Who was the main female collaborator with Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle of mill workers in Ahmedabad ?

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (c) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2024 Q7 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q7 — History PYQ with Answer