R.H.G. Johnston, a District Officer in the Agra region of the United Provinces, produced The Truth Will Out in 1930. It represents a localised response to the civil disobedience campaign of the Indian National Congress (INC).

The period of civil disobedience lasted from 1930-34 and marked an important turning point for the INC, the largest of India’s own political parties. Guided once more by Mahatma Gandhi, the party rejected the declaration made in 1929 by Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, which proposed Dominion status for India. They also declined to attend his Round Table conferences, held to discuss the future of the sub-continent. The campaign of civil disobedience was undertaken instead, with the objective of gaining complete independence from Britain. This method of protest had distinct advantages for the INC. According to Judith Brown, the campaign ‘increased the political significance and prestige of Congress as an all-India organization, enabled it to re-forge links with a wide span of Indians operating at different political levels, and increased the leverage of its central leaders, particularly Gandhi, over their countrymen and the British’ (Brown, 1994, 274).

Beginning with Gandhi’s famous march from Sabarmati to the coast at Dandi, where he illegally produced salt in protest against government tax, the campaign was adaptable to local issues throughout India. In the United Provinces protests incorporated the picketing of shops, the breaking of forest laws, and the flying of the INC flag over schools and municipal buildings (Cell, 1992, 168). Here the government responded by declaring the INC illegal, leading to the imprisonment of around 750 members by June 1930 (Cell, 1992, 169). It was in the latter half of 1930 that the protests took on a rural dimension for the first time. United Provinces was home to the INC leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who was imprisoned in October 1930, in part for encouraging rural tenants to withhold their rents. This means of protest was widely supported, not least because a slump in agricultural prices made it difficult for tenants to pay any money in the first place. It has been argued that in Agra, even before the slump, ‘the average peasant lived at or perilously near the margin of subsistence’ (Cell, 1992, 183). The withdrawal of this money posed a direct problem for provincial government: it was via a percentage of the landlord’s rent revenue that they gained taxes from the peasantry.

District Officers, in their role as Deputy Commissioners, were responsible for the general administration of their areas. They also served as District Magistrates and were in charge of the collection of taxes. R.H.G. Johnston, therefore, would have been intimately connected with the problems posed by the INC campaign in his district. The governor of United Provinces, Sir Malcolm Hailey, also became increasingly attuned to the situation, allowing his District Officers recourse to specialist publicity officers and film propaganda as part of a publicity campaign to encourage rural landlords to act more responsibly towards their tenants (Hunt and Harrison, 1980, 192). R.H.G Johnston appears to have taken it upon himself to address the problems presented by the INC, however. His film addresses the Indian peasantry rather than landlords, and it was made in 1930, four years before Hailey’s campaign.

Ultimately, the INC proved to be the more effective propagandists. Hunt and Harrison have argued that ‘When the ban on Congress was lifted in 1934, it was the Congress workers, cycling through the countryside spreading the message that Congress rule would reduce tenant rents […], who won the support of the peasant’ (Hunt and Harrison, 1980, 192). As evidence they cite the success of the INC in the 1934 elections.