Chachaji

Sharma: Mr Jauhar, could you tell us who were the prominent leaders of the Arya Samaj in Delhi in 1921 and what were its activities?

Chacha Ji: Of the prominent leaders of the Arya Samaj in that period, of course, Swami Shraddhanand was the greatest. Then, in those days the new capital, the secretariat, central assembly and the viceregal lodge were all under construction and many contractors who were working in small capacities were Arya Samajis. They were actually conducting the Arya Samaj affairs. Before that Seth Raghumal was one of the staunch Arya Samaji and a pillar of the Arya Samaj. The contractors who were wholly and solely interested in working for the Arya Samaj were Lala Narayan Dutt, Baba Milkha Singh and Lala Banwarilal. There were so many others also but these were the elderly and prominent figures.

The Arya Samajis, as in Punjab, were working very devotedly. They had the main Arya Samaj Mandir in Chawri Bazaar and there the weekly meetings were conducted and lectures were also held occasionally. In those times, some movement of conversion or change in religion was going on under the leadership of Swami Shraddhanand.

Sharma: Shuddhi movement?

Chacha Ji: Yes. The Shuddhi movement was somewhat contradictory—because the Congress was coming up with the Khilafat movement, Hindus and Muslims were coming together. That was more or less the time when the Shuddhi movement had to be gradually stopped. And we thought that with the leadership of Dr Yudhvir Singh we should have a powerful and very resourceful organisation like the YMCA—the YMAA (Young Men’s Arya Association). In Hindi we used to call it the Arya Kumar Sabha. It was established in Delhi and it became a very powerful organisation. Dr Keshav Dev Shastri, who had just returned from America, was its All-India president. Dr Yudhvir Singh was our local president. It became an All-India movement and we established branches of this Arya Kumar Sabha at many places, in U.P., Rajputana and Punjab. We had our annual sessions also. We admitted members only up to the age of twenty-five, and after that age they would not remain its members. They could become sympathisers. In the course of time, I became the secretary of the local Arya Kumar Sabha. I was working very hard.

One day it struck me that my original name Sikandar Lal, till I passed my matriculation, was more or less a foreign name or a Mohammedan name and it would not go well with the Arya Samaj. So I decided to change my name. A meeting of the Arya Kumar Sabha was called, and more than two hundred members were present. We had a regular ceremony, havan, etc. And prasad was distributed. I changed my name to Surendra Nath.

‘Jauhar’ is our original caste. We were Khatris. But that does not matter much. Yes, this ‘Jauhar’ surname has been used by all our family. Actually it was ‘Johar’ that they used to write. But to make it a powerful name, I used “au” in my name—‘Jauhar’—full of valour.

When I was in Delhi, I was working equally and very strongly in both the organisations, i.e. the Arya Kumar Sabha as well as the Congress. I do not remember the composition of the Congress in those days. As far as I remember, we were allotted a strength of 15 members by the All India Congress Committee, to form a District Congress Committee. There was no Provincial Congress Committee, in Delhi in those days. So fifteen members were allotted to us. As far as I remember, we tried our best but we could never get all the fifteen members. Because nobody would like to become a ‘Regular Member’ of the Congress.

Towards the end, probably in the year 1923 or 1924, our District Congress Committee office was at the Esplanade Road. And the membership which we could achieve was 13. I don’t remember all the names of the 13 members. Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari was our president. Asaf Ali barrister, Maulana Arif Hasvi, Maulana Abdulah (he was called Chooriwala or Attawala), Desbandhu Gupta, Pandit Indra Vidya Vachaspati, younger son of Swami Shraddhanand, and myself. There were two or three more members.

We had very regular meetings of the District Congress Committee, practically twice or thrice a week, to chalkout our programmes. And gradually the Congress movement, according to the instructions of the All India Congress Committee, went on in a subtle manner.

I do not remember the year when we shifted our office to Chandni Chowk. And then a Provincial Congress Committee was also formed. I was also a member of this Committee.

Sharma: What were the activities of the Arya Kumar Sabha?

Chacha Ji: We had regular weekly meetings and we had a large membership. Our meetings were very powerful. We used to go for social work. And we used to do ‘volunteer’ work. Wherever there were any difficulties to the public we used to help them—in all sorts of festivals, melas, religious functions. We were the active workers and volunteer force of the Arya Samaj. We used to organise its meetings, processions, erect and control pandals, etc. We also brought out a magazine called Arya Kumar which was printed more or less free by Pandit Narayan Prasad Betab. He had his own printing press, Vanguard Press, in a street behind the Jama Masjid. My office at Diwan Bhawan was also nearby. Most of the poems in Arya Kumar were composed by Pt. Narayan Prasad Betab himself. He was a very good poet of Urdu but his script was Hindi. The language was mixed Hindi and Urdu, i.e. Hindustani as termed by Gandhiji. Our members used to contribute articles to that.

During the Shatabdi year of Swami Dayanand at Mathura, we organised a very big meeting at the Shatabdi session of our own All India Arya Kumar Sabha too. And there were many such activities we used to have, like mock parliament. That was also our very regular feature—what was going on in the Parliament in those days. And then we used to call one of the members of the Assembly and under his chairmanship we used to have the mock parliament. More or less voluntary and social work activities we used to have, day in and day out. We used to have regular activity. It was a living organisation in those days.

There was an engineer from Martin & Co. The firm was constructing Travancore House in those days on the road which is now called Curzon Road. And this engineer had hired a house just opposite my house outside Ajmeri Gate. And his son, poor fellow, probably the only son, at the age of 9 or 10, died of severe smallpox. His body had completely rotted with smallpox. I mean it was nothing but flesh!…All flesh coming out. And he was an outsider. There were hardly any Bengalis in Delhi in those days. And he could not get any people to…to (voice chokes) to carry… the body of his son to Jamuna for cremation.

So he came to my house and told me. I went there and saw the body. It was really in a decomposed condition. But I never had…I was so strong in my mind…these things never disturbed me. I said, “You don’t worry.” I immediately went and called about 15 or 20 members of the Arya Kumar Sabha...late in the night at about 10 p.m., one by one, from their houses. And without any fear, without any repulsion or hesitation in our minds, we just wrapped the body and took it to the Yamuna ourselves and cremated it at about 12 o’clock in the night.

If there was a flood, fire, any catastrophe, or any sort of trouble—the Arya Kumar Sabha members would immediately rush to help and save the people. Of course, there was no communal bias in those days. So there were no communal troubles. The Khilafat movement, all the religious movements and the Congress national movement were all going hand in hand. There was some sort of amity amongst them in those days.

Sharma: Mr Jauhar, would you think that the conception of religion as held by the Arya Samajis was somewhat narrow in the sense that the attitude of the Arya Samaj towards other religious communities, especially the Muslims, was one like that in those days?

Chacha Ji: Well, we did not have that in our mind at all. It was not narrow—we had completely forgotten the narrowness of religion in those days. But now, at the age of sixty-eight, I feel that religion, whether it is Hinduism or Islam or Sikhism, is all narrow. But those days were such that we were cooperating with each other. Swami Shraddhnand was working in the Arya Samaj hand in hand with the Mohammedans. He was the only person who was allowed to speak to the Mohammedans from the ‘Mimber’—i.e. sacred rostrum of the Jama Masjid in those days, and as far as I know and I was told, previous to that no religious person, belonging to any other religion, was allowed to do so. So those days were different!

Then the Arya Samaj, in a way, was also a revolutionary movement of individual and social awareness amongst Hindus, and most of the people who joined the Congress for national freedom came from the Arya Samaj in those days, as far as this part of the country (North India) is concerned. For example, Lala Deshbandhu Gupta was a staunch Arya Samaji who was my age. He was only a matriculate. Deshbandhu Gupta came probably six months or one year after me, just like a brahmachari, wearing a long shirt and a tehmad, with about an eight feet long shaft in his hand. I should say, he was selected by Swami Shraddhanand to be his first lieutenant. Swamiji started The Tej newspaper only for him. He was his very brilliant student. He knew Urdu very well and, at the same time, Hindi and English also very well. In the course of time, we worked all our life in the Congress movement together. He was one of the members of the District Congress Committee. He took up the profession of writing and making speeches. So he was one of the best speakers on the stage. He could speak extempore in any language— Hindi, Urdu or English. In those days, the speakers like C.Rajagopalachari, Satyamurti and some others from South India used to speak in English in the public meetings and Deshbandhu Gupta used to translate their speeches on the spot—sentence by sentence, sometimes more forcefully than even the original speeches! Apart from this, history knows that he became a very powerful and towering journalist and became even the president of the All India Newspaper Editors’ Conference, Indian & Western Newspapers Editors’ Conference, Indian and Eastern Newspaper Editors’ Conference—such organisations of eminence in which even foreigners were members. He went even to London to conduct conferences and meetings. He was also an Arya Samaji.

The nature of the religions of those days was not like the religious and communal furies or fights of nowadays— because those were times when, for the sake of the country, all different sects had joined hands. Even the Sikhs had joined us, although called Akalis, like a wing and part of the volunteer movement to help the Indian National Congress. They had not become a political party. Just as we formed the Arya Kumar Sabha, perhaps they formed the Akali Dal. They were young people who would give their life for the nation. Everyone likes his own religion. In spite of that, co-operation was there, the narrowness was not at all there in those days.

Sharma: Mr Jauhar, would you tell us how far the Hindu-Muslim unity, the hallmark of that period, was a positive thing based on true understanding and respect for each other’s religion? Or was it a negative thing, a marriage of convenience?

Chacha Ji: Well, I don’t think in those days it was just a marriage of convenience. It was only for the sake of the country, for a higher cause that they had joined wholeheartedly, they were completely one at that time. Everyone respected the other. In the Congress we never could, even for a second, conceive that one was an Arya Samaji, or a Hindu and the other was a Sikh or a Mohammedan. This never came to our minds. For instance, take the case of Hakim Ajmal Khan. I remember that he was never a regular member of the District Congress Committee at all but was very much respected by the entire Hindu community on account of his personality and profession. He used his profession for Hindus and Mohammedans alike.

When the Khilafat movement was started, it helped the national cause just as the Arya Samaj had done for the country or for the Hindu religion. Of course, it was the need of those times but now it is out-of-date. Such things sometimes work and after their time is over, they gradually degenerate or stagnate and lose their value. But the basic truths of all the religions are the same. They are never different. It is only our own narrowness that makes us think in different terms. Otherwise there is hardly any difference as to how one sits or prays or acts. Fanaticism, of course, is very bad and poisonous. It is a slur on religion. Actually religions in themselves have no basis or foundation for such a thing.

Sharma: Who were the important Muslim leaders during the early 1920s?

Chacha Ji: As I told you, they were Hakim Ajmal Khan, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, Barrister Asaf Ali, Maulana Arif Hasvi and Abdulla Churiwala. Of course, there were hundreds and thousands of Mohammedans who were in this movement. But leaders of stature were only those I have mentioned. Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari had an established medical practice with some of the Muslim States and he was leading a different lifestyle.

In public life, like Maulana Abdullah Atewala or Arif Hasvi, there were hundreds of others, just as there were hundreds of Hindus or Arya Samajis, Sikhs were also there. Dr Ansari’s nephew Faridul Haq Ansari was also one of our prominent members. He was also a member of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee for twenty years or so.

Sharma: Up to 1918, the membership of the Congress was very much restricted to the classes like lawyers, doctors, and others. After 1920, do you think the Congress was able to attract the common man into its fold?

Chacha Ji: Well, I came to Delhi only in 1921, when I was hardly seventeen or eighteen years old. The Congress movement had caught the public mind, the common man, whether he was Hindu or a Mohammedan, was ready to fight for the freedom of the country. In the course of time, when parleys between Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi started, things started deteriorating gradually and there came to be two camps, Hindu and Mohammedan. And it appeared as if the bargaining was being done. Earlier there was not a trace or sign of the emerging two camps.

Sharma: Say in 1921, what was the network of the Congress organisation? You had the District Congress Committee?

Chacha Ji: Yes.

Sharma: Did you have mohalla Congress Committees also?

Chacha Ji: No, we did not have anything else except the District Congress Committee, consisting of thirteen members. The Congress movement was going on in a subtle way, it was slowly gaining ground and momentum. Everyone was thinking that there should be some organisation to fight the British Government. That is all. Otherwise, we did not have much of a regular organisation. It was only the District Congress Committee.

Sharma: Approximately what would be the number of basic ‘four-anna members’ of the Congress in Delhi at that time?

Chacha Ji: I think it was hardly a few hundred, and after 1921 it increased. In those days the population of Delhi was only three and a half lakhs, when we were campaigning for four-anna members of the Congress. It was not a very regular organisation but gradually we could have a few thousand members.

Sharma: Mr Jauhar, were you ever engaged in collecting money for the Tilak Swaraj Fund?

Chacha Ji: I was too young in those days. Tilak died in 1920 and I came here only in 1921.

Sharma: The Congress had started a Fund at the Nagpur Congress and called it the Tilak Swaraj Fund. You do not remember?

Chacha Ji: Yes. But it did not get much prominence in Delhi, as far as I can remember.