History – Aruna Asaf Ali – {Ep.253}

Today’s episode is from history. It’s about Aruna Asaf Ali, a progressive thinker who greatly influenced India’s fight for independence and galvanized the masses at crucial times

Welcome to “Stories From India”. This is a podcast that will take you on a journey through the rich mythology, folklore and history of the Indian subcontinent. I am Narada Muni, the celestial storyteller and the original “time lord”. With my ability to travel through space and time, I can bring you fascinating stories from the past, the present, and the future. From the epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana to the folktales of the Panchatantra to stories of Akbar-Birbal and Tenali Raman, I have a story for every occasion.

The purpose of the stories is neither to pass judgment nor to indoctrinate. My goal is only to share these stories with people who may not have heard them before and to make them more entertaining for those who have.

Today’s Story

On this show we cover myths, legends, folktales and history. Today’s episode is firmly on the history side of the fence. We’re dipping back into Indian Independence history. Specifically the story of one woman who dared to be different. Aruna Asaf Ali.

Let’s rewind the clock to almost a century ago. It was 1930, and winter time in Old Delhi. This scene is set in a haveli which is the hindi word for a mansion. A husband and wife were sitting in their chairs in the little courtyard sipping tea and eating biscuits. That’s the part where this stops being ordinary.

Aruna was not just a housewife. She was a teacher, and worth her salt. After all, she had some of the best education her country had to offer – starting with the Sacred Heart Convent in Lahore, and later All Saints College in picturesque Nainital. 

And if you were wondering – the answer is yes – Lahore in modern day Pakistan was all part of a single country with the rest of India. After enduring all those years of great education, she paid it forward, by teaching the next generation.

And yet, remarkable though it was that she had a career, this wasn’t the most unusual thing in their domestic life. Besides being over 20 years her senior, Asaf Ali was of a different religion from Aruna. Priyanka Chopra might not have been quite the pioneer.

While it did not result in the kind of coverage we’ve seen a few years ago, Aruna and Asaf Ali’s marriage raised more than a few eyebrows. In fact with her family, it did a lot more than just raise eyebrows. Aruna’s family completely disowned her and broke off all contact.

But right now, sitting here sipping their hot masala tea neither showed any signs of worrying about any of that. They had bigger things to worry about, now that Aruna had spilled the tea. Figuratively. Asaf Ali had spilled it literally, but that’s besides the point.

“Salt is an interesting choice, and may go down well” Aruna said.

Her husband had a different opinion. “Salt isn’t in the same league as tea”

They weren’t talking about eating a namkeen, a savory snack to go with their tea. Like I said, this was about more grave national matters – a protest against the new British tax on salt.

“Tea worked for the Americans up in Boston. I hear they threw a party, got wild, and tossed some boxes into the ocean. I’m a little skeptical about Salt”

“I don’t agree. It’s the right choice for 2 reasons. One, it’s essential for everyone. The British Salt Tax hurts everyone, and this is a unifying factor.
And second reason – the British underestimate the impact of a Salt Satyagraha. Our spy in the Viceroy’s office told us Lord Irwin wrote a letter to his bosses back in England about how the prospect of a salt protest does not keep him up at night. Only the mosquitoes keep him up at night, and thank goodness for Odomos”

Asaf Ali was still a little skeptical “Look, I think Gandhi is the salt of the Earth and all that. I have a lot of respect for him. And yet he seems far too optimistic here with this saline solution. What’s he proposing exactly – let’s all take a leisurely stroll to the seaside and get ourselves arrested for the crime of seasoning our food? How is that supposed to strike fear in the hearts of the British Empire? Gandhi did a Satyagraha pilot about a decade ago. How did that turn out?”

“Not so great, I agree. But only because Gandhi gave it up once it got violent. Kinda hard to continue to call it a satyagraha if there’s violence. The Bardoli Satyagraha on the other hand was a resounding success.”

“I have not forgotten that. I’m sure the British are still pretty salty about it. But that might have been Sardar Patel’s leadership that made it a success. And now the British have preemptively arrested him”

“I think you’re missing the point, dear. It was the farmers who made the Bardoli Satyagraha successful more than an individual Gandhi or Patel. This Salt satyagraha is about each one of us – not just Gandhi, Nehru and Patel- any of us could become a leader. All we want is to season our own food with our own salt, and not ruin it down to the tasteless levels of British cuisine.”

Those words were prophetic. Not the words about the lack of taste in British cuisine. After all, we do have to give them credit for inventing that staple dish everyone orders at Indian restaurants – Chicken Tikka Masala.

What Aruna foresaw was that anyone could become a leader. She demonstrated it the very next week. 

She was leading a local group of people in protest against the British Salt Tax. It was just a simple gathering in an open ground. Aruna was making a speech. 

Mid-speech at her gathering, a Sub Inspector and a few hawaladars walked in. The local police station was trying to meet an arbitrary quota. Maybe there was some competition going on amongst the police on who could jail more of these protestors. 

“Well well well, what do we have here?”

“It’s just a simple gathering of friends, Inspector” Aruna said

“Well, we’ve had a complaint. You are occupying this ground and the kids in the neighborhood wanted to play gilli-danda.

It was completely made up of course. The British administration did not care about gilli-danda. Besides there was enough room on this maidan or open ground for several gilli-danda tournaments, and several protests. Aruna tried to point this out. It did not go well.

“Add a charge for littering, all these pamphlets” the sub-inspector instructed his assistant.

“But… we are still holding these pamphlets in our arms, we haven’t littered them!” Aruna protested.

“A mere technicality. Also you’ve broken the megaphone rule”

“We don’t have a megaphone”

“And that’s the rule. You must have megaphones in order to protest”

This was infuriating, but it’s not like they had a choice. They went along. quietly. 

Similar things were happening in other parts of the country. The British didn’t take well to the idea of all these salt protests. They may or have used pepper spray, which was nothing to sneeze at. Aruna was arrested and promptly thrown into prison. Along with another 60,000 other people. Ironically, Mahatma Gandhi himself was NOT immediately arrested. Blame that on confusion rather than anything else. None of the officers of the Raj was sure if what Gandhi had done had been an arrestable offense. He hadn’t committed assault or anything else violent – they didn’t really have a strong code for dealing with white collar criminals. One officer pointed out that the standard procedure would be to forcibly take the shirt off of his back, or to sue the pants off of him. But everyone agreed neither of those could apply to Gandhi as he did not wear pants or a shirt – only a dhoti.

You can bet Lord Irwin was not pleased that Gandhi was still free. And neither was Gandhi. 

The difference was Gandhi was going to do something about it “I’ll write Irwin another letter and tell him everything about the next march, and the next Salt protest. He won’t be able to just shake it off”

Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, didn’t see the point of giving away his plans. “Listen, if I want to rob the Kohinoor diamond, I won’t send a letter to the guards giving away all my plans. I’m just going to rob it.”

Sarojini Naidu chimed in “Technically that wouldn’t be robbing. The Kohinoor is ours, so it would be a rescue mission. But that’s besides the point. I’m with Kasturba on this one. I don’t see a point. If you get arrested, who continues the marches and protests across the country?”

“You would,” Gandhi said calmly. He had a point of course. Satyagraha would continue whether or not he was there. 

Lord Irwin might have taken Gandhi’s previous letters with a grain of salt. But no more. Lord Irwin’s staff suspecting some kind of trickery had soldiers lined up a day in advance of what Gandhi had mentioned in his letter. But there was no subterfuge here. Gandhi was arrested exactly according to his plans. Sarojini Naidu played a major role in continuing the protests, as did a few others. There was a bonus – the uproar was a little bit more than he had anticipated. All in a good way, because it brought world attention. And for the first time on the global stage, Gandhi and his ideas of non-violence began to be taken seriously.

It did lead to some pressure and ultimately round table discussions between Gandhi and Irwin.

So they let people make salt, but only if their place of residence was by the sea. After all, the British had to be seen to not be giving in too easily. It had to be seen as a true compromise – anything else would just be rubbing salt in fresh british wounds. 

One of the positive outcomes was that all political prisoners were to be released. And that was something that Gandhi had in particular championed for. However, Aruna was not released. She was held back on a charge of vagrancy, of all things!

“For goodness sake, I live in a house 20 minutes from here”

But the police found loopholes – the house wasn’t in her name, and that meant she was homeless by their logic.

This trumped up logic had most of her co-protestors simply refusing to leave prison. Not that they were getting three free meals a day on government expense. Ultimately, it was only with intervention from Mahatma Gandhi himself that everyone else gave in and left Aruna Asaf Ali behind in prison. I know that makes it seem terrible, but the story didn’t end there. You see there was plenty of agitation from the public. It got a little worrisome for the sub-inspector. Sure his stats were high on the leaderboard. But keeping back picketers every single day for just one prisoner? He could afford to give her up. So the Sub-inspector conveniently found a loophole to discover that she wasn’t a vagrant after all. And let her go.

That didn’t last very long, because within a year Aruna Asaf Ali was back in jail. More protests of course. And this time she was prepared. Having had an inside view of the conditions in jail, she came prepared with a 16 point plan for improving conditions for political prisoners.

The British prison administration was getting a little fed up with her. They correctly diagnosed that all these extra “features” they were forced to add to their prisons were a result of one person. And to solve that problem – they transferred Aruna Asaf Ali to Ambala. But putting her in solitary confinement was a condition that the Ambala jail warden insisted on. He didn’t have a massive budget for improving prison conditions.

Ultimately, Aruna Asaf Ali was set free. And as far as the British knew, she seemed to have given up activism. But they were wrong. She was secretly and deeply involved in an underground movement.

Fast forward a few years. It was the 8th of August 1942, and the location was the Gowalia tank maidan in Bombay. Bombay was what Mumbai was known as back then. Another firestorm was brewing. This was the Quit India movement. Gandhi made his very famous call to “Do or Die”, the more serious version of Go Big or Go Home.

Britain was deep in World War 2, but they did have the resources to act. They judged that keeping folks on the All India Congress Committee would turn this into a worse version of the Satyagraha. So they did what they do best – take charge of a situation that wasn’t theirs to take charge of in the first place. They put everyone in jail the very next day. And by everyone, I mean everyone they had built up dossiers on. Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad. Everyone who was involved in anything to do with the decision to get the British to quietly, orderly exit India. It’s ironic when you think about all the turmoil from Britain’s exit from the European Union in recent years, none of it comes close to the chaos, the suffering that people in India had to endure in their fight for independence.

Having put all of the leadership of the All India Congress Committee in jail, the British thought they had avoided a major disaster. Yet another miscalculation. 

The British did not jail Aruna Asaf Ali. Maybe in typical patriarchal thinking, they underestimated the impact a woman could have had. Regardless, that meant that on the 9th of August 1942, Aruna Asaf Ali was presiding over the Congress session at the Gowalia Tank Maidan. It wasn’t just that she hoisted the congress flag which gave the masses hopes of an Independent India. She drove home Gandhi’s message. The British had acted quickly in silencing Gandhi, and other leaders. But Aruna Asaf Ali reinforced the Do or Die message, along with the specific things that went into disobedience. What that practically meant for each person. Things like not supporting any foreign businesses, not watching movies, withdrawing money from their banks and so on.

It had its effect. While the leaders were for the most part until the end of world war 2 at least, Aruna Asaf Ali remained on the run, continuing to spread the message. Gandhi sent her a letter, pleading with her to turn herself in – now that her work was done. He pointed out she could herself claim the price the government had put on her head, and then use the money for a good cause. Aruna rejected that idea. After all, it went completely against the core principle of the Quit India movement of cooperating with the British administration.

That’s all we have time for this time.

Some notes on the show

Aruna Asaf Ali stayed active post-independence. She even became the first mayor of Delhi. She became a socialist at one point, disillusioned with Congress leadership. And later a communist.

What she left behind are examples of progressive thinking, not being afraid to challenge the status quo – and not to be constrained by rules – she knew what the right thing to do was, and she did it.

Fun fact, her husband Asaf Ali tried defending Bhagat Singh. And he was also the first Indian ambassador to the US.

Next Time

In the next episode, we’ll cover the legend of Harishchandra

Feedback

Thank you all for the comments on Social Media and on Spotify’s Q&A! I can’t directly reply to the questions there, but I’ll address them here on this show.

Thank you Jenn, and Kaira for the support.

Hiranmayee – History episodes can be a bit dry, but I hope you liked today’s one.

Purushottam – hope you had a good rama navami celebration too.

Remind Me, and Deep Explorer 08, yes we’re just about a couple of episodes away from the conclusion of the Ramayana.

Samay, I do have Vikramaditya coming up very soon.

Raj Banga, I don’t think I’m the best person to tell the DC comics story.

Aarush – great question. But the answer is simple. The Narasimha avatar comes after the Kurma avatar. Yes, I haven’t forgotten the Indus Valley civilization story. It’s in the works, and I hope to get to it soon.

Shalu – thank you as always for your kind words!

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