द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

60 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE
every kind. Moreover, leaders like Mr. B. C. Pal had refused
to give evidence before British law courts on the ground that
they refused to recognise their jurisdiction. Sri Arabindo
Ghosh, the leader of the Extremist section of the Nationalist
Movement in Bengal in those days had compared this policy
with the policy of the Irish Sinn Fein Party. Several decades
earlier, the country had witnessed another movement which
could also be regarded as a precursor of Mr. Gandhi's non-
co-operation. Before scientists in Europe learnt to produce
synthetic indigo, Bengal was an important supplier of indigo.
The indigo plantations in those days were owned by Britishers
and these foreign landlords were oppressive and brutal in
their behaviour towards the tenants. When their brutality
became unbearable, the tenants in Jessore and Nadia took the
law into their own hands. They refused to pay rent, stopped
cultivating indigo and made it impossible for the British
landlords to live there and terrorise them. (A graphic
description of these incidents can be found in the book
Nil-darpan of the well-known Bengali writer, Dinabandhu
Mitra.) Thus the people had already learnt to rid themselves
of oppression through their own exertions, where they found
that the Government neglected its duty.
It is a well-known fact that Mr. Gandhi had in his earlier
life been considerably influenced by the teachings of Jesus
Christ and the ideas of Leo Tolstoy. It cannot therefore be
claimed that he was altogether original in his ideas or novel
in his practice. But his real merit was a twofold one. He
translated the teachings of Christ and the ideas of Tolstoy
and Thoreau into actual practice and demonstrated that it
was possible to fight for liberty without resorting to violence.
Secondly, he used 'non-co-operation' not for remedying local
grievances, but for winning national freedom and he well-nigh
demonstrated that it was possible to paralyse the civil adminis-
tration of a foreign Government thereby and bring the Govern-
ment to its knees. A happy combination of factors helped to
bring Mr. Gandhi to the forefront in 1920. The attempted
revolution during the Great War had failed and the Revolu-
tionary Party had been crushed. There was consequently no
possibility of another revolution in 1920. Nevertheless, the