Part-I
Nationalism in India
Introduction
In India, as in Vietnam and many other colonies, the growth of modern nationalism is intimately connected to the anti-colonial movement. People began discovering their unity in the process of their struggle with colonialism. The sense of being oppressed under colonialism provided a shared bond that tied many different groups together.
The Indian National movement can be divided into three phases.
(i) 1885 – 1905 : The Moderate phase or the period of early nationalists. In this phase the vision of the Indian National Congress was dim, vague & confused. The movement was confined to a handful of the educated middle class intelligentsia who drew inspiration from western liberal and radical thought.
(ii) 1905 -1919 : The Extremist phase or the period of militant nationalists. During the second stage the Congress came out of childhood age & its aim & scope were considerably extended. It aimed at an all round development of the people’s social, cultural, economic & political ‘Swaraj’ or self government was the goal of the Congress. It adopted western revolutionary methods to get rid of western imperialism.
(iii) 1919 – 1947 : The Gandhian phase or the final phase. It was dominated by the objective of ‘Poorna Swaraj’ or complete independence to be achieved under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi by the charcteristically Indian method of non-violence & non-cooperation.
In this chapter we will deal with the third phase of the Indian National Movement.
The First world war, Khilafat & Non-cooperation
After 1919, we see the national movement spread to new areas, incorporated new social groups, and developed new modes of struggle.
Effects of First World War
(i) Increase in defence Expenditure : First of all, the war created a new economic and political situation. It led to huge increase in defence expenditure which was financed by war loans and increasing taxes : customs duties were raised and income tax introduced.
(ii) Inflation : Through the war years prices increased – doubling between 1913 and 1918 – leading to extreme hardship for the common people.
(iii) Forced Recruitment : Villages were called upon to supply soldiers, and the forced recruitment in rural areas caused widespread anger. People hoped that their hardship would end after the war was over. But that did not happen.
(iv) Famine and Influenza epidemic : In 1918-19 and 1920-21, crops failed in many parts of India, resulting in acute shortageof food. This was accompained by an influenza epidemic. According to the census of 1921, 12 to 13 million people perished as a result of famines and the epidemic.
The Idea of Satyagraha
(i) Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in January 1915. He had successfully fought the racist regime in South Africa with a novel method of mass agitation, which he called satyagraha. The idea of satyagraha emphasised the power of truth and the need to search for truth.
(ii) This could be done by appealing to the conscience of the oppressor. People – including the oppressors – had to be persuaded to see the truth, instead of being forced to accept truth through the use of violence. By this struggle, truth was bound to ultimately triumph. Mahatma Gandhi believed that this dharma of non-violence could unite all Indians.
(iii) In 1916 he travelled to Champaran in Bihar to inspire the peasants to struggle against the oppressive plantation system.
(iv) Then in 1917, he organised a satyagraha to support the peasants of the Kheda district of Gujarat. Affected by crop failure and a plague epidemic, the peasants of Kheda could not pay the revenue, and were demanding that revenue collection be relaxed.
(v) In 1918, Mahatma Gandhi went to Ahmedabad to organise a satyagraha movement amongst cotton mill workers.
The Rowlatt Act
(i) Rowlatt Act (1919) – This Act had been hurriedly passed through the Imperial Legislative Council despite the united opposition of the Indian members. It gave the government enormous powers to repress political activities, and allowed detention of political prisoners without trial for two years.
(ii) Mahatma Gandhi wanted nationwide satyagraha against such unjust laws, which would start with a hartal on 6 April.
(iii) Alarmed by the popular upsurge, and scared that lines of communication such as the railways and telegraph would be disrupted, the British administration decided to clamp down on nationalists. Local leaders were picked up from Amritsar, and Mahatma Gandhi was barred from entering Delhi.
(iv) On 10 April, the police in Amritsar fired upon a peaceful procession, provoking widespread attacks on banks, post offices and railway stations. Martial law was imposed and General Dyer took command.
Jallianwala Bagh Incident
(i) On 13 April the infamous Jallianwalla Bagh incident took place. On that day a large crowd gathered in the enclosed ground of Jallianwalla Bagh. Some came to protest against the government’s new repressive measures. Others had come to attend the annual Baisakhi fair. Being from outside the city, many villagers were unaware of the martial law that had been imposed. Dyer entered the area, blocked the exit points, and opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. His object, as he declared later, was to ‘produce a moral effect’, to create in the minds of Satyagrahis a feeling of terror and awe.
(ii) As the news of Jallianwalla Bagh spread, crowds took to the streets in many north Indian towns. There were strikes, clashes with the police and attacks on government buildings.
(iii) While the Rowlatt satyagraha had been a widespread movement, it was still limited mostly to cities and towns. Mahatma Gandhi now felt the need to launch a more broad-based movement in India.
Khilafat Movement
(i) Mahatma Gandhi was certain that no such movement could be organised without bringing the Hindus and Muslims closer together. One way of doing this, he felt, was to take up the Khilafat issue.
(ii) To defend the Khalifa’s temporal powers, a Khilafat Committee was formed in Bombay in March 1919. A young generation of Muslim leaders like the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, began discussing with Mahatma Gandhi about the possibilty of a united mass action on the issue. Gandhi saw this as an opportunity to bring Muslims under the umbrella of a unified national movement.
(iii) At the Calcutta session of the Congress in September 1920, he convinced other leaders of the need to start a non-cooperation movement in support of Khilafat as well as for swaraj.
Need of Non-cooperation
(i) In his famous Book “Hind Swaraj” (1909 )Mahatma Gandhi declared that British rule was established in India with the cooperation of Indians, and had survived only because of this cooperation. If Indians refused to cooperate, British rule in India would collapse within a year, and swaraj would come.
(ii) Gandhiji proposed that the movement should unfold in stages. It should begin with the surrender of titles that the government awarded, and a boycott of civil services, army, police, courts and legislative council, schools, and foreign goods.
(iii) Then, in case the government used repression, a full civil disobedience campaign would be launched.
(iv) Many within the Congress were, however, concerned about the proposals. They were reluctant to boycott the council elections scheduled for November 1920, and they feared that the movement might lead to popular violence.
(v) In the months between September and December there was an intense tussle within the Congress. Finally, at the Congress session at Nagpur in December 1920, a compromise was worked out and the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted.
Differing Strands within the Movement
The Movement in the towns
(i) The movement started with middle-class participation in the cities. Thousands of students left government-controlled schools and colleges, headmasters and teachers resigned, and lawyers gave up their legal practices.
(ii) The effects of non-cooperation on the economic front were more dramatic. Foreign goods were boycotted, liquor shops picketed, and foreign cloth burnt in huge bonfires. The import of foreign cloth halved between 1921 and 1922. In many places merchants and traders refused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign trade.
(iii) But this movement in the cities gradually slowed down for a variety of reasons. Khadi cloth was often more expensive than mass-produced mill cloth and poor people could not afford to buy it.
(iv) Similarly the boycott of British institutions posed a problem. For the movement to be successful, alternative Indian institutions had to be set up so that they could be used in place of the British ones. These were slow to come up. So students and teachers began trickling back to government schools and lawyers joined back work in government courts.
Rebellion in the Countryside
(i) From the cities, the Non-Cooperation Movement spread to the countryside.
(ii) In Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra – a sanyasi who had earlier been to Fiji as an indentured labourer. The peasants movement demanded reduction of revenue, abolition of begar, and social boycott of oppressive landlords.
(iii) In many places nai – dhobi bandhs were organised by panchayats to deprive landlords of the services of even barbers and washermen.
(iv) By October, the Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Baba Ramchandra, and a few others. Within a month, over 300 branches had been set up in the villages around the region.
(v) The peasant movement, however, developed in forms that the Congress leadership was unhappy with. As the movements spread in 1921, the houses of talukdars and merchants were attacked, bazaars were looted, and grain hoards were taken over.
(vi) In many places local leaders told peasants that Gandhiji had declared that no taxes were to be paid and land was to be redistributed among the poor.
(vii) In the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, a militant guerrila movement spread in the early 1920s – not a form ofstruggle that the Congress could approve.
(viii) The person who came to lead them was an interesting figure. Alluri Sitaram Raju claimed that he had a variety of special powers : he could make correct astrological predictions and heal people, and he could survive even bullet shots. Captivated by Raju, the rebels proclaimed that he was an incarnation of God. Raju talked of the greatness of Mahatma Gandhi, said he was inspired by the Non – Cooperation Movement, and persuaded people to wear khadi and give up drinking.
(ix) At the same time he asserted that India could be liberated only by the use of force, not non – violence. The Gudem rebels attacked police stations, attempted to kill British officials and carried on guerilla warfare for achieving swaraj. Raju was captured and executed in 1924, and over time became a folk hero.
Swaraj in the Plantations
(i) For plantation workers in Assam, freedom meant the right to move freely in and out of the confined space in which they were enclosed, and it meant retaining a link with the village from which they had come.
(ii) Under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859, plantation workers were not permitted to leave the tea gardens without permission, and in fact they were rarely given such permission.
(iii) When they heard of the Non – Cooperation Movement, they believed that Gandhi Raj was coming and everyone would be given land in their own villages. They, however, never reached their destination. Stranded on the way by a railway and steamer strike, they were caught by the police and brutally beaten up.
(iv) The visions of these movements were not defined by the Congress programme. They interpreted the term swaraj in their own ways, imagining it to be a time when all suffering and all troubles would be over.
Part-II
Civil Disobedience movement
(i) In February 1922, Mahatma Gandhi decided to withdraw the Non – Cooperation Movement. He felt the movement was turning violent in many places and satyagrahis needed to be properly trained before they would be ready for mass struggles.
(ii) Some leaders of Congress felt that it was important to oppose British policies within the councils, argue for reform and also demonstrate that these councils were not truly democratic. C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party within the Congress to argue for a return to council politics. But younger leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose pressed for more radical mass agitation and for full independence.
(iii) In such a situation two factors again shaped Indian politics towards the late 1920s.
(a) The first was the effect of the worldwide economic depression. Agricultural prices began to fall from 1926 and collapsed after 1930. As the demand for agricultural goods fell and exports declined, peasants found it difficult to sell their harvest & pay their revenue. By 1930, the countryside was in turmoil.
(b) Tory government in Britain constituted a Statutory Commission under Sir John Simon. Set up in response to the nationalist movement, the commission was to look into the functioning of the constitutional system in India and suggest changes.The problem was that the commission did not have single Indian member. They were all British.
(iv) When the Simon Commission arrived in India in 1928, it was greeted with the slogan ‘Go back Simon’. All parties, including the Congress and the Muslim League, participated in the demonstrations.
(v) The viceroy, Lord Irwin, announced in October 1929, a vague offer of ‘dominion status’ for India in an unspecified future, and a Round Table Conference to discuss a future constitution. This did not satisfy the Congress leaders.
(vi) In December 1929, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Lahore Congress formalised the demand of ‘Purna Swaraj’ or full independence for India. It was declared that 26 January, 1930, would be celebrated as the Independence Daywhen people were to take a pledge to struggle for complete independence.
The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement
(i) On 31 January 1930, Gandhi sent a letter to Viceroy Irwin stating eleven demands. Some of these were of general interest; others were specific demands of different classes, from industrialists to peasant.
(ii) The most stirring of all was the demand to abolish the salt tax. Salt was something consumed by the rich and the poor alike, and it was one of the most essential items of food. The tax on salt and the government monopoly over its production, Mahatma Gandhi declared, revealed the most oppressive face of British rule.
(iii) If the demands were not fulfilled by 11 March, the letter stated, the Congress would launch a civil disobedience campaign. Irwin was unwilling to negotiate.
(iv) So Mahatma Gandhi started his famous salt march accompanied by 78 of his trusted volunteers. The march was over 240 miles, from Gandhiji’s ashram in Sabarmati to the Gujarat coastal town of Dandi. The volunteers walked for 24 days, about 10 miles a day. On 6 April he reached Dandi, and ceremonially violated the law, manufacturing salt by boiling sea water.
(v) This marked the beginning of the Civil Disobedience Movement. People were now asked not only to refuse cooperation with the British, as they had done in 1921-22, but also to break colonial laws.
(vi) As the movement spread, foreign cloth was boycotted, and liquor shops were picketed. Peasants refused to pay revenue and chaukidari taxes, village officials resigned, and in many places forest people violated forest laws-going into Reserved Forests to collect wood and graze cattle.
(vii) Worried by the developments, the colonial government began arresting the Congress leaders one by one. When Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devout disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, was arrested in April 1930, angry crowds demonstrated in the streets of Peshawar, facing armoured cars and police firing. Many were killed. A month later, when Mahatma Gandhi himself was arrested, industrial workers in Sholapur attacked police posts, municipal buildings, lawcourts and railway stations – all structures that symbolished British rule. A frightened government responded with a policy of brutal repression.
(viii) In such a situation, Mahatma Gandhi once again decided to call off the movement and entered into a pact with Irwin on 5 March 1931. By this Gandhi – Irwin Pact, Gandhiji consented to participate in a Round Table Conference (the Congress had boycott the first Round Table Conference) in London and the government agreed to release the political prisoners.
(ix) In December 1931, Gandhiji went to London for the conference, but the negotiations broke down and he returned disappointed. With great apprehension, Mahatma Gandhi relaunched the Civil Disobedience Movement. For over a year, the movement continued, but by 1934 it lost its momentum.
Participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement
(i) In the countryside, rich peasant communities-like the Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh – were active in the movement. Being producers of commercial crops, they were very hard hit by the trade depression and falling prices. These rich peasants became enthusiastic supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement, organising their communities, and at times forcing reluctant members, to participate in the boycott programmes. For them the fight for swaraj was a struggle against high revenues. But they were deeply disappointed when the movement was called off in 1931 without the revenue rates being revised. So when the movement was restarted in 1932, many of them refused to participate.
(ii) The poorer peasantry were interested in the lowering of the revenue demand. As the Depression continued and cash incomes decreased the small tenants found it difficult to pay their rent to landlords. They wanted the unpaid rent to the landlord to be remitted. Apprehensive of raising issue that might upset the rich peasants and landlords, the Congress was unwilling to support ‘no rent’ campaigns in most places. So the relationship between the poor peasants and the Congress remained uncertain.
(iii) During the First World War, Indian merchants and industrialists had made huge profits and become powerful. Keen on expanding their business, they now reacted against colonial policies that restricted business activities. They wanted protection against imports of foreign goods, and a rupee-sterling foreign exchange ratio that would discourage imports. To organise business interests, they formed the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress in 1920 and the Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industries (FICCI) in 1927. Led by prominent industrialists like PurshottamdasThakurdas and G.D. Birla, the industrialists attacked colonial control over the Indian economy, and supported the Civil Disobedience Movement when it was first launched. Most businessmen came to see swaraj as a time when colonial restrictions on business would no longer exist and trade and industry would flourish without constraints. But after the failure of the Round Table Conference, business groups were no longer uniformaly enthusiastic. They were apprehensive of the spread of militant activities, and worried about prolonged disruption of business, as well as of the growing influence of socialism amongst the younger members of the Congress.
(iv) The industrial working classes did not participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement in large numbers, except in the Nagpur region. As the industrialists came closer to the Congress, workers stayed aloof. But in spite of that, some workers did participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement, selectively adopting some of the ideas of the Gandhian programme, like boycott of foreign goods, as part of their own movements against low wages and poor working conditions. But the Congress was reluctant to include workers’ demands as part of its programme of struggle, It felt this would alienate industrialists and divide the anti imperial forces.
(v) Another important feature of the Civil Disobedience Movement was the large-scale participation of women. They participated in protest marches, manufactured salt, and picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops. Many went to jail. In urban areas these women were from high-caste families; in rural areas they came from rich peasant households. Moved by Gandhiji’s call,they began to see service to the nation as a sacred duty of women. the Congress was reluctant to allow women to hold any position of authority within the organization. It was keen only on their symbolic presence.
The Limits of Civil Disobedience
(i) For long the Congress had ignored the dalits, for fear of offending the sanatanis, the conservative high-caste Hindus. But Mahamta Gandhi declared that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability was not eliminated. He called the ‘untouchables’ harijan, or the children of God, organised satyagraha to secure them entry into temples, and access to public wells, tanks, roads and schools.
(ii) But many dalit leaders were keen on a different political solution to the problems of the communtiy. They began organising themselves, demanding reseved seats in educational institutions, and a seperate electorate that would choose dalit members for legislative councils. Political empowerment, they believed would resolve the problems of their social disabilities. Dalit participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement was therefore limited, particularly in the Maharashtra and Nagpur region where their organisation was quite strong.
(iii) Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who organised the dalits into the Depressed Classes Association in 1930, clashed with Mahatma Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference by demanding separate electrorates for dalits.
(iv) Ambedkar ultimateley accepted Gandhiji’s position and the result was the Poona Pact of September 1932. It gave the Depressed Classes (later to be known as the Schedule Castes) reserved seats in provincial and central legislative councils, but they were to be voted in by the general electorate. The dalit movement, however, continued to be apprehensive of the Congress national movement.
(v) After the decline of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement, a large section of Muslims felt alienated from the Congress. From the mid-1920s the Congress came to be more visibly associated with openly Hindu religious nationalist group like the Hindu Mahasabha. As relations between Hindus and Muslims worsened, each communtiy organised religious processions with militant fervour provoking Hindu Muslim conmunal clashes and riots in various cities. Every riot deepened the distance between the two communities.
(vi) When the Civil Disobedience Movement started there was thus an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust between communities. Alienated from the Congress, large sections of Muslims could not respond to the call for a united struggle. They feared that the culture and identity of minorities would be submerged under the domination of a Hindu majority.
The Sense of collective Belonging
(i) Nationalism spreads when people begin to believe that they are all part of the same nation, when they discover some unity that binds them together.
(ii) This sense of collective belonging came partly through the experience of united struggles. But there were also a variety of cultural processes through which nationalism captured people’s imagination. History and fiction, folklore and songs, popular prints and symbols, all played a part in the making of nationalism.
(iii) It was in the twentieth century, with the growth of nationalism, that the identity of India came to be visually associatedwith the image of Bharat Mata.
(iv) The image was first created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the 1870s he wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland. Later it was included in his novel Anandamath and widely sung during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal.
(v) Moved by the Swadeshi movement, Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata.
(vi) Ideas of nationalism also developed through a movement to revive Indian folklore. In late-nineteenth-century India, nationalists began recording folk tales sung by bards and they toured villages to gather folk songs and legends.
(vii) In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore himself began collecting ballads, nursery rhymes and myths, and led the movement for folk revival.
(viii) In Madras, Natesa Sastri published a massive four-volume collection of Tamil folk tales, The Folklore of Southern India. He believed that folklore was national literature.
(ix) During the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow) was designed. It had eight lotuses representing eight provinces of British India, and a crescent moon, representing Hindus and Muslims.
(x) By 1921, Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag. It was again a tricolour (red, green and white) and had a spining wheel in the centre, representing the Gandhian ideal of self-help. Carrying the flag, holding it aloft, during marches became a symbol of defiance.
(xi) Another means of creating a feeling of nationalism was through reinterpretation of history. By the end of the nineteenth century many Indians began feeling that to instill a sense of pride in the nation, Indian history had to be thought about differently.
(xii) Indians began looking into the past to discover India’s great achievements. They wrote about the glorious developments in ancient times when art and architecture, science and mathematics, religion and culture, law and philosophy, crafts and trade had flourished.
(xiii) This glorious time, in their view, was followed by a history of decline, when India was colonised. These nationalist histories urged the readers to take pride in India’s great achievements in the past and struggle to change the miserable conditions of life under British rule.
(xiv) These efforts to unify people were not without problems. When the past being glorified was Hindu, when the images celebrated were drawn from Hindu iconography, then people of other communities felt left out.
Conclusion :
A growing anger against the colonial government was thus bringing together various groups and classes of Indians into a common struggle for freedom. The Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi tried to channel people’s grievances into organised movements for independence. Diverse groups and classes participated in these movements with varied aspirations and expectations. As their grievances were wide-ranging, freedom from colonial rule also meant different things to different people. The high points of Congress activity and nationalist unity were followed by phases of disunity and inner conflict between groups. In order words, what was emerging was a nation with many voices wanting freedom from colonial rule.
Add to your Knowledge
(1) In 1720, the British government enacted a legislation banning the use of Indian printed cotton textiles chintz-in England. This Act was known as the Calico Act.
(2) In 1878, Britishers passed Arms Act. It disallowed Indians to possess arms.
(3) In 1878 Vernacular press Act was enacted in an effort to silence those newspapers who were critical of the Britishgovernment.
(4) A.O. Hume, a retired British official played an important role in the formation of Indian National Congress.
(5) In 1905 Viceroy Curzon partitioned Bengal. The partition of Bengal infuriated people. The struggle that unfolded came to be known as the swadeshi movement.
(6) Knighthood was an honour granted by the British crown for exceptional personal achievement or public service. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood against the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy.
(7) In 1895, along with other Indians, Mahatama Gandhi established Natal Congress to fight against racial discrimination at Durban in South America.
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