For a man of indifferent health, 1922 was an extraordinarily demanding year for Rangarajan. On his release from Vellore jail 20th March he all but ran the Congress party as General Secretary. On Ist June he took on the Editorship of Young India. He was a member of the Congress Civil Disobedience Committee, set up to decide if India was ready for its renewal, and this entailed extensive travel. He took on the role of protagonist of Gandhi's views as he believed them to be, against all opponents, and was seemingly to triumph at the 37th Gaya INC Congress. So phenomenal is this burden of office that the Editors have given a whole volume to but one year. I wonder if some brief introductory biographical and political narrative might not helpfully accompany the chronology provided and whether the decision to require the reader to refer back to Volume 1 for biographical notes will work as the series proceeds.

The Volume begins with Rangarajan's remarkable Jail Diary. He was sentenced for three months, a sentence surely that ranks alongside the likes of those by Thoreau, Gramsci, Peter Wildeblood or Terry Waite. Initially he rejoiced in imprisonment: “I feel it is a delightful place, I was free and had thrown off the foreign yoke”. (p. 3) But quite soon he saw jail as “a little degraded world of itself where beasts are out to rule over beasts”. (p. 9) He had mistakenly hoped his health would improve in prison. In fact he was plagued with both asthma, particularly on one night of “real horror”, and with boils and had to spend time in the hospital wing. This was to prove even worse than solitary confinement, tormented by bed bugs, lice, mosquitoes, and with an intolerable doctor in charge: “I never thought that an educated young man could be so little-minded”. (p. 25) How did he survive? He resorted to prayer: “I hope to grow strong enough to commune with the Highest to break the prison bars”. (p. 7) Was it ignorance of Sanskrit and music that stood in the way of yoga? “In spite of strenuous prayer the vision of the true God had not yet come to me”. (p. 35) His mother's death had led him to “doubt, atheism and anarchy” (p. 46), and it seemed that his belief was still wayward. He read, the Indian classics, the Ramayana, the Tamil Kural, Robinson Crusoe and Plato's texts on Socrates. He was to finish a book on Socrates in jail and contemplated one on the martyrdom of Christ. But it seems it was his daily spell of spinning that saved him. He welcomed the company of fellow prisoners: “it is a rare privilege to live here in such strange company”. (p. 38) Political and criminal were all mixed together. He was kept apart from Andhra non-co-operators, mingled with Moplah prisoners, and got to know well the colourful Hira Singh from the Lahore Conspiracy case and the Ghadr movement. Initially Rangarajan resolved to put up with these harsh conditions and not ask for any special favours from the politicals, despite them being free of any “moral depravity”. He took pride in being a prisoner: “short of yielding up our lives, imprisonment is the fullest expression of our revolt against the evil which we seek to end”. (p. 14) The last thing they should do was seek favours from this regime: “it is to suffer unjust punishments without complaint that we have come here”. (p. 40) “If we show unhappiness over any of the rigours imposed the Government wins”. (p. 25) Even so, he admitted his resistance to any appeal was “against the inclinations of my emotions”. (p. 57). Clearly there was no likelihood of non-co-operators anticipating the dirty campaign of Sinn Fein in H Block. In time the prison administration itself relented and the politicals were removed from the close prison which housed the criminals. He was aware of how fellow prisoners ran the prison: “I think this is a slave system made self-supporting”. (p. 40) He seemed to accept capital punishment: three prisoners were executed while he was there. During the last 20 days, all the ‘politicals’ were placed in a single space which Rangarajan described as a kind of student hostel. On his release he wrote of prison as one of the happiest periods of his life. He showered praise on the jail superintendent, Major Anderson.

In jail he had to come to terms with Gandhi's controversial suspension of civil disobedience because of the atrocity at Chauri Chaura. He reflected: “the decision to let things remain in active now is wrong. To set a stale programme before the people at a time when repression is in full swing is likely to set the clock back”. (p. 66) But he came round. Maybe individual satyagraha would be as strong as civil disobedience? He even found himself speculating that we “will look regretfully back to the old regime of comparative justice and efficient, peaceful, more or less honest administration”. (p. 44) But it was he who had to address the consequences of Gandhi's decision.

Rangarajan identified three main causes in the Gandhian agenda, khaddar and the constructive programme, Hindu-Muslim unity, and non-co-operation, embracing withdrawal from government schools and colleges, lawyers from the courts, and above all, a continuing boycott of the newly reformed legislatures. And behind these was his surely misguided deification of Gandhi as leader: “a man greater than the Kaiser, greater than Napoleon of St Helena, a man of world-value, one whose fellows in history and companions in Heaven will be Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus and others of that class”. (p. 93) Admittedly, with Gandhi locked away and out of touch, Rangarajan was pragmatic enough to ascribe to Congress the right to make adjustments in strategy. He could comment on just about any event within or outside India. His was the sharpest mind that elucidated Gandhism at the time and it is a pity he never gathered these disparate thoughts in his journalism and speeches into a coherent whole. There was an almost blind faith in spinning, the means of teaching Indians self-reliance, the way of fashioning a mind-set of non-violence. But Rangarajan was always the politician, and here he also saw the way to build up a Congress electorate and, above all, prepare Indians for a renewal of civil disobedience. To raise any alternative strategy would fatally weaken “the atmosphere” that was accumulating. To recommend extending the boycott of British cloth to all British goods, for example, would merely stoke up anger. He would not brook any change: “tolerance does not mean there should be the least surrender of judgement or compromise of principle”. (p. 124)

This was sustained by a hugely optimistic view of humankind. Human nature, he believed, was naturally good, and would respond to suffering, that “the law of life is love”, “to put things in the right path we have only to apply the forces of love”. Ruefully, he had to recognise that the raj was “unsportsmanlike” in its failure to respond to the Congress withdrawal from all violence and he had to accept that brute force could usurp human nature: “we cannot be angels but certainly we strive at not being bigger-brained beasts”. (p. 277) He endorsed Gandhi's belief that the water-tight barriers between religion and politics be broken down, a need “for spiritualising our political life”. (p. 225) Liberals like Srinivasa Sastri ridiculed this faith in saintliness.

Rangarajan refused to acknowledge that the odds were increasingly against Hindu-Muslim unity. He accepted that the communal violence in Malabar was a huge set-back, together with further outbreaks in Multan. But here was another virtue of the constructive programme, its strengthening of communal ties. Amazingly, by way of endorsing the khilafat movement, he never ceased to support Turkey under Kemal Ataturk: “it rests only with India by the oceanic strength of her soul to stop Britain in her course and save Turkey”. (p. 373) He took Ataturk's deposition of the Sultan in his stride. No doubt the next volume will tell us how he took secular Ataturk's abolition of the Caliphate.

But the biggest debate within Congress was over the boycott of the Councils. Rangarajan was an unyielding opponent of Council entry. He fired off in all directions. He saw how weird it was that the Vice-Roy, Lord Reading, assumed the leadership of those ready to work the system. (The concept of ‘collaborator’ had not yet been identified.) It is curious he never mentions the non-Brahmin Justice party playing just this role in the Presidency of Madras. He mocked all attempts at constitution-making by the Moderates like Annie Besant and J R Jayakar, with some Congress leaders, like Motilal Nehru, moving in that direction. Intriguingly, he draws on the example of the First and Second Socialist Internationals to make his point: “they studiously avoided all discussion of the detailed form of organisation and concrete polices of the proposed socialist Government”. (p. 256) He also played down the importance of the Indianisation of the administration: “it matters little whether it is composed of Englishmen, Scotchmen or Indians”, providing it is clean. (p. 243) But Rangarajan was up against a formidable opponent in the Bengal Congress leader C. R. Das. Note that Das was the guru Subhas Chandra Bose, Gandhi's later most powerful opponent-who pursued a policy on the Irish model of entering the Councils to wreck them from within, deadlock versus boycott, chose. Rangarajan believed Das had got the Irish parallel wrong, it only worked there through as a result of vitality in its local institutions. Such institutions were lacking in India. In his view Das “has got out of the groove of direct war and is running along the path of Parliamentarism”. (p. 291) With the paralysis of the Councils, there would simply be Civil Service rule. This debate was thrashed out at the Calcutta AICC meeting and the December Gaya INC Congress, C. R. Das its President. Rangarajan saw a risk of India being plunged back into “its original trance” by raising this alternative to the constructive programme: “look to the villages and cooperatives, here is the making of the civil revolt, this is the real objective of the constructive programme”. (p. 359) And he was to prevail at Gaya. But in 1923 Gandhi was to give the nod to C. R. Das's Swarajist party. There is of course a massive irony that one of India's greatest practitioners of parliamentary government, both in the Madras legislatures and the Lok Sabha, was here its most brilliant opponent.

Ineluctably I suspect the editors are committed to a chronological approach. This can make for heavy reading. I favoured a thematic, dividing Rangarajan's career into three: the politics of power, his conflict with the raj and his rivals; the politics of communalism, the issues of Hindu-Muslim relationships and the challenge of the anti-Brahmin movement; the politics of principle, Rangarajan's commitment to economic and social reform. Later in the series the editors will have to find ways of editing his remarkable but very long parliamentary speeches. But we must continue to welcome and support this ambitious project.