Shukla brings Gandhi to Champaran

'Indigo' is taken from Louis Fischer's book 'The Life of Mahatma Gandhi'. In 1942, Fischer visited Gandhi at his ashram in Sevagram, and Gandhi told him how he had first decided to urge the British to leave India. It began in 1917, in Champaran.

In December 1916, Gandhi went to the annual convention of the Indian National Congress in Lucknow. Among the delegates was a poor, emaciated peasant, Rajkumar Shukla, a sharecropper from Champaran, at the foot of the Himalayas near Nepal. He had come to complain about the injustice of the landlord system in Bihar, and someone had told him to speak to Gandhi.

Shukla was illiterate but resolute: he would not take no for an answer. Gandhi said he had appointments elsewhere, but Shukla followed him everywhere: to Cawnpore, and to Gandhi's ashram near Ahmedabad, for weeks, begging him to fix a date. Gandhi, impressed by his tenacity, asked him to meet him in Calcutta. Months later, Shukla was there, waiting, and would not leave Gandhi's side until the two set off together for Bihar.

In Patna, Shukla took Gandhi to the house of a lawyer, Rajendra Prasad (later President of India), who was away. The servants knew Shukla as a poor yeoman, and took Gandhi for another peasant. He was not allowed to draw water from the well, in case some drops splashed and polluted the source: they did not know his caste. In his plain dhoti, arriving with a poor farmer, the great leader was taken for just another poor villager, a favourite exam question.

Gandhi decided to go first to Muzzafarpur to get more information. There Professor J. B. Kripalani met him at the station at midnight with a large body of students. This was remarkable, because in smaller places Indians were afraid to show sympathy for supporters of home rule.

Lawyers in Muzzafarpur told him about the peasants' cases. Gandhi chided them for collecting big fees from the poor sharecroppers. Taking such cases to court did little good, he said: what really mattered was to free the peasants from fear.