Shaping Sovereignty: Militant Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Quit India Movement in Late Colonial Gujarat (Ahmedabad, 1942–43)

The “successful” conclusion of the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928 affirmed Mohandas Gandhi’s non-violent political doctrine within (and outside) India and projected the architect of this anti-colonial protest, Vallabhbhai Patel, as the “uncontested” leader of the Indian nationalist movement and the Congress Party. Studying shifts in the nationalist movement before and during the Quit India Agitation in 1942, this paper explores the manner in which Patel refashioned the repertoire of available tactics of satyagraha which Gandhi had carefully created in earlier decades. In contrast to settled histories of the non-violent movement in Gujarat, the author argues that Gandhi and Patel diverged on the direction of the nationalist movement in this period and did so in manners that were unprecedented. While Gandhi stressed the need to address the injustices that disenfranchised lower-caste and Dalit (ex-Untouchable) peasants confronted, Patel stressed the need to confront the colonial state more forcefully throughout the colony and to counter the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which sought to challenge the dominance of the Congress Party that Patel controlled. Examining a relatively understudied moment of the Indian nationalist movement in late colonial Gujarat, this paper highlights how Gandhi became more of a figurehead of the movement at the time while Patel emerged as its effective leader, enabling him to blend together Gandhi’s non-violent practices with a strategy to employ violent force against the state (together with Patel’s own carefully crafted Hindu nationalist rhetoric). I demonstrate how Patel’s charges at the grassroots level introduced practices of sabotage and armed combat with the colonial state—often with spectacular effect—in the context of organizing a putatively “non-violent” agitation. I suggest that such shifts in the non-violent movement in Gujarat imbued the category of ‘satyagraha’ with novel inflections that braided together ahimsa (non-harm) and hinsa (violence).