NCERT Solutions Class 12 History Chapter 11 Mahatma Gandhi

Concept used. Gandhiji deliberately closed the distance between a nationalist leader and the labouring poor, so that ordinary peasants and workers would see him as one of themselves rather than as a distant politician. He did this through his dress, his daily habits, his language and his way of living.

The concrete ways in which he identified with the common people were these:

1. Simple dress. While other leaders wore a Western suit or an Indian bandgala, Gandhiji moved among the people in a simple dhoti or loincloth. During a tour of South India in 1921 he even shaved his head and adopted the loincloth to identify with the poor.
2. The charkha. He spent part of each day working on the charkha (spinning wheel) and urged other nationalists to do the same. Manual spinning let him break the caste boundary between mental and manual labour.
3. The mother tongue. He encouraged the nationalist message to be carried in people's own languages rather than in English, the language of the rulers. Congress committees were therefore organised on linguistic lines.
4. Ascetic living. His plain food, his fasts and his love of working with his hands gave him an ascetic image that the poor admired and could relate to.

Gandhiji identified with the common people through a simple dhoti or loincloth, daily spinning on the charkha, use of the mother tongue and a plain ascetic life, so that the poor saw him as one of their own.

Concept used. The peasants saw Gandhiji not as an ordinary politician but as a messiah or saviour with almost magical powers. This view comes to us mainly from the historian Shahid Amin's study of reports and rumours in the local press of eastern Uttar Pradesh when Gandhiji toured there in February 1921.

The peasants' perception had these features:

1. A saviour with many names. He was called ``Gandhi baba'', ``Gandhi Maharaj'' or simply ``Mahatma''. Peasants believed he would rescue them from high taxes and oppressive officials and restore dignity to their lives.
2. Miraculous powers. Rumours said he had been sent by the King to redress the farmers' grievances, that his power was superior to that of all local officials and even of the English monarch, and that the colonial rulers would flee the district once he arrived.
3. Reward and punishment. Those who doubted or abused him were said to suffer: houses collapsed, crops failed, a sceptic's wheat turned to sesamum. Believers, by contrast, were rewarded.
4. Genuine devotion. Wherever he went, adoring crowds of tens of thousands gathered at stations; people wept, sought his darshan and showered coins and currency notes as offerings.

Peasants perceived Gandhiji as a messiah, ``Gandhi baba'' or ``Mahatma'', with miraculous powers sent to free them from oppressive taxes and officials, rewarding the faithful and ruining those who opposed him.

Concept used. The salt laws gave the colonial state a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt. Gandhiji chose to break them because salt was the one item that touched every Indian household, rich or poor, of every region and religion, which made it the perfect issue around which to build a mass struggle.

The salt laws became a central issue for these reasons:

1. Salt was indispensable. Salt was essential in every Indian home, yet people were forbidden from making it even for their own use and were compelled to buy it at a high, taxed price.
2. The tax was unjust. Gandhiji called the salt monopoly a ``fourfold curse'': it destroyed a village industry, wasted salt that nature makes freely, cost the state money to destroy it, and squeezed an enormous tax (he said over 1,000 per cent) from a starving people.
3. It united everyone. Because the burden of the salt tax fell on all classes, regions and communities alike, attacking it could ``mobilise a wider discontent'' against British rule than any narrower grievance.
4. The march dramatised it. The Dandi March (12 March to 6 April 1930) turned this idea into action: Gandhiji walked from Sabarmati to the sea and made salt, becoming a criminal in the eyes of the law and launching Civil Disobedience.

Because salt was an everyday necessity for every Indian and yet heavily taxed under a state monopoly, breaking the salt law could unite all classes and communities, making it the ideal issue for the Civil Disobedience struggle.

Concept used. Contemporary newspapers, published in English and in many Indian languages, are a major source for the national movement because they tracked Gandhiji's activities day by day and also recorded what ordinary Indians thought of him. They must, however, be read with care, since every paper carried its editor's politics.

Newspapers are an important source for these reasons:

1. They followed events closely. Papers reported Gandhiji's movements, speeches and campaigns in detail, giving us a running, dated record of the freedom struggle.
2. They captured popular opinion. They represented what ordinary people felt about Gandhiji, including the rumours and popular prints that show how he was perceived as a near-divine figure.
3. They offer many viewpoints. Because reports appeared in both English and Indian-language papers, a London newspaper and an Indian nationalist paper described the same event very differently; reading them together exposes their bias.

Newspapers are valuable because they tracked Gandhiji's activities and recorded popular opinion in many languages; read critically and against one another, they reveal both the events and the contrasting viewpoints of the national movement.

Concept used. The charkha (spinning wheel) became the abiding symbol of Indian nationalism because it stood for everything Gandhiji wanted India to be: self-reliant, dignified in manual labour, and free of dependence on machine-made foreign cloth. Gandhiji was deeply critical of the modern age in which machines enslaved humans and threw workers out of jobs.

The charkha was chosen for these reasons:

1. A protest against the machine. Gandhiji objected to the ``craze for machinery'' that ``saved labour'' until thousands were left jobless and starving. The charkha symbolised a human society that would not glorify machines and technology.
2. Income and self-reliance. The spinning wheel could give the poor a supplementary income in their own cottages and make them self-reliant, the heart of swadeshi.
3. Breaking caste barriers. Working the charkha himself, and urging others to do so, let Gandhiji break the boundary the caste system drew between mental labour and manual labour.
4. Khadi over mill cloth. Spinning produced khadi (home-spun cloth), which Gandhiji urged Indians to wear instead of imported, mill-made cloth, making the charkha a daily act of economic resistance.

The charkha was chosen because it symbolised self-reliance, dignity of manual labour and resistance to machine-made foreign cloth; spinning gave the poor income and broke the caste divide between mental and manual work.

Concept used. Non-cooperation was Gandhiji's idea that British rule survived only because Indians cooperated with it; if Indians withdrew that cooperation, the Raj would collapse. The protest therefore took the form of a planned ``renunciation of all voluntary association with the British Government''. Gandhiji promised that if it was carried out fully, India would win swaraj within a year.

Non-cooperation worked as a form of protest in these ways:

1. Boycott of colonial institutions. Indians were asked to stop attending government schools, colleges and law courts. Students left government schools, and lawyers refused to attend court.
2. Economic resistance. People refused to pay taxes, surrendered titles, and boycotted foreign cloth, which was collected and burnt in great bonfires, in favour of khadi.
3. Strikes and rural protest. The working class struck work: official figures record 396 strikes in 1921 involving 600,000 workers. In the countryside, hill tribes in Andhra broke forest laws, Awadh farmers withheld taxes and Kumaun peasants refused to carry loads for officials.
4. Joining hands with Khilafat. By coupling non-cooperation with the Khilafat Movement, Gandhiji hoped Hindus and Muslims would together end colonial rule, widening the protest.

Its power was real. For the first time since the Revolt of 1857 the British Raj was shaken to its foundations. Yet because it depended on non-violence, Gandhiji called the whole movement off in February 1922 after a mob torched a police station at Chauri Chaura, killing several constables, which he refused to justify.

Non-cooperation was protest through total withdrawal of voluntary support, boycott of schools, courts and foreign cloth, non-payment of taxes and strikes, making it peaceful but powerful enough to shake the Raj, until Chauri Chaura forced Gandhiji to call it off.

Concept used. The Round Table Conferences were a series of meetings the British government convened in London (1930, 1931, 1932) to discuss India's political future after the Salt March had forced them to realise that the Raj could not last forever. The talks failed to reach a settlement because of who was, or was not, present and because the Indian side did not speak with one voice.

The dialogues were inconclusive for these reasons:

1. The first conference had no Congress. The First Round Table Conference met in November 1930 without the pre-eminent political leader, Gandhiji, who was in jail, and without the Congress. This rendered the meeting ``an exercise in futility''.
2. Congress claims were challenged. At the Second Conference (late 1931) Gandhiji represented the Congress, but his claim that it spoke for all of India was contested by three parties: the Muslim League, which claimed to represent the Muslim minority; the Princes, who said the Congress had no stake in their states; and B.R. Ambedkar, who argued that the Congress did not represent the lowest castes.
3. The deadlock over representation. With these rival claims unresolved, no agreement on a common political settlement was possible, and the Second Conference too ended without result.
4. A hostile Viceroy at home. Gandhiji returned to India and resumed civil disobedience, but the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was deeply unsympathetic, so the door to a negotiated settlement closed further.

The Round Table dialogues failed because the first met without the Congress, and at the second Gandhiji's claim to represent all India was challenged by the Muslim League, the Princes and Ambedkar, leaving the question of representation deadlocked.

Concept used. Before Gandhiji, Indian nationalism was largely an elite phenomenon, the work of lawyers, doctors and landlords confined to the educated middle class. Gandhiji transformed it into a genuine mass movement that drew in peasants, workers and artisans across the whole country, a promise he first made in his BHU speech of February 1916.

He transformed the movement in these ways:

1. From elite to mass base. By 1922 nationalism was no longer a movement of professionals; hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers and artisans now took part, venerating him as their ``Mahatma''.
2. New methods of struggle. He gave the movement satyagraha and mass non-violent techniques, the Rowlatt satyagraha, Non-cooperation, the Salt March and Civil Disobedience, and Quit India, that ordinary people could join.
3. Powerful symbols. The dhoti, the charkha and khadi, and simple acts like making salt, turned abstract politics into things every Indian could see and do.
4. Careful organisation. New Congress branches and ``Praja Mandals'' were set up, the message was carried in regional mother tongues, and committees were based on linguistic regions, taking nationalism to the farthest corners of the country.
5. A wide social coalition. His admirers ranged from poor peasants to rich industrialists like G.D. Birla, and talented lieutenants, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Rajagopalachari, Bose and others from many regions and faiths, drew in countless followers.

Gandhiji turned an elite movement of lawyers and landlords into a mass struggle of peasants and workers, using non-violent satyagraha, powerful symbols like the charkha and salt, careful organisation in regional languages, and a coalition stretching from poor peasants to industrialists.

Concept used. Historians reconstruct a leader's career from many kinds of sources. Private letters and autobiographies give us access to the inner, personal world of an individual, while official accounts (such as police and government records) give us the state's view. Each must be read with its own cautions.

What private letters and autobiographies tell us:

1. Private thoughts and feelings. In letters people express their anger and pain, dismay and anxiety, hopes and frustrations in ways they would not in public statements, as Nehru's exchange with Gandhiji and Rajendra Prasad in 1936 shows.
2. A self-framed picture. Autobiographies are rich in human detail but are retrospective accounts, often written from memory. They tell us what the author recalled, thought important, or wished others to believe: writing one is ``a way of framing a picture of yourself''.
3. The need to read silences. Because both are personal and selective, the historian must ask what the author does not tell us, the wilful or unwitting acts of forgetting.
4. A blurred public-private line. Many private letters were written knowing they might be published; Gandhiji printed others' letters in Harijan and Nehru published A Bunch of Old Letters. So even ``private'' scripts can be shaped for a public.

These sources differ from official accounts in important ways. Official records, like the confidential Fortnightly Reports of the Home Department, were written by policemen and officials and express what the higher authorities saw or ``wanted to believe''. They often noticed sedition while assuring themselves that the danger was unreal, and were unwilling to admit that Gandhiji's actions stirred the masses. Private sources reveal the inner life of individuals; official sources reveal the anxieties and blind spots of the colonial state.

Private letters and autobiographies reveal an individual's inner feelings and self-image, but are selective and memory-based; unlike official accounts, which record the state's anxious, often distrustful view, they show the personal and human side of history.

Concept used. This is a map-work task on the route of the Dandi March (12 March to 6 April 1930), the 24-day, roughly 240-mile walk by which Gandhiji launched the Civil Disobedience Movement. You plot the line from his Sabarmati Ashram in the north to the coastal village of Dandi in the south, marking the towns and villages on the way.

How to complete the map work:

1. Mark the start and end. Begin at the Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad and end at Dandi on the Arabian Sea coast, where Gandhiji broke the salt law on 6 April 1930.
2. Plot the main halts in order. Draw the line southward through Aslali, Nadiad, Anand, Borsad, then across the Mahi river to Kankapura, on to Kareli, Ankleshwar and Bharuch, then Surat, Navsari and finally Dandi.
3. Show direction and distance. Use an arrow from Sabarmati to Dandi to show the south-bound march, and add a scale or note that the walk covered about 240 miles over 24 days.
4. Add a clear legend. Use one symbol for the route line, one for towns and villages, and label Ahmedabad and Dandi prominently so the start and finish stand out.

On a map of Gujarat, draw the route from Sabarmati Ashram (Ahmedabad) southward through Nadiad, Anand, Borsad, Bharuch, Surat and Navsari to Dandi on the coast, with an arrow showing the direction and a legend for the route and halts.

Concept used. This is a project on reading autobiographies as historical sources. The aim is not to summarise two life stories but to compare how two nationalist leaders framed their own lives and interpreted the same national movement, and to notice where their views differ.

How to plan and write the account:

1. Choose two contrasting autobiographies. For example, Jawaharlal Nehru's An Autobiography and M.K. Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth, or Nehru paired with a leader from a different region or ideology, so the contrast is sharp.
2. Read for self-representation. Note how each author frames a picture of himself: what he stresses, what he is proud of, and, just as importantly, what he stays silent about or chooses to forget.
3. Compare their reading of the movement. Set side by side how each interprets key events (Non-cooperation, the Salt March, Quit India) and ideas (non-violence, socialism, religion), and show where they agree and where they diverge.
4. Write a comparative account. Organise the write-up by theme rather than by book, and end by reflecting on how the authors' memory, ideology and awareness of a later readership shaped what they wrote.

Pick two contrasting autobiographies (such as Nehru and Gandhi), read each for how the author frames his own life and the movement, compare their views theme by theme, and write a comparative account that weighs their memory, bias and silences.

Concept used. This is a project on reading letters and speeches as primary sources for one chosen event of the national movement. The special aim is to compare the view from the top (the national leadership) with the view of local leaders, including, if possible, leaders from your own region.

How to carry out the project:

1. Pick one focused event. Choose a single, well-documented episode, for example the Salt March of 1930 or the Quit India Movement of 1942, so that you can study it in depth.
2. Gather the published sources. Read speeches and letters of the time, such as Gandhiji's Dandi speech of 5 April 1930 in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, or Nehru's letters in A Bunch of Old Letters, and any published writings of a local leader from your area.
3. Compare top and local views. See how the national leaders described and directed the event, and how local leaders interpreted, adapted or even quietly differed from those directions, since peasants and local activists often acted ``in ways that best suited their interests''.
4. Write your account. Present the event through these layered voices, and reflect on why the same movement looked different from the top and from the locality.

Choose one event (such as the Salt March or Quit India), read the published letters and speeches of national leaders alongside the writings of a local leader, compare the view from the top with the view on the ground, and write a layered account of the movement.