On Sunday, April 6, 1919, countless of men and women across India went without eating, answering Mohandas Gandhi’s call for a national hartal. It was a day of fasting and prayer; shopkeepers shuttered their doors for the day, and people took to the streets to protest.
The specific trigger for this mass movement was the passage of the Rowlatt Act, which, in the name of fighting terrorism after World War One, gave the British sweeping authority to go after those suspected of acting seditiously. The right to trial by jury was stripped away, evidence could be withheld from the accused, and new penalties, more severe and arbitrary, were instituted. Gandhi and others were outraged by this infringement of their civil liberties, and a national effort to have this legislation repealed began.
Gandhi had struggled to find an appropriate call to action. But early one morning, it came to him, “as if in a dream,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “We should call upon the country to observe a general hartal. Satyagraha is a process of self-purification, and our 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.”
An estimated 150,000 people gathered the morning of April 6 in Bombay to hear Gandhi speak at Chowpatty beach. “This is not a bad beginning,” he said. “No country has ever risen, no nation has ever been made without sacrifice, and we are trying an experiment of building up ourselves by self-sacrifice without resorting to violence in any shape or form. This is satyagraha.”
Many engaged in civil disobedience as the week went on, flouting the Rowlatt Act. Illegal newspapers were printed and distributed; Gandhi wrote to the local police chief, “May I send you a copy of the unregistered newspaper issued today by me as its Editor?” Banned books were sold as well, sometimes at 10 times their face value as a show of support.
But not all was peaceful. Troops fired on crowds in Delhi, killing nine. Ahmedabad found itself under martial law, with soldiers marching through their streets. Tensions grew and violence crept into the fringes of the movement; telegraph lines were sabotaged, railroad stations were burned, and some government officials were even killed. The escalation took a dramatic turn the following Sunday, in Jallianwala Bagh.
Gandhi believed the best of people, but in large enough groups, the percentages got away from him. Have you ever done something in a crowd that you wouldn’t have as an individual?