Gandhi Arrives

Where Parts One and Two Left Us

One page, so you can start here if you need to.

British rule turned religion from a fact about Indians into the operating system of Indian public life. Religion became a legal category in court, a box on the census form, and finally, in 1909, the basis of the vote itself through separate electorates.

In 1905 the British partitioned Bengal on lines that matched religion to province, and a Home Secretary wrote in an internal note that a divided Bengal pulling in different directions was one of the merits of the scheme. Mass agitation reversed that partition in 1911, which taught Congress that pressure works and taught Muslim leaders that loyalty to the British buys nothing.

Muslim India got a party in 1906, elite and loyalist, asking for a guaranteed share inside one country. In 1916 at Lucknow the Congress signed up to separate electorates in exchange for a moment of real unity.

Nobody yet wanted a separate country. The two nation idea existed as a description in several mouths, Hindu and Muslim, but not as a demand.

Part 3 covers 1915 to 1930. In these fifteen years the freedom movement becomes a mass movement for the first time, and the communal problem becomes a mass problem for the first time. Those two things happen together, and whether that is a coincidence is the argument of this part.

Gandhi spent twenty one years in South Africa, from 1893 to 1915. He arrived a nervous barrister who could barely speak in court. He left as a political inventor. He also said things in those years that are ugly and indefensible, and we are going to read them.

1The South Africa Years and the Racism Charge

What he did there

He went in 1893 on a one year contract for a Gujarati merchant firm. He stayed twenty one years. Along the way he was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave a first class compartment, an event he later described as the turning point of his life.

He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. In 1906, at a mass meeting in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, he launched the method he would later call satyagraha, against a law requiring Indians to register and be fingerprinted. Thousands of Indians courted arrest, including Gandhi, repeatedly. In 1913 he led a march of over two thousand Indian miners and their families across a provincial border in deliberate defiance of the law. The government eventually negotiated. Gandhi had proved, on a small scale, that organised voluntary suffering could move a state.

Now the quotes

These are real. They come from his own newspaper and his own petitions. I am not going to soften them.

• He argued that Indians were "much superior, in capacity, reliability and obedience, to the average Kaffir".
• In 1904, opposing a plan by Johannesburg municipal authorities to house Africans alongside Indians, he wrote: "Mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I feel most strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population."
• In 1905 he complained that "of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian location should be chosen for dumping down all kaffirs of the town".
• He objected to Indian prisoners being housed with African prisoners in Johannesburg jail.

The word he used, which I have printed as he wrote it because sanitising it would be dishonest, is today one of the most offensive words in South Africa. In his time it was in common administrative use, but that only explains its currency, not the argument he built with it. His argument was that Indians deserved better treatmentbecause they were not Africans. That is a claim of racial hierarchy, and no amount of context makes it something else.

The historians Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed set this out at length in The South African Gandhi, published in 2015. Their central charge is not just the language. It is that Gandhi deliberately kept the Indian struggle separate from the African one, and that he sought inclusion for Indians inside the empire rather than the end of racial rule.

The defence, at its strongest

Being fair means putting the other case properly, so here it is.

• He was a colonial subject arguing inside a colonial framework.His early strategy was to hold the British to their own 1858 promise of equal treatment for all subjects of the Queen. That argument only worked if you accepted the empire's terms. It was a lawyer's tactic, and it was a morally cheap one, but it was not a programme of racial supremacy.
• He changed, and the change is documented.In a speech in Johannesburg in 1908 he described a future South Africa in which all the races mingled and produced a civilisation the world had not yet seen. By the 1920s he was writing that the disabilities of Africans were far worse than those of Indians. In 1946 he supported the Africans in their struggle and told an American visitor that it may be through the Black people that the unadulterated message of nonviolence would be delivered to the world.
• People who had every reason to reject him did not.Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli and the African National Congress drew on his methods and honoured him openly. That does not make the quotes acceptable. It does mean that Black South African leaders weighed the whole record and reached a judgement.
• During the Bambatha rebellion in 1906 he raised an Indian stretcher bearer corps on the British side, which is the worst part of the record politically. But his own account, and the corps' work, involved carrying and nursing wounded Zulus whom white orderlies refused to touch. He wrote later that the experience shook him.

Before we test the charges against him, we should be clear about what he did, because "Gandhi did nothing" is a claim we will demolish with numbers in Part 7 and with structure right here.

2What Gandhi Actually Invented, and Why It Worked

He came home to a movement that could not reach ordinary people

Gandhi returned to India in January 1915. His political mentor Gokhale told him to spend a year travelling and saying nothing. He did.

What he found was a Congress that was thirty years old, respectable, and almost entirely a body of English speaking lawyers, professors and journalists. It passed resolutions. It sent petitions. Its annual session was a few thousand men in coats. A peasant in Bihar had never heard of it and would not have understood a word of its proceedings.

Satyagraha in plain words

The word means holding firmly to truth. In practice it is a method with four moving parts.

1.Break an unjust law openly, not secretly.Announce in advance what you will do and when.

2.Accept the punishment without resisting.Do not run, do not hit back, do not hide.

3.Do it in large numbers, so that the state must either back down or fill its jails with people

4.Keep the door openso the opponent can concede without humiliation.

Why did this work against the British in particular? Because the British ruled India with a tiny number of people and a very large story. The story was that they governed by law and consent, for the good of Indians. Violence lets a government use that story: rebels are criminals, and shooting criminals is order. Mass nonviolent lawbreaking attacks the story directly. The government must beat unarmed people in front of witnesses, and every beating destroys the justification for its own presence.

It was also, and this is rarely said, a method that suited India's actual condition. Indians had no weapons, no army and no money. What they had was numbers. Satyagraha is a strategy that converts the one resource you have into pressure.

The three experiments that proved it, 1917 to 1918 1919: Rowlatt and Jallianwala Bagh

In March 1919 the government passed the Rowlatt Act, allowing detention without trial. Gandhi called a nationwide hartal. On 13 April 1919 in Amritsar, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched troops into the enclosed garden of Jallianwala Bagh where a large crowd had gathered, blocked the only wide exit and ordered them to fire on the crowd without warning. Firing continued for about ten minutes until the ammunition was nearly exhausted. Official figures gave 379 dead. Indian estimates were far higher. Martial law followed in Punjab, with public floggings and the notorious crawling order.

The importance of Jallianwala Bagh is not only the horror. It is that it destroyed the British story about themselves in the minds of millions of loyal Indians in a single afternoon. Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood. Moderates who had spent their lives asking politely stopped asking.

What he did to the Congress in 1920

This is the least dramatic and most important thing in the chapter. At the Nagpur session in December 1920 the Congress constitution was rewritten, largely on Gandhi's design.

• Membership cost four annas a year.A peasant could join.
• Provincial committees were redrawn on language linesrather than on British administrative boundaries, so that Congress work could be done in the language people actually spoke.
• A permanent Working Committeeof fifteen was created, so the party had an executive that functioned all year instead of a body that met once a year.
• Village and district committeeswere built beneath the provincial ones, creating a chain from a hamlet to the national leadership.

Within a year Congress membership went from a few thousand to millions. Whatever you think of Gandhi's decisions, this is the machine that fought the next twenty seven years, and he built it.

This is the first of the two great charges in Part 3, and in my view it is the more serious one, although it is the less famous.

3The Khilafat Gamble: Masterstroke or Original Sin?

What Khilafat actually was

The Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul also held the title of Caliph, the symbolic head of Sunni Muslims worldwide. Turkey had fought on the losing side in the First World War. The victorious Allies, Britain foremost among them, were dismembering the Ottoman Empire, and the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 stripped it further.

For many Indian Muslims this was not foreign news. Britain was destroying the institution they regarded as the guardian of the holy places and the symbolic centre of their faith, and Indian Muslim soldiers had helped Britain do it. The Khilafat movement, led by the brothers Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali, demanded that Britain preserve the Caliph's position and the holy places.

Gandhi's decision

Gandhi did not merely sympathise. He took the Congress into a formal alliance with the Khilafat committees, and at the special Calcutta session in September 1920 and then at Nagpur in December 1920 he made Khilafat and Punjab the two stated grievances of the Non Cooperation Movement. He accepted the presidency of the All India Khilafat Conference. He wrote and spoke about the Caliph's cause constantly.

His stated reasoning was consistent and he never hid it. He believed a wrong done to Muslims was a wrong done to India, that helping a neighbour in his own grief without asking anything back was the only honest basis for friendship, and that this was a chance no one would get twice to bind the two communities together in a shared struggle.

• It worked, at first, spectacularly. 1920 to 1922 was the largest and most united mass movement India had ever seen. Muslim and Hindu leaders shared platforms. Muslims joined Congress in numbers never seen before or, arguably, since.
• The alternative was worse.Muslim political anger in 1919 was going to be expressed somewhere. Gandhi's choice was whether it flowed into a national movement alongside Hindus or into a separate channel. He chose to bring it inside.
• It was consistent with his whole philosophy.He did not bargain. He supported a cause he considered just, for free. Ask yourself what Muslim leaders would have concluded if the Congress had told them that their grievance was not India's business.

• The cause was not Indian.Indian peasants were asked to boycott British goods over the constitutional status of a Turkish monarch. That is a genuinely strange foundation for a national movement, and Jinnah, of all people, said so at the time. Jinnah opposed the whole approach, warned that it would lead to disaster, and resigned from the Congress at Nagpur in 1920 over it. Read that sentence again. In 1920 Jinnah was the constitutionalist warning against mixing religion into mass politics, and Gandhi was the one doing the mixing.
• It taught a lesson that could not be untaught.Before 1920, Muslim politics in India was elite and constitutional. Khilafat made it a mass religious movement with mosques, preachers and religious symbols as its organising network. That network did not dissolve when the cause died. It was there, ready, for whoever came next.
• It was a religious cause, so it legitimised religion as the fuel of politics for everybody. Hindu mobilisation on religious lines grew in direct response, which is Chapter 6.
• The hijrat disaster.In 1920, some religious leaders declared India a land where Islam could not be practised freely and called for migration. Around eighteen thousand Muslim peasants, mostly from Sindh and the North West Frontier, sold their land and walked to Afghanistan. Afghanistan closed the border. Most straggled back, destitute, having lost everything. Gandhi did not order this and did not endorse it, but it happened inside the atmosphere he had helped create.
• And then the cause evaporated.On 1 November 1922 the Turks abolished the Sultanate. On 3 March 1924 Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate itself. The Turks did not want a Caliph. Indian Muslims had been mobilised, at enormous cost, to defend an institution that the country concerned dismantled by its own choice.

The case that it was a masterstroke The case that it was the original sin Weighing it

Here is where I have to be careful, because it is easy to judge 1920 with the knowledge of 1947.

In 1920 Gandhi could not know that Ataturk would abolish the Caliphate. Nobody could. He also could not know that Malabar would explode. What he could see was a real chance, probably the best chance anyone ever had, to fuse the two communities in a single struggle, and he took it.

But there is a criticism that survives even after you allow for hindsight, and I think it is the correct one. It is not that Gandhi supported the Khilafat cause. It is that he supported itwithout asking for anything, and without building any structure that would outlast it. He did not use the moment of maximum Muslim goodwill to settle the constitutional question of minority representation. He did not get separate electorates given up. He did not get a written understanding about what a free India would look like for Muslims. He assumed that shared struggle would produce shared trust and that the details could be settled later.

They could not be settled later. In 1927 and 1928 and 1929 the two sides tried, and failed, and Chapter 6 will show you that failure. By then the goodwill was gone and only the arithmetic was left.

I have rewritten this chapter more times than any other. It involves mass killing, forced conversion, a peasant revolt against real oppression, a British reconquest of enormous brutality, and a response by Gandhi that I think was wrong. All of those things are true at once, and most accounts you will read pick one and delete the rest.

4Malabar, August 1921: The Hardest Chapter in This Book

The background nobody disputes

The Mappilas, called Moplahs in British records, are a Muslim community of the Malabar coast in what is now Kerala, descended largely from Arab traders and local converts. In the districts of Ernad and Valluvanad they were mostly landless or tenant cultivators.

The landlords, called janmis, were overwhelmingly Hindu, mainly Nambudiri Brahmins and Nairs. British land law from the early nineteenth century had converted what had been customary shared rights into absolute landlord ownership with the tenant reduced to a rent payer who could be evicted at will. Rents were extortionate and eviction was constant.

The result was a century of violence. Between the 1830s and 1920 there were dozens of Mappila outbreaks, and their pattern was consistent: attacks on landlords and their agents, temple desecration, and then death at the hands of British troops. This was not new in 1921. It had happened again and again for ninety years.

What happened in 1921

The Khilafat and Non Cooperation movements reached Malabar in 1920 and 1921 and were received with intense enthusiasm. Congress and Khilafat committees were formed. Tenant grievances and religious feeling fused.

On 20 August 1921 the police went to the Mambaram mosque at Tirurangadi to arrest Khilafat leaders. Rumours spread that the mosque had been damaged. Crowds attacked police and government offices. Within days British authority collapsed across a large area of Ernad and Valluvanad. Rebels declared their own administration under Variankunnath Kunjahammad Haji, cut the railway and telegraph, and burned records.

Then it changed. Once the British had gone, the violence turned on the local Hindu population. What followed included killings, forced conversions to Islam, destruction and desecration of temples, looting and the flight of tens of thousands of Hindus from their homes.

The British reconquest, which took until early 1922, was itself savage. In the incident known as the Wagon Tragedy, on 20 November 1921, sixty seven Mappila prisoners suffocated to death in a sealed goods wagon while being transported to prison.

The numbers, honestly

This is where you must be careful, because the figures are contested and both sides inflate.

Be suspicious of anyone who gives you a precise round number for Hindus killed. The honest statement is that thousands died in total, that a large number of the dead were Hindus killed by rebels, that a larger number were Mappilas killed by British forces, and that forced conversions happened on a scale nobody at the time recorded properly.

Was it a peasant revolt or a communal massacre?

Both, in sequence, and the sequence is the whole point.

It began as a rising against British authority and landlord power, with Khilafat feeling as its emotional charge. Within days of the British losing control, it became something else: violence directed at Hindus as Hindus, including Hindus who were not landlords. That transformation is exactly what happens when a class grievance is mobilised through religious identity and then the restraining authority is removed.

People who call it purely a freedom struggle have to explain the forced conversions and the temples. People who call it purely a religious massacre have to explain the ninety years of agrarian violence that preceded any Khilafat committee, and the two thousand Mappilas shot by the British.

Gandhi's response, which is the real charge

Gandhi was not in Malabar. What is at issue is what he wrote and said about it, mostly in his weekly paper Young India.

What he said, in order:

• He criticised the rebels for failing to remain nonviolent, but described them as among the bravest in the land.
• He is very widely quoted as having called them "brave God fearing Moplahs who were fighting for what they consider as religion and in a manner which they consider as religious". This sentence is quoted by Dr B. R. Ambedkar in Pakistan or the Partition of India, which is an independent and hostile source and makes it about as well attested as anything in this debate.
• On 20 October 1921 he wrote that Muslims must feel the shame and humiliation of the Moplah conduct regarding forcible conversions and looting, and must work to make such things impossible even among the most fanatical.
• He wrote that Hindus must find out the causes of Moplah fanaticism, and that they were not without blame, having treated the Mappila as a serf or dreaded him rather than as a neighbour.
• On 8 December 1921 he published an article titled The Moplah Tragedyin Young India. It appears in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, volume 21, as item 231.
• He appealed for funds for starving Mappila families in an article titled The Starving Moplah, writing that in the face of starvation and homelessness all argument and opposition must be hushed.

Testing the charge against him

Did he condemn the violence?Yes, but with a consistent pattern: the condemnation was usually paired with an explanation of the rebels' motives, praise for their courage or sincerity, and a demand that Hindus examine their own conduct as landlords. If you were a Hindu refugee from Ernad in October 1921, reading that you were "not without blame" would have felt like a wound.

Was there a double standard?This is Ambedkar's charge and it is the sharpest one. Ambedkar wrote that Gandhi was so obsessed with establishing Hindu and Muslim unity that he was prepared to minimise the conduct of the Moplahs and of the Khilafat leaders who congratulated them, and that Gandhi never called Muslims to account even for gross crimes against Hindus.

Ambedkar was neither a Hindu nationalist nor a Gandhi enemy for its own sake. He was a rigorous man making a specific accusation with examples.

What about the Congress resolution?The Congress Working Committee's resolution expressed regret at instances of "so called forcible conversion" by some fanatics, and warned the public against believing government versions. Given what had actually happened, the phrase "so called" is not defensible, and the warning against government propaganda functioned as a way of not looking.

Of all the accusations against Gandhi, this is the one that carries the most emotion, and it is the one that collapses fastest under examination. That is an unusual combination, so let us go slowly.

5Chauri Chaura: Did He Throw Away Freedom?

What happened at Chauri Chaura

On 4 February 1922, in the small town of Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces, a procession of volunteers was fired on by police. The crowd chased the police, who retreated into the police station. The crowd set the building on fire. Twenty two policemen were killed, most of them burned alive. Some accounts give twenty three.

Gandhi's reaction was immediate and absolute. He fasted for five days. On 12 February 1922 the Congress Working Committee met at Bardoli and passed the Bardoli Resolution, suspending the mass civil disobedience campaign and redirecting the movement into what he called the constructive programme: hand spinning, national schools, temperance work, Hindu and Muslim unity, and the removal of untouchability.

The fury inside the Congress was real

This part of the claim is completely true and should not be minimised. The decision was taken by Gandhi and imposed on a party that largely disagreed. Motilal Nehru, Chittaranjan Das, Lala Lajpat Rai and Subhas Chandra Bose all objected. Several were in jail and learned of it there. Jawaharlal Nehru later wrote of the shock and anger with which they received the news. Bose described it as a national calamity.

Gandhi's own answer was that a movement is not a machine for generating pressure, it is a moral claim, and a moral claim that produces men burning policemen alive has already failed. He also argued, more practically, that if the movement turned violent it would be crushed, because the British were incomparably better at violence than Indians were.

Now test the premise: was freedom actually within reach in February 1922?

This is the part the claim never examines. Apply Rule 6 from Part 1: for a "he could have" claim to stand, the opportunity has to have been real. So let us look at the state of British power in early 1922.

There is a further point, and it is the strongest. The British had one enormous advantage over an unarmed mass movement: legitimacy for the use of force. As long as Indians were nonviolent, every use of force was a scandal that damaged the ruler. The moment Indians began killing policemen, force became policing, and the government's own people, its Indian soldiers and its Indian constables, would fight for it without hesitation. Gandhi's decision looks like moral fastidiousness. It was also, in cold strategic terms, a recognition that the movement's only weapon was about to be taken away from it.

Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922 and tried for sedition. At what became known as the Great Trial he pleaded guilty, invited the maximum penalty and made a statement that is one of the great documents of the period. The judge sentenced him to six years and said, in open court, that no one would be better pleased than himself if the government later saw fit to reduce it. He was released in February 1924 after an operation for appendicitis.

By then the movement he had built was in pieces, and something else was growing in the gap.

The 1920s are usually skipped. They have no famous march and no famous massacre. They are also the decade in which almost every organisation and every argument that produces 1947 comes into existence.

6What Grew in the Ruins, 1922 to 1930

The alliance dies

The Khilafat cause was destroyed by the Turks themselves. The Sultanate went on 1 November 1922 and the Caliphate on 3 March 1924, abolished by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Indian Muslims who had sacrificed, gone to jail and in some cases lost everything discovered that the institution they had defended had been dismantled by the Muslims of the country concerned.

At the same time the Khilafat leaders felt betrayed by the sudden suspension at Bardoli. The alliance did not fade. It broke.

The worst communal decade so far

What followed was a wave of Hindu and Muslim rioting on a scale India had not seen. Multan in 1922. Nagpur in 1923 and 1924. Kohat in the North West Frontier in September 1924, where the Hindu and Sikh population was effectively driven out. Calcutta repeatedly. Dozens of towns through 1926 and 1927.

Gandhi's response to Kohat was a twenty one day fast in Delhi in September 1924, undertaken in the house of Maulana Mohammad Ali. It moved people and it changed nothing.

Alongside the riots came the numbers race that Part 1 predicted, now in organised form.

• Shuddhi and Sangathan.The Arya Samaj ran campaigns to convert or reconvert people to Hinduism and to organise Hindus for self defence. Swami Shraddhanand, the leading figure, was murdered by a Muslim assailant in December 1926.
• Tabligh and Tanzim.The Muslim counterparts, for religious propagation and community organisation.
• Cow protection and music before mosques.The two standard flashpoints of the decade, each a dispute about public space and each easily converted into a riot.

The organisations that are still with us The constitutional road also fails

While all this was happening, Indians made one serious attempt to settle the communal question among themselves, and it failed in a way that mattered enormously.

• 1927, the Simon Commission.Britain appointed a commission to review Indian government with seven members, every one of them British. The insult united Indians briefly. It was met everywhere with black flags and the slogan "Simon go back". It was during a lathi charge on one such demonstration at Lahore in October 1928 that Lala Lajpat Rai was injured. He died a few weeks later, and his death set Bhagat Singh on the path that Part 5 will follow.
• 1928, the Nehru Report.Challenged to produce their own constitution, Indians did. A committee under Motilal Nehru proposed dominion status, a strong centre, joint electorates with reserved seats for Muslims where they were a minority, and no separate electorates.
• 1929, Jinnah's Fourteen Points.Jinnah came to the All Parties Convention with amendments: one third of seats for Muslims at the centre, separate electorates retained until Muslims themselves gave them up, and residual powers to the provinces. The amendments were rejected.

Jinnah is said to have called the moment "the parting of the ways". Whether he used those exact words at that meeting is disputed, and I flag it as such. What is not disputed is that after 1929 he withdrew from the Indian political mainstream, spent much of the early 1930s practising law in London, and returned in 1935 a different politician.

The point for our story is this. Between 1927 and 1929, Indians tried to write their own constitutional settlement of the communal problem, without the British, and could not agree. Both sides had reasonable arguments. Congress said permanent religious quotas would prevent a nation from ever forming. The League said that without them a permanent minority had no protection. Both were right, which is precisely why it could not be solved.

And then the movement restarts

At the Lahore session in December 1929, under the presidency of the forty year old Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress adopted Purna Swaraj, complete independence, as its goal, and 26 January 1930 was declared Independence Day. That date is why India's Republic Day is 26 January.

On 12 March 1930 Gandhi set out from Sabarmati with seventy eight followers to walk 240 miles to the sea at Dandi and break the salt law. Part 4 begins there.

Where We Have Reached

Fifteen years have passed since Gandhi came home. The scoreboard is genuinely mixed, and I want to set it out plainly.

• He turned the Congress from a debating society of a few thousand into a mass organisation with village branches and a subscription a farmer could afford.
• He gave a disarmed people a method that used their only real asset, numbers, and that attacked the one thing the British could not do without, their own justification.
• He brought Muslim India into a national movement in numbers never seen before or since.
• He made the removal of untouchability a stated aim of the national movement, which no political body in India had done before, however inadequately he pursued it.

What he achieved What went wrong

• He spent the whole capital of Hindu and Muslim unity on a foreign religious cause and obtained no constitutional settlement in return, and the cause then vanished.
• He made religion the fuel of mass politics, and a Hindu counter mobilisation followed within four years.
• Over Malabar he applied his own moral standard to one community and not to the other, and it damaged him with Hindu opinion permanently.
• He suspended the entire national movement unilaterally, which was strategically defensible and organisationally costly, and it left a legacy of resentment among the very leaders, Bose above all, who would later break with him.

And the structural problem underneath everything has not moved at all. In 1930 India still votes by religion, still counts by religion, and still cannot agree a constitution because neither side can safely concede what the other needs.

In Part 4 we go into the 1930s: the Round Table Conferences, the confrontation between Gandhi and Ambedkar that produced the Poona Pact, the elections of 1937 that humiliated the Muslim League and then made it, and the resolution passed in Lahore in 1940.

• The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, volume 21, August to December 1921, including item 231,The Moplah Tragedy, from Young India, 8 December 1921. Full text available at the Internet Archive and Gandhi Serve.
• Gandhi's South African writings in Indian Opinionand his petitions of 1904 and 1905, reproduced in the Collected Works.
• Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed,The South African Gandhi: Stretcher Bearer of Empire, Stanford University Press, 2015, and the scholarly reviews and rebuttals it produced.
• B. R. Ambedkar,Pakistan or the Partition of India, 1940 and later editions, for the criticism of Gandhi's response to the Malabar rebellion.
• Annie Besant, "Malabar's Agony", open letter in New India, 29 November 1921.
• Conrad Wood and other scholarly studies of the Mappila rebellion in Modern Asian Studies, for the agrarian background and the pattern of nineteenth century outbreaks.
• Official British casualty returns for the Malabar rebellion: 2, 337 rebels killed, 1, 652 wounded, 45, 404 imprisoned.
• Congress Working Committee resolution on Malabar, 1921, and the Bardoli Resolution of 12 February 1922.
• Gandhi's statement at the Great Trial, Ahmedabad, 18 March 1922.
• Standard accounts of the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh at Nagpur on 27 September 1925, and of Hedgewar's earlier Congress activity.
• V. D. Savarkar,Essentials of Hindutva, 1923.
• The Nehru Report, 1928, and Jinnah's Fourteen Points, 1929.