[Bapu : Mahatma Gandhi]

"He dresses like a coolie, forswears all personal advancement, lives practically on the air and is a pure visionary"

The fact that Gandhiji had not taken part in the Home Rule agitation, nor in the negotiations which had led to the Lucknow pact between the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim league in 1916 showed that he was largely isolated from the main currents of Indian politics.

Of Gandhiji, Montague’s impression was of ‘a social reformer with a real desire to find grievances and to cure them not for any reasons for self advertisement, but to improve the conditions of fellowmen. 'He dresses like a coolie, forswears all personal advancement, lives practically on the air and is a pure visionary.’ The reason for his isolation from politics can be attributed to not only his self denying ordinance of participation in political agitation during the war but also of his ideas and methods which did not quite fit in with those of the two dominant groups in the Indian National Congress.

Champaran in Bihar had been seething with agrarian discontent for some time. Gandhiji did not take part in the discussion when it came up for discussion in the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in December, 1916. After the session, a peasant, Raj Kumar Shukla from Champaran, requested Gandhiji to visit the district and see things for himself. His tenacious approach proved fruitful, for after arriving in Bihar, Gandhiji learned enough to become anxious to investigate the facts for himself. With the evidence of 8000 tenants in his hands, there was no aspect of the agrarian problem with which Gandhiji was not thoroughly acquainted. Knowledgeable, persuasive and firm, he was able to make out an irresistible case for the tenants. The Government of India felt perturbed at Gandhiji’s presence in Champaran and the possibilities of a Satyagraha struggle developing in the Indigo districts of Bihar. The Champaran Agrarian Committee thus appointed unanimously recommended the abolition of the oppressive ‘Tinkathia system’, and of the illegal exactions under which the tenants groaned.