DMPQ:By his own admission, Gandhi was on a humanitarian rather than a political mission to Champaran. But Champaran changed the course of the freedom struggle.

Mahatma Gandhi’s first Satyagraha in India is being marked this April. It was undertaken in the erstwhile undivided Champaran district in northern Bihar. He went there in April, 1917 on learning about the abuses suffered by the cultivators of the district, forced into growing indigo by British planters/estate owners. ‘The Champaran tenant’, informs Gandhi, ‘was … Read more