6 - Tilak’s Radical Innocence: Mercy, Sedition, and the State Trial

Summary

This chapter focuses on the Noncooperation Movement (1920–1922) and, in particular, the role played by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The NCM was the largest political movement for swaraj that India had ever seen. As the leader of this movement, Gandhi would demand noncooperators refuse mercy, and if necessary, sacrifice their lives in pursuit of political freedom. For Gandhi, it was only by reclaiming the right to die a political death that the satyagrahi could finally escape the label of the criminal and the category of rebellion. The chapter studies the place of mercy in Gandhian thought by paying close attention to his response to the Amritsar Massacre, his public speeches and writings, and his performance in his trial for sedition in 1922. As I argue, by embracing guilt and rejecting mercy, Gandhi threatened to finally explode the political conditions upon which imperial sovereignty had been organized.