The Last Phase (2)

Nationalism Versus Imperialism Helplessness of the Middle Classes Gandhi Comes

World War I came. Politics were at a low ebb, chiefly because of the split in the Congress between the two sections, the so-called extremists and the moderates, and because of war-time restrictions and regulations. Yet one tendency was marked: the rising middle class among the Muslims was growing more nationally minded and was pushing the Muslim League towards the Congress. They even joined hands.

Industry developed during the war and produced enormous dividends—100 to 200 per cent—from the jute mills of Bengal and the cotton mills of Bombay, Ahmedabad, and elsewhere. Some of these dividends flowed to the owners of foreign capital in Dundee and London, some went to swell the riches of Indian millionaires; and yet the workers who had created these dividends lived at an incredibly low level of existence—in ‘filthy, disease-ridden hovels,’ with no window or chimney, no light or water supply, no sanitary arrangements. This near the so-called city of palaces, Calcutta, dominated by British capital! In Bombay, where Indian capital was more in evidence, an inquiry commission found in one room, fifteen feet by twelve, six families, in all thirty adults and children, living together. Three of these women were expecting a confinement soon, and each family had a separate oven in that one room. These are special cases, but they are not very exceptional. They describe conditions in the ’twenties and ’thirties of this century when some improvements had already been made. What these conditions were like previous to these improvements staggers the imagination.1

I remember visiting some of these slums and hovels of industrial workers, gasping for breath there, and coming out dazed and full of horror and anger. I remember also going down a coal mine in Jharia and seeing the conditions in which our womenfolk worked there. I can never forget that picture or the shock that came to me that human beings should labour thus. Women were subsequently prohibited from working underground, but now they have been sent back there because, we are told, war needs require additional labour; and yet millions of men are starving and unemployed. There is no lack of men, but the wages are so low and the conditions of work so bad that they do not attract.

A delegation sent by the British Trade Union Congress visited India in 1928. In their report they said that ‘In Assam tea the sweat, hunger, and despair of a million Indians enter year by year.’ The Director of Public Health in Bengal, in his report for 1927-28, said that the peasantry of that province were ‘taking to a dietary on which even rats could not live for more than five weeks.’

World War I ended at last, and the peace, instead of bringing us relief and progress, brought us repressive legislation and martial law in the Punjab. A bitter sense of humiliation and a passionate anger filled our people. All the unending talk