Nowhere in the colonial world were
these issues debated more vigorously
than in India. Before the Sepoy Mutiny,
Indian consciousness had focused
primarily on the question of religious
identity. But in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, a stronger
sense of national consciousness began
to arise, provoked by the conservative
policies and racial arrogance of the
British colonial authorities.
The first Indian nationalists were almost invariably
upper-class and educated. Many of them were from urban
areas such as Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. Some were
trained in law and were members of the civil service. At
first, many tended to prefer reform to revolution and accepted
the idea that India needed modernization before it
could handle the problems of independence. An exponent
of this view was Gopal Gokhale (1866 –1915), a
moderate nationalist who hoped that he could convince
the British to bring about needed reforms in Indian society.
Gokhale and other like-minded reformists did have
some effect. In the 1880s, the government launched a series
of reforms introducing a measure of self-government
for the first time. All too often, however, such efforts were
sabotaged by local British officials.
The slow pace of reform convinced many Indian nationalists
that relying on British benevolence was futile.
In 1885, a small group of Indians met in Bombay to form
the Indian National Congress (INC). They hoped to
speak for all India, but most were high-caste Englishtrained
Hindus. Like their reformist predecessors, members
of the INC did not demand immediate independence
and accepted the need for reforms to end
traditional abuses like child marriage and sati. At the
same time, they called for an Indian share in the governing
process and more spending on economic development
and less on military campaigns along the frontier.
The British responded with a few concessions, such as
accepting the principle of elective Indian participation
on government councils, but in general, change was
glacially slow. As impatient members of the INC became
disillusioned, radical leaders such as Balwantrao Tilak
(1856 –1920) openly criticized the British while defending
traditional customs like child marriage to solicit support
from conservative elements within the local population.
Tilak’s activities split the INC between moderates
and radicals, and he and his followers formed the New
Party, which called for the use of terrorism and violence
to achieve national independence. Tilak was eventually
convicted of sedition.
The INC also had difficulty reconciling religious differences
within its ranks. The stated goal of the INC was
to seek self-determination for all Indians regardless of
class or religious affiliation, but many of its leaders were
Hindu and inevitably reflected Hindu concerns. By the
first decade of the twentieth century, Muslims began to
call for the creation of a separate Muslim League to represent
the interests of the millions of Muslims in Indian
society.
In 1915, the return of a young Hindu lawyer from
South Africa transformed the movement and galvanized
India’s struggle for independence and identity. Mohandas
Gandhi was born in 1869 in Gujarat, in western India,
the son of a government minister. In the late nineteenth
century, he studied in London and became a lawyer. In
1893, he went to South Africa to work in a law firm serving
Indian émigrés working as laborers there. He soon became
aware of the racial prejudice and exploitation experienced
by Indians living in the territory and tried to
organize them to protect their living conditions.
On his return to India, Gandhi immediately became
active in the independence movement. Using his experience
in South Africa, he set up a movement based on
nonviolent resistance (the Indian term was satyagraha,
“hold fast to the truth”) to try to force the British to improve
the lot of the poor and grant independence to India.
Gandhi was particularly concerned about the plight
of the millions of “untouchables,” whom he called harijans,
or “children of God.” When the British attempted
to suppress dissent, he called on his followers to refuse to
obey British regulations. He began to manufacture his
own clothes (dressing in a simple dhoti made of coarse
homespun cotton) and adopted the spinning wheel as a
symbol of Indian resistance to imports of British textiles.
Gandhi, now increasingly known as India’s “Great
Soul” (Mahatma), organized mass protests to achieve his
aims, but in 1919, they got out of hand and led to British
reprisals. British troops killed hundreds of unarmed protesters
in the enclosed square in the city of Amritsar in
northwestern India. When the protests spread, Gandhi
was horrified at the violence and briefly retreated from active
politics. Nevertheless, he was arrested for his role in
the protests and spent several years in prison.
Gandhi combined his anticolonial activities with an
appeal to the spiritual instincts of all Indians. Though
born and raised a Hindu, he possessed a universalist approach
to the idea of God that transcended individual religion,
although it was shaped by the historical themes of
Hindu religious belief. At a speech given in London in
September 1931, he expressed his view of the nature of
God as “an indefinable mysterious power that pervades
everything . . . , an unseen power which makes itself felt
and yet defies all proof.”
In 1921, the British passed the Government of India
Act to expand the role of Indians in the governing process
and transform the heretofore advisory Legislative
Council into a bicameral parliament, two-thirds of whose
members would be elected. Similar bodies were created at
the provincial level. In a stroke, five million Indians were
enfranchised. But such reforms were no longer enough for
many members of the INC, which under its new leader,
Motilal Nehru, wanted to push aggressively for full independence.
The British exacerbated the situation by increasing
the salt tax and prohibiting the Indian people
from manufacturing or harvesting their own salt. On release
from prison, Gandhi resumed his policy of civil disobedience
by openly joining several dozen supporters in a
200-mile walk to the sea, where he picked up a lump of
salt and urged Indians to ignore the law. Gandhi and
many other members of the INC were arrested.
In the 1930s, a new figure entered the movement in
the person of Jawaharlal Nehru, son of the INC leader
Motilal Nehru. Educated in the law in Great Britain and
a brahmin (member of the highest social caste) by birth,
Nehru personified the new Anglo-Indian politician: secular,
rational, upper-class, and intellectual. In fact, he
appeared to be everything that Gandhi was not. With his
emergence, the independence movement embarked on
dual paths: religious and secular, native and Western, traditional
and modern. The dichotomous character of the
INC leadership may well have strengthened the movement
by bringing together the two primary impulses behind
the desire for independence: elite nationalism and
the primal force of Indian traditionalism. But it portended
trouble for the nation’s new leadership in defining
India’s future path in the contemporary world. In the
meantime, Muslim discontent with Hindu dominance
over the INC was increasing. In 1940, the Muslim League
called for the creation of a separate Muslim state, to be
known as Pakistan (“Land of the Pure”), in the northwest.
As communal strife between Hindus and Muslims
increased, many Indians came to realize with sorrow (and
some British colonialists with satisfaction) that British
rule was all that stood between peace and civil war.
World History
