Champaran Satyagraha

Background

Under the tinkathia system, tenant farmers in Champaran were contractually bound to plant indigo on three-twentieths (tin kathia) of their landholding for European planters, who then set the terms of purchase. By the early twentieth century synthetic dyes had undercut the world price of natural indigo, and planters responded by tightening the terms of tenancy, imposing additional levies, and demanding compensation from tenants for releasing them from the indigo clause. Cultivators had petitioned local and provincial authorities for years with little effect.

A Champaran landholder and activist, Raj Kumar Shukla, travelled to persuade Gandhi — recently returned to India from South Africa and not yet a national figure — to visit the district and see conditions directly. Gandhi arrived in Champaran in April 1917.

The campaign

Local officials ordered Gandhi to leave the district under the Defence of India regulations. He refused, was arrested, and appeared before a magistrate in Motihari; the prosecution was withdrawn on instruction from the provincial government rather than pursued, and Gandhi was permitted to proceed with his inquiry. This refusal to comply with an order he considered unjust, followed by voluntary submission to arrest, became a template for the later satyagraha campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s.

Gandhi, together with Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, J.B. Kripalani, Mahadev Desai and others, organised a systematic collection of testimony from thousands of tenant cultivators documenting the terms of the tinkathia system and associated exactions. Volunteers went village to village recording statements, often in the presence of local officials, building a body of evidence that the provincial administration could not easily dismiss. The colonial government, under pressure from the scale and orderliness of the inquiry, appointed an official Champaran Agrarian Committee, on which Gandhi himself sat alongside planter representatives and government officials, to examine conditions in the district and recommend reform.

Outcome

The inquiry's findings led to the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1917, which abolished the tinkathia system and provided for partial refund of the illegal exactions collected from tenants, though planters retained a share of the disputed amounts. Volunteers associated with the campaign also opened schools and undertook sanitation and health work in Champaran villages during and after the inquiry.

Champaran was Gandhi's first satyagraha conducted on Indian soil, following his earlier use of similar methods of civil resistance in South Africa, and it established Bihar-based colleagues — notably Rajendra Prasad — as close political associates. It is generally treated as the episode that introduced Gandhi's methods of organised, disciplined civil resistance to an Indian mass constituency, ahead of the far larger Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22.