Negley FARSON (Special Correspondent for India), The Chicago Daily News:
Bombay, June 21, 1930.

Heroic, bearded Sikhs, several with blood dripping from their mouths, refusing to move or even to draw their ‘kirpans’ (sacred swords) to defend themselves from the shower of lathi blows.

Hindu women and girls dressed in orange robes of sacrifice, flinging themselves on the bridles of horses and imploring mounted police not to strike male Congress volunteers, as they were Hindus themselves.

Stretcher-bearers waiting beside little islands of prostrate unflinching, immovable Satyagrahis, who had flung themselves on the ground grouped about their women upholding the flag of Swaraj (home-rule).

These were the scenes on the Maidan Esplanade, Bombay’s splendid seafront park, where the six-day deadlock between police and Mahatma Gandhi’s followers has broken out in a bewildering brutal and stupid yet heroic spectacle.

The scene opened at six o’clock outside the Esplanade. At the police station facing the park some hundreds of yellow turbaned blue-clad, barelegged Mahratti policemen were leaning on their dreaded bamboo lathis under the command of a score of English police sergeants in topees and cotton drill.

At 6:45, marching in good formation down the tree-lined pleasant boulevard came the first detachment of volunteers. This was the ambulance unit, mostly boys and young doctors, dressed in khaki with Red Cross badges on their arms. They marched past the waiting police without a glance to the south side of the playing field, where they parked their ambulances and brought out their stretchers.

It was like nurses and orderlies preparing an operating theater.

At 7 o’clock began to come processions of white-robed volunteers bearing red, green and white banners, singing ‘We will take Swaraj – India Our Motherland.’ At the head of each walked a tiny detachment of women and girls dressed in orange robes, many garlanded with jasmine. They marched steadily on past the policemen and actually lined up behind the stretchers.

They waited there in a long front down the boulevard for the order to march on the field.

I shall not forget the scenes which followed. Darkfaced Mahratti policemen in their yellow turbans marched along in column, led by English sergeants across the field toward the waiting crowd. As they neared it the police went faster and faster. The Hindus, who may be willing to die but dread physical pain, watched them approach with frightened eyes. Then the police broke into a charge.

Many Hindus at once ran, fleeing down the streets – but most stood stock-still.

Crash! Whack! Whack! Whack! At last the crowd broke. Only the orange clad women were left standing beside the prostrate figures of crumpled men. Congress volunteer ambulance’s clanging bells, stretcher-bearers running helter-skelter across the field.

Whack! Whack! Whack!

A minute’s lull and then, with flags flying, another column of volunteers marched onto the vast green field. A column of Mahrattas marched to meet them. They clashed – a clash, a rattle, dull thuds, then the faint-hearted ran and again there was the spectacle of the green field dotted with a line of fallen bodies and again the same islands of orange clad Hindu women holding up the flags of Swaraj.

And here in the center of one of these islands sat a little knot of men, their heads bowed, submitting to a rain of lathi blows – refusing to move until on a stretcher and completely laid out. And there were stretchers within two feet of the suffering men, waiting for them.

Then came a band of fifty Sikhs – and a heroic scene. The Sikhs, as you know, are a fierce fighting brotherhood. As soon as he can raise one, every man wears a beard, which he curls around a cord or ties to his ears. The Sikhs also wear their hair long like women and curl it in a topknot under their turbans. These Sikhs were Akalis of a fanatic religious sect. They wore the kirpan, or sacred sword.

With them were fifteen of their young girls and women. The women also wore sacred swords, and although dressed in orange saris like Hindu women, they wore little cotton trousers, which reached to their tiny, sandaled feet. They were pretty girls and not so loud voiced and excited as the Hindu ladies. They simply smiled as if they liked danger, which they do.

One of them had her little baby, which she wanted to hold up before the police to dare them to come on. She laughed at me when my remark was translated that it was terrible to drag a child into this.

Coming from all districts as representatives of the fighting Punjab, these Sikhs swore they would not draw their kirpans to defend themselves, but they would not leave the field. They did not.

‘Never, never, never!’ they cried, to the terrific delight of their Hindu brothers, in Swaraj. ‘We will never retreat. We will die, we will!’ The police hesitated before hitting the Sikhs. They asked their women would they not please, please, leave the field.

‘No!’ said the women, ‘we will die with our men.’

Mounted Indian policemen who had been galloping across the field, whacking heads indiscriminately, came to a stymie when they faced the little cluster of blue Akali turbans on the slender Sikh men.

‘The Sikhs are brave men – how can we hit them?’ It was not fear, but respect.

But the police, determined to try to clear the field, at last rushed around the Sikh women and began to hit the men. I stood within five feet of a Sikh leader as he took the lathi blows. He was a short, heavily muscled man.

The blows came – he stood straight. His turban was knocked off. The long black hair was bared with the round topknot. He closed his eyes as the blows fell – until at last he swayed and fell to the ground.

No other Sikhs had tried to shield him, but now, shouting their defiance, they wiped away the blood streaming from his mouth. Hysterical Hindus rushed to him, bearing cakes of ice to rub the contusions over his eyes. The Sikh gave me a smile – and stood for more.

And then the police threw up their hands. ‘You can’t go on hitting a blighter when he stands up to you like that.’

EDITOR’S NOTE: It is difficult to imagine now the brutality of the British efforts to repress Gandhi’s nonviolence campaigns, in India or South Africa. The 1930 press release given above must surely put us in mind of the recent police suppression of various Occupy sites worldwide. A number of sources quote news dispatches about the Salt March. This extract is representative and is taken from Richard B. Gregg, The Power of Non-violence, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1934, pp. 34-37.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: James Negley FARSON (1890-1960) was a journalist and well-known writer of travel books. His father was the controversial US Civil War General James Negley. Farson attended the prestigious Andover school but gave up his university studies to become a journalist. On one of his first assignments he was sent to Russia, arriving in Saint Petersburg on the very day the Russian Revolution broke out. He was among the first Western reporters to interview Gandhi. His many dispatches of Gandhi’s campaign are a study in how positive the press was towards Gandhi, and how scathing about British repression. He numbered F. Scott Fitzgerald among his friends, wrote colorful prose, and led a colorful life. It was said that he was one of the few people who could drink Hemingway under the table.

See also a news dispatch written by Webb Miller in May 1930.