Saving Indian Villages: British Empire, the Great Depression and Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement

This article traces an intricate relationship between Mahatma Gandhi’s call for Civil Disobedience (1930–1933) and the global economic slump of the 1920s experienced by Britain and colonial India. I argue that the economic hardships faced by Indians (particularly the peasant classes) forced Gandhi to revisit his sociopolitical approach to India’s nationalist movement. Despite the chronological overlap of the Great Depression (1929–1931) with Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–1933), the relation between these two major events has not been adequately explored in recent scholarship. I propose to contextualize the changes in Gandhi’s economic ideas and political strategy (often against contending ideological trends) leading to his defence of Indian peasant interests during the Gandhi–Irwin Pact and the Second Round Table Conference. Gandhi’s increasing awareness of the economic crises and Britain’s severe opposition to granting financial autonomy to India pushed Gandhi in the direction of charting a new path for economic self-reliance. This, I suggest, resulted in his nation-wide popular movement for reviving the Indian village economy in the form of the ‘Constructive Programme’ (1934–1948) in subsequent years.