Abbas Tyabji
Abbas Tyabji and Mahatma Gandhi in 1934
Abbas Tyabji (1853 – June 9, 1936) was an Indian freedom fighter from Gujarat, who once served as the Chief Justice of the (Baroda) Gujarat High Court. Mahatma Gandhi appointed Tyabji, at age seventy-six, to replace him as leader of the Salt Satyagraha in May, 1930 after Gandhi’s arrest.[1] Tyabji was arrested soon afterward and imprisoned by the British Indian Government. Gandhi and others respectfully called Tyabji the “Grand Old Man of Gujarat”.[2][3]
A Sulaimani Bohra Muslim and grandson of the merchant prince Mullah Tyab Ali Bhai Mian, Abbas Tyabji was educated in England, where he lived for eleven years. He was an early proponent of women’s rights, supporting women’s education and social reform. He broke with the prevailing custom of the times by disregarding purdah restrictions and sending his daughters to school.[4]
His nephew, Salim Ali, states that before 1919 Tyabji:
Though a moderate nationalist at heart, he would stand no adverse criticism of the British as a people, or of the Raj, and even a mildly disparaging remark about the King-Emperor or the royal family was anathema to him. . . If he had any strong sentiments about Swadeshi he certainly didn’t show it by precept or example. . . This being so, he naturally disagreed vehemently with Gandhiji and his methods of political mass agitation. . . In other respects his moderate but simmering nationalism and his absolute integrity and fairness as a judge were widely recognized and lauded, even by leftist Congressmen and anti-British extremists.[5]
At the time, he was seen as a model of Britishness, leading a Western lifestyle and wearing impeccably tailored English suits.[6] All of that changed after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, when he was appointed by the Indian National Congress as chairman of an independent fact-finding committee. He cross-examined hundreds of eyewitnesses and victims of the atrocities committed by Reginald Dyer, reacting with “nausea and revulsion.” That experience drove him to become a loyal follower of Gandhi, giving strong support to the cause of the Indian National Congress.[5]
Leaving his Western style aristocratic life behind, he adopted many of the symbols of the Gandhi movement, burning his English clothes and spinning and wearing khadi.[6] He traveled around the country in third class railway carriages, staying in simple dharamsalas and ashrams, sleeping on the ground and walking miles preaching non-violent disobedience against the British Indian government. He continued this new lifestyle well past the age of seventy, including several years in British jails.[5] In 1928, he supported Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in the Bardoli Satyagraha, which included a boycott of British cloth and goods. Tyabji’s daughter, Sohaila, remembered loading a bullock cart with the family’s foreign garments, onto which were loaded all her mother’s “best Irish linen, bedspreads, table covers… “, her father’s “angarkha, chowghas and English suits” and Sohaila’s own “favourite caps of silk and velvet”, all given to be burnt.[3]
