The freedom struggle

Before 1917 Indian nationalism spoke mainly through petitions and resolutions of an educated few. Gandhi's satyagrahas, in NCERT's words, 'unleashed a surge of popular action' unprecedented in colonial India, and that mass base is where their significance lies.

How the movements mobilised the masses

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• Peasants first: indigo growers of Champaran and Kheda's farmers brought agrarian grievance into national politics under Gandhi's local satyagrahas.
• Workers, students, lawyers: Ahmedabad mill hands struck; Non-Cooperation emptied schools, colleges and courts as lawyers like Motilal Nehru left practice.
• Hindus and Muslims together: merging Khilafat with Non-Cooperation drew ulama and Muslim townsmen onto the same platform as Congress.
• Women and the Frontier: the Salt March first drew women in large numbers, at Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's urging; Khudai Khidmatgars carried non-violence to the Pathans.
• Tribals, villages, youth: forest satyagrahas in the Central Provinces, Bardoli's no-tax campaign, and Quit India's parallel governments at Satara and Medinipur led by socialists like Jayaprakash Narayan.

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On 8 August 1942 the AICC at Bombay endorsed the Quit India resolution, and Gandhi gave the call 'Do or Die'.

Events that led to Quit India

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• War without consent: India was declared a belligerent in 1939 without consulting Indians; the August Offer (1940) and satyagrahas won no promise of freedom.
• Cripps failure: dominion status after the war, with a provincial opt-out, offered no real power now.
• War at the door: Japan's advance to Burma, shortages and rising prices bred anger; Wardha's Working Committee passed it on 14 July 1942.

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Both Gandhi and Tagore rejected colonial schooling, which Gandhi said made Indians "strangers in their own lands", but they differed on what education and the nation were for.

Approach towards education

• Gandhi, education for self-respect: colonial education enslaved minds, so he wanted Indian languages as the medium and learning that restored dignity.
• Craft at the core: under Nai Talim, literacy alone was not education; pupils had to work with their hands and learn a craft.
• Tagore, education for creativity: schools killed a child's wonder, so he built Santiniketan, an abode of peace in rural Bengal.
• Blending traditions: science and technology sat beside art and music; Visva-Bharati's Kala Bhavana (1919) was India's first nationalist art school.

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Tribal communities lived by shifting cultivation, forest produce and customary rights over land. Colonial revenue and forest laws turned them into indebted tenants and wage labourers, and they replied with some of India's earliest anti-colonial revolts.

How colonial rule affected tribals

• Land and debt: cash revenue and private property opened tribal land to moneylenders, traders and landlords, the dikus; unpaid debts meant lost land.
• Forests: the Indian Forest Act, 1878 reserved forests for timber and railways, curbing grazing, jhum and minor produce, so customary use became crime.
• Labour: tribals were recruited for tea plantations, mines and railway works, often under coercive contracts far from home.
• Stigma and intrusion: the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 labelled communities criminal by birth; police, courts and missions eroded village autonomy.

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When 72 delegates met at Bombay in December 1885 to found the Indian National Congress, its early leaders, among them Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, W.C. Bonnerji and Surendranath Banerji, chose petitions and reasoned argument over agitation. Their two decades of work laid much of the base for the wider struggle, though not all of it.

Foundations the Moderates laid

• All-India platform: annual sessions brought leaders of different regions, languages and faiths together, turning scattered grievances into one national voice.
• Economic nationalism: Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) and R.C. Dutt's economic history showed how Indian wealth was drained to Britain.
• Constitutional gains: their demand for larger councils was met in part by the Indian Councils Act, 1892, which enlarged the legislatures and let members question the government.
• Political education: newspapers, public meetings and memorials spread ideas of civil rights, representative government and Indianisation of the services.
• Leaders and method: the Moderate Gopal Krishna Gokhale was Gandhi's acknowledged political mentor, and his patient, fact-based advocacy shaped Gandhi's style.
• Goal of self-rule: the 1906 Calcutta session, with Naoroji as president, declared Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education as Congress goals.

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For Gandhi, swaraj had to be built from below. Every campaign of protest therefore ran alongside constructive work in khadi, unity, education and social reform, which gave Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience their depth.

During Non-Cooperation

• Khadi and swadeshi: hand-spinning and weaving replaced mill-made cloth, and the charkha became the emblem of economic self-reliance.
• Boycott with substitutes: bonfires of foreign cloth, seen as the symbol of Western domination, went with the use of Indian goods.
• National education: students left government schools for national institutions such as Gujarat Vidyapith, founded by Gandhi on 18 October 1920.
• Unity and arbitration: village panchayats settled disputes outside British courts, and the Khilafat alliance built Hindu-Muslim unity.
• Social reform: temperance through picketing of liquor shops and a campaign against untouchability.

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Lord Curzon (1899–1905) ruled as an efficient autocrat whose reforms, by overriding educated Indian opinion, gave nationalism its sharpest push yet.

Policies: the merits

• Administrative drive: attention to irrigation, rural credit and ancient monuments improved governance.

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After Non-Cooperation the national movement ceased to be a platform of the educated few. Through the 1920s and 1930s new ideologies entered the Congress or grew beside it, and each carried a fresh social group into the struggle.

Ideological strands after the 1920s

• Gandhian mass politics: the Salt March (1930) turned a household tax into an all-India cause, and Quit India (1942) drew in peasants, women, students and traders.
• Constitutionalists: C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru's Swaraj Party (1923) took the fight into the councils; the Nehru Report (1928) defined equal citizenship, keeping lawyers and professionals engaged.
• Socialists: young leaders formed the Congress Socialist Party (1934) for a more radical, egalitarian Congress; the Karachi Session (1931) declared Fundamental Rights, including women's equality.
• Communists and labour: the AITUC (Bombay, 1920) and the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929) put industrial workers and strikes on the national stage.
• Revolutionaries: the HSRA, founded at Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla in 1928, and Bhagat Singh's Assembly bomb (1929) fired students; the Chittagong armoury raid (1930) followed.

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Company rule met resistance from its early decades: the Sannyasi rebellion in famine-struck Bengal, the Vellore mutiny of 1806 and the Santhal revolt of 1855-56. In 1857 these streams met.

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A century of local rebellions

• Peasant and tribal anger: revenue demands, moneylenders and lost forest rights fuelled local risings; in 1857 Gonoo of Singhbhum led the Kol tribals.
• Sepoy grievance: the Vellore mutiny arose over uniform rules that offended Hindu and Muslim sepoys; the greased cartridges touched the same nerve.
• Dispossessed rulers: the Doctrine of Lapse and Awadh's annexation displaced old elites; Rani Lakshmi Bai and Kunwar Singh of Arrah led in 1857.
• Fear for faith: laws against sati (1829) and for widow remarriage, with missionary activity, bred fear for religion and custom.

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The nineteenth-century awakening, from Rammohun Roy's campaign against sati to Vivekananda's Chicago address of 1893, re-read tradition through reason. It gave educated Indians a shared language of self-respect, the raw material of national identity.

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How the Renaissance shaped national identity

• Reason over custom: campaigns against sati (abolished 1829) and for widow remarriage built a questioning public that later questioned colonial rule.
• Pride in the past: the Asiatic Society (1784), Dayananda's call to return to the Vedas and Vivekananda's defence of Indian civilisation answered colonial contempt.
• Print and song: Bankim's Anandamath (1882) carried 'Vande Mataram', later sung across the Swadeshi movement.
• Associations to Congress: English-educated professionals formed the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Indian Association, then the Congress; Dadabhai Naoroji's drain critique gave them an economic case.
• A wider nation: Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj and Sri Narayana Guru drew lower castes into the idea of the nation.

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Gandhiji's satyagrahas at Champaran (1917), Kheda and Ahmedabad (1918) opened the Congress to peasants and mill workers. Each group that joined later brought its own grievance, method and vision, widening and deepening the movement.

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Voices that widened the base

• Peasants: Champaran's indigo tenants, Kheda's revenue protest and Bardoli (1928) made satyagraha a rural weapon; Baba Ramchandra led Awadh's tenants.
• Workers and kisans: the All India Trade Union Congress (1920) and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936) carried wages, rent and debt into nationalist politics.
• Tribals: in the Gudem Hills, Alluri Sitaram Raju's revolt of the early 1920s read swaraj as freedom from forest laws and forced road labour.
• Women: the Salt March became the first nationalist activity with women in large numbers, and Quit India drew Aruna Asaf Ali, Matangini Hazra and Kanaklata Barua.
• Muslim voices: the Khilafat alliance brought Muslims into Non-Cooperation, while Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars built a non-violent movement among the Pathans.
• Dalit voice: Ambedkar's Depressed Classes Association (1930) and the Poona Pact (September 1932) forced the movement to confront caste; reserved seats for the Depressed Classes followed.

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By 1946, the INA trials, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny and the Cabinet Mission Plan had weakened British authority, and a war-exhausted Britain sought a transition. Its exit was certain; how it left, through its offers, its timing and its handling of the princes, made the transfer far harder.

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How imperial power complicated the transfer

• Cripps offer (1942): post-war dominion status came with the right of any province 'not prepared to accept the new Constitution' to keep its position, conceding the principle of division.
• Repression: mass arrests after Quit India removed the Congress from politics for three years, while the League consolidated its 1940 demand for Muslim states.
• Cabinet Mission (1946): its 16 May scheme of grouped provinces under a weak centre won League acceptance, but rival readings of grouping broke the talks; Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) brought bloody riots.
• A divided Interim Government: formed under Nehru in September 1946, it took in the League in October; by January 1947 the League sought the Constituent Assembly's dissolution.
• Deadline diplomacy: Attlee's government fixed June 1948 for withdrawal, then hurried the transfer to August 1947; partition followed with the migration of millions and widespread violence.
• Princely states: Britain refused to pass paramountcy to the successors and let it lapse, leaving 565 states legally free to choose.

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In Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi wrote, "It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves". That idea of self-rule, inward and outward, is why his thought still speaks to today's conflicts, inequality, consumption and public ethics.

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From 1885 the Moderates, among them Dadabhai Naoroji, Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, sought reform by constitutional agitation. By the 1890s, NCERT notes, many Indians questioned this political style.

Why the Moderates failed to convince

• Narrow social base: urban English-educated lawyers, teachers and journalists; peasants, workers and most women stayed outside.
• Feeble methods: petitions, memorials and resolutions, mocked as "politics of prayers", won only the Indian Councils Act, 1892, a modest, indirect widening of representation.
• Self-contradiction: their own drain of wealth critique showed colonial rule impoverished India, yet they kept trusting British fairness.
• Modest goals: Indianisation of services, a separate judiciary and repeal of the Arms Act, not self-government.
• Mass distress unaddressed: the famines of 1896–97 and 1899–1900 drew resolutions but no popular campaign.
• Part-time leaders: in 1887 Dinshaw Wacha complained to Naoroji that colleagues like Pherozeshah Mehta were too busy with personal work.

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Till the early 1920s, nationalist demands centred on self-government within the empire. Gandhian mass mobilisation drew peasants, workers, women and depressed classes into politics, and their hopes widened the very meaning of swaraj.

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New objectives added since the 1920s

• Complete independence: the Lahore session of December 1929, under Jawaharlal Nehru, committed the Congress to Purna Swaraj; 26 January 1930 was observed as Independence Day.
• Democratic citizenship: the Motilal Nehru Report (1928) held that every person of either sex aged twenty-one should share in public affairs.
• Equal rights: the Karachi session (1931) declared all citizens equal before law irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex, committing the movement to women's equality.
• Social justice: Gandhi warned that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability survived; the Poona Pact (September 1932) gave the depressed classes reserved seats.
• Economic justice: the Congress Socialist Party (1934) pressed for a more radical, egalitarian Congress, and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936) demanded freedom from economic exploitation.
• Linguistic federalism: after the Nagpur session of 1920, the Congress reorganised itself on linguistic lines and promised linguistic provinces.
• Secular nationhood: equality across religions made communal harmony a condition of freedom, not an afterthought.

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The Salt March of 1930 was the first nationalist campaign that drew women in large numbers. Gandhi's methods turned the few pioneers of earlier decades into a mass force.

Before the Gandhian phase

• Organised voice: the Women's India Association (1917) and the National Council for Women in India (1925) gave women a public platform for reform and rights.

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Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose shared the goal of complete independence and a deep mutual regard. Yet their open clash in 1939 exposed two distinct roads to freedom.

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