Nationalism in India

In 1919, nationalism was expanding into new areas, and new social groups and modes of struggle were emerging. In January 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi came back to India, bringing with him the concept of nonviolent mass agitation- Satyagraha, which focused on the power of truth and the need to search for it. Satyagraha imposed the power of truth and encouraged people to seek it. It implied that no physical force was necessary for the struggle against injustice to fight the colonists. 

Mahatma Gandhi had organized Satyagraha on a mass level in various parts of India. In 1916, he went to Champaran, Bihar, to encourage peasants to fight the oppressive plantation system. In 1917, the peasants of the Kheda district demanded relaxation in revenue collection due to a plague epidemic and a crop failure. Gandhi organized Satyagraha in Kheda, Gujarat, in support of the peasants of that district. Similarly, in 1918, he organized another mass movement of Satyagraha in Ahmedabad among the cotton mill workers.

Here’s an introduction of nationalism in India, where we will learn about the various movements of struggle that had symbolized nationalism in India and eventually led to the independence movement of our country. This article will help students to collect relevant information for nationalism in India project work as well.

The Rowlatt Act

The British government had proposed and hurriedly passed the Rowlatt Act in 1919 through the Imperial Legislative Council despite the opposition of the Indian members. This Act gave the government vast powers to suppress political activity and allowed the prisoners to be detained without trial for two years. Gandhi advocated for nonviolent civil disobedience against such unjust laws, beginning with a hartal on April 6, 1919. 

Rallies were held in various cities, workers went on strike in railway workshops, and small, and big shops closed their doors. The British administration decided to restrict the nationalists in response to the popular uprising, fearing that communication lines such as the railways and telegraph would be disrupted in this movement. Local leaders were arrested from Amritsar, and Gandhi was denied entry in Delhi. 

On April 10, 1919, the police fired on a peaceful procession in Amritsar, resulting in widespread attacks on banks, railway stations, and post offices. Martial law was declared. General Dyer took over the charge. On April 13, 1919, the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre took place. A large crowd gathered in Jallianwalla Bagh's enclosed ground to attend the annual fair for Baisakhi. Some people came to the ground to protest against the new repressive measures of the British government. 

Many people came from other villages and were not aware of the martial law being imposed in the city. Dyer entered the ground, shut down the exit, and opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds of innocent people. As later stated, this massacre was aimed to produce a moral effect and to instill fear and awe in the minds of Satyagrahis.  

Crowds took to the streets in several north Indian towns as the news of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre spread. Strikes, attacks on government buildings, and clashes with police occurred. The government answered with brutal repression to humiliate and terrorize the people. The Satyagrahis were forced to rub their noses on the ground, crawl on the streets, and salute all Britishers. People were flogged, villages around Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, were bombed. As the violence escalated, Mahatma Gandhi called the movement off.

While the Rowlatt Satyagraha was a widespread movement, it was still mostly confined to cities and towns. Mahatma Gandhi now felt compelled to launch a broader-based movement in India. However, he was certain that no such movement could be organized unless Hindus and Muslims worked together. He believed that taking up the Khilafat issue was one way to accomplish this. The Ottoman of Turkey was defeated at the end of World War I. 

There were rumours that the Ottoman emperor, the Khalifa, the spiritual leader of the Islamic world, would be subjected to a harsh peace treaty. In March 1919, a Khilafat Committee was formed in Bombay to defend the Khalifa's temporal powers.

A new generation of Muslim leaders, such as the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, began discussing the possibility of united mass action on the issue with Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhiji saw this as an opportunity to unite Muslims under a unified national movement. In September 1920, at the Congress session in Calcutta, he persuaded other leaders of the importance of launching a non-cooperation movement in support of Khilafat and Swaraj.

Non-Cooperation Movement

Gandhiji advocated for a staged approach to the non-cooperation movement. It should start with the boycott of the civil services, police, army, schools, courts and legislative councils, foreign commodities, and the surrender of titles bestowed by the British government. If the government repressed the people, a full-fledged civil disobedience movement would have to be launched. Mahatma Gandhi and Shaukat Ali toured the country extensively in the summer of 1920, mobilizing public support for the non-cooperation movement.

Many members of Congress, however, were concerned about the proposals. They were hesitant to boycott the November 1920 council elections because they feared the movement would spark popular violence. Between September and December, there was a heated debate within Congress. There was a time when the opponents and the supporters of the movement were nowhere close to coming together. Finally, in December 1920, at the Congress session held at Nagpur, the Non-Cooperation program was adopted. 

Different Strands of the Non-Cooperation Movement

The non-cooperation movement started in January 1921 with the active participation of various social groups driven by their aspirations. The term Swaraj had different significance to different social groups. 

Non-Cooperation Movement in the Towns and Cities

In the cities, the movement began with the participation of middle-class people. Thousands of students left government-run schools and colleges, headmasters and teachers resigned, and lawyers ceased practicing. Most provinces boycotted the council elections, excluding Madras, where the Justice Party, a non-Brahman party, felt that entering the council was one way to gain power. 

The economic consequences of non-cooperation were quite dramatic. Liquor shops were picketed, foreign goods were boycotted, and foreign clothing was burned in massive bonfires. The price of imported foreign clothes was almost halved between 1921 and 1922. Merchants and traders in many places refused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign trade. As the boycott movement began to spread, people abandoned imported clothing and began to wear indigenous clothes. Hence, the production of Indian textile mills and handlooms increased. 

The Non-Cooperation movement slowed down gradually in the cities. Khadi clothing was more expensive than mass-produced mill cloth. Hence the poor could not afford it. The boycott of British institutions resulted in a problem. To ensure the success of the movement, alternative Indian institutions had to be established that could be attended instead of the British ones. As it took longer for these institutions to be established, students and teachers began to return to the government schools, and lawyers returned to work in government courts.

Non-Cooperation Movement in the Countryside

In the countryside, the peasants and the tribes participated in the movement. In Awadh, the movement was against the landlords and ‘talukdars’ who extorted exorbitant land rents and other taxes from the peasants. The peasants were forced to ‘begar’, that is, they had to work on the farms of the landlords without any wages. They were randomly evicted from the farmlands so that they could not acquire any rights over the land. They did not have any job security on the leased lands. 

The non-cooperation movement of the peasants demanded revenue reduction, begar abolition, and a social boycott of the landlords. The panchayat organized nai dhobi bandhs that would deprive the landlords of the services of washermen and barbers. In October 1920, Jawaharlal Nehru, Baba Ramchandra, with some other people, had set up the Oudh Kisan Sabha. Over 300 branches of the committee were established in villages around that area. As a result, when the Non-Cooperation Movement began the following year, Congress's effort was to integrate the Awadh peasant struggle into the larger struggle. 

The peasant movement, on the other hand, took forms that the Congress leadership despised. As the movement spread in 1921, talukdars' and merchants' homes were attacked, bazaars were looted, and grain hoards were seized. Local leaders told peasants in many places that Gandhi had declared that no taxes would be paid and that land would be redistributed among the poor. The Mahatma's name was being invoked to validate all actions and aspirations.

Dandi March and the Civil Disobedience Movement

Mahatma Gandhi saw salt as a powerful symbol with the potential to unite the nation. On January 31, 1930, he sent Viceroy Irwin a letter outlining eleven demands. Some were of general interest, while others were specific demands of various classes, ranging from industrialists to peasants. The idea was to broaden the demands so that all classes within Indian society could identify with them and join forces in a united campaign. The most stirring demand was to repeal the salt tax. Salt was something that was consumed by both the rich and the poor, and it was one of the most important food items. Gandhi revealed the most repressive face of the British government by putting light on the salt tax, the government’s monopoly on salt production in India.

Gandhi’s letter to Irwin was an ultimatum. According to the letter, Congress would be launching a civil disobedience movement if the government did not fulfill its demands by March 11. Irwin was adamantly opposed to bargaining. As a result, Mahatma Gandhi began the salt march, along with 78 of his trusted volunteers. From his ashram in Sabarmati to Dandi, the coastal town in Gujarat, they walked more than 240 miles. They walked for 24 days, covering approximately 10 miles per day. Thousands of commoners gathered to hear Mahatma Gandhi wherever he went, and he explained what he meant by Swaraj and urged them to defy the British peacefully. On April 6, they arrived at Dandi and made salt by boiling the seawater. This event marked the start of the Civil Disobedience Movement. 

The common people were asked to break the colonial laws imposed by the British government in addition to non-cooperating with them. Salt was manufactured by the commoners in front of the salt factories in many parts of India to break the salt law. Foreign clothing was boycotted, peasants refused to pay taxes, liquor shops were picketed in towns, the officials in villages resigned from their offices. In certain parts of the country, the Forest laws were broken, people went into the Reserved Forests for cattle grazing and collected wood. 

Concerned about the situation, the colonial government began arresting Congress leaders. This resulted in violent clashes in a number of places. When Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, was arrested in April 1930, angry crowds marched through the streets of Peshawar, confronted by armored cars and police firing. Many people were killed. When Mahatma Gandhi was arrested a month later, industrial workers attacked police stations, municipal buildings, law courts, and railway stations in Sholapur. A terrified government responded with a brutal repression policy. Women and children were beaten, and peaceful Satyagrahis were attacked, and nearly 100000 people were arrested.

Seeing the widespread acts of violence against the common people, Gandhi had to call off the Civil Disobedience Movement, entering into the Gandhi-Irwin pact on March 5, 1931. According to this pact, Gandhi agreed to be a part of a Round Table Conference in London and the British government agreed to release the political prisoners. Hence, in December 1931, Gandhi went to attend the round table conference in London. However, he returned disappointed as the negotiations did not proceed as per his proposals. After his return, he found that the political prisoners, like Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghaffar Khan were still imprisoned. Also, the British government had declared Congress to be illegal, along with a number of new repressive impositions to prevent meetings, boycotts, and rallies. Therefore, Gandhi had to relaunch the movement of Civil Disobedience, however, it lost its pace by 1934.

Limitations of the Civil Disobedience Movement

Some social groups were unable to relate to the concept of Swaraj. One such group was the nation's 'untouchables,' who began to refer to themselves as Dalit or oppressed since the 1930s. For a long time, Congress ignored the Dalits out of fear of upsetting the Sanatanis, or conservative high-caste Hindus. However, Mahatma Gandhi declared that swaraj would not come for another hundred years unless untouchability was abolished. He lovingly called the ‘untouchables’ Harijans, God’s children. Gandhi organized Satyagraha to ensure their entry at temples, and to ensure their access to public tanks, wells, schools, and roads. Gandhi himself cleaned toilets to elevate the work of the bhangi (the sweepers) and convinced the upper castes to change their hearts and abandon "the sin of untouchability." However, many Dalit leaders desired a different political solution to the community's problems. 

They began to organize and demand reserved seats in educational institutions as well as a separate electorate to select Dalit members for legislative councils. They believed that political empowerment would solve their social disabilities. The participation of the Dalit social group was limited in this movement, especially in Maharashtra and Nagpur where the Dalit organization was sufficiently strong.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar had formed the Depressed Classes Association in 1930. At the Second Round Table Conference, he clashed with Mahatma Gandhi, demanding separate electorates for Dalits. When the British government agreed to Ambedkar's demand, Gandhiji started observing a fast unto death. Separate electorates for Dalits, he believed, would decelerate the process of their integration into society. Ambedkar eventually agreed to Gandhiji's proposal and entered into the Poona Pact of September 1932.

The Depressed Classes (later known as the Scheduled Castes) were given reserved seats in provincial and central legislative councils, but they had to be elected by the general electorate.

Some Muslim political groups also were not actively participating in the Civil Disobedience Movement. Following the end of the Khilafat movement, many Muslims felt alienated from Congress. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the Congress became more visibly associated with Hindu religious nationalist groups such as the Hindu Mahasabha. As Hindu-Muslim relations deteriorated, each community organized religious processions with militant zeal, sparking Hindu-Muslim communal clashes and riots in various cities. Each riot aggravated the clash between the two communities. 

The Muslim League and Congress seemed to form an alliance in 1927. The major differences between the two political bodies were regarding the representation of each in the assemblies to be elected in the future. Muhammed Ali Jinnah was ready to let go of the demand for separate electorates only if Congress assured reserved seats for Muslims in the Central Assembly and proportional representation as per the population in the provinces dominated by Muslims, such as Punjab and Bengal. In 1928, at the All Parties Conference, the discussions on Muslim representation in the assemblies did not yield anything results when M. R. Jayakar from Hindu Mahasabha expressed his opinions strongly in opposition to the representation arrangements. 

As a result, when the Civil Disobedience Movement began, there was an environment of suspicion and distrust between the two communities.

Large sections of Muslims were alienated from the Congress and were unable to respond to the call for a united struggle. Muslim leaders and intellectuals expressed concern about Muslims' status as a minority in India. They feared that their cultures and identities would be submerged under the dominance of a Hindu majority. 

During the early 20th century, growing resentment against the colonial government united various groups and classes of Indians in a common struggle for freedom. The Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, attempted to channel people's grievances into organized movements for independence. Nationalists attempted to forge national unity through such movements. However, diverse groups and classes participated in these movements, each with its own set of goals and expectations. Freedom from colonial rule meant different things to different people because their grievances were different. 

Conclusion 

Congress worked tirelessly to reconcile differences and ensure that the demands of one group did not alienate another. This is precisely why the movement's unity was frequently shattered. The high points of Congress activity and nationalist unity were followed by periods of disunity and conflicts within groups. Hence, a nation with many voices demanding independence from colonial rule was emerging. The topics and sub-topics discussed above will help students with their nationalism in India project work. The nationalism in India important questions can be answered with the help of the notes in nationalism in India PDF.