Class 8 Social Science Chapter 9: India's Long Road to Independence

Two fronts, not one

The struggle for independence is usually told as politics. It began as something wider. Before any party existed, Indians were arguing about their own society, and those arguments fed straight into the politics that followed.

What the reformers attacked

Not Britain, in the first instance. They went after practices in Indian society: child marriage, the treatment of widows, discrimination by caste, and the absence of schooling, especially for girls. The attack came from inside.

Where they looked for models

Many of India's educated and well-off looked to Europe as the model for modernising the country, and several reformers favoured English education. But taking a useful idea is not imitation. Dayananda Saraswati argued for a return to the Vedas, which no European recommended.

The Brahmo Samaj

Founded by Raja Ram Mohan Roy in Calcutta in 1828. It opposed child marriage and caste discrimination, supported the rights of widows and the education of girls, and taught that God is one. It weakened later through disagreements among its own members.

The Arya Samaj

Founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati in Bombay in 1875. It pressed for a return to the Vedas, for reasoned thinking, equality and self-reliance, and against ritual and caste by birth. It supported schooling for women and the remarriage of widows, and out of it came a great many of the north's later freedom fighters.

The others, and why the list is short

The Shuddhi movement, run by Arya Samaj leaders late in the century, worked to bring back people who had left Hinduism. Vidyasagar, Syed Ahmed Khan and Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule opened schools and challenged caste and gender inequality. There were many more across India than any chapter has room for.

A novel that mattered politically

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay was a sub-magistrate in Bengal who wrote popular novels in Bengali. In 1882 he published Anandamath, set during the Sannyasi Rebellion and the famine that devastated Bengal in 1770. In it the motherland is worshipped as a divine mother.

The song inside it

The poem Bande Mataram appears in that novel, though it had been composed earlier, in 1875. The title is Bengali for praise to the mother. In 1950 the Constituent Assembly made it India's National Song. Rabindranath Tagore had set it to music and sung it at the Congress session of 1896 in Calcutta.

Why a song is a political fact

Because it travels where an argument cannot. A resolution has to be read; a song is sung by people who never attended a meeting. In 1905 it became the rallying cry of a whole province, thirty years after it was written.

Vivekananda

Born Narendranath Datta in 1863, he studied Western literature, history and philosophy alongside ancient Indian texts and classical music, and played several sports. At eighteen he met Sri Ramakrishna and became his foremost disciple. In 1893 his speech defending India's civilisation made a strong impression at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

The Congress begins

Seventy-two delegates met at Bombay in December 1885. Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British official, was central to founding it, and Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee was elected its first president. Most delegates came from English-educated, well-off families.

What it actually asked for

Not independence. It declared its faith in British rule and its loyalty to the Crown, met once a year, and passed resolutions asking for dialogue. What it wanted was a larger Indian part in the governing, some safeguard for civil rights, and a measure of reform. Grant that, the reasoning ran, and the anger would settle.

And what it got

Almost nothing. The government largely ignored the resolutions, granted minor concessions, and kept Indians out of any decision that mattered. That failure is what taught the next generation that asking was not enough.

Discontent was older than the Congress

Baba Ram Singh led the Kuka movement, also called Namdhari, in Punjab through the 1860s and into the next decade. It worked against female infanticide, child marriage and dowry, and it rejected foreign goods, wore hand-spun white cloth, and ran its own post and its own courts to keep clear of British institutions.

What that cost

In 1872 a group of Kukas attacked government-sanctioned slaughterhouses. Sixty-five were put to death with no trial at all. Many were tied across the mouth of a cannon and blown from it. Baba Ram Singh was exiled to Burma and died there. The movement is a forerunner of the mass boycotts of the next century.

Poona, and Tilak

After famine and plague in western Maharashtra, the authorities' harsh measures were bitterly resented, and in 1897 the three Chapekar brothers shot the British Plague Commissioner of Poona. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a founder of the Congress, thought its leaders too moderate and attacked colonial oppression in his Marathi paper Kesari.

How Tilak reached people

Religious and patriotic symbols carried his message that people should stand up and resist. To spread it he built mass public events out of Ganesh Chaturthi and the Shivaji festival. Charged with sedition on no real evidence, he was given eighteen months of rigorous imprisonment, and came out of it as Lokmanya, revered by the people.

Birsa Munda

From the Munda tribe of the Chota Nagpur region, Birsa led tribal resistance to British exploitation, oppressive landlords and missionary inroads, promising to restore tribal faith, rights and dignity. In 1899 and 1900 he led the Ulgulaan, the Great Tumult. He was arrested early in 1900 and was dead within four months, aged twenty-four, still in his cell.

Scenario:

Imagine a lawyer travelling to Bombay in December 1885 for the first session of the Indian National Congress. He is one of seventy-two delegates. Most of them, like him, come from English-educated and well-off families. The resolutions he will vote on ask the government for more Indian members in the councils and for some administrative reform. They open by affirming loyalty to the British Crown. On the train he reads a Marathi newspaper that calls the government an oppressor. He wonders whether the meeting he is attending is brave or merely polite.

Analysis:

The session was neither brave nor merely polite: it was a test. Asking politely and being ignored is what taught the next generation that asking was not enough, and the newspaper the delegate read on the train is where the next phase came from.

Activity:

Write the delegate's diary entry for the evening after the government's reply arrives.

Title:

Build the reformers' table yourself

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

The point of the last step is that a reform movement is measured by what it changed, not by when it was founded.

The poem Bande Mataram is older than the novel it appears in: composed in 1875, published inside Anandamath in 1882.

The Kukas of Punjab ran their own postal system and their own courts, decades before boycott became a national strategy.

Birsa Munda was twenty-four years old when he died in jail, four months after his arrest in 1900.

The two Samajs — ROY FIRST, DAYANANDA SECOND — Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj at Calcutta in 1828; Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay in 1875, forty-seven years later.

What the early Congress was — LOYAL, YEARLY, AND IGNORED — It declared allegiance to the Crown, met once a year to pass resolutions, and was answered with minor concessions and nothing else.

A plan with a stated reason

In the first years of the twentieth century George Curzon, then viceroy, proposed dividing the Bengal presidency. It was India's largest, reaching into what are now Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Assam. The official reason given was more efficient administration.

And the real one

A division between a largely Muslim east and a largely Hindu west. The chapter calls it a faithful application of divide and rule. The plan was widely opposed before it was carried out, and Curzon announced it anyway in 1905.

Who objected, and why it stung

Opposition came from Bipin Chandra Pal and Ashwini Kumar Dutt, from Surendranath Banerjee, and from Tagore, who between them brought communities together against the plan. Their case was that Hindus and Muslims in Bengal had on the whole lived peacefully side by side, so the line was an attack on a shared identity.

The first result, as intended

The two communities were pushed apart. Curzon had dangled two things before Muslim leaders: money spent on the eastern half, and a larger share of the official posts there. Most of them ended up defending the line.

The second result, which nobody planned

Public meetings, processions and protest rallies multiplied. A measure meant to divide produced the first movement that reached beyond the drawing rooms, and that was no part of the colonial calculation.

Why 1911 is not a happy ending

The government withdrew the partition in 1911 under the weight of the protests. But the chapter's verdict is that the damage had been done: the communities had been set against each other, and a line rubbed off a map does not undo that.

A newspaper with a programme

The Bande Mataram daily took a bold stand. Against what an English schooling did to Indian self-respect it set a third plank, National Education, beside Swadeshi and boycott, and spelled out passive resistance as the method.

Schooling of their own

In 1906 leading citizens founded a National Council of Education and launched the Bengal National College, meant to give a genuinely Indian education. No modern subject was left out, but being rooted in Indian thought was the point. Aurobindo Ghose was its first principal, and the college was later absorbed into Jadavpur University.

Four words become policy

At the Calcutta session in December 1906, with Dadabhai Naoroji presiding, the Congress adopted Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education as its objectives. That is the first time the organisation asked for something other than concessions.

The word they would not define

Swaraj means self-rule, and the session deliberately left it at that. It was understood to cover anything from self-rule inside the British Empire to full independence. The vagueness was useful: it let two camps vote for one resolution.

India as the Mother

Partly inspired by Bankim's novel, many nationalists wrote and spoke of Bharat Mata, the motherland as a divine mother. Abanindranath Tagore painted her in 1905, the year of the partition. In the Madras presidency the poet Subramania Bharati put Bande Mataram into Tamil and wrote poems calling on her to rise. In Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai gave a publication of his own that title.

Why the image travelled

A political argument has to be followed. A mother in danger does not. The figure of Bharat Mata turned a dispute about provincial boundaries into something a person could feel an obligation towards. That is why it appears in a painting, in Tamil verse and in a Punjabi paper within a few years of each other.

The All-India Muslim League

Founded at Dhaka in December 1906 by prominent leaders of the Muslim community, to defend Muslim political interests in British India. Their worry had grown since the Congress was formed: they distrusted it and feared Muslims would not be adequately represented in a body dominated by Hindus.

What came before the League

An alternative platform was wanted, so in 1886 Syed Ahmad Khan founded the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference. He had campaigned against the Congress. The Congress tried to meet these concerns and did not succeed. At first the League spoke for a limited, mostly elite section of Muslims, and a few decades later this division fed the two-nation idea.

The Surat split

The authorities were alarmed by the Calcutta resolutions, especially the call for Swaraj, and pressed the moderate leaders. At the Surat session of December 1907 the Moderates tried to pull back to small administrative gains, with self-government reached slowly and inside the Empire.

Who was on each side

Among the Moderates were Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who founded the Servants of India Society, the Bombay lawyer Pherozeshah Mehta, the journalist Surendranath Banerjee and the Calcutta lawyer Rashbehari Ghosh. The Nationalist camp was led by Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, called the Lion of Punjab for the force of his speeches, and Aurobindo Ghose.

How it ended

Tilak was prevented from speaking, the session collapsed into chaos, and the Nationalists walked out and held their own meeting. One organisation had become two camps with different aims.

A label worth noticing

The Moderates and the British called anyone demanding nothing less than independence an Extremist or a Radical. That group called themselves Nationalists, on the ground that there is nothing extreme about wanting your own country to govern itself.

Scenario:

A cloth merchant in a Bengal market town keeps two kinds of stock. One is mill cloth imported from Britain, which is cheap and sells quickly. The other is cloth woven in the district, which costs him more and moves slowly. Since the partition was announced, young men have been holding meetings outside his shop. They ask him to stop selling the imported cloth altogether. His profit would fall. His neighbour, who sells only imported goods, says politics is no business of a shopkeeper.

Analysis:

The merchant's choice shows why this phase mattered more than the resolutions suggest. A political demand that can be acted on by a shopkeeper, a student or a housewife reaches further than one that can only be made in a council chamber.

Activity:

List three everyday decisions through which an ordinary person could join the Swadeshi movement.

Title:

Trace the programme to its parts

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

There is no single right order. The argument is the exercise, because each of the four asks a different amount of a person.

The partition of Bengal was withdrawn in 1911, six years after it was announced, because popular feeling against it never subsided.

The Bengal National College, founded in 1906 with Aurobindo Ghose as its first principal, was later absorbed into Jadavpur University.

The word Extremist was never chosen by the people it described. They called themselves Nationalists.

The Calcutta programme — RULE, GOODS, REFUSE, SCHOOL — Swaraj is self-rule, Swadeshi is Indian goods, Boycott is refusing British ones, and National Education is schooling of their own.

Three years, three turns — DIVIDED, DECIDED, DIVIDED AGAIN — Bengal was divided in 1905, the Congress decided on its four objectives in 1906, and the Congress itself divided at Surat in 1907.

Three pitches, one desk

From the late nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines, in the Indian languages and in English too, put colonial policy in question and exposed injustice. They did not all ask for the same thing, and the range is the point.

The polite end

The moderate end was held by The Bengalee, which Surendranath Banerjee edited, and by Voice of India under Dadabhai Naoroji. They argued, carefully, for more Indians in the services and for reform.

The angry middle, and the far end

Tilak's Kesari attacked colonial oppression in forceful Marathi. The Bande Mataram daily set out Swadeshi, boycott, National Education and a method of passive resistance.

Yugantar, meaning New Era, was a Bengali paper that called for British rule to be thrown off by force. It was run by revolutionaries around Barindra Ghose and connected to the Anushilan Samiti. Several such papers were suppressed and shut down across India.

Why the range mattered

A government that silences only the most extreme voice pushes moderate readers towards it. Repression kept moving the centre of Indian opinion, which is why a decade that began with petitions ended with bombs.

The societies

The Anushilan Samiti was set up in Bengal in 1902, with centres in many towns and villages, giving young men intellectual, moral and physical training. In Maharashtra, V.D. Savarkar founded Abhinav Bharat. Tilak was closely associated with it and probably in touch with others.

No single command

These were scattered groups with their own leaders, papers and regions. Some were in touch with each other. There was never one organisation, and treating them as a single movement makes their reach look smaller than it was.

A decade of attacks

In April 1908 two young members of Barindra's group, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, carried out the attack the chapter opens this section with. In 1909 bombs were thrown at Viceroy Minto's carriage in Ahmedabad and missed. The same year three members of Abhinav Bharat shot a district magistrate in a Nashik theatre, and were hanged soon after; Anant Kanhere was eighteen.

Tirunelveli, 1911

Vanchinathan shot a district collector at a railway station in Tamil Nadu. That collector had shut down a shipping company, the Swadeshi Steam Navigation, which the nationalist V.O. Chidambaram Pillai had started. Pillai was then prosecuted unjustly and imprisoned.

Delhi, 1912

Charles Hardinge was riding an elephant through the new capital on the day of his ceremonial entry when somebody threw a bomb at him. An umbrella bearer was killed and Hardinge was injured but survived.

The Ghadar Movement

In 1914 and 1915 Indian revolutionaries tried to set off a mutiny inside the British Indian Army during the First World War. The party behind it, Ghadar, had been started by Indians who had emigrated to North America. Sohan Singh Bhakna and Lala Hardayal were among its founders, and a good number of them sailed back to join the attempt.

How it ended, and what it left

Inside India the work of getting men into the army fell to Sachindra Nath Sanyal, to Kartar Singh Sarabha and to Rash Behari Bose, among others. British intelligence uncovered the plot. Arrests, imprisonment in the Cellular Jail and executions followed, Kartar Singh among them at nineteen. The mutiny failed, and it laid the groundwork for later revolutionary efforts.

Kala Pani

In the Andaman Islands the British built the Cellular Jail, whose whole purpose was to put revolutionaries somewhere the mainland could not reach them. Known as Kala Pani, the black water, it was designed for solitary confinement and intended to break the spirit of the prisoners.

What the design meant in practice

Punishing physical work, pressing oil by hand among it, with penalties for the least disobedience. Barindra Ghose and Savarkar were among those who left descriptions of the forced labour and ill-treatment. Many died, some lost their sanity, and those who tried to escape were hanged.

One escape that mattered

Years after getting out of India and reaching Japan, Rash Behari Bose laid the foundation of the Indian National Army, which Subhas Chandra Bose would lead.

Bagha Jatin and the German Plot

Jatin Mukherjee led the Anushilan Samiti and was nicknamed Bagha, meaning tiger, because he once fought one bare-handed. He worked with Rash Behari Bose on a plan to receive a large shipment of German arms by sea. The weapons were meant to start an armed rising while Britain was busy with the war.

The anthill at Balasore

The authorities learned of the plan, and Jatin and his companions hid in the jungles of Balasore, near where the arms were to land. On 9 September 1915 a large police contingent surrounded them and they fought for seventy-five minutes from behind an anthill. Jatin, severely wounded, died the next day; those taken alive were hanged.

The north-east

Piyali Baruah and Maniram Dewan were hanged in public during the 1857 rebellion in Assam. In the Quit India Movement of 1942 Kanak Lata Baruah and Kushal Konwar gave their lives. In Manipur, Rani Gaidinliu began fighting the British at thirteen, urging people not to pay taxes and not to work for the colonial masters.

How to judge all this

Most of the attacks failed. The bomb at Hardinge missed its man, the Ghadar plot was uncovered, the German arms never landed. The chapter measures them differently: they rattled the colonial government, they met with strong popular approval, and the failures laid groundwork. They also hardened Britain's resolve to rule with an iron hand, which is a real consequence in the other direction.

Scenario:

A British district magistrate in Bengal reads three Indian newspapers before breakfast. One prints careful essays asking for more Indians in the services. One attacks his government in forceful language and is edited by a man already jailed for sedition. The third openly calls for the violent overthrow of British rule. He has the legal power to shut all three. He knows that shutting the third will be popular in London, and that shutting the first will make enemies of the men he still hopes to work with.

Analysis:

The three papers are the three strategies of the whole chapter sitting on one desk. The magistrate's problem is the government's problem: repression aimed at the most extreme voice pushed moderate readers towards it, which is how the centre of Indian opinion kept moving.

Activity:

Decide which paper you would shut first, and write two sentences defending the choice.

Title:

Map the scattered societies

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

The count in the last step is the point. The map looks nothing like a single movement with a headquarters.

The Ghadar Party was founded by Indian migrants in North America, so one of the period's boldest plots was organised from outside India altogether.

Jatin Mukherjee was nicknamed Bagha, meaning tiger, because he once fought a tiger with his bare hands.

Rani Gaidinliu of Manipur began resisting British rule at the age of thirteen.

Three papers, three pitches — ASK, ATTACK, OVERTHROW — Voice of India asked for reform, Kesari attacked colonial oppression, and Yugantar called for British rule to be overthrown by force.

Why the jail was on an island — DISTANCE WAS THE DESIGN — The Cellular Jail's remoteness was not an inconvenience to be managed but the instrument itself: isolation was meant to break the prisoners.

A method made elsewhere

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born at Porbandar in Gujarat in 1869. After school he went to London to study law, and then to South Africa. What happened there is the reason he matters to this chapter.

What South Africa taught him

He met racial discrimination against people classed as coloured in his own person, and saw the hardships of the Indian community there. Out of that came satyagraha, which rests on passive resistance and on ahimsa, or nonviolence. He arrived in India with the method already worked out.

Why that order matters

It is easy to read Gandhi as a figure who emerged from Indian politics. He did not. The method was tested abroad against a different government, and brought back, which is why it looked so unlike anything the Congress had tried.

Amritsar, April 1919

A crowd gathered in an enclosed garden called Jallianwala Bagh, in defiance of a ban, to protest against the repressive Rowlatt Act. Brigadier-General Dyer and his troops arrived, sealed the main exit, and opened fire without warning on the unarmed crowd.

Ten minutes

The firing went on for about ten minutes. Some 1,650 rounds were fired, the troops firing deliberately into the densest part of the crowd, and on anyone making for another way out. Some were shot, some crushed in the rush, and others went into a well to escape the bullets.

The count, and the dispute about it

Britain's official count conceded just under 400 killed and more than 1,200 hurt. Indian estimates put the dead past a thousand. That gap is itself part of the history.

What it did to trust

The massacre sent shockwaves across the country. It permanently scarred public trust in the British government, and it united Indians of every background in the resolve to be free. More than any resolution, this is the event that made the next phase a mass movement.

And what happened to Dyer

He became known as the Butcher of Amritsar and defended his action proudly before a British-dominated inquiry committee. The committee condemned what he had done but recommended no penal action. After a general outcry he was removed from India. The British government has never apologised for the massacre.

Two long shadows

Rabindranath Tagore wrote to the Viceroy in protest and returned the knighthood Britain had given him. Punjab's lieutenant governor O'Dwyer, who had suppressed people's rights ruthlessly, defended Dyer. Twenty years on, a Ghadar Party revolutionary named Udham Singh found O'Dwyer in London and shot him. Udham Singh was hanged, and at his trial he argued that what he had done was legitimate.

The Khilafat question

For some six centuries the Ottoman Empire had spanned much of south-east Europe, western Asia and north Africa. At its head was the sultan in Constantinople, and the same man held a second office: Caliph, which made him the Muslim world's leader in religion as well as in politics. At the end of the First World War the empire was broken up and the Caliph's position became shaky.

The movement in India

In 1919 the Khilafat Movement was launched by Muslim leaders. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was among them, with the Ali brothers, Shaukat and Muhammad. Its demand was that the Caliph should not lose his authority in religion.

Why Gandhi joined it

Here, he judged, was a chance to set Hindus and Muslims against British rule side by side, and to draw Muslims into the national movement. In 1920 the Khilafat leaders and the Congress made an alliance, undertaking to press the two causes side by side, and the movement merged into non-cooperation.

What that achieved, and what it cost

It did increase Muslim participation in the national movement and brought large numbers of Hindus to the Khilafat cause. But a number of Congress members held that what became of the Caliph in Turkey was nothing to do with India. A few Muslim leaders were sceptical because it tied Indian Muslims' loyalty to a religious power in distant Turkey. Jinnah left the Congress at its 1920 session, warning against mixing religion into the independence movement.

Chauri Chaura

In February 1922, at a town in what is now Uttar Pradesh, protesters set fire to a police station and policemen died. Gandhi judged this inhuman conduct and abruptly called off the whole Non-Cooperation Movement.

The argument that followed

Inside the Congress the decision was widely disliked. Subhas Chandra Bose objected, so did Chittaranjan Das, and so did both the Nehrus, father and son. The movement had been spreading, and stopping it looked to them like throwing away everything gained.

Who was right

The case for Gandhi is that a movement built on nonviolence which carries on after killing has lost the thing that made it different from any other revolt. The case against is that the British read restraint as weakness and that the momentum never returned. Historians still argue it.

What came next instead

Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das formed the Swaraj Party to try a different strategy. It was short-lived, because Das died in 1925.

And the end of Khilafat

The movement simply ran out. Mustafa Kemal ended the sultanate in 1922, and two years later the office of Caliph went with it. Historians have debated what it left behind. It did bring the communities together for a while. It also left Indian Muslims with a sharper sense of being separate, and that gave the more radical leaders room to ask for more. Riots between the two communities broke out in several regions in the years that followed.

Scenario:

Picture the Congress leadership in early 1922. The Non-Cooperation Movement is at its height. Students have left government schools, lawyers have left the courts, foreign cloth is being burned and the alliance with the Khilafat leaders has brought in numbers no earlier movement reached. Then news comes from Chauri Chaura, a town in what is now Uttar Pradesh. Protesters have set fire to a police station and policemen have died. Gandhi announces that the whole movement will stop. Younger leaders are furious, and say the British will read it as weakness.

Analysis:

The decision is the clearest case in the chapter of means mattering as much as ends. A movement built on nonviolence that continues after killing has lost the thing that made it different, which is Gandhi's argument. Whether it was worth the momentum is a question historians still argue.

Activity:

Write the two strongest sentences you can for each side of this argument.

Title:

Count the cost of a decade

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

You are not asked to memorise the figures. The point is the scale of ordinary participation behind the few names a chapter has room for.

Rabindranath Tagore returned the knighthood Britain had given him as a protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Udham Singh waited two decades, then found O'Dwyer in London and shot him for having defended Dyer.

Nothing Britain did finished the Khilafat Movement. Mustafa Kemal did, by ending the sultanate in 1922 and the office of Caliph two years after.

The order of Gandhi's life — PORBANDAR, LONDON, AFRICA, INDIA — Born in Gujarat in 1869, law in London, the method worked out in South Africa, and only then the Indian movement.

Amritsar's two numbers — FOUR HUNDRED SAID, A THOUSAND COUNTED — The official British figure admitted nearly 400 dead; Indian estimates put the toll above a thousand, and the gap is part of the history.

A commission with nobody from India on it

The government knew the discontent was growing and kept offering reforms that looked substantial without crossing the line towards home rule. In 1927 the Simon Commission came to study constitutional reform. It had not a single Indian member.

Simon Go Back

Marches and rallies answered it. The slogan went up in street after street, and black flags were waved to show what people thought. The commission laid bare, once again, Britain's refusal to consult Indians about their own future, and strengthened the call for complete self-rule.

Lahore, October 1928

The police broke up a nonviolent march Lala Lajpat Rai was leading, beating the marchers with sticks, beating the marchers with sticks. Badly injured, he still addressed a meeting that evening and told it that a government attacking its own unarmed subjects had forfeited any claim to be civilised. He died two weeks later, and national feeling was further inflamed.

The other road, again

Many freedom fighters disagreed with Gandhi's nonviolence and with a pace they thought left the rulers under too little pressure. They held that force was a legitimate means to independence.

Kakori

The Hindustan Republican Association, inspired by the earlier Ghadar attempt, needed money. Near a village called Kakori they held up a train carrying government money. Chandrashekhar Azad was in the group, with Ashfaqulla Khan and Ram Prasad Bismil. The crackdown was severe: Bismil, Khan and several others were executed, and all of them became popular heroes at their trial. The body renamed itself, becoming the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.

Purna Swaraj, and how old the demand was

Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose argued that the moment had come for a harder demand, which was complete independence. It was not a new one.

The Nationalist faction had voiced it two decades earlier. Aurobindo had asked for much the same in 1908. In 1921 the call came from Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who belonged to the League and to the Congress alike, and Savarkar expressed a similar demand in 1925. What changed at Lahore in December 1929 was that the Congress as a whole adopted it.

What the resolution argued

That freedom and the fruits of one's own work are a right belonging to any people. That a government depriving people of those rights may be altered or abolished by them. And that British rule in India had both taken away freedom and ruined the country, economically and culturally alike. Therefore India must break the British connection.

The Salt March, and why salt

Gandhi turned the demand into action by launching civil disobedience. It began with a march of 380 kilometres in March and April 1930. The destination was Dandi, a coastal village in southern Gujarat, where he symbolically picked up some salt.

Because the colonial government held a monopoly on producing it and charged a high tax. Every household in India paid that tax. Breaking the salt law cost nothing, needed no equipment and could be done by anybody, so Gandhi judged it the right symbol for the fight against colonial rule.

What the movement actually consisted of

Refusals. Thousands were arrested, Gandhi among them, and the movement widened regardless. Salt was lifted on other coasts, foreign cloth went unbought, and taxes went unpaid. Over sixty thousand people were jailed in 1930 alone.

Who came out of their houses

Women broke the salt law in large numbers. They walked in the processions, and they stood outside the liquor sellers and the dealers in foreign cloth. A British report remarked on women of education and good family leaving seclusion, in some cases from behind the purdah, to join Congress demonstrations.

Sarojini Naidu

A noted poet and a powerful speaker, she had been the first woman from India to preside over the Congress, back in 1925. She argued hard for the rights of women, and for the vote above all. She joined protest after protest, and was jailed more than once for it.

Peshawar, April 1930

In the North-West Frontier Province people came out peacefully because their leader had been taken: Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who held to nonviolence himself. British troops brought armoured cars and opened fire, killing hundreds.

The order that was refused

Two platoons of the Royal Garhwal Rifles refused to fire on the unarmed crowd. They were Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army, led by Chandra Singh Garhwali, and they chose jail rather than hurt their fellow Indians. Colonial rule rested on Indian soldiers, which is why a refusal like this mattered more than a march.

The Gandhi-Irwin Pact, and what it was worth

Keen to quiet the protests, Viceroy Irwin reached an agreement with Gandhi in 1931. Prisoners who had kept clear of violence were let out, and private salt-making was permitted within limits. The Congress for its part called off civil disobedience and agreed to send delegates to a conference in London.

The form was what counted. Each side now sat down with the other on level terms, which had never happened before. But the conference produced no breakthrough, and younger Congress leaders criticised the pact because it guaranteed nothing about Purna Swaraj.

After the pact

Gandhi tried to resume civil disobedience. The British answered with mass arrests and the public enthusiasm was no longer there, so he withdrew the movement in 1934. The Congress turned to constitutional methods and complex negotiation.

1935, and what provincial autonomy meant

The British conceded elected governments at the provincial level while keeping foreign affairs, defence and internal security, and British- appointed governors could take over a province's administration indefinitely. It was real and it was limited, both at once.

Untouchability, the disagreement and the pact

Gandhi turned to social reform, campaigning against the discrimination suffered by those the caste system rejected, called the Depressed Classes officially and Scheduled Castes in the Constitution. B.R. Ambedkar, who had suffered that discrimination himself, shared the goal but held that separate electorates were the only way to secure their political voice.

Gandhi feared separate electorates would divide Hindu society permanently and began a fast unto death against them. What was settled instead was more seats kept aside for the Depressed Classes in the legislatures, and no separate electorates at all.

The idea of separate nations, and who stood where

Muslims generally kept away from civil disobedience. Presiding over the Muslim League session at Allahabad in 1930, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal proposed a separate territory for Muslims in north-western India, within a larger Indian federation. The word Pakistan was coined a few years later, so this was not yet that idea, but it intensified the debate about separateness.

Almost the whole Congress leadership rejected the two-nation idea, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Azad among them. They held that the communities could share a country and settle what divided them. Jinnah took the opposite view and backed Pakistan. Certain Hindu bodies, the Hindu Mahasabha under Savarkar among them, treated the two communities as separate nations sharing a country, while stopping short of demanding that it be divided.

Scenario:

On 23 April 1930 a crowd gathers in Peshawar to protest peacefully because their leader had been taken: Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a man committed to nonviolent methods. British troops bring armoured cars and open fire. Hundreds are killed. In the middle of this, two platoons of the Royal Garhwal Rifles are ordered to fire on the crowd. They are Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army, led by Chandra Singh Garhwali. They refuse. They are court-martialled and imprisoned for it, having chosen jail rather than shoot unarmed Indians.

Analysis:

This is the quiet turning point of the whole decade. A government can jail sixty thousand people, as it did in 1930, and still rule. It cannot rule once the men holding the rifles start deciding which orders they will obey, which is also why the naval mutiny of 1946 mattered so much.

Activity:

Explain in three sentences why a refusal to fire is a greater threat to an empire than a protest march.

Title:

Pick a law worth breaking

Safety:

This is a thinking exercise only. Do not break any rule.

What You Notice:

The test Gandhi applied was reach, not severity: a law that touches everybody can be disobeyed by everybody.

Over sixty thousand people were jailed during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930, and another forty thousand during civil disobedience between 1931 and 1934.

Before walking to Dandi beside Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu had already presided over the Congress in 1925, the first woman from India to do it.

Two platoons of Indian soldiers chose prison rather than fire on an unarmed Indian crowd at Peshawar in April 1930.

The road from 1927 to 1931 — COMMISSION, CHARGE, RESOLUTION, MARCH, PACT — Simon in 1927, the lathi charge in 1928, Purna Swaraj at Lahore in 1929, Dandi in 1930 and the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in 1931.

Why salt — EVERYBODY PAID, SO ANYBODY COULD — The tax reached every household, and breaking the law required nothing to be bought or carried, so participation had no entry price.

A war nobody asked them about

Europe went to war again in 1939 and the fighting soon reached most of the world. India was pulled into it without being consulted, which is the fact the rest of this topic turns on.

What India gave, and lost

More than two and a half million Indian soldiers joined, forming the largest volunteer army in history, and official figures put at least 87,000 of them killed in the field. At home there were shortages of food and goods and high taxes. Churchill ordered Indian grain shipped out to the fighting fronts. Bengal starved for it in 1943, and the dead ran into millions.

The sentence that turned, and the road Bose took

Support for Britain was widespread at first. Then the feeling grew that the sacrifices were enormous, the war somebody else's, and their own freedom still withheld. That is the shift the Congress read in 1942.

Subhas Chandra Bose, once a Congress leader, parted from Gandhi over nonviolence, holding that armed struggle was the only road to freedom. Raising an army inside India was impossible, so he decided to seek help from Britain's enemies.

The journey

He slipped out of house arrest in India early in 1941, crossed Afghanistan and Russia, and reached Germany. He stayed there almost two years, looking for help from forces hostile to the British. Japan, he decided, offered the better prospect, being Germany's ally in the war against Britain. It was there, on the foundation Rash Behari Bose had laid, that the Indian National Army took shape under him.

What Bose and Gandhi actually disagreed about

Method, not aim. Both wanted the same independence. Bose held that it would only be won by force and that Britain's enemies were therefore useful allies; Gandhi held that the means decide what the end turns out to be. It is a disagreement worth keeping straight, because treating them as opposites loses what they shared.

The Cripps Mission

Under pressure to secure Indian support during the war, Churchill sent Stafford Cripps in 1942 with an offer. It promised dominion status once the war ended, but let provinces opt out of the post-war India. A few Congress leaders such as C. Rajagopalachari favoured accepting it for tactical reasons. Most, Gandhi among them, found the assurances insufficient and rejected it.

Do or Die

In August 1942 Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement with that call. The demand was simple and complete: the British must leave India at once.

A movement without its leaders

Virtually the whole Congress leadership was arrested, and the movement went on anyway. Workers struck and students left their schools. Government buildings were attacked and telegraph poles pulled up. Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, among others, kept an underground organisation going. Viceroy Linlithgow called it the most serious rebellion since 1857.

What it proved even though it was crushed

It was suppressed brutally, with many deaths and arrests across the country. But it had carried on without its leaders, and the message to Britain was that India could no longer be governed without Indian consent.

Aruna Asaf Ali

She had taken part in earlier protests and suffered solitary confinement for it. With the senior leadership in custody, it was she who raised the flag at Bombay's Gowalia Tank Maidan. For nearly four years afterwards she stayed hidden, never caught, though declared an outlaw with money offered for her. She edited underground bulletins and helped co-ordinate secret resistance, and later supported the naval mutiny of February 1946.

Kanaklata Barua

A teenage activist from Assam, shot dead by police at seventeen while leading a procession to hoist the national flag at the police station at Gohpur. She is honoured as Birangana, the heroic woman, and is among the youngest icons of the freedom struggle.

The scale of ordinary sacrifice

Some forty thousand were jailed during non-cooperation between 1920 and 1922. Over sixty thousand during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930. Another forty thousand during civil disobedience from 1931 to 1934. During Quit India between 1942 and 1945, over a hundred thousand were imprisoned and nearly ten thousand killed. The figures are not for memorising; they are the answer to anyone who thinks a few famous names won this.

Why 1947 and not earlier

With the Allied victory of 1945, one European power after another saw that its colonies could not be held. An era of decolonisation began, and Britain, exhausted by the war, sought a transition to Indian independence.

The mutinies that settled it

In January 1946 thousands of personnel mutinied in the Royal Indian Air Force. The next month sailors of the Royal Indian Navy rebelled in Bombay against ill-treatment, and it spread quickly across India. The rebellion was called off, but the signal was unmistakable: Britain could not count on Indian servicemen to keep the empire for it any longer.

Talks, and deadlock

The Cabinet Mission of 1946 proposed dividing India into three groups of provinces, each with complete autonomy except in defence, foreign affairs and communication. Long talks followed and came to nothing, the Congress and the League being too far apart.

Direct Action

Pressure for a Muslim state of its own sharpened, and Jinnah broke openly with constitutional method and called for Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946. Brutal communal violence submerged Calcutta, encouraged by provocative speeches and pamphlets, and thousands died and thousands more lost their homes. The fear it left made living peaceably together look impossible, and partition look like the only road. An Interim Government under Jawaharlal Nehru took charge in September 1946 with tensions still high.

Five weeks to draw a border

Nobody should read partition as something India's leadership wanted. Opposition to the plan was broad, the Congress included, and no national agreement existed on it. Argument about whether any other road was open has never stopped. The last viceroy settled it in July 1947 by handing the job to Cyril Radcliffe. Radcliffe was a lawyer from Britain who did not know the country, and he had roughly five weeks. The Radcliffe Line split Punjab and Bengal almost overnight. Out of it came an India with a Hindu majority and a Pakistan with a Muslim one, the latter in two wings. The eastern wing became Bangladesh in 1971.

What that cost

Millions found themselves on the wrong side of a line, with homes, friends and sacred places now in another country. The partition of August 1947 brought migration and violence on an unprecedented scale. Three causes are named, and they acted at once: communities that no longer trusted one another, a boundary drawn in haste and planned badly, with order collapsed entirely. Women were singled out above all, and faced abduction and assault. Independence was a hard-won collective victory, and it arrived alongside a catastrophe.

Scenario:

A family has farmed the same land in Punjab for generations. In July a British lawyer who has never visited the district is given five weeks to draw a border. In August the line is published. Their village is now in another country. Their fields are a short walk away and across an international boundary. The shrine they have visited all their lives is on the far side. Law and order has broken down, rumours are spreading, and armed groups are moving through the district. They must decide within days whether to stay or leave.

Analysis:

The family's choice is the human measure of a decision taken far above them. Millions made it in the same few weeks, and the migration and massacres that followed are why the chapter calls independence a hard-won victory rather than a simple one.

Activity:

Write the letter this family might have sent to a relative a year later.

Title:

Weigh the pressures of 1946

Safety:

No safety concerns; this is a paper exercise.

What You Notice:

Independence came from a combination, not a single cause. The exercise is to see that some of the causes were not Indian actions at all.

The Indian force that served in the Second World War was the largest volunteer army in history, with more than two and a half million soldiers.

Aruna Asaf Ali evaded capture for nearly four years after hoisting the flag in Bombay, with a bounty on her head, editing underground bulletins the whole time.

Cyril Radcliffe had never been to India before he was given about five weeks to draw the border between two new countries.

Why 1947 and not earlier — EXHAUSTED, DISOBEYED, DESERTED — Britain was exhausted by the war, Quit India had shown it could not rule without consent, and the 1946 mutinies showed the military would not hold the empire for it.

The three causes of partition's violence — MISTRUST, RUSH, COLLAPSE — Trust between the communities gone, a boundary hurried and badly planned, and order collapsed entirely, all at once.