Across India, it was a time of political ferment. Since the start of the First World War, the Indian National Congress and other nationalists had stepped up demands for swaraj, or “self-government” for Indians. To most of these activists, swaraj, as conceptualized in the 1910s and early 1920s, meant a representative government, run almost entirely by Indians, while maintaining allegiance to the British Crown and remaining a part of the Empire. More specifically, what they sought was “dominion status” for India.
In other words, they wanted India to have the same rights and level of autonomy as the British dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa (and later Ireland). The term “Dominion” as applied to these countries had come to mean that they governed themselves, and “[a] resolution of the Imperial War Conference in 1917 referred to ‘full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth’”. Although the precise position of the dominions within the Empire underwent further changes during the 1920s and 1930s, Indian nationalists of various hues continued to measure India’s constitutional status with reference to them.
As he made quite evident in his 1920 book Reconstructing India, Visvesvaraya shared the hope that India would achieve dominion status in the near future. Laying down the gauntlet, he declared that the colonial government would be judged on whether this became a reality in the coming ten years. His interest in the subject of constitutional reform, along with his commitment to questions of industrialization and technical education, now brought him into regular contact with two leaders of the Indian National Congress.
The first of these was the veteran leader and former Congress President Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946), a lawyer from Allahabad who also served in the Imperial Legislative Council from 1909 to 1920 and helped establish the Benares Hindu University (BHU) in 1916. Visvesvaraya had first met Malaviya in December 1910, when he took leave from his work as chief engineer in Mysore to attend the Allahabad session of the Indian National Congress. A year or so later, he had seen Malaviya deliver a speech in Hindi of “great force and eloquence” at a meeting in Calcutta held to raise funds for BHU. When BHU became a reality, it had a direct link with Mysore in the person of Krishnaraja Wadiyar, who served as the Benares institution’s first chancellor.
Although he did not share Malaviya’s specific interest in the revival of Hindu culture, Visvesvaraya appreciated the latter’s role “in moulding the thoughts of his orthodox audiences” – in other words, in liberalising their views. One point, in particular, drew the two men together, and that was a fervent belief in the need for policies that would encourage industrialisation in India. As a member of the Indian Industrial Commission (1916–18) appointed by the Government of India, Malaviya had written a searing dissenting note in which he emphasised India’s precolonial industrial heritage, and argued that Japan and Germany rather than Britain must serve as exemplars for the country’s industrial reinvigoration.
The second Congress politician whom Visvesvaraya got to know well in these years was Mukund Ramrao Jayakar (1873– 1959). Educated at St Xavier’s and Elphinstone Colleges in Bombay, Jayakar had qualified as a barrister in London in 1905 before registering as an advocate in the Bombay High Court.8 In the years that followed, he combined his legal practice with social reform work and regular attendance at Congress meetings. He also participated in the Home Rule movement and was one of the members of the committee appointed by the Congress to inquire into the infamous Jalliwanwala Bagh massacre of 1919.
Jayakar and Visvesvaraya had common friends. When Jayakar was unwell in 1917, these friends took him to Bangalore to convalesce. The party stayed with Visvesvaraya, who was then still dewan, at Ballabrooie, and saw some of the local sights. Jayakar was as impressed by his “dignified, unobtrusive, considerate” host as he was by the electricity-generating town of Sivasamudram and the reservoir under construction at Kannambadi. A few years later, when Visvesvaraya moved into his Bombay house on Warden Road, the two men became neighbours, in a manner of speaking, as Jayakar lived in nearby Thakurdwar.
Malaviya and Jayakar were active participants in the movement for Swaraj. Although they were intimate comrades of Mohandas Gandhi – the rising star of the Congress, and by 1919, its most important leader – they remained wedded to the Liberal or Moderate credo. This, as we saw in Chapter 14, involved engaging in dialogue and negotiation with the colonial powers while working within the existing legislative machinery. Gandhi, on the other hand, had converted the nationalist agitation into a mass movement, and his preferred mode of political mobilisation was “non-cooperation”. This involved refusing to participate in colonial institutions (courts, legislative bodies, schools, colleges), boycotting British goods, and organising nationwide hartals or strikes. All these measures were to be undertaken nonviolently. He also formed an alliance with the leaders of the Khilafat agitation, a protest by Indian Muslims against the Allies’ post-war policies related to some of the sacred sites of Islam that had been ruled by the now-defeated Ottomans.
In 1920–21, Gandhi launched a massive non-cooperation drive across the country to protest the inadequacy of the postwar constitutional reforms and the subsequent draconian actions of the colonial government, which had been cracking down mercilessly on dissidents – sometimes violently, as in the case of the horrific shooting at Jallianwalla Bagh. The Congress now demanded that the British grant India swaraj while making amends for their actions in Punjab.
Excerpted with permission from Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M Visvesvaraya, Aparajith Ramnath, Penguin India.
