MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 7 of 100

Correct — option (2), Anusaya Sarabhai. The Ahmedabad mill workers' struggle of 1918 was the second of Gandhi's three early Indian experiments, between Champaran in 1917 and Kheda later in 1918, and it was Anasuya Sarabhai who brought him into it. Her position was extraordinary: she was the sister of Ambalal Sarabhai, one of Ahmedabad's leading mill owners and a figure on the employers' side of this very dispute, and she had already been working among the mill hands of the city — running a school for their children, helping with their grievances — after returning from studies in England. When the mill owners withdrew the plague bonus and the workers demanded a large rise in wages, it was Anasuya Sarabhai who organised the workers and Gandhi who arbitrated the terms of their agitation, insisting on a written pledge, on non-violence, and on daily meetings under the shade of a tree by the Sabarmati. When the strike began to weaken and workers started drifting back, Gandhi undertook his first fast in an Indian public cause to hold them to their pledge — a decision he himself acknowledged put unfair pressure on the mill owners, among them Anasuya's own brother. The dispute was settled by arbitration in the workers' favour on the central question of the wage increase. The struggle's institutional legacy is the Majoor Mahajan Sangh, the Textile Labour Association of Ahmedabad, founded in 1920, in which Anasuya Sarabhai was the central figure and which became the model for Gandhian trade unionism based on arbitration rather than class conflict. She was known to the workers as Motaben, elder sister, and the question's phrase 'main female collaborator' describes her role in the 1918 struggle precisely.

• (1)Sarojini Naidu — Sarojini Naidu was a Congress politician and poet whose work in these years was political and platform-based rather than industrial — Home Rule agitation, the Congress and Muslim League sessions of the period, and later the presidency of the Congress at Kanpur in 1925 and the leadership of the Dharasana raid in 1930. She had no part in the Ahmedabad mill dispute of 1918. She is placed in this option list because she is the most recognisable woman in the national movement of the period, which is exactly the reflex the question is testing: recognising a famous name is not the same as knowing which struggle she was in.
• (3)Kasturba Gandhi — Kasturba Gandhi is a plausible-looking answer because she worked alongside Gandhi in this very period and in this very region — she was at the Sabarmati ashram and had done village work during the Champaran campaign of 1917, teaching sanitation and running classes. But the Ahmedabad struggle was an industrial dispute organised among the mill hands of the city, and its organiser was Anasuya Sarabhai, whose access to both the workforce and the mill-owning families made the arbitration possible. Choosing Kasturba here substitutes proximity to Gandhi for the specific organisational role the question asks about.
• (4)Aruna Asaf Ali — Aruna Asaf Ali belongs to a much later generation and is eliminated by chronology. Born in 1909, she was a child at the time of the 1918 Ahmedabad strike; her prominence came with the Quit India movement of 1942, when she hoisted the flag at the Gowalia Tank maidan in Bombay after the leadership had been arrested and then worked underground. Her later career included the editorship of nationalist journals and, in 1958, the mayoralty of Delhi. Nothing in her record touches the Ahmedabad mill dispute, which ended before she was ten years old.

The Ahmedabad mill strike of 1918 is the case study through which Gandhian labour relations are taught. Gandhi did not treat the mill owners as an enemy class to be defeated but as a party to be persuaded, and the machinery he built for that purpose — a written pledge binding the workers, arbitration as the preferred means of settlement, and the fast as the leader's own sacrifice rather than a weapon aimed at the employer — became the template for the Textile Labour Association founded in 1920. That model of trusteeship and arbitration is what separates Gandhian trade unionism from the class-conflict unionism that the communists built in Bombay's mills a few years later, and the difference is a standard examination theme. The episode is also the first use of the fast by Gandhi in an Indian public dispute, and by his own account it was ethically uncomfortable precisely because the employers included his personal friends.

MPSC and other commissions test Gandhi's early Indian campaigns as a trio — Champaran 1917, Ahmedabad 1918, Kheda 1918 — and the most productive way to hold them is by the grievance, the collaborators and the outcome of each. Ahmedabad's distinguishing features are that it was industrial rather than agrarian, that it produced Gandhi's first fast in India, that it was settled by arbitration, and that its principal local collaborator was a woman from the mill-owning class itself. Questions on the collaborators are common because each campaign has a small, fixed cast — Rajkumar Shukla and Rajendra Prasad at Champaran, Vallabhbhai Patel and Indulal Yagnik at Kheda, Anasuya Sarabhai at Ahmedabad — and because those names allow a commission to test precise reading rather than general familiarity. The theme also connects to the labour-history questions set on Bombay, since the same few years produced the All India Trade Union Congress in 1920 and, soon afterwards, a very different class-conflict unionism in the mill districts; the Ahmedabad model is therefore best learnt as one of two competing traditions rather than on its own.

• The Ahmedabad mill workers' struggle of 1918 arose from the withdrawal of the plague bonus and the workers' demand for a wage increase, and was settled by arbitration in the workers' favour.
• Anasuya Sarabhai, sister of the mill owner Ambalal Sarabhai, organised the workers and brought Gandhi into the dispute; the workers called her Motaben, elder sister.
• Gandhi undertook his first fast in an Indian public cause during this strike, to hold wavering workers to the pledge they had taken.
• The Majoor Mahajan Sangh, the Textile Labour Association of Ahmedabad, was founded in 1920 out of this struggle and became the model of Gandhian trade unionism based on arbitration rather than class conflict.
• Ahmedabad 1918 is the second of Gandhi's three early Indian campaigns, coming after Champaran in 1917 and alongside the Kheda satyagraha of 1918.

• Answering with the most famous woman in the option list rather than the one attached to this particular campaign
• Confusing Kasturba Gandhi's work during Champaran in 1917 with the Ahmedabad industrial dispute of 1918
• Ignoring dates: Aruna Asaf Ali, born in 1909, belongs to the Quit India generation and could not have been a collaborator in 1918

Questions on Gandhi's early campaigns almost always turn on a specific pairing — the campaign and the person who invited or assisted him, the campaign and the method he first used there, the campaign and the way it was settled. MPSC builds the option list from real women or real associates of the national movement so that recognition alone cannot decide it, and it frequently includes at least one name from a later decade that a date check would remove. Preparing this theme as a three-column table of campaign, local collaborators and outcome answers most of the family in a single pass.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Majoor Mahajan Sangh, or Textile Labour Association, founded at Ahmedabad in 1920 out of the mill workers' struggle of 1918, is associated chiefly with which organiser ?

  • (a)Anasuya Sarabhai
  • (b)Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
  • (c)S. A. Dange
  • (d)N. M. Joshi

  Answer(a) Anasuya Sarabhai — she organised the Ahmedabad mill hands during the 1918 dispute and was the central figure in the Textile Labour Association founded in 1920, the model of Gandhian arbitration-based unionism. S. A. Dange and the Girni Kamgar Union represent the rival class-conflict tradition in Bombay, and N. M. Joshi is associated with the founding of the All India Trade Union Congress in 1920.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  During which of Gandhi's campaigns did he undertake his first fast in an Indian public cause ?

  • (a)The Champaran satyagraha of 1917
  • (b)The Ahmedabad mill workers' struggle of 1918
  • (c)The Kheda satyagraha of 1918
  • (d)The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22

  Answer(b) The Ahmedabad mill workers' struggle of 1918 — Gandhi fasted to hold the striking workers to the pledge they had taken when the strike began to weaken, and the dispute was afterwards settled by arbitration. Champaran was settled through an official inquiry committee, and Kheda through the suspension of revenue collection from those genuinely unable to pay.