Abbas Tyabji himself was arrested a few days later while leading a march with 59 volunteers to the Dharasana Salt Pans.
Today, 9 June, is the death anniversary of Abbas Tyabji (c.1853 – 1936). To understand the spirit of India’s struggle for freedom in the first half of the 20th century, you need to know the story of his life; in a way it tells the story of the struggle itself.
More than once he was Acting President of the Indian National Congress. About 17 years elder to Mahatma Gandhi, Abbas Tyabji, who was known as the Grand Old Man of Gujarat, succeeded Gandhi as the national leader of the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930 after the latter’s arrest on 4/5 May of that year. Abbas Tyabji himself was arrested a few days later while leading a march with 59 volunteers to the Dharasana Salt Pans. Upon his arrest, he was succeeded by Sarojini Naidu as the national leader of the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Though based in Bombay and Gujarat, Abbas Tyabji acquired in his later days a cottage in Mussoorie in the Himalayas for occasional restful interludes to recoup his health. (Mussoorie is 22 miles from my hometown Dehra Dun). This is where he passed away in 1936. He lies buried in Landour, Mussoorie. Gujarat has tended in recent years to forget such people as Abbas Tyabji, but his memory is now refreshed every year by the Uttarakhand Freedom Fighters Association which has till recently been active in Mussoorie.
The two paintings below were lying on the floor when in 1996 curiosity took me and a few friends to Southwood, his cottage in Mussoorie which had been dedicated by his family to the nation after the country’s independence in 1947.
The cottage itself was slated for demolition. That proposal was abandoned after the noise we created in the media and elsewhere. But I have not seen these paintings again.
The paintings depict Abbas Tyabji with his “Gandhi cap” and his wife Amina, a freedom fighter in her own right, wearing a khadi (handspun and handwoven cloth) sari. The Gandhi cap, by the way, was said to be modeled on the caps prisoners were often, it is understood, made to wear in Gandhi’s days in South Africa. Later it was adapted in the Gold Coast (later Ghana) in the days of the struggle led by Kwame Nkrumah with the letters “P.G.” (Prison Graduate) marked on them. Wearing the Gandhi cap by a Govt servant in colonial India could lead to dismissal from service; and especially in the 1920s and early 1930s, prosecution of civilians. It had, along with Khadi cloth, become a symbol of Defiance.
Till 1913 Abbas Tyabji had been a judge in the princely state of Baroda in western India. After plunging into the freedom movement a few years later, his life changed dramatically. By the 1920s, when he was a septuagenarian, he was going around Gujarat’s villages on a bullock cart under the blazing summer sun hawking Khadi as part of the boycott of foreign cloth. Even at an advanced age he courted arrest more than once both in the non-co-operation movement and in the peasants’ struggle in Bardoli.
A school for girls still runs in Baroda, Gujarat, in the name of Amina Tyabji.
Anil Nauriya
New Delhi
