The little grey woman saw me looking at the picture. "It's Gandhi," she said excitedly in a broad Lancashire accent. "My friend saw him when he came to our mill town!" We were in the Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy exhibition in London's British Library, and I wasn't surprised to find Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi there. The exhibition's purpose was to stress that the rights of man received formal legal recognition only when England's King John conceded the Charter of Runnymede to his rebellious barons 800 years ago. But the point to emerge was that even if Magna Carta competes with the English language as Britain's greatest export, the fight for freedom has been carried out by individuals of courage in every age.
The massive, meticulously organized display of books, pictures, coins, seals, statues and other artefacts testifies to that struggle. A couple up from Portsmouth warned us to wear sturdy shoes: they had spent two hours tramping from showcase to showcase. We spent three and must confess to being physically too tired towards the end to do full justice to the nine rooms. But it was clear there was little merit in Dean Acheson's jibe that Britain had lost an empire without finding a role. The role of inspiring not merely Magna Carta but also the fundamental rights enshrined in India's Constitution, the American Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights had never been lost.
Much of this is a question of faith. As a British chief justice, Lord Bingham, put it, "the significance of Magna Carta lay not only in what it actually said, but in what later generations claimed and believed it has said". That could make it a dangerous proposition, explaining why in 1947 the British Colonial Office rejected a plea for annual Magna Carta Day celebrations throughout the empire. It feared "ill-disposed colonial politicians" with great enthusiasm for something they hadn't read "but which they presume to contain guarantees of every so-called 'right' they might be interested that moment in claiming" would exploit the myth. The American War of Independence demonstrated such misguided colonials didn't have to be black, brown or yellow. Europeans in India could also be recalcitrant. On display is The Humble Petition of the British Subjects residing in the Province of Bengal, Behar and Orissa and their Several Dependencies submitted on February 26, 1779 demanding the "inherent, unalienable and indefeasible" right under Magna Carta to trial by jury.
The petition concerned a public works department superintendent called James Creassy accused of assault, battery and illegal detention against two Indian carpenters. Creassy and his servant had apparently locked up the men and beaten them with rattan canes. The Supreme Court in Fort William had limited jury trial in 1773. Six years later, the notorious Elijah Impey, the chief justice, ruled that Magna Carta was "merely a local influence" in Britain without wider application in the colonies. He warned that Creassy "was running his Head against a Wall, and would dash his Brains out" if he persisted. Unfortunately, the exhibition doesn't say whether Creassy saved his brains.
A certain deliberate attempt to play down Magna Carta's importance has exactly the opposite effect. Visitors are reminded the original document was only a peace treaty between the king and his warring lords. John was a notorious tyrant, and a chronicler's words when he died - "Foul as it is, Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of King John" - are prominently inscribed high on one wall. Pope Innocent III, to whom John swore fealty in 1213, declared the pact "base and shameful, null and void" and annulled it within weeks. The papal annulment provoked civil war and a French invasion followed by John's death when "Magna Carta seemed to be a failure without a future". Almost all its clauses have been repealed; those relating to forest law being transferred to a separate Forest Charter as long ago as 1217. Even in 1215, only "free men" were entitled to the document's assurance of justice and protection of the law. "Free men" were an elite minority which is why the author of 1066 and All That mischievously commented that Magna Carta was "a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)".
No doubt that was one reason for refusing universal celebrations. Magna Carta became all things to all men. The royalists cited it against Parliament and Parliament invoked it against King Charles I. Radical politicians demanding parliamentary reform as well as Chartists seeking to extend the franchise quoted the document. It was used to challenge press censorship, imprisonment without trial and even King George IV's divorce of his hapless queen. Magna Carta became even more popular after being printed in 1508, inspiring individual resistance and empowering popular protest. But like the petitioners from "Bengal, Behar and Orissa and their Several Dependencies", expatriates found to their dismay that British justice and the right to trial by jury did not always apply overseas.
The second Indian invocation seems to be the East India Company's despatch of 1854 which was "called the Magna Carta of English education in India". Then - and somewhat more justifiably - came "The Queen's Proclamation, the Magna Carta of the people of India" promising equality irrespective of race. Victoria held herself bound to Indians "by the same obligations of duty" which bound her to her other subjects and which she vowed she would "faithfully and conscientiously fulfil". Satyendranath Tagore, Behari Lal Gupta, Romesh Chunder Dutt and Surendranath Banerjea took advantage of the more pertinent commitment that her "subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices" solely on the basis of "education, ability, and integrity".
The Proclamation prompted a Congratulatory Address from the Inhabitants of Calcutta with 11 pages of signatures that the sheriff forwarded on November 22, 1858. Rajindra Mullick heads the list of Mullicks, Ghoses, Dutts and other loyal Bengalis. But it was the fierce resistance to the Ilbert Bill to give Indian magistrates the same jurisdiction over Europeans that Europeans in the Indian Civil Service enjoyed that brought powerful tribal passions to the surface. The European and Anglo-Indian Defence Association thought the measure trampled on its ancient right to trial by jury. For Kristo Das Pal, editor of the Hindoo Patriot and member of the legislative council, the Bill was Magna Carta, "the battleground on which the whole principle of legislation for India was being fought".
Sadly, the exhibition doesn't quote Gandhi on any of this. As indicated by the photograph of his South African attorney's office, his involvement is restricted to South Africa's 1914 Indian Relief Act which Gandhi hailed as "the Magna Carta of our liberty in this land". It abolished the £3 tax on former indentured labourers, validated Hindu and Muslim marriages, and enabled children in India to join their parents in South Africa. Thereby, it also confirmed the British constitutional theory "that there would be no legal, racial inequality between different subjects of the Crown" and "vindicated Passive Resistance as a lawful clean weapon".
The little grey woman knew nothing of either arena of strife. But she was from Preston, and her friend in nearby Darwin had never forgotten how as a 12-year-old girl she had watched her mother and other mill workers cheer the dark little man in a loin cloth in adjacent Nelson. There are other memories of Gandhi's visit to Lancashire: a Bolton journalist remembers asking for a message as his train passed through the town and being rewarded with perplexed silence. But 84 years after the encounter, the Darwin woman's excitement seems as infectious and enduring as Magna Carta's appeal.
