Nationalism in India: Class 10 History · Chapter 2

Picture four Indians in 1920: a lawyer in Bombay, a tenant farmer in Awadh, a tea-garden worker in Assam and a college student in Lahore. They spoke different languages, prayed in different ways and worried about very different things. Within a few months, many people like them were answering the same call and shouting the same slogans. How did people so unlike each other come to feel part of one nation?

What they shared was a ruler. In Chapter 1 you saw nationalism (राष्ट्रवाद) in Europe grow alongside the making of nation-states. In India, as in most colonies, it grew out of the fight against foreign rule: being governed by outsiders gave very different people a reason to stand together. But the lawyer, the farmer, the tea worker and the student were not hurt by colonialism in the same way, so they did not dream of the same freedom. Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress tried to weave their hopes into one movement, and the weaving was never free of quarrels.

This chapter covers roughly fifteen years, from 1919 to 1934, with a short look at Quit India in 1942. At its centre are two great campaigns led by Gandhiji: Non-Cooperation (1921–22) and Civil Disobedience (1930–34). As you read, watch for three things. What methods did the Congress use to build a mass movement? Why did each group join or hold back? And how did songs, pictures, stories and flags make the nation feel real?

2.1 The First World War, Khilafat and Non-Cooperation

Something changed after 1919. Until then the national movement had been led mostly by educated people in the cities. Within a couple of years it was reaching villages, forests and tea gardens, and using methods no one had tried on such a scale. Why? The story begins with the war that ended in November 1918.

Imagine a farming family in a Punjab village in 1918. Their eldest son has been pressed into the army by a recruiter with a quota to fill. Everything they buy, from cloth to salt, costs about twice what it did in 1913. The harvest has failed, and the influenza sweeping the country has reached their lane. Millions of Indian families faced some version of this.

Behind these hardships lay the First World War (1914–18). The colonial government's defence spending soared, and it raised the money through war loans and heavier taxes: higher customs duties and new taxes on incomes. Forced recruitment (जबरन भर्ती) of soldiers from villages bred bitter anger, especially in Punjab. Then the crops failed twice, in 1918–19 and again in 1920–21, causing food shortages, while the influenza pandemic of 1918 spread across India. According to the 1921 Census, famine and the epidemic together killed 12 to 13 million people. Many had hoped that peace would bring relief. It did not, and into this mood stepped a new leader with a new way to fight (Fig. 2.1).

2.1.1 The Idea of Satyagraha

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi came home to India in January 1915 after more than twenty years in South Africa. There he had led Indians against racist laws, such as a heavy tax on labourers who had finished their indenture. In November 1913 he led thousands of Indian workers on a march from Natal into the Transvaal in defiance of a ban. When he was arrested, still more workers joined in. He called this new kind of mass struggle satyagraha (सत्याग्रह).

Suppose a law is unjust. You could obey it, or fight it with force. Gandhiji proposed a third way. The word satyagraha joins satya (truth) and agraha (a firm hold): it means holding fast to truth. A satyagrahi breaks the unjust law openly and calmly, then accepts arrest or blows without striking back and without hatred. The aim is not to defeat the opponent but to win him over. Each act of peaceful suffering speaks to the conscience of the rulers and of everyone watching, until even the opponent comes to see the truth. Gandhiji was convinced that a struggle built on non-violence could unite Indians of every religion and class (Fig. 2.2).

Back in India, Gandhiji tested the method in three local campaigns, each for a different group of people. They made him a national figure within three years.

2.1.2 The Rowlatt Act

By 1919 Gandhiji was ready to go national. His target was the Rowlatt Act, named after Justice Sidney Rowlatt, who chaired the committee that proposed it. The Act let the government arrest people suspected of political activity and hold them for up to two years without a trial. It was rushed through the Imperial Legislative Council in March 1919, although the Indian members opposed it as one; Muhammad Ali Jinnah resigned from the Council in protest. People summed up the law in a popular slogan: na vakil, na daleel, na appeal (no lawyer, no argument, no appeal).

The protest was to open with a hartal (हड़ताल), a day when shops shut and work stops, on 6 April 1919, followed by non-violent civil disobedience against the law. The response surprised everyone. Cities held rallies, railway workshop staff downed tools, and bazaars stayed shuttered. To the British the upsurge looked dangerous: what if the railways and telegraph lines that held their rule together were cut? They struck at the leadership. Gandhiji was pulled off a train near Delhi and sent back to Bombay so that he could not reach Delhi and Punjab. In Amritsar, two popular local leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, were arrested.

Amritsar boiled over. When a procession marched to demand the leaders' release on 10 April, the police opened fire on it. In the rioting that followed, banks, post offices and railway stations were attacked. The army moved in under General Reginald Dyer, and the city was placed under martial law.

It was Baisakhi, 13 April 1919, and Jallianwala Bagh, an open ground in Amritsar boxed in by the walls of houses, was crowded with thousands of people. Many were villagers who had come to town for the festival fair and knew nothing of the ban on meetings; others had gathered to protest against the arrests. Late in the afternoon Dyer arrived with troops, placed them across the narrow main entrance and, giving no warning, ordered them to open fire. For about ten minutes they fired into the trapped crowd, stopping only when their ammunition was nearly spent. Some people jumped into a well inside the ground to escape. Officially 379 people died; Indian estimates put the number far higher (Fig. 2.3).

Why fire on an unarmed crowd? Dyer later said he had wanted to ‘produce a moral effect’, that is, to terrify every would-be satyagrahi. Instead, the news brought people out in many north Indian towns, and strikes, police clashes and attacks on government buildings followed. The government's answer was to humiliate Punjab. In one Amritsar lane Indians were made to crawl on their bellies. Elsewhere people had to rub their noses on the ground, salaam (salute) every British officer, or face public flogging, and aircraft bombed villages around Gujranwala (now in Pakistan). As violence spread, Gandhiji called off the satyagraha, admitting that he had asked people to defy the law before they were ready, a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’.

The Khilafat question

Gandhiji drew two lessons from 1919. The Rowlatt protests, though widespread, had barely touched the villages, and a real mass movement would have to reach far beyond the towns. It would also need Hindus and Muslims to stand together. The Khilafat (ख़िलाफ़त) question gave him a chance to bring them closer.

Ottoman Turkey had fought on the losing side in the war. Its Sultan was also the Khalifa, whom many Muslims across the world regarded as their spiritual head. Word spread that the victorious Allies meant to impose a harsh treaty that would strip him of his powers. (The Treaty of Sèvres of August 1920 did carve up his empire.) In March 1919 Indian Muslims formed a Khilafat Committee in Bombay to defend the Khalifa. Among its younger leaders were Muhammad Ali and his brother Shaukat Ali, who soon opened talks with Gandhiji about joint mass action. For Gandhiji this was the opening he needed to draw Muslims into one national movement. At a special Congress session in Calcutta in September 1920, he won the other leaders over to non-cooperation on behalf of two causes at once: the Khilafat and swaraj (स्वराज), or self-rule.

2.1.3 Why Non-cooperation?

Gandhiji's case for non-cooperation went back to his book Hind Swaraj (1909). A few thousand British officials, he argued, could rule millions of Indians only because Indians themselves ran the system for them. Indians served as clerks, soldiers, policemen and lawyers, studied in government schools and bought British goods. If Indians withdrew that help, British rule would fall, within a year he predicted, and swaraj would arrive (Fig. 2.4).

Gandhiji did not ask for everything at once. His plan was a ladder of steps, each harder than the last. The first rung was easy: give back the titles and honours the government had handed out. The second was much harder: a boycott (बहिष्कार) of government service, the army and police, the courts, the legislative councils, government schools and foreign goods. The top rung, kept in reserve in case the government turned to repression, was full civil disobedience, including a refusal to pay taxes. Gandhiji himself set an example by returning the Kaisar-i-Hind medal the government had awarded him.

Not every Congress leader liked the plan. Elections to the councils were due in November 1920, and many were unwilling to throw away their chance of winning seats; others feared that mass action would slide into violence. While Gandhiji and Shaukat Ali spent the summer of 1920 touring the country to rally ordinary people, the leadership argued. The quarrel ran from September to December, and for a time neither side would budge. At last, at the Nagpur session in December 1920, the two sides reached a compromise and the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted.

2.2 Differing Strands within the Movement

Picture the crowds of 1921: students and shopkeepers, peasants and forest dwellers, tea-garden workers and lawyers. All of them answered the call for swaraj, yet each heard something different in the word, shaped by its own troubles and hopes (Fig. 2.5). The movement itself was launched in January 1921. Let us follow it from the towns to the villages, the forests and the tea gardens.

2.2.1 The Movement in the Towns

The urban middle classes moved first. In city after city, students walked out of schools and colleges run by the government, and many headmasters and teachers resigned along with them. Lawyers gave up their practice in the British courts. Most provinces boycotted the council elections. Madras did not: there the Justice Party, which spoke for non-Brahmans, stood for election, because a seat in the council promised non-Brahmans a share of power that had usually gone to Brahmans.

The boycott bit hardest in the marketplace. Imported cloth, seen as the badge of Western economic and cultural domination, was piled up in public squares and set alight. Volunteers picketed (धरना) liquor shops, and many merchants refused to handle foreign goods or to lend money for foreign trade. The numbers show the impact: India imported foreign cloth worth ₹102 crore in 1921, but only ₹57 crore worth in 1922, a fall of more than 40 per cent. Indian mills and handloom weavers gained, because people who gave up foreign clothes had to buy Indian ones.

Within a year or so, the town movement began to flag. The trouble was cost and choice. Hand-spun khadi usually cost more than factory-made cloth, which put it out of reach of poor families for long. Leaving British institutions made sense only if there were Indian ones to join, and these appeared slowly and in small numbers. A student who quit a government college still needed a degree; a lawyer who left the courts still needed an income. One by one, many went back (Table 2.1).

2.2.2 Rebellion in the Countryside

Beyond the towns, peasants and tribal people had been fighting their own battles since the war. Non-Cooperation now reached them, and their struggles became part of it.

Consider a tenant farmer in Awadh (in today's Uttar Pradesh). His talukdar, a big landlord, charges a crushing rent plus a string of extra cesses. On some days he must work the landlord's fields for nothing; this forced, unpaid labour is called begar (बेगार). He can be thrown off his plot at any time, and landlords evict tenants regularly precisely so that no tenant can build up a legal claim to the land. Peasants like him found a leader in Baba Ramchandra, a sanyasi who had once gone to Fiji as an indentured labourer.

The peasants' demands were clear: lower revenue, no more begar, and a social boycott of landlords who oppressed them. Village panchayats enforced the boycott through nai–dhobi bandhs, so that such landlords lost even the services of barbers and washermen. From June 1920 Jawaharlal Nehru went from village to village in Awadh, listening to peasants' complaints. That October he, Baba Ramchandra and a few others set up the Oudh Kisan Sabha, which had more than 300 village branches within a month. When Non-Cooperation began the following year, the Congress set out to fold this peasant struggle into the national one.

The peasants, however, did not always follow the Congress script. In 1921 crowds attacked the homes of talukdars and merchants, looted markets and carried off hoarded grain. Local leaders spread word that Gandhiji had abolished taxes and ordered land to be shared among the poor, though he had said nothing of the kind. The Mahatma's name came to be used to justify whatever people did and whatever they hoped for.

Tribal peasants drew yet another meaning from Gandhiji's message. In the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, the early 1920s saw a militant guerrilla movement, a form of struggle the Congress could never approve. The trouble began with the forests. Here, as across India's forest belts, officials had closed large areas to the hill people, who could no longer graze cattle there or gather fuelwood and fruit. They lost part of their living, and they felt robbed of rights their families had always enjoyed. The last straw came when officials forced them to do begar, building roads without pay. The hills rose in revolt.

Their leader, Alluri Sitarama Raju, was a remarkable figure. He claimed special powers: he could make accurate astrological predictions, heal the sick and even survive bullets. Captivated, his followers came to believe he was an incarnation of God. Raju praised Gandhiji, said Non-Cooperation inspired him, and asked his people to take up khadi and stop drinking liquor. Yet he was convinced that only force, not non-violence, could free India. Under him the rebels raided police stations, tried to kill British officials and waged guerrilla war for swaraj. Raju was captured and executed in May 1924, and over time he became a folk hero.

2.2.3 Swaraj in the Plantations

On Assam's tea plantations, the workers' first wish was simple: to be able to leave. Most had been brought from distant districts, and under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859 they could not walk out of the tea gardens without permission, which was hardly ever granted. Freedom, for them, meant moving in and out of the estates as they chose and keeping their ties with the villages they came from.

News of Non-Cooperation reached the gardens in 1921, and thousands of workers took it as their signal. In May 1921, for example, thousands walked out of the tea gardens of the Chargola valley in a single exodus, defying the managers. Gandhi Raj, they believed, was about to arrive, and with it land for everyone in their own village. Few reached home. Railway and steamer services were disrupted by a strike, the travellers were stranded, and the police caught them and beat them brutally.

The Congress programme did not shape any of these hopes. Peasants, tribal people and workers each filled the word swaraj with their own meaning, often a time when every hardship would simply end. Yet something important was happening. A hill villager shouting Gandhiji's name, or a crowd raising the slogan ‘Swatantra Bharat’ (free India), was linking a local grievance to a struggle across the whole country. People were starting to think beyond their own village or valley.

2.3 Towards Civil Disobedience

On 4 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district, a protest in the local bazaar went out of control. After a clash with the police, the crowd set fire to the police station, and more than twenty policemen died. Violence had already broken out in several places, and Gandhiji now called off the Non-Cooperation Movement. Satyagrahis, he said, needed proper training before they were ready for a mass struggle.

What next? The Congress split over the answer. One group, worn out by mass campaigns, wanted to fight elections to the provincial councils that the Government of India Act of 1919 had created. From inside, they argued, they could resist British policies, push for reform and expose how undemocratic the councils really were. Led by C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru, this group formed the Swaraj Party within the Congress. A younger group, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, wanted the opposite: more radical mass agitation and nothing less than full independence (two ways forward).

While the Congress argued, two developments changed the political scene in the late 1920s. The first was the worldwide economic depression. Prices of farm produce started sliding in 1926 and crashed after 1930. With demand for agricultural goods shrinking and exports falling, peasants could hardly sell their crops, let alone pay their revenue. By 1930 rural India was seething with unrest.

The second blow came from London. Britain's Conservative (Tory) government appointed a Statutory Commission, headed by Sir John Simon, to study how India's constitutional system was working and recommend changes. It was meant as an answer to Indian demands, yet all seven of its members were British: not a single Indian was included. Indians took this as an insult. The Congress, at its Madras session in December 1927, resolved to boycott it, and when the commission landed in 1928 it was greeted with black flags and the cry ‘Go back Simon’. For once all parties, the Congress and the Muslim League included, protested together.

The Viceroy, Lord Irwin, tried to calm things down. In October 1929 he held out dominion status for India, without saying when, and promised a Round Table Conference where Indian and British leaders would talk about a new constitution. Congress leaders were not impressed. Within the party, the radicals around Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose grew louder, while the liberals and moderates, who had hoped for self-government inside the British Empire, steadily lost ground.

The Congress met at Lahore in December 1929 under Jawaharlal Nehru's presidency and formally made Purna Swaraj (पूर्ण स्वराज), complete independence, its goal. It fixed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day: on that day people across India were to pledge themselves to the struggle for complete freedom. The pledge argued that a people whom a government robs of freedom and oppresses has the right to change or abolish that government. It accused British rule of ruining India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually. Yet the celebrations drew little attention. Gandhiji saw that an abstract idea like freedom had to be tied to the concrete problems of everyday life.

2.3.1 The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement

Every kitchen in India uses salt, from the richest to the poorest, and in 1930 every pinch of it carried a British tax. The government also held a monopoly over making salt, so Indians could not even collect it freely from their own coast. Gandhiji saw in this the most oppressive face of British rule, and a symbol that the whole nation could understand.

He first put his case to the Viceroy. On 31 January 1930 he wrote to Irwin with eleven demands, chosen so that every class could find something of its own in them. Some concerned everyone, such as prohibition of liquor, the release of political prisoners and a cut in military spending. Others targeted particular groups: a lower rupee–sterling exchange rate and protection against foreign cloth for industrialists, and a fifty per cent cut in land revenue for peasants. The demand that stirred people most was the abolition of the salt tax.

The letter ended with a deadline: unless the demands were met by 11 March, the Congress would begin civil disobedience. Irwin would not negotiate. On 12 March 1930 Gandhiji walked out of his Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad at the head of 78 hand-picked volunteers, bound for Dandi on the Gujarat coast. For 24 days they covered about 10 miles (16 km) a day, over 240 miles (about 385 km) in all. At every halt crowds gathered, and Gandhiji told them what swaraj meant and asked them to defy the British peacefully. On the morning of 6 April, at Dandi, he made salt from the sea, openly breaking the law (Fig. 2.6).

With that handful of salt, the Civil Disobedience (सविनय अवज्ञा) Movement began. It went a step beyond Non-Cooperation. In 1921–22 Indians had been asked to withdraw from British institutions; now they were asked to break British laws (compared).

The salt law was soon being broken all over India. People boiled sea water or scraped salt from the shore, and crowds demonstrated outside government salt depots. The movement then widened. Foreign cloth was boycotted and liquor shops picketed once again. Peasants stopped paying revenue and the chaukidari tax that paid for village watchmen, and village officials gave up their posts. In forest areas, people deliberately broke forest laws, walking into Reserved Forests to cut wood and graze their cattle.

The government, alarmed, began picking off Congress leaders one by one, and the arrests set off violent clashes in many places. In April 1930 the police arrested Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devoted follower of Gandhiji who led the Khudai Khidmatgars (‘Servants of God’) in the North-West Frontier Province. In Peshawar, protesting crowds were met with armoured cars and gunfire, and many people died. When Gandhiji was arrested a month later, industrial workers in Sholapur turned on the buildings that stood for British rule: police posts, municipal offices, law courts and railway stations. The frightened government hit back hard. Police beat peaceful satyagrahis, and even women and children, and about a lakh (100,000) people went to jail.

In March 1931 Gandhiji chose to pause the struggle. Under the Gandhi–Irwin Pact, signed on 5 March, the government would free political prisoners. In return Gandhiji would go to London for the Round Table Conference, though the Congress had stayed away from the first one. The second conference, held in late 1931, achieved nothing for India, and Gandhiji came home disappointed in December. He returned to a crackdown. Nehru and Ghaffar Khan were already behind bars, the Congress was soon outlawed, and meetings, demonstrations and boycotts were banned. Uneasy, but left with little choice, Gandhiji restarted Civil Disobedience in 1932. It survived for more than a year before running out of steam by 1934.

2.3.2 How Participants saw the Movement

Civil Disobedience drew in many groups, but each had its own reasons for joining and its own idea of swaraj. Their support also rose and fell as the movement went on (Table 2.3).

Take a well-off Patidar family in Gujarat that grows cotton or tobacco for sale. When the depression came, the price of its crop crashed and its cash income all but disappeared, yet the government still demanded the same land revenue. Rich peasant communities like this, including the Jats of Uttar Pradesh, were hit hard because they produced commercial crops, and the government's refusal to cut the revenue made them angry. They became some of the most eager supporters of Civil Disobedience, organising whole communities and at times pressuring unwilling members to join the boycotts. To them, swaraj meant above all a fight against high revenue. That is why they felt badly let down when Gandhiji suspended the movement in 1931 with revenue rates unchanged, and why many refused to rejoin when it restarted in 1932.

Poorer peasants needed something different. Many of them were small tenants who farmed land rented from landlords. As the depression dragged on and cash ran short, they fell behind with their rent and wanted the arrears cancelled. Many joined radical movements, a lot of them led by Socialists and Communists. The Congress, anxious not to upset rich peasants and landlords, would not back ‘no rent’ campaigns in most places, so poor peasants never quite knew where they stood with it.

Business groups had their own reasons to join. The First World War had been good for Indian merchants and industrialists: they had earned large profits and grown powerful. Now they wanted room to expand, and colonial policies stood in the way. They asked for protection from foreign imports and for a rupee–sterling exchange rate that would make imports dearer. To press these demands they organised, setting up the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress (1920) and later the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 1927. Under leading industrialists such as Purshottamdas Thakurdas and G. D. Birla, they criticised colonial control of the Indian economy.

At first, business groups backed Civil Disobedience with money, and many traders stopped dealing in imported goods. Most businessmen looked forward to a swaraj in which colonial curbs on business would vanish and trade and industry could flourish. After the Round Table Conference failed, however, they were no longer so keen. Militant activity was spreading, business had been disrupted for too long, and many younger Congress members were turning towards socialism; all of this worried them.

Industrial workers, apart from those around Nagpur, mostly stayed out of Civil Disobedience. The closer the industrialists came to the Congress, the more the workers held back. Some did take part, but on their own terms. They adopted pieces of the Gandhian programme, such as the boycott of foreign goods, in their own battles over low wages and poor working conditions. Railway workers went on strike in 1930; dockworkers followed in 1932. In the Chotanagpur region, thousands of mine workers put on Gandhi caps in 1930 and joined protest rallies and boycotts. Still, the Congress kept workers' demands out of its programme, fearing it would anger industrialists and divide the forces opposed to imperial rule.

Women joined Civil Disobedience on a scale never seen before. When Gandhiji's march passed through Gujarat, thousands of women left their homes to hear him speak. In the months that followed they marched in processions, made salt, picketed shops that sold foreign cloth or liquor, and went to jail in large numbers. For many it was their first step into public life. In the towns these women mostly belonged to high-caste families; in the countryside they came from rich peasant households. Gandhiji's appeal led them to see serving the nation as a sacred duty.

Did this change how society saw women? Not very much. Gandhiji himself held that a woman's first duty lay at home, in being a good wife and mother. Inside the Congress, women were welcome in processions but for many years were kept away from positions of power; the party valued them largely as a symbol. Sarojini Naidu, Congress president in 1925, was a rare exception.

2.3.3 The Limits of Civil Disobedience

Some groups were not stirred by an abstract swaraj at all. Among them were the people treated as ‘untouchables’, who from around the 1930s began calling themselves dalit (दलित), meaning oppressed. The Congress had long kept away from their cause, worried that it would anger the sanatanis, conservative upper-caste Hindus. Gandhiji broke with this. Swaraj, he declared, would not come for a hundred years unless untouchability ended. He gave the ‘untouchables’ the name Harijan, children of God, and led satyagrahas to open temples, public wells, tanks, roads and schools to them. He cleaned toilets himself to show that a sweeper's work deserved dignity, and appealed to upper castes to change their hearts and give up ‘the sin of untouchability’.

Many dalit leaders, though, wanted a political answer, and some found the name Harijan patronising. They began to organise. They asked for seats to be reserved for dalits in schools and colleges, and for a separate electorate (पृथक निर्वाचिका) in which dalit voters alone would choose dalit members of the legislative councils. Only political power, they believed, would remove their social disabilities. Dalits therefore took a limited part in Civil Disobedience, above all in Maharashtra and the Nagpur region, where their organisations were strong.

The clash came at the Second Round Table Conference in 1931. Dr B. R. Ambedkar, who in 1930 had brought dalits together in the Depressed Classes Association, demanded separate electorates for them, and Gandhiji opposed him. In August 1932 the British government's Communal Award granted Ambedkar's demand. Gandhiji, then a prisoner in Yerwada jail in Poona, answered with a fast unto death, arguing that separate electorates would hold back dalits' integration into society. In the end Ambedkar accepted Gandhiji's position, and in September 1932 the two sides signed the Poona Pact. The Depressed Classes (later known as the Scheduled Castes) got reserved seats in the provincial and central legislative councils. But the members for those seats would be chosen by all voters, the general electorate (Fig. 2.7). Even so, the dalit movement remained wary of the Congress-led national movement.

Both leaders wanted untouchability ended; they disagreed about how. Historians still weigh the Poona Pact differently. Some see it as a compromise that kept the national movement united, while others see it as a setback for an independent dalit political voice.

Many Muslim political organisations, too, responded coolly to Civil Disobedience. Once the Non-Cooperation–Khilafat Movement faded, a large part of the Muslim community felt estranged. From about 1925 the Congress was increasingly seen alongside openly Hindu religious nationalist groups such as the Hindu Mahasabha. Relations between the communities soured. Religious processions on both sides turned militant, and clashes and riots broke out in several cities. With every riot the two communities drifted further apart.

Attempts were made to patch things up. The Congress and the Muslim League discussed a fresh alliance, and in 1927 a settlement looked possible. The sticking point was how communities would be represented in the assemblies to be elected in future. Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League offered to give up separate electorates if Muslims got two guarantees. One was reserved seats in the Central Assembly. The other was seats in proportion to population in the Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab. Negotiations dragged on, but hope of agreement collapsed at the All Parties Conference of 1928, where M. R. Jayakar of the Hindu Mahasabha fought hard against any compromise.

By the time Civil Disobedience started, then, suspicion and mistrust ran deep. Large numbers of Muslims, estranged from the Congress, did not respond to its appeal for a joint struggle. Muslim leaders and thinkers in large numbers were anxious about the place of Muslims as a minority, afraid that a Hindu majority would swamp the culture and identity of minorities. Yet many Muslims stayed with the Congress-led struggle. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was among its foremost leaders, and Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars were some of Gandhiji's staunchest followers.

2.4 The Sense of Collective Belonging

A nation exists, in a sense, when enough people believe they belong to it and feel that something ties them to one another. How did that belief take root in India, among people of different communities, regions and languages?

Shared struggle was one answer: people who marched, picketed and went to jail together began to feel like one people. Culture was another. Stories and histories, folk tales and songs, cheap printed pictures and symbols such as flags all helped people to imagine the nation.

As you saw in Chapter 1 with Marianne and Germania, a nation is often pictured as a person, which gives people an image to identify with. In twentieth-century India the nation came to be seen as Bharat Mata, Mother India. The Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay first gave this image shape. During the 1870s he composed ‘Vande Mataram’ (‘Mother, I bow to thee’), a hymn to the motherland that he later placed in his novel Anandamath (1882). In the Swadeshi movement in Bengal it was sung everywhere.

In 1905, the year the Swadeshi movement began, the artist Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata as a calm, gentle ascetic in saffron. Her four arms hold a book, sheaves of paddy, a white cloth and a rosary: learning, food, clothing and spiritual strength. Like Raja Ravi Varma before him, he wanted to create a way of painting that would look unmistakably Indian. Over the following decades the image took many forms in popular prints and in the work of other artists. Some prints, for instance, showed her holding a trident, with a lion and an elephant beside her as symbols of power. Being devoted to this mother figure came to count as proof that you were a nationalist.

Many of us grew up on stories told by grandparents, songs sung at weddings and harvests, and riddles passed down for generations. In the late nineteenth century, nationalists began to see such folklore as a national treasure. In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore gathered ballads, nursery rhymes and myths and led a movement to revive folk culture. In Madras, Natesa Sastri brought out The Folklore of Southern India, four large volumes of Tamil folk tales. To him, folklore was the nation's own literature and the truest record of how ordinary people thought. Others travelled from village to village, writing down tales sung by wandering bards. Their reasoning was that folk culture showed the real India, damaged by outside influence, and that saving it would help Indians rediscover who they were and take pride in their past.

As the movement grew, its leaders saw ever more clearly how icons and symbols could bind people together and stir national feeling. Flags are a good example (Fig. 2.8). Bengal's Swadeshi movement produced a tricolour of green, yellow and red, carrying eight lotuses for the eight provinces of British India, and a sun and a crescent moon standing for Hindus and Muslims. By 1921 Gandhiji had put forward a Swaraj flag, drawn up with the help of Pingali Venkayya. It too was a tricolour, of red, green and white, with a spinning wheel at the centre for the Gandhian ideal of self-help. Carrying this flag and holding it high in a march became an act of defiance.

History itself became a battleground. Colonial writers and officials often described Indians as backward and primitive, a people unfit to rule themselves. Indian writers answered with the past. Towards the close of the nineteenth century they produced histories that celebrated ancient India: its temples and sculpture, its mathematics and astronomy, its philosophy and law, its crafts and its trade. The story they told had three acts: a golden age, a long decline, and finally colonial rule. Its message to readers was to be proud of what India had once been, and to fight to change the miserable present under the British.

A Bengali history book of 1858, Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay's Bharatbarsher Itihas (The History of Bharatbarsh), already struck this note. It contrasted two ages. In the past, it said, foreign visitors had admired Indians' courage and honesty, and Indian armies had marched far abroad. In the present, a few troops from a small, distant island ruled over the country.

There was a catch, though. Much of this glorified past was a Hindu past, and many national images, Bharat Mata among them, borrowed the look of Hindu goddesses. Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others could easily feel that this nation was not quite theirs. The same symbols that drew some people in kept others at a distance.

Conclusion

Look back over the chapter and a pattern appears. Anger at colonial rule brought together people who had little else in common: mill owners and mill workers, landlords and tenants, Patidar farmers and Assam's tea workers. Gandhiji and the Congress gave that anger a shape, organising it into movements with clear methods and goals. But each group came with its own grievances, so each imagined a different freedom.

Holding them together meant constant balancing. A step that pleased one group, such as backing tenants against landlords or workers against industrialists, risked driving another away. So moments of great unity, as in 1921 and 1930, were followed by periods of division and quarrel. The nation that emerged from these struggles spoke with many voices, but all of them wanted an end to colonial rule.

Quit India Movement, 1942

Quit India came in the middle of the Second World War. In 1942 Britain sent the Cripps Mission to win Indian support for the war, but its offer fell well short of real self-government, and wartime hardship added to the anger. Gandhiji's answer was blunt: the British must leave India altogether. Meeting at Wardha on 14 July 1942, the Congress Working Committee adopted the ‘Quit India’ resolution, demanding that power be handed to Indians at once. The All India Congress Committee endorsed it in Bombay on 8 August and called for non-violent mass action across the whole country. That evening Gandhiji gave his famous call: ‘Do or Die’ (Karo ya maro).

By dawn the next day Gandhiji and the top Congress leaders were in jail, but the movement carried on without them. Hartals were observed, processions marched with national songs and slogans, and in large parts of the country the machinery of government nearly stopped. This was a truly mass movement: students, workers and peasants joined in their thousands. Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and Aruna Asaf Ali were among the leaders who kept it alive. Women were in the front line too, among them Rama Devi in Odisha, Kanaklata Barua in Assam and Matangini Hazra in Bengal. Kanaklata Barua, aged 17, and Matangini Hazra, aged 73, were shot dead while leading processions with the national flag. The British used massive force, and still needed more than a year to put the movement down.