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Episode: The Poet Who Toppled The British Empire

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:43:53

Episode Shownotes

India, 1930. Sarojini Naidu is marching towards a British-controlled saltwork; behind her is a long column of protestors all dressed in white. The great campaigner for India's Independence, Gandhi, is now in jail. In his place, he's chosen Naidu to lead this movement against the hard and fearsome British Empire.

Naidu and her marchers want change, and they want to achieve it peacefully. India's fate, they believe, depends on a non-violent path to resistance. Today, there will be violence. But it won't come from them. This is the final episode in a four-part series about how to succeed without being a jerk. This episode is based on David Bodanis' forthcoming book How To Change The World, which is scheduled to be published in late 2025.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this episode of "Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford," the focus is on Sarojini Naidu, a pivotal leader in India's independence movement. Leading a non-violent protest march to a British saltworks in 1930 while Mahatma Gandhi was imprisoned, Naidu exemplified peaceful resistance despite facing armed opposition. Her journey from disillusionment with British culture at Cambridge to advocating for civil disobedience after witnessing atrocities like the Amritsar massacre highlights her transformation into a determined activist. Naidu's efforts aimed to expose the injustices of British rule, ultimately contributing to the global awareness of India's independence struggle and inspiring future non-violent movements around the world.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Poet Who Toppled The British Empire) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_03
Pushkin.

00:00:17 Speaker_00
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00:00:50 Speaker_03
London, the 1st of July, 1909. It's South Kensington, a quiet but immensely wealthy neighbourhood, full of grand townhouses, even mansions.

00:01:02 Speaker_03
This particular evening, a retired army officer, William Hutt Curzon Wiley, is attending a grand reception at the palatial Imperial Institute, celebrating his efforts assisting students from India

00:01:19 Speaker_03
As the evening draws to a close, Curzon Wiley leaves the venue and begins to walk down the elegant steps of the Imperial Institute.

00:01:30 Speaker_03
Suddenly, a young Indian man in gold-rimmed spectacles steps forward, raises a pistol, and shoots him twice in the face. As the old man sinks to the floor, his assailant keeps shooting. A Parsi doctor rushes to help.

00:01:47 Speaker_03
The young man turns, aims, and kills him too. The assassin was acting alone. But he wasn't the only person to feel that the only way to break the British occupation of India was with a violent uprising.

00:02:07 Speaker_03
The assassin lived in a house in North London with dozens of other young Indian men. They'd been practising violent resistance together, how to fire a rifle, how to make weapons. how to evade the police.

00:02:22 Speaker_03
One of those housemates, a man called Byron, wrote a letter to the Times of London, supporting the assassin. Byron secretly visited him in prison, then fled the country. The assassination had been senseless.

00:02:40 Speaker_03
No matter how passionately you opposed the British Empire, Curzon Wiley was a harmless old man. The assassin had killed him in cold blood, and a bystander who'd only tried to help.

00:02:53 Speaker_03
And would a violent murder prompt the British to rethink their role in India, or to crack down? But this cautionary tale isn't about the assassin or about his sympathiser Byron.

00:03:09 Speaker_03
It's about someone who found a different way to bring about revolutionary change. Byron's sister, a woman called Sarojini. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. She's a slight woman, not even five feet tall.

00:03:56 Speaker_03
The long end of her sari is pulled over her head. The expression on her face is apprehensive. There's a long row of marchers behind her, all wearing white. They followed Sarojini Naidu to the coast to make salt.

00:04:14 Speaker_03
But they've stopped now, outside a British-controlled salt work on the northwest coast of India.

00:04:21 Speaker_03
The Arabian Sea shimmers just a few hundred yards ahead, but the marchers' path is blocked by the barbed wire that's wrapped around the salt works, and by 60 policemen, all holding steel-tipped clubs.

00:04:36 Speaker_03
And there are soldiers, too, with heavy rifles pointed at the marchers. The year is 1930, 21 years after the assassination in South Kensington. The great campaigner for India's independence from the British Empire, Mahatma Gandhi, is in jail.

00:04:56 Speaker_03
The successor he's chosen to lead India's independence movement is Sarojini Naidu. Naidu and her marchers want vast change against a hard opponent, and they want it without violence.

00:05:14 Speaker_03
Sarojini has decisively rejected the murderous approach that her brother Biran endorsed. India's fate, Naidu believes, depends on a non-violent path to resistance. She steps forward. Her marches follow. There will be violence, to be sure.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
But it won't come This is the final episode in our series inspired by the work of David Badanis. This story comes from his forthcoming book, How to Change the World, Lessons from Three People Who Did.

00:05:53 Speaker_03
When David first told me Naidu's story, I was fascinated. Sarojini Naidu was an unlikely revolutionary. When she was growing up in the 1880s, her family worshipped England.

00:06:08 Speaker_03
In her childhood home in Hyderabad, volumes of Shakespeare and Wordsworth filled their shelves. Stories of Britain's military and intellectual heroes came up frequently in conversation.

00:06:21 Speaker_03
Servants might speak native languages, but with her own brothers and sisters, Naidoo said, it was considered the height of ignorance and misfortune not to be acquainted with English. She grew up believing it was fair for Indians to be colonised.

00:06:39 Speaker_03
By that time, Britain had controlled India for generations. That control was more forceful in some parts of the country, with garrisons of troops with machine guns and artillery at hand.

00:06:50 Speaker_03
In other areas, British control was wielded indirectly, through local princes who were ostensibly in power, but who knew they had to do what the local British representatives wanted. And Naidu thought this was a fine thing.

00:07:08 Speaker_03
As one Hindu elder she looked up to explained, man for man, the English are better than ourselves. They have a higher standard of duty, higher notions of organised work and discipline. As a teenager, Naidu got a scholarship to study in Cambridge.

00:07:29 Speaker_03
When she landed in Britain in 1896, just 17 years old and terribly shy, she discovered even more reasons to look up to the British. There were underground tubes for trains that cut through the very soil beneath her feet.

00:07:47 Speaker_03
There were complex vehicles that propelled themselves without horses. The future had arrived. Everything seemed incredible. She took the train on to Cambridge, where she was going to study at the women's college, Girton.

00:08:02 Speaker_03
After her first day, she wrote to her boyfriend at home, effectively her fiancé, and told him, ''Everybody makes a pet of me, ''though I've been here only a few hours. ''You see, I am by far the youngest.'' And a curiosity.

00:08:19 Speaker_03
She was touched when the girls invited her for bicycle trips to the all-male colleges.

00:08:25 Speaker_03
Those bicycles were a revolutionary invention, giving women a real sense of independence for the first time, even if senior faculty would ride alongside as chaperones.

00:08:37 Speaker_03
Even more exciting than the bicycles was getting to meet the male students, the best of whom might rule her country one day. She wrote to her family breathlessly about how they were so educated and so civilised.

00:08:56 Speaker_03
Everything might have stayed like that, with Naidoo remaining a proud subject of Queen Victoria's empire. It turned out that although women at Cambridge could attend lectures and take exams, they weren't allowed to receive degrees.

00:09:14 Speaker_03
If a woman studied biology, for example, she might be top in the exams, but since she wouldn't get a diploma, she could never go on to become a doctor.

00:09:25 Speaker_03
One energetic young classics lecturer at Naidoo's college, a woman named Catherine Jax Blake, was fed up with this system. She was a suffragette and she thought women should have the same rights as everyone else.

00:09:40 Speaker_03
She lobbied successfully to have the university vote on changing their policy. A date was set in May. Undergraduates couldn't vote, but male faculty and alumni could. And special trains were arranged to bring former students from London to Cambridge.

00:10:02 Speaker_03
By early afternoon on May the 21st, voting day, over 1,000 voters had passed through the Senate House. There was a crush of many thousand more students pressed outside, mostly men, a few women.

00:10:19 Speaker_03
Just as the result was to be announced, a group of students on the roof of Caius College across the way mockingly let out the sound of a vigorous cock crow. This was the signal, wrote one witness, for the commencement of operations.

00:10:38 Speaker_03
Occupants of the front rooms at Caius immediately began to hang out banners that mocked women. Other male students leaned out of an upstairs window and started lowering a papay-maché figure of a woman, life-size. An effigy.

00:10:54 Speaker_03
They'd made it with bright red hair, looking silly in a cap and gown. Another group of students, at another upstairs window, brought out another effigy. This time of a woman straddling that symbol of female freedom, a bicycle.

00:11:12 Speaker_03
They'd torn her dress off so she was exposed humiliatingly in her underwear. And they'd painted the underwear bright blue so no one could miss it. Down below, the men started jeering. When the result was announced, women would not be granted degrees.

00:11:32 Speaker_03
Pandemonium broke loose. The bicyclist effigy figure was lowered to the ground. Hundreds of undergraduate men struggled forward to attack it, tearing at its exposed body. Then they put it on top of a cab and went on a journey round the town.

00:11:49 Speaker_03
Crowds of male students and graduates ran alongside, blowing horns and yelling out. The rest of the men at the Senate House vote started running through the town too. Women everywhere were groped or pressed up against walls.

00:12:04 Speaker_03
Others were tugged into the mob and flung around for fun. Seemingly every man on the street was rabid, wild. These were the future rulers of Naidoo's land. Now, they were humiliating every woman they could catch.

00:12:22 Speaker_03
A large group of men ended up outside another women's college, where they were shouting obscenities and throwing fireworks into the girls' windows. They rammed fragments of the effigy through the college gates.

00:12:37 Speaker_03
They stayed for hours, setting up a bonfire in front of the building, trapping the women inside.

00:12:44 Speaker_03
Meanwhile, an even bigger group of students, police estimates were in the thousands, brought other life-sized female effigies to the main market square in Cambridge.

00:12:56 Speaker_03
One was of the tutor at Naidoo's college, Catherine Jex Blake, the one who'd dared petition for the degrees. These effigies, too, were stripped and mutilated before being burnt in another bonfire. The men kept on adding fresh fuel.

00:13:16 Speaker_03
The flames and the jeering went on long into the night. Cambridge's women had merely asked to be awarded the degrees their studies and examinations deserved. They hadn't even succeeded.

00:13:40 Speaker_03
And yet the very idea of this sparked hour after hour of harassment, humiliation and riot. Cautionary Tales will return in just a moment.

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00:15:09 Speaker_03
On the morning of May the 21st, Naidoo had been polite and trusting, thinking British culture the pinnacle of civilisation around the world. But by the end of the day, her British idol had fallen.

00:15:26 Speaker_03
What right did men like that have to control her people at all? Over the next few days, it became clear she had to leave Cambridge. Something deeper became clear, too. She couldn't be a pawn in this empire any more.

00:15:49 Speaker_03
Sarojini went to London and spent time with a number of writers, including the great Irish poet Yeats, who happened to be her friend's roommate.

00:15:59 Speaker_03
They met at home for drinks and conversation, and she was impressed with the way he was inspiring Irish nationalists with the force and eloquence of his writing. Why should Ireland be subservient to England? For that matter, why should India?

00:16:19 Speaker_03
Naidoo was inspired, too, and encouraged that someone of Yeats's stature would take a young Indian woman seriously. The Cambridge riots had shown her a dark truth about the alleged superiority of the British.

00:16:36 Speaker_03
But London reminded her that the British weren't all bad. Many Britons were open to reason, to the arguments for fairness. Sarojini Naidu was 19 years old when she returned to India and determined to push back against British rule.

00:16:58 Speaker_03
In Hyderabad, however, her partner Govindu expected they would quickly get married and start having children, which they did. Soon, she was a housewife, her whole life enclosed.

00:17:14 Speaker_03
She started writing poetry, but with little children, it was hard to find much time. There was a veranda with a swing where she could look out, decorated cages with chirping songbirds inside

00:17:30 Speaker_03
Everyone thinks I'm so nice and cheerful, she wrote, all the banal things, but I've merely taught myself to be commonplace. Everything is slipping away.

00:17:45 Speaker_03
After all she'd seen in England, after all that she recognized was still going on in India, it felt terrible to be passive. Right outside Hyderabad, for example, there was a large British military base.

00:18:06 Speaker_03
Just by their presence, they made sure that industries and rail lines were arranged to benefit investors in England, not farmers or other workers in India. She had to find another way to work toward freedom from British rule.

00:18:24 Speaker_03
Could politics be the answer? When her children were older, Sarojini Naidu immersed herself in the Indian National Congress, a group dominated by Bengali intellectuals who politely, calmly lobbied the British government for fairer treatment.

00:18:44 Speaker_03
It's there where, despite her terrible shyness and slight stature, Naidoo discovered that speaking out in public, she felt different. What is it that we demand? She called out from one podium.

00:19:01 Speaker_03
Nothing new, nothing startling, but a thing that is as old as life. You shouldn't be disinherited as exiles in your own land. The day is over when we were content to be slaves. Finally, it seemed, she'd found the right way forward.

00:19:25 Speaker_03
During the First World War, she pushed to get India to support the British cause, trusting that afterwards, in reward, the subcontinent would be awarded dominion status, that it would have more freedom from British rule as Canada and New Zealand had.

00:19:44 Speaker_03
Everything seemed agreed. London was on board. But at the last minute, just after the war ended, the British Empire's most senior representative in India, the Viceroy, undermined it all.

00:20:01 Speaker_03
there would be no relaxation of the rules and no dominion status. He wanted everything to go back to how it had been before the war. In fact, there would now be harsher rules, the rights to arrest anyone with no trial and no controls against torture.

00:20:21 Speaker_03
Indians across the continent began to protest. But the protests were disconnected, not especially organised. On the 13th of April 1919, a large crowd gathered in the Jallianwala Gardens in the centre of the old city of Amritsar in the Punjab region.

00:20:44 Speaker_03
Many were families, in town for a cattle festival. Some were meeting to discuss the new legislation. Others were just enjoying the sunny day. The garden was mostly dried out and a few acres in size.

00:21:00 Speaker_03
Since families were large, there were a lot of children, perhaps 15,000 people total. To Major General Reginald Dyer, the man in charge of the city, this wasn't local citizenry at ease, or even patriotism. It was fanaticism.

00:21:24 Speaker_03
He'd put up a handful of notices that meetings weren't allowed, but he didn't know Emirates so well and didn't realise that hardly anyone had seen them. Rather, he was insistent that proper order was not to be thwarted.

00:21:43 Speaker_03
There was a 10-foot-high stone and brick wall around most of the garden. At the one narrow entrance, he parked armoured cars sideways on, blocking any exit. Then, he and his mostly Indian troops advanced inside, 50 of them carrying heavy rifles.

00:22:09 Speaker_03
They didn't say anything, just took up position on a slight rise once they were a few yards in front of the crowd.

00:22:19 Speaker_03
A few of the Sikhs near the front with military training had a sudden, ominous feeling and tried to get families near them to begin walking out now. But this made no sense. Hardly anyone had moved when, without warning,

00:22:39 Speaker_03
Dyer had all 50 of his men open fire. Then they reloaded and fired again, and again, till the thousands of shells they had were all gone. It was the greatest massacre in the history of British India, with probably 500 or more people dead.

00:23:06 Speaker_03
As one former Prime Minister, Asquith, called it, the worst in the history of our empire from its very inception. The army justified its actions, arguing that soldiers had been firing in self-defence, faced by a violent mob.

00:23:28 Speaker_03
The response to the massacre from the authorities in London was half-hearted criticism. It was a few weeks later that the young Indian assassin gunned down a retired army officer and a good Samaritan doctor outside a reception in South Kensington.

00:23:50 Speaker_03
It's at points like this, rock bottom, that it's tempting to give up. Sarojini Naidu had been working with the Indian National Congress for over a decade, and she saw clearly that lobbying and negotiation did no good.

00:24:09 Speaker_03
Her brother Biren had endorsed random murderous violence. That was no good either. But then, what was left? Naidoo had to find a different path. And for that, she turned to Gandhi. Naidu and Gandhi had first met in 1914, and quickly became friends.

00:24:34 Speaker_03
At the time, she was already the voice of the Indian National Congress, as well as a well-reviewed poet. Gandhi would later become world famous, but back then, he was a little-known activist based in South Africa.

00:24:49 Speaker_03
Five years on, after the massacre at Amritsar, Naidu and Gandhi discussed their options. What if, instead of violence or politics, you directly oppose the way the authorities have arranged society?

00:25:07 Speaker_03
Not viciously, but so that it would make the injustice clear to everyone. What about civil disobedience of an emphatic sort? New concepts need new words. Setya is the Sanskrit for truth. Graha means to hold firmly.

00:25:31 Speaker_03
The idea behind what was now called Sechagraha is that an unjust law violates the right order of the universe. And we need to rectify that, to hold firmly to the truth, but in a manner that doesn't create new injustices.

00:25:49 Speaker_03
In short, disobey, but without violence. A fair idea that, it turns out, is incredibly hard to carry out in practice. In 1921, Gandhi and Naidu targeted the visit of the Prince of Wales to Bombay. Huge piles of imported British clothing were burned.

00:26:20 Speaker_03
And as the Prince was welcomed into the port, he found himself surrounded by protesters, politely but firmly demonstrating their disapproval of British rule.

00:26:32 Speaker_03
What the protesters hadn't reckoned with was the offence taken by the locals taking part in the welcoming ceremonies. How could an honoured guest be treated so? As those locals left, fights broke out between them and the demonstrators.

00:26:50 Speaker_03
And when the police showed up, the fights got worse. Once a mob is roused, it's hard to stop. Soon, almost anyone in Western clothes was being attacked. The police counterattacked. Fighting of all sorts spread and lasted for four days.

00:27:11 Speaker_03
By the end, dozens of innocent people were dead. It was awful. The reverse of everything Naidu had hoped for. The vision for Sechagraha was in jeopardy.

00:27:28 Speaker_03
And with Gandhi often in jail, everyone was looking to Sarojini Naidu to help them figure out what to do next. Cautionary tales will return. A few years after the debacle in Bombay, Naidu was elected head of the Indian National Congress.

00:28:00 Speaker_03
She was the first Indian woman to reach that position. Responsibility for Indian independence sat heavily on her shoulders. There had been little progress. The country was still run for the benefit of the British at the expense of Indians.

00:28:19 Speaker_03
One senior British politician was at least honest about it. I know it is said at missionary meetings that we've conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain.

00:28:39 Speaker_03
We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should hold it. In 1930, the leadership of the Indian National Congress decided to try to reclaim one small piece of what Indians had lost under British rule. Salt.

00:29:01 Speaker_03
For centuries, salt had been free, with anyone able to collect whatever they needed. But when Britain took over, they also took over salt production and put a tax on it.

00:29:15 Speaker_03
78 members of Gandhi's ashram walked 200 miles to one of the big salt-making regions on the coast. In April, however, when the marchers reached the sea, the British Viceroy, Irwin, had a remarkable response. He did nothing.

00:29:35 Speaker_03
The marchers collected their salty mud. Press cameras caught the images. There was Naidoo in her long sari. Gandhi in his usual loincloth with a shawl over his shoulders. The point of non-violent resistance was to have something to resist.

00:29:58 Speaker_03
Without a response from the authorities, what were they supposed to do? Gandhi collected more mud. So did most of the marchers. Still, Erwin did nothing. Over the next few days, journalists began to mock the marchers.

00:30:17 Speaker_03
All they saw were Indians milling about on a beach. Soon, the journalists left. And then, almost everyone else left, too. Irwin had made the marchers look like fools. A few weeks later, he had Gandhi arrested.

00:30:37 Speaker_03
Quickly, at night, bright flashlights in the face, armed troops, Much of the rest of the nationalist leadership was thrown into jail too. Naidoo, clearly, was next. And support for their movement was waning.

00:30:57 Speaker_03
Indians had had enough of British excuses, and now enough of the Indian National Congress saying there was some magical Satyagraha, a third way to get the freedom they wanted. Some people were calling for more violence.

00:31:14 Speaker_03
Naidu was convinced that would only lead to more repression. She realised that she didn't have long to act.

00:31:21 Speaker_03
She sent out messages to people she trusted, trying to get journalists interested in a new protest, and then hurried back to the coast, to a hamlet called Dharasana.

00:31:34 Speaker_03
There, Britain had built a large saltworks, where salt was collected from large lagoons, then purified and stacked in high pyramids. The mudflats were surrounded by barbed wire and deep, moat-like ditches.

00:31:51 Speaker_03
By the time Naidu got there, danger was in the air. Some nearby protesters were being led by Gandhi's son, Manilal, who was excitable and prone to violence. The salt works were guarded by police with their vicious clubs and troops with rifles.

00:32:12 Speaker_03
They were itching for an excuse to use them. Naidu spent long days going from one small group of protesters to another, explaining their purpose. They weren't just there to get salt.

00:32:26 Speaker_03
They were there to expose the unfairness of taxes paid by Indians to keep Britons in luxury. If there was violence, that violence is all the world would see. Each marcher's self-control was indispensable.

00:32:44 Speaker_03
If even a few acted out, it would be like Amritsar. It would become fair for the soldiers to shoot back. Naidoo warned the marchers that the police would be violent. You will be beaten, she said, but you must not resist. You must not even raise a hand.

00:33:07 Speaker_03
Britons would be watching. The world would be watching. All the forces of the universe were watching this isolated hamlet and beach.

00:33:20 Speaker_03
It might seem to be just a speck on the Gujarat coast, but if they could remain non-violent, they could make it the most important place on earth. If anyone wished to step back now, they should feel no shame.

00:33:36 Speaker_03
But for the others, they had to show the world what British rule really meant. On Wednesday, May the 21st, they went ahead. Naidu was at the front. Gandhi's son, Manilal, wasn't far behind. It was terrifying as they got close.

00:34:00 Speaker_03
And Naidu started a group chant. Long live the revolution. The peaceful revolution. Before Naidu's marchers could reach the barbed wire, scores of Indian police rushed forward, wielding clubs.

00:34:21 Speaker_03
They rained down on some protesters' heads with sickening crunches, cracking skulls. Men fell bleeding. But the next row of marchers calmly continued. accepting the same beating. When they refused to fight back, the police became enraged.

00:34:42 Speaker_03
They kept beating people, stamping on them, leaving dozens and then hundreds writhing on the ground. It only came to an end at noon, when Naidoo herself was arrested. 320 marchers had been seriously wounded. Many were still unconscious.

00:35:10 Speaker_03
The British government announced a few days later that nothing had happened, that there had been some slight confusion at Dharasana that day, but no shots were fired, and at most four people were wounded.

00:35:26 Speaker_03
Viceroy Irwin wrote to the king, how amusing it was. It all was peaceful, easy, just. And there, perhaps, the story might have ended. Except that Naidu's attempts to draw journalists to Dharasana had succeeded.

00:35:52 Speaker_03
One man, an American from the Midwest, had made it along. Just one. But he worked for United Press, an American wire service that sent articles to over 1,000 newspapers worldwide.

00:36:10 Speaker_03
He had seen everything, and his reports were read by tens of millions around the globe. The heart went out of the British establishment. A few diehards said how preposterous it was that Indians thought non-violence could make any real change.

00:36:31 Speaker_03
Didn't they realise it would never work in Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Soviet Union? But that was the point. Most Britons were proud their nation was nothing like those dictatorships. That was what Naidu was brilliantly banking on.

00:36:50 Speaker_03
that if violence was the only way to keep India submitting to British rule, then the British didn't want it. And it worked. More and more Britons questioned what their government was doing in India.

00:37:08 Speaker_03
And a few years later, after the Second World War, Prime Minister Clement Attlee's post-war government granted India its independence. That alone would be a staggering achievement. 350 million people finally free from colonial rule.

00:37:26 Speaker_03
But similar freedom campaigns spread around the world. To Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in America, to Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa, to women's rights and disability rights, and much else.

00:37:45 Speaker_03
Sarojini Naidu and Gandhi found their third way and then they shared it. This powerful, gentler path to transform nations. That finishes our series of four episodes, inspired by my friend David Bedanus's book, The Art of Fairness.

00:38:18 Speaker_03
The story of Sarojini Naidu is told in his forthcoming volume, How to Change the World. Now, all of the stories have been grappling with the question we dealt with right at the start, with the American baseball manager, Leo DeRocha.

00:38:32 Speaker_03
He was famous for saying, nice guys finish last. Well, David was watching DeRocha at his prime as a manager. David is back in the studio with me now. David, nice guys finish last. What do we think about whether that statement holds up?

00:38:49 Speaker_02
There was a real lot of what de Rocher was saying that was true. Through most of that summer, when I was there watching them, he succeeded. Nice guys do finish last almost all the time. If you're only nice, if you're only polite, you're like a doormat.

00:39:05 Speaker_02
You get walked all over all the time.

00:39:08 Speaker_03
and so need to be a bit tougher. But that doesn't mean going to the other extreme.

00:39:13 Speaker_02
Well, see, that's the whole thing. Remember Naidoo's brother that you were talking about in the assassination in London in 1909, the one that he supported. He went to an extreme. It's kind of a logical opposite.

00:39:25 Speaker_02
Oh, being nice and polite hasn't gotten us anywhere for freedom from England. So we're going to shoot an old guy in the face and that'll work. Exactly. They're going way too far.

00:39:33 Speaker_02
The Indian National Congress used to begin their meetings in the 1890s and 1900 by singing God Save the Queen.

00:39:40 Speaker_02
They actually did because they thought if they were really, really, really polite, the nice people in Britain would forget the fact that they look differently and would be nice to them.

00:39:47 Speaker_02
This is a case where de Roche is sort of right, purely being nice. The British establishment will keep on going indefinitely. But the temptation to go to the opposite extreme, that's what we have to fight.

00:39:58 Speaker_02
The Russian revolution was about as violent a revolution as you can get. The result was Lenin and Stalin. People get into that mood. It's easy to overshoot.

00:40:07 Speaker_03
Right. So you need to find a middle way. And that is really what these tales have been exploring. So Darosha lost to a baseball banisher who knew how to keep control, but he wasn't a bully.

00:40:17 Speaker_03
And the Empire State Building went up faster than any other skyscraper of its time, with its builders keeping that ethos. Firm but fair. They trust but verify. They checked. And I like that.

00:40:30 Speaker_02
But there's a problem.

00:40:32 Speaker_03
There's always a problem.

00:40:33 Speaker_02
What is the problem? The problem? Well, the thing is, the idea is a great one. I've loved writing these books that show this firm but fair inaction. Your books show good ways of acting also.

00:40:44 Speaker_02
But the thing is, your books also show the great ingenuity people need to make these principles work. We have these ideas. We know what we're supposed to do. Turning it into action is hard. Do you saw it in these four episodes?

00:40:56 Speaker_03
Absolutely. I mean, the struggle, for example, that Naidu and Gandhi had when they organized this protest of the Prince of Wales, the future king, coming to India. And it just got out of control.

00:41:09 Speaker_03
So it's easy to say, oh, you know, we're going to protest in a nonviolent way. But actually, those protests became incredibly violent. Or one of the stories that really explored this so elegantly was William Bly.

00:41:22 Speaker_03
the captain who suffered the mutiny on the bounty. And I found it so interesting that the challenge that he faced was that his approach worked in some contexts, but the context kept changing. And he couldn't adapt to the context. He couldn't adapt.

00:41:36 Speaker_02
That's what happens. You vow, OK, I'm going to be calm. I'm OK. I'm going to be calm. And then your kids are crying at 9 p.m. and you really want them to go to bed and you become less calm. We know what we should do, but actually carrying it out is hard.

00:41:48 Speaker_02
So in a sense, when we do books of instructions, we need meta-instructions also. Here's the instructions. Here's the principles. Now here's how to apply it when times are rough.

00:41:58 Speaker_03
And that links into a couple of things we hear a lot in cautionary tales. So one of the things that people really need is this alertness to what is going on around them and this responsiveness to feedback.

00:42:09 Speaker_03
So rather than just setting their course and following the course that they planned all along, it's never going to be right first time. They've got to have that opportunity to spot that something's going wrong.

00:42:20 Speaker_03
And a lot of the disasters that happen in cautionary tales are ultimately because of broken feedback loops. Something's going wrong and the people with the ability to make change don't get told or they're not listening.

00:42:32 Speaker_03
And then the other thing is just preparing yourself for something going wrong, mentally rehearsing that.

00:42:38 Speaker_03
I mean, that's something that Paul Starrett, for example, who was the project manager on the Empire State Building, he did a great job of thinking through all the things that could go wrong and working out how he was going to deal with them.

00:42:52 Speaker_03
Whereas William Bly he never quite seemed to be able to think that through or to think ahead. Even when stuff had gone wrong and then it had started going right again, he wasn't able to go, okay, hmm, you know, I had a near miss.

00:43:03 Speaker_03
How am I going to make sure the things don't fall apart next time?

00:43:06 Speaker_02
I think that's probably our best practical solution. Practice it and imagine it going wrong. My mother used to say, David, if you want to get to know somebody well, go on a trip, but have something go wrong. Then you'll see how people respond.

00:43:20 Speaker_02
It's sort of like theatrically acting out the different ways things can go wrong. If the military says, do this, and everything will act perfectly, you forget the enemy has a vote, the environment has a vote, chance has a vote.

00:43:33 Speaker_02
But if we practice it a little bit, say, OK, what will I do when I'm a bit stressed here? What will I do when I'm a bit tired? Then when it actually comes into action, you at least have a better chance.

00:43:43 Speaker_03
David, these are just amazing stories, amazing insights. Thank you so much for bringing them to us. With pleasure.

00:43:48 Speaker_03
David Badanus's forthcoming book, including the life story of Sarojini Naidu, is How to Change the World, Lessons from Three People Who Did. It is scheduled to come out in 2025, and of course you can reserve a copy in advance.

00:44:03 Speaker_03
Just check out our website. If you can't wait, David's many other books, including The Art of Fairness, well, they're available wherever books are sold. Portionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

00:44:21 Speaker_03
This miniseries is based on David Badanus's book, The Art of Fairness, the power of decency in a world turned mean, and it was written with David Badanus himself. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

00:44:38 Speaker_03
The show is produced by Alice Fiennes with Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script.

00:44:49 Speaker_03
Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

00:44:57 Speaker_03
The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Bette Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

00:45:13 Speaker_03
It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It does really make a difference to us.

00:45:24 Speaker_03
And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

00:45:37 Speaker_00
The holiday season is back, which means it's a time for giving. Subaru and its retailers believe in giving back to those who need it most. For the past 17 years, Subaru has made the act of buying a Subaru during the holiday season an act of love.

00:45:51 Speaker_00
When you purchase or lease a new Subaru during the Subaru Share the Love event, Subaru and its retailers donate a minimum of $300 to charity.

00:46:00 Speaker_00
By the end of this year's event, Subaru and its retailers will have donated nearly $320 million to national and hometown charities. To learn more, go to Subaru.com slash share. Subaru, more than a car company.