Dharampal - The Civil Disobedience

" ... The immediate cause of the protest was the levy of the house tax. Yet unhappiness and revulsion had been simmering for a considerable time previous to this levy. By 1810, these areas had been under British domination for about 50 years ...

The main elements behind the organisation of civil disobedience at Benares were:
1. Closing of all shops and activity to the extent that even ‘the dead bodies were actually cast neglected into the Ganges, because the proper people could not be prevailed upon to administer the customary rites.’ (p.62)

2. Continuous assemblage of people in thousands (one estimate24 puts the number at more than 200,000 for many days) sitting in dhurna, ‘declaring that they will not separate till the tax shall be abolished.’ (p.71)

3. The close links made by the various artisans and craftsmen with the protest through their craft guilds and associations.

4. The Lohars, at that time a strong and well-knit group, taking the lead, calling upon other Lohars in different areas to join them. (p.71)

5. A total close-down by the Mullahs (boatmen). (p.70)

6. The assembled peopled who ‘bound themselves by oath never to disperse’ till they had achieved their object. (p.69)

7. The dispatch of emissaries ‘to convey a Dhurm Puttree to every village in the province, summoning one individual of each family to repair to the assembly at Benares.’ (p.69)

8. ‘Individuals of every class contributed each in proportion to his means to enable them to persevere’, and ‘for the support of those, whose families depended for subsistence on their daily labour.’ (p.69)

9. ‘The religious orders’ exerting all their influence to keep the people ‘unanimous.’ (p.69)

10. ‘The combination was so general, that’, according to the magistrate ‘the police were scarcely able to protect the few who had courage to secede, from being plundered and insulted.’ (p.69)

11. The displaying of protesting posters about the streets of Benares. The magistrate called them ‘inflammatory papers of the most objectionable tendency’ and ‘offered a reward of Rs.500 for every man on whom such a paper may be found.’ (p.85)

Regarding the people’s own view of the unarmed resistance they had put up, the collector reported: ‘Open violence does not seem their aim, they seem rather to vaunt their security in being unarmed in that a military force would not use deadly weapons against such inoffensive foes. And in this confidence they collect and increase, knowing that the civil power cannot disperse them, and thinking that the military will not.’ (p.71) The taking of such steps seems to have come to them naturally. Further, their protesting in this manner in itself did not imply any enmity between them and state power. It is in this context that the rejected petition quoted some prevalent saying: ‘to whom can appeal for redress of what I have sustained from you, to whom but to you who have inflicted it.’ The concept of ruler-ruled rela-tionship which they seem to have held, and which till then had perhaps been widely accepted, was of continuing interaction between the two. Such a dialogue seems to have been resorted to whenever required, and its instrumentalities included all that the people of Benares employed in this particular protest.

It was, perhaps, only belatedly that the people of India began to comprehend the futility of such traditional protests in relation to authorities wholly subscribing to an alien value system and who thus had nothing in common with themselves. Such a realisation on the one hand, would have made them turn to violence; and on the other, reduced them more and more to passivity and inertness."