadeo Ballal Namjoshi and Vaman Shivram Apte. Natesan says Life Members bound themselves to serve for 20 years on a subsistence allowance, and Sastri puts Gokhale’s pay at Rs 75 a month. Quarrels over social reform led Tilak to leave in 1890, Hoyland writes, adding that Gokhale used to say he had joined the Society out of admiration for Tilak.

Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge and reformer, shaped him. From 1887 Gokhale edited the quarterly of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, a public association Ranade guided, says Natesan. After staying a month with Gokhale in Calcutta, Gandhi recalled that “Ranade’s authority was final in every matter.” In 1897 Gokhale gave evidence in London to the Welby Commission on Indian expenditure, where Chandra and his co-authors say he outshone veterans. Pherozeshah Mehta’s seat on the Imperial Legislative Council went to him next.

What the 1902 speech said about salt and the rupee

Currency, in his reading, explained the surplus. The Government still levied the taxes it had judged necessary when the rupee’s exchange value was at its lowest, and the rising rupee cut what it had to pay in London, leaving what he called “currency surpluses.” He asked for three reliefs: the extra eight annas on the salt duty, an income-tax threshold of Rs 1,000, and the end of the cotton excise. The speech had “an electrifying effect” on the public, Chandra and his co-authors write.

Salt had been taxed at Rs 2 a maund (the weight salt was sold by) until 1887 to 1888, when the duty rose to Rs 2 and 8 annas. A despatch from the Secretary of State of 12 April 1888, which Gokhale read out in 1902, called the increase temporary. By 1903 he could welcome a cut back to Rs 2 and count two of his three requests as granted. Another eight annas was his plea in 1904, when he called salt “essentially a poor man’s question.” Finance Member Sir Edward Law’s reply, Gokhale recalled in 1905, was that he was “one of the multitude who stand at the door of the Treasury and always cry, ‘give, give!’” On 29 March 1905 the Government announced a further cut of eight annas, and Gokhale welcomed it.

Hoyland credits Gokhale’s advocacy with the reductions. The speeches show that officials had called the 1888 increase temporary themselves and that the later cuts came out of surpluses, so how far he caused them is a judgment, not a recorded fact. The longer story of the duty is in our account of the salt tax.

By 1910 he ranked schooling above salt. Moving a resolution for free and compulsory primary schooling in March 1910, he said that if every other source of money failed he would advocate an extra eight annas on salt. He called it “a smaller evil that my countrymen should eat less salt” than that their children grow up in ignorance. When he moved on 18 March 1912 to send his Elementary Education Bill to a select committee, the motion was lost by a majority of 25, Natesan reports.

12 June 1905, and a constitution with seven vows

The Society’s own printed constitution says Gokhale founded it at Poona on 12 June 1905. Its members, the text says, “frankly accept the British connection” and name “Self-Government within the Empire” as their goal. “Public life must be spiritualized,” it adds. The objects are to train national missionaries and to promote the interests of Indians by constitutional means, from a Home and library at Poona.

Every member took seven vows on admission: to put the country first in his thoughts; to seek no personal advantage; to regard all Indians as brothers without distinction of caste or creed; to be content with the provision the Society could make and to “devote no part of his energies to earning money for himself”; to lead a pure personal life; to “engage in no personal quarrel with any one”; and to keep the Society’s aims in view.

Training lasted five years, under the “entire guidance and control” of the head of the Society. According to the bye-laws as printed in 1915, a member under training got Rs 30 a month for the first two years and Rs 35 for the next three. Ordinary members drew Rs 55, rising to Rs 65, and every member got a personal allowance of Rs 10 on top. Each life was insured for Rs 3,000. The Society’s list of 16 July 1915 names nine ordinary members, headed by Natesh Appaji Dravid, Gopal Krishna Devadhar and Anant Vinayak Patwardhan, and shows Sastri as president.

Hoyland says Gokhale resented the suggestion that the Society was a secular body and liked to compare it to medieval religious orders. In 1918 Gandhi wrote that Gokhale held political work must be filled with the spirit of religion.

Banaras, 27 to 30 December 1905

Banaras (Benares in the printed address) hosted the 21st Congress, with Gokhale presiding. Hoyland says he hurried back from England, where in fifty days he had given 45 speeches. His address turned early to Lord Curzon, who had just left India. Gokhale compared Curzon’s rule to Aurangzeb’s and said Curzon “did not really understand the people of India.” Of the partition he said: “A cruel wrong has been inflicted on our Bengalee brethren.” More than 500 public meetings had protested, he told the delegates, before it took effect on 16 October. Curzon, for his part, judged in 1905, in words Chandra and his co-authors quote, that Gokhale either did not see where he was going or was dishonest.

The boycott of British goods was legitimate on an extreme occasion such as Bengal’s, Gokhale said, but a weapon to be kept in reserve. The Congress aimed at a government “similar to what exists in the self-governing Colonies of the British Empire,” reached by gradual steps.

Nine immediate demands followed. Among them were Legislative Councils with half their members elected, a rise in the elected members of the 25-member Viceroy’s Council from five to 12, three Indians on the Secretary of State’s Council, and the separation of judicial from executive work. Lower military spending, more primary and technical schooling and relief of peasant debt were on the list too. Many educated Indians, Gokhale said of the new Secretary of State for India, John Morley, “feel towards Mr. Morley as towards a Master.” The partition is covered in our account of Curzon and Bengal.

Chandra and his co-authors write that Banaras backed swadeshi and the boycott for Bengal only, while Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghose wanted both extended across India with swaraj as the aim. Dadabhai Naoroji declared swaraj the Congress’s goal in 1906.

The apology of 1897, Surat, and the compromise of 1914

Hoyland describes Gokhale and Tilak as old colleagues who drifted apart over social reform and political method. Gokhale’s standing suffered a blow in 1897. Plague operations in Poona produced a story, while he was in London, that British soldiers had violated two women. Sastri says Gokhale gave it to a parliamentary committee and the Manchester Guardian as something told to him, not something he knew. “Malevolent invention” was the Bombay Government’s reply, Sastri records.

Back in India, Gokhale could not get his correspondents to come forward, Hoyland writes. Refusing to name them, he apologised without conditions, on the advice of friends including Ranade, to the Governor, the Plague Committee and the soldiers. Sastri reads the apology as a point of honour. Hoyland writes that Gokhale “took the matter up without waiting for further proof,” and adds that Tilak made great capital of the apology afterwards.

At Surat in December 1907, Chandra and his co-authors write, Gokhale had warned in October that a split “means a disaster,” yet he lacked the personality to stand up to Mehta, who was determined on one. That year, they add, he told the Extremists that the Government would have “no difficulty in throttling” the Congress. Our Tilak article tells the split itself.

Tilak was tried in 1908 and sentenced to six years, says Sastri. On 17 July, during the trial, Gokhale wrote from London that “his prosecution has been a fearful mistake.” Newspapers including Bande Mataram still accused him of urging it. A letter printed by Hoyland has Gokhale calling the charge “a despicable and malevolent fabrication.” Sastri, who says he heard Gokhale speak of Tilak more than once, quotes him: “Although I do not approve of his methods, I never question his motives.”

December 1914 at Madras brought the last quarrel. A compromise to readmit Tilak’s followers failed when Gokhale withdrew his consent after hearing a report of Tilak’s talk with the Congress secretary, Sastri says, and a bitter press fight followed. Hoyland holds Tilak responsible for the dispute and says it broke Gokhale’s heart. Mehta’s Bombay group won Gokhale over, say Chandra and his co-authors. Tilak’s own account of the episode is not among the sources used here.

South Africa, 22 October to 17 November 1912

Gandhi writes that Gokhale moved a resolution in the Council on 25 February 1910 to let the Governor-General bar indentured labour for Natal, and that it carried. The law took effect on 1 July 1911, Gokhale said in 1912. On 4 March 1912 he moved to end indenture altogether and called the £3 annual tax on Natal’s freed labourers “a diabolical device.” The Government was not ready to go that far, Natesan says. Our history of indenture covers the system.

Gokhale landed at Cape Town on 22 October 1912 and left on 17 November, Gandhi writes. A state railway saloon came from the Union Government. Acting as his secretary, Gandhi also translated Gokhale’s Marathi speeches into Hindustani for Indian audiences from Johannesburg onward. At Pretoria, after about two hours with ministers, Gokhale reported that General Botha had promised the repeal of the Black Act and the abolition of the £3 tax. “You must return to India within twelve months,” he told Gandhi. “I doubt it very much,” came the answer.

The Government did not abolish the tax within a year and declared it could not be removed at all, Gandhi wrote. Without Gokhale’s visit, he argued, the tax would not have become a demand of the struggle. Satyagraha resumed in 1913 and the promise was never kept, according to Chandra and his co-authors. The words of the Pretoria conversation come from Gandhi alone.

The guru, and the application Gandhi withdrew

In 1896, at Fergusson College, Gandhi met Gokhale for the first time. “Sir Pherozeshah had seemed to me like the Himalaya, the Lokamanya like the ocean. But Gokhale was as the Ganges,” he wrote in his Autobiography. Writing in 1918, he added: “I have often said that Gokhale was my political Guru.”

Gokhale had made him promise to travel India for a year and give no opinion on public questions, Gandhi told Andrews. Gokhale also laughed at parts of Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj, saying, “After you have stayed a year in India, your views will correct themselves.” January 1915 brought Gandhi back to India, according to Chandra and his co-authors. Gokhale died on Friday 19 February 1915, Sastri writes. Gandhi had been at Shantiniketan barely a week when the telegram came, and he left for Poona the same day.

Joining the Society was Gandhi’s next step. The members were divided, he writes, and those against held that he and they were “as the poles asunder” on important matters. A letter to Sastri asked that the adjourned meeting not be held, which withdrew his application. Later he judged that “the opposition of those who had been against me was justified,” and that he had remained “a member in spirit.”

In his last days, according to Sastri, Gokhale wrote out in pencil the minimum constitutional reforms India would accept, at the request of Lord Willingdon, Governor of Bombay. Copies went to Willingdon and two other men, and the document was not published until August 1917.