The Poet Who Toppled The British Empire

of the Imperial Institute. Suddenly, a young Indian man in gold rimmed spectacles steps forward, raises a pistol, and shoots him twice in the face. As the old man sinks to the floor, his assailant keeps shooting. A Parsi doctor rushes to help. The young man turns, aims and kills him too. The assassin was acting alone, but he wasn't the only person to feel that the only way to break the British occupation of India was with a violent uprising. The assassin lived in a house in North London with

dozens of other young Indian men. They'd been practicing violent resistance together how to fire a rifle, how to make weapons, how to evade the police. One of those housemates, a man called Byron, wrote a letter to the Times of London supporting the assassin. Barron secretly visited him in prison, then fled the country. The assassination had been senseless, no matter how passionately you opposed the British Empire. Coursin Wiley

was a harmless old man. The assassin had killed him in cold blood, and a bystander who'd only tried to help and would a violent murder prompt the British to rethink their role in India or to crack down. But this cautionary tale isn't about the assassin or about his sympathizer Bern. It's about someone who found a different way to bring about revolutionary change. Barren's sister, the woman called Sorgeny. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. She's

a slight woman, not even five feet tall. The long end of her sari is pulled over her head. The expression on her face is apprehensive. There's a long row of marchers behind her, all wearing white. They followed Sir Augeny Naidu to the coast to make salt, but they've stopped now outside a British controlled saltwork on the northwest

coast of India. The Arabian Sea shimmers just a few hundred yards ahead, but the marcher's path is blocked by the barbed wire that's wrapped around the saltworks and by sixty policemen, all holding steel tipped clubs, and soldiers too, with heavy rifles pointed at the marchers. The year is nineteen thirty, twenty one years after the assassination in South Kensington. The great campaigner for India's independence from the British Empire, Mahatma Gandhi, is in jail. The successor he's chosen to

lead India's independence movement is Sir Erogeny Nidu. Naidu and her marchers want vast change against a hard opponent, and they want it without violence. Sirrogeny has decisively rejected the murderous approach that her brother Bren endorsed. India's fate, Nido believes depends on a nonviolent path to resistance. She steps forward, her marchers follow. There will be violence, to be sure, but it won't come from them. This is the final

episode in our series. Inspired by the work of David Badanis. This story comes from his forthcoming book How to Change the World Lessons from Three People Who did. When David first told me Nidou's story, I was fascinated. Sirrogenny. Nidou was an unlikely revolutionary. When she was growing up in the eighteen eighties, her family worshiped England. In her childhood home in Hyderabad, volumes of Shakespeare and Wordsworth filled their shelves.

Stories of Britain's military and intellectual heroes came up frequently in conversation. Servants might speak native languages, but with her own brothers and sisters, Nidou said, it was considered the height of ignorance and misfortune not to be acquainted with English. She grew up believing it was fair for Indians to be colonized. By that time, Britain had controlled India for generations.

That control was more forceful in some parts of the country, with garrisons of troops and machine guns and artillery at hand. In other areas, British control was wielded indirectly through local princes who were ostensibly in power but who knew they had to do what the local British representatives wanted, and Naido thought this was a fine thing. As one Hindu elder she looked up to explained Man for Mann the Englisher, better than ourselves. They have a higher standard of duty,

higher notions of organized work and discipline. As a teenager, Nido got a scholarship to study in Cambridge. When she landed in Britain in eighteen ninety six, just seventeen years old and terribly shy, she discovered but even more reasons to look up to the British. There were underground tubes for trains that cut through the very soil beneath her feet. There were complex vehicles that propelled themselves without horses. The

future had arrived. Everything seemed incredible. She took the train on to Cambridge, where she was going to study at the Women's College Girton. After her first day, she wrote to her boyfriend at home, effectively her fiancee, and told him, everybody makes a pet of me, though I've been here only a few hours. You see, I am by far the youngest and the curiosity. She was touched when the girls invited her for bicycle trips to the all male colleges.

Those bicycles were a revolutionary invention, giving women a real sense of independence for the first time, even if senior faculty would ride alongside as chaperone's. Even more exciting than the bicycles was getting to meet the male students, the best of whom might rule her country. One day, she wrote to her family breathlessly about how they were so educated and so civilized. Everything might have stayed like that, with Nido remaining a proud subject of Queen Victoria's empire.

But it turned out that although women at Cambridge could attend lectures and take exams, they weren't allowed to receive degrees. If a woman studied biology, for example, she might be top in the exams, but since she wouldn't get a diploma, she could never go on to become a doctor. One energetic young classics lecturer at Nidoo's College, a woman named Catherine jex Blake, was fed up with this system. She was a suffragette and she thought women should have the

same rights as everyone else. She lobbied successfully to have the university vote on changing their policy. A date was set in May. Undergraduates couldn't vote, but male faculty and alumni could, and special trains were arranged to bring former students from London to Cambridge. By early afternoon on May the twenty first voting day, over a thousand voters had passed through the Senate House. There was a crush of many thousand more students pressed outside, mostly men, a few women.

Just as the result was to be announced, a group of students on the roof of Keyes College across the way mockingly let out the sound of a vigorous cock crow. This was the signal, wrote one witness, for the commencement of operations. Occupants of the front rooms at Keys immediately began to hang out banners that mocked women. Other male students leaned out of an upstairs window and started a lowering a pape mache figure of a woman life size, an effigy that'd made it with bright red hair, looking

silly in a cap and gown. Another group of students at another upstairs window brought out another effigy, this time of a woman straddling that symbol of female freedom, a bicycle. They'd torn her dress off so she was exposed humiliatingly in her underwear, and then painted the underwear bright blue, so no one could miss it down below. The men started jeering. When the result was announced women would not be granted degrees, pandemonium broke loose. The bicyclist effigy figure

was lowered to the ground. Hundreds of undergraduate men struggled forward to attack it, tearing at its exposed body. Then they put it on top of a cow and went on a journey around the town. Crowds of male students and graduates ran alongside, blowing horns and yelling out the rest of the men at the Senate House vote started running through the town too. Women everywhere were groped or pressed up against walls. Others were tugged into the mob and flung around for fun. Seemingly every man on the

street was rabid wild. These were the future rulers of Naidoo's land. Now they were humiliating every woman they could catch. A large group of men ended up outside another women's college, where they were shouting of senaties and throwing fireworks into the girl's windows. They rammed fragments of the effigy through the cottage gates. They stayed for hours, setting up a

bonfire in front of the building, trapping the women inside. Meanwhile, an even bigger group of students police estimates were in the thousands, brought other life sized female effiges to the main market square in Cambridge. One was of the tutor at Naidu's college, Katherine jex Blake, the one who'd dared petition for the degrees. These effiges, too, were stripped and mutilated before being burnt in another bonfire. The men kept on adding fresh fuel. The flames and the jeering went

on long into the night. Cambridge's women had merely asked to be awarded the degrees their studies and examinations deserved. They hadn't even succeeded, and yet the very idea of this sparked hour after hour of harassment, humiliation and riot. Cautionary tales will return in just a moment. On the morning of May the twenty first, Naidoo had been polite and trusting, thinking British culture the pinnacle of civilization around the world. But by the end of the day her

British idol had fallen. What right did men like that have to control her people at all? Over the next few days it became clear she had to leave Cambridge. Something deeper became clear too, she couldn't be a pawn in this empire anymore. Sir Rogereny went to London and spent time with a number of writers, including the great Irish poet Yates, who happened to be her friend's roommate.

They met at home for drinks and conversation, and she was impressed with the way he was inspiring Irish nationalists with the force and eloquence of his writing. Why should Ireland be subservient to England? For that matter, why should India? Naido was inspired too, and encouraged that someone of Yates's stature would take a young Indian woman seriously. The Cambridge riots had shown her a dark truth about the alleged superiority of the British, but London reminded her that the

British weren't all bad. Many Britons were open to reason, to the arguments for fairness. Sir Rogerie Naidoo was nineteen years old when she returned to India and determined to push back against British rule in Hyderabad. However, her partner Gorvindhu expected they would quickly get married and start having children, which they did soon. She was a housewife, her whole life enclosed. She started writing poetry, but with little children

it was hard to find much time. There was a verandah with a swing where she could look out decorated cages with chirping songbirds inside. Everyone thinks I'm so nice and cheerful, She wrote all the banal things. But I've merely taught myself to be commonplace. Everything is slipping away. After all she had seen in England, after all that she recognized was still going on in India, it felt terrible to be passive. Right outside Hyderabad, for example, there

was a large British military base. Just by their presence, they made sure that industries and rail lines were arranged to benefit investors in England, not farmers or other workers in India. She had to find another way to work toward freedom from British rule. Could politics be the answer?

When her children were older, Sir Orogini Naidu immersed herself in the Indian National Congress, a group dominated by Bengali intellectuals who politely, calmly lobbied the British government for fairer treatment. It's there where. Despite her terrible shyness and slight stature, Naidou discovered that speaking out in public, she felt different. What is it that we demand, she called out from one podium, Nothing new, nothing startling, but a thing that

is as old as life. You shouldn't be disinherited as exiles in your own land. The day is over when we were content to be slaves. Finally, it seemed she had found the right way forward. During the First World War, she pushed to get India to support the British cause, trusting that afterwards, in reward, the subcontinent would be awarded dominion status, that it would have more freedom from British

rule as Canada in New Zealand. Had everything seemed agreed, London was on board, but at the last minute, just after the war ended, the British Empire's most senior representative in India, the Viceroy, undermined it all. There would be no relaxation of the rules and no dominion status. He wanted everything to go back to how it had been before the war. In fact, there would now be harsher rules, the rights to arrest anyone with no trial, and no

controls against torture. Indians across the continent began to protest, but the protests were disconnected not especially organized. On the thirteenth of April nineteen nineteen, a large crowd gathered in the Jalianwala gardens in the center of the old city of Mritzar in the Punjab region. Many were families in town for a cattle festival. Some were meeting to discuss the new legislation, others were just enjoying the sunny day. The garden was mostly dried out and a few acres

in size. Since families were large, there were a lot of children, perhaps fifteen thousand people total. To Major General Reginald Dyer, the man in charge of the city, this wasn't local citizenry at ease or even patriotism. It was fanaticism. He had put up a handful of notices that meetings weren't allowed, but he didn't know amritz so well and didn't realize that hardly anyone had seen them. Rather, he was insistent that proper order was not to be thwarted.

There was a ten foot high stone and brick wall around most of the garden. At the one narrow entrance, he parked armored car sideways on, blocking any exit. Then he and his mostly Indian troops advanced inside, fifty of them carrying heavy rifles. They didn't say anything, just took

up position on a slight rise. Once they were a few yards in front of the crowd, a few of the Sikhs near the front, with military training, had a sudden ominous feeling and tried to get families near them to begin walking out now, but this made no sense. Hardly anyone had moved when, without warning Dyer had all fifty of his men open fire, and they reloaded and fired again and again till the thousands of shells they

had were all gone. It was the greatest massacre in the history of British India, with probably five hundred or more people dead. As one former Prime Minister Asquith called it the worst in the history of our empire. From its very inception. The Army justified its actions, arguing that soldiers had been firing in self defense faced by a violent mob. The response to the massacre from the authorities

in London was half hearted criticism. There was a few weeks later that the young Indian assassin gunned down a retired army officer and a good marat and doctor outside a reception in South Kensington and to points like this rock bottom that it's at tempting to give up. Sir Rougerie Nidou had been working with the Indian National Congress for over a decade and she saw clearly that lobbying and negotiation did no good. Her brother bern had endorsed

random murderous violence. That was no good either. But then what was left Nido had to find a different path, and for that she turned to Gandhi. Naido and Gandhi had first met in nineteen fourteen and quickly became friends. At the time, she was already the voice of the Indian National Congress as well as a well reviewed poet. Gandhi would later become world famous. Back then, he was

a little known activist based in South Africa. Five years on after the massacred and Ritzer, Naido and Gandhi discussed their options. What if instead of violence or politics, you directly oppose the way the authorities have arranged society, not viciously, but so that it would make the injustice clear to everyone. What about civil disobedience of an emphatic sort. New concepts need new words. Setya is the Sanskrit for truth. Graha

means to hold firmly. The idea behind what was now called Setyagraha is that an unjust law violates the right order of the universe, and we need to rectify that hold firmly to the truth, but in a manner that doesn't create new injustices. In short, disobey but without violence, a fair idea that, it turns out, is incredibly hard to carry out in practice. In nineteen twenty one, Gandhi and Naid targeted the visit of the Prince of Wales

to Bombay. Huge piles of imported British clothing were burned, and as the Prince was welcomed into the port, he found himself surrounded by protesters, politely but firmly demonstrating their disapproval of British rule. What the protesters hadn't reckoned with was the offense taken by the locals taking part in the welcoming ceremonies. How could an honored guest be treated so As those locals left, fights broke out between them and the demonstrators, and when the police showed up, the

fights got worse. Once a mob is roused, it's hard to stop. Soon almost anyone in Western clothes was being attacked, the police counterattacked. Fighting of all sorts spread and lasted for four days. By the end, dozens of innocent people were dead. It was awful, the reverse of everything I do had hoped for. The vision for Sacha Grajo was in jeopardy and with Gandhi often in jail, everyone was looking to Sir Rogereni Nidol to help them figure out

what to do next. Cautionary tales will return. A few years after the debacle in Bombay, Naidu was elected head of the Indian National Congress. She was the first Indian woman to reach that position. Responsibility for Indian independence sat heavily on her shoulders. There had been little progress. The country was still run for the benefit of the British at the expense of Indians. One senior British politician was

at least honest about it. I know it is said at missionary meetings that we've conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is Kant. We conquered India as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should hold it. In nineteen thirty the leadership of the Indian National Congress decided to try to reclaim one small piece of what Indians had lost under British rule salt.

For centuries, salt had been free, with anyone able to collect whatever they needed, but when Britain took over, they also took over salt production and put a tax on it. Seventy eight members of Gandhi's Ashram walked two hundred miles to one of the big salt making regions on the coast in April. However, when the marchers reached the sea, the British Viceroy Irwin had a remarkable response. He did nothing. The marchers collected their salty mud. Press cameras caught the images.

There was Naidoo in her long sard hurry, Gandhy in his usual loincloth with a shawl over his shoulders. The point of non violent resistance was to have something to resist. Without a response from the authorities, what were they supposed to do. Gandy collected more mud, so did most of the marchers. Still, Irwin did nothing. Over the next few days, journalists began to mock the marchers. All they saw were Indians milling about on a beach Soon the journalists left,

and then almost everyone else left too. Irwin had made the marchers look like fools. A few weeks later, he had Gandhy arrested quickly at night, bright flashlights in the face, armed troops to the rest of the nationalist leadership was thrown into jail two. Nido clearly was next, and support for their movement was waning. Indians had had enough of British excuses, and now enough of the Indian National Congress saying there was some magical sechagaha, a third way to

get the freedom they wanted. Some people were calling for more violence. Nidu was convinced that would only lead to more repression. She realized that she didn't have long to act. She sent out messages to people she trusted, trying to get journalists interested in a new protest, and then hurried

back to the coast to a hamlet called d Rasana. There, Britain had built a large salt works where salt was collected from large lagoons, then purified and stacked in high pyramid The mudflats were surrounded by barbed wire and deep moat like ditches. By the time Nido got there, danger was in the air. Some nearby protesters were being led by Gandhi's son Manulal, who was excitable and prone to violence. The salt works were guarded by police with their vicious

clubs and troops with rifles. They were itching for an excuse to use them. Naidoo spent long days going from one small group of protesters to another, explaining their purpose. They weren't just there to get salt. They were there to expose the unfairness of taxes paid by Indians to keep Britons in luxury. If there was violence, that violence is all the world would see. Each marcher's self control was indispensable. If even a few acted out, it would

be like Amritza. It would become fair for the soldiers to shoot back. Naid warned the marchers that the police would be violent. You will be beaten, she said, but you must not resist. You must not even raise a hand. Briton's would be watching. The world would be watching. All the forces of the universe were watching this isolated hamlet and beach. It might seem to be just a speck on the Gujarak coast, but if they could remain nonviolent, they could make it the most important place on earth.

If anyone wished to step back now, they should feel no shame. But for the others, they had to show the world what British rule really mean. On Wednesday, made the twenty first, they went ahead. Naidu was at the front. Gandhi's son Manuelal wasn't far behind. It was terrifying as they got close, and Naidu started a group chant Bin kilab Zindabad, Long Live the Revolution, the Peaceful Revolution. Before Nidou's marchers could reach the barbed wire, scores of Indian

police rushed forward, wielding clubs. They rained down on some protesters' heads with sickening crunches, cracking skulls. Men fell bleeding, but the next row of marchers calmly continued, accepting the same beating. When they refused to fight back, the police became enraged. They kept beating people, stamping on them, leaving dozens and then hundreds writhing on the ground. It only came to

an end at noon, when Naidu herself was arrested. Three hundred and twenty marchers had been seriously wounded, many were still unconscious. The British government announced a few days later that nothing had happened that there had been some slight confusion at Durrasana that day, but no shots were fired

and at most four people were wounded. Viceroy Irwin wrote to the King, how amusing it was, and all was peaceful, easy, just and there Perhaps the story might have ended, except that Naidou's attempts to draw journalists to Durasna had succeeded. One man, an American from the Midwest, had made it along just one, but he worked for United Press, an American wire service that sent articles to over one thousand newspapers worldwide. He had seen everything, and his reports were

read by tens of millions around the globe. The heart went out of the British establishment. A few die hards said how preposterous it was that Indians thought nonviolence could make any real change. Didn't they realize it would never work in Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Soviet Union. But that was the point. Most Britons were proud. Their nation was

nothing like those dictatorships. That was what NI do was brilliantly banking on that if violence was the only way to keep India submitting to British rule, then the British didn't want it, and it worked. More and more Britons questioned what their government was doing in India, and a few years later, after the Second World War, Prime Minister Clement Atli's post war government granted India its independence. That alone would be a staggering achievement three hundred and fifty

million people finally free from colonial rule. But similar freedom campaigns spread around the world, to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in America, to Nelson Mandela and the end of Apartheith in South Africa, to women's rights and disability rights, and much else. Sir Rogenny Nidu and Gandhi found their third way and then they shared it. This powerful gentler path to transform nations that finishes our series of four episodes inspired by a friend, David Bidanas's

book The Art of Fairness. The story of Sir Rogenny Naidu is told in his forthcoming volume How to Change the World Now. All of the stories have been grappling with the question we dealt with right at the start. With the American baseball manager Leo du Rocha. He was famous for saying, nice guys finish last well, David was watching Derochia at his prime as a manager. David is back in the studio with me now, David, nice guys finished last. What do we think about whether that statement holds up.

going indefinitely. But the temptation to go to the opposite extreme, that's what we have to fight. The Russian Revolution was about as violent a revolution as you can get. The result was Lenin and Stalin. People get into that mood. It's easy to overshoot.

Or One of the stories that really explored this so elegantly was William Bligh, the captain who suffered the mutiny on the Bounty, and I found it so interesting that the challenge that he faced was that his approach worked in some contexts, but the context kept changing and he couldn't adapt to the context.

spot that something's going wrong. And a lot of the disasters that happen in cautionary tales are ultimately because of broken feedback loops. Something's going wrong and the people with the ability to make change don't get told or they're not listening. And then the other thing is just preparing

yourself for something going wrong mentally rehearsing that. I mean, that's something that Paul Starrett, for example, who was the project manager on the Empire State Building, he did a great job of thinking through all the things that could go wrong and working out how I was going to deal with them. Whereas William Bly he never quite seemed to be able to think that through well, to think ahead, even when stuff had gone wrong and then it had started going right again, he wasn't able to go, Okay,

you know I had a near miss. How am I going to make sure the things don't fall apart next time?

chance has a vote. But if we practice it a little bit, say okay, what'll I do when I'm a bit stressed here? What will I do when I'm a bit tired, Then when it actually comes into action, you at least have a better chance.

while they're available wherever books are solved. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. This mini series is based on David Bandanas's book The Art of Fairness, The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean, and it was written with David Bandanas himself. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. The show is produced by Alice Fines, with Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music the work

of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gustridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Gretta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded

at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It doesn't really make a difference to us and if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus