Statue of Gandhi, The Embarcadero, San Francisco.
Hartal
Dreamed 1919/3/18 by Mahatma Gandhi
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Statue of Gandhi, The Embarcadero, San Francisco. |
Mahatma Gandhi first worked in a South African law firm and led nonviolent protests against racial discrimination there. In l9l5 he returned to British-ruled India and supported the Allies during the First World War by raising and leading an ambulance corps. After cooperating in the war effort, India expected to receive Dominion status.
Instead, in l9l9 the Rowlatt Acts were passed by the Indian national legislature. These acts aimed to curtail civil liberties of Indians in the name of preventing terrorist violence.
The entire country viewed the legislation as a grievous insult, but they were a minority in their own legislature. Gandhi made the only appearance of his life in the legislative chamber to argue against the Rowlatt Acts--to no avail. He felt at a loss about what to do if they passed into law.
But the morning after reading of their final passage, Gandhi had his plan of action.
The idea came to me last night in a dream that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal [hunger strike]," Gandhi wrote. "Ours is a sacred fight, and it seems to me to be in the fitness of things that it should be commenced with an act of self-purification. Let all the people of India, therefore, suspend their business on that day and observe the day as one of fasting and prayer."Gandhi and his allies drafted a call for a hartal on April 6 of that year. Newspapers throughout India published the plea. "The whole of India from one end to the other, towns as well as villages, observed a complete hartal on that day," he recounted in his autobiography. "lt was a most wonderful spectacle."
Thus began the nonviolent campaign against British rule, which featured many hunger strikes and culminated in the independence of India nearly three decades later. It is unlikely that a Western leader would have taken a dream suggestion this literally.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Well, except Lincoln, who relied on warning dreams throughout the Civil War. And after--famously, he dreamt of his own assassination.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Deirdre Barrett's The Committee of Sleep, 2001, p.149-50. Her source: Gandhi's My Autobiography (Desai translation, 1957) p.337-9
DATE: Wikipedia dates final passage of the Rowlett Acts to March 18, 1919.
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