Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c5.s2.20

c5.s2.20

A contributory factor leading to the extensive adoption and success of Gandhian non-cooperation and civil disobedience has perhaps been the relative mellowness and a certain reflective quality which the twentieth century British rulers had acquired by the time Mahatma Gandhi came to launch his various movements. His own personality may have further added to this reflective quality inducing many of the British in their more private moments to share his views about the great injury which British rule had done to the Indian people. In contrast, the British rulers of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century were by and large, not only the agents of a most callous and inhuman state system, but individually and collectively subscribed to and practised such callousness and inhumanity. What primarily brought about the change and the comparatively mellower attitudes is a matter for a different enquiry.