Discuss how the Satyagrahas of Gandhi removed the spell of fear among Indians and thus knocked off an important pillar of imperialism.

Answer:

Colonial rule rested as much on the prestige of British power and the fear it inspired as on force itself. Gandhi's satyagrahas, by teaching ordinary Indians to court arrest and endure violence without retaliating, destroyed that fear and with it a principal pillar of imperial authority.

Fear as a pillar of imperial rule

• A small British establishment governed a vast population largely through prestige.
• The memory of the repression of 1857 was deliberately kept alive.
• Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 was intended to produce a moral effect through terror.
• Ordinary people had come to regard British power as invincible.

How satyagraha dissolved that fear

• Courting arrest turned the prison from a place of shame into a badge of honour.
• Non-violence deprived repression of its justification and shamed those who used it.
• Open, public defiance replaced conspiracy, so participants had nothing to conceal.
• Discipline gave individuals the confidence that came from acting collectively.
• Gandhi taught that fear, not force, was the true instrument of subjection.

The campaigns in practice

• Champaran in 1917 showed indigo peasants that officials could be defied successfully.
• Non-Cooperation from 1920 brought lakhs to surrender titles, schools and courts.
• The Dandi March of 1930 saw ordinary people openly break the salt law.
• At Dharasana, satyagrahis advanced into lathi blows without flinching, as Webb Miller reported.
• Over sixty thousand were imprisoned during Civil Disobedience.
• Quit India in 1942 saw the people act on their own once the leaders were jailed.

The consequences for imperial authority

• Moral prestige, the Raj's chief asset, was destroyed before world opinion.
• Repression became counter-productive, winning sympathy for the movement.
• Women, peasants and students entered politics in unprecedented numbers.
• British officials themselves acknowledged that governing by consent had become impossible.

Assessment

• Nehru wrote that Gandhi's greatest gift was to rid Indians of fear.
• Repression could no longer intimidate a people willing to fill the jails.
• The moral initiative passed permanently to the nationalists.
• Judith Brown notes how this transformed the character of Indian politics.

Gandhi's satyagrahas therefore struck at the psychological foundation of colonial rule. As historians of the freedom movement observe, once Indians ceased to be afraid, a government of a few over many could no longer be sustained, and it was this transformation of the popular mind that made independence inevitable.