From the Indian National Congress to Gandhi's Arrival (1885--1919)
The first reading explained the India the British conquered. This one explains how Indians began to fight back, and why they could not agree on what they were fighting for. It covers the rise of the Indian National Congress, the emergence of Hindu revivalism and Muslim separatism, and Gandhi's arrival on the political stage. The central tension is between two theories of Indian nationhood: one secular and constitutional, the other rooted in religious identity. That tension will drive every debate at the Simla conference.
British officials established universities and schools across India that would, within a generation, produce the people who challenged British rule. In 1857 the British founded universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras modeled after the University of London. Hundreds of primary and secondary schools followed. Although instruction was usually in regional languages, nearly all included English.
The decision to teach in English was not purely ideological. Running a dual-language government---translating every document, maintaining translators at every level---was expensive. When Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his famous 1835 Minute on Education, arguing for English instruction to create "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect," he was also solving a fiscal problem. But the policy had consequences Macaulay did not intend. English became an unintended lingua franca for a subcontinent that had never had one. For the first time, a Tamil speaker in Madras could communicate with an Urdu speaker in Delhi and a Bengali speaker in Calcutta. Even Persian, the previous administrative language, had never been popularized enough to serve this function. This linguistic connectivity was a precondition for a genuinely all-India nationalist movement.
The limited reach of these schools was confirmed by the persistence of illiteracy: according to the 1881 census, 95% of Indians could not read or write any language. But one group seized the opportunity. High-caste Hindus recognized that knowledge of English, British laws, customs, and preferences would open careers in administration, law, and medicine. By the 1880s, an entire class of young Indian men, having learned English and absorbed British culture, were advancing through the lower levels of the civil service. But their ambitions were blocked. The Indian Civil Service examination was held only in London, requiring candidates to pay their own way across the ocean. The exam tested European classical knowledge and, in at least one case, horsemanship. Indians never made up more than five percent of ICS officers. Queen Victoria's 1858 Proclamation had promised Indians would be "freely and impartially admitted to office," but the examination system was designed to ensure they were not.
For Indian Muslims, the shift was devastating. Persian had been the language of government for centuries. As the British replaced Persian with English in administration after the 1830s, Muslim elites were slow to adapt, often seeing English education as a threat to Islamic learning. Some Muslim clerics in Delhi issued fatwas declaring English education tantamount to apostasy. Hindu families, with fewer theological reservations, embraced English schools rapidly. The results were stark: Indian Muslims in parts of North India went from holding roughly 64% of subordinate government posts in the mid-nineteenth century to holding about 35% by 1913, while Hindus held the majority. The colonial state was increasingly staffed by English-educated Hindus, with consequences for the politics of partition.
The deeper irony is that English-educated Indians read John Stuart Mill on liberty, studied the French Revolution, and absorbed the empiricist philosophy that the British themselves championed---and then turned those very ideas against their rulers. British official Mount Stuart Elphinstone foresaw this early on, calling English education "our high road back to Europe."
These frustrated, British-educated young Indians inhabited two worlds. They had assimilated to British values but were barred from British power. Their careers depended on British institutions, but those same institutions blocked their advancement.
One such Indian was Surendranath Banerjea (1848--1926). His father, a Brahmin doctor, sent him to London to take the civil service exam. Banerjea passed, was assigned as a magistrate in Bengal, one of the first Indians to hold such a position, but was dismissed over a subordinate's clerical error. His appeals were denied. Embittered, he returned to Calcutta and committed his life to "redressing our wrongs and protecting our rights."
In 1885, Indian leaders responded to decades of blocked ambition by organizing the Indian National Congress (INC). The Congress was founded with the help of Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant sympathetic to Indian demands. This collaboration was strategic on both sides: Hume hoped the Congress would serve as a "safety valve," channeling Indian frustration into constitutional petitions rather than revolutionary violence. Indian leaders, for their part, hoped to use Hume as a "lightning conductor," deflecting official hostility while they built their organization. Each side thought it was using the other.
Delegates at the first session of the Indian National Congress, Bombay, 1885. Note the Western dress: these were British-educated professionals seeking reform from within, not revolutionaries. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Early Congress leaders admired British civilization and believed they would ultimately inherit power through constitutional means. Their moderation was not timidity but a deliberate strategic choice. They understood that India was, in their own phrase, "a nation-in-the-making," a society so divided by language, region, caste, and religion that mass mobilization was premature. Their petitions to the government were, in reality, aimed at educating the Indian public. Justice Ranade explained to the young Gokhale: "These memorials are nominally addressed to government. In reality they are addressed to the people, so that they may learn how to think in these matters."
But the Congress faced a fundamental contradiction. It claimed to speak for all Indians, yet its leaders were divorced from the masses. The INC focused on civil service discrimination, issues that mattered little to the peasant whose mud hut had washed away in a storm, or the Untouchable who could not access a water well. The leaders' British education, which gave them political sophistication, also ensured their political impotence among ordinary Indians. They held their meetings during the Christmas holidays because, as lawyers, that was when they had time off. They could not build a nation through elite petition alone, yet they feared mass mobilization precisely because the nation was not yet formed.
The INC's path to nationhood, reforming British rule from within, was now challenged by leaders with a different vision. They did not seek to modernize India on British lines. They sought to revitalize and enshrine Hindu values.
To understand these leaders, it is important to recognize that "Hinduism" as a single, unified religion is partly a colonial creation. Before British rule, the diverse traditions of the subcontinent---Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shakta, and countless regional practices---were not understood as branches of one religion in the way that Protestantism and Catholicism are branches of Christianity. The colonial census, which required every Indian to declare a fixed religious affiliation, and the missionary assault, which treated Hinduism as a rival to be defeated, forced these diverse traditions to reorganize along more unified lines. Hindu revivalists were not simply recovering an ancient identity; they were constructing a new one, partly in reaction to the colonial encounter.
Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838--1894), a Bengali civil servant and novelist, wrote fiction celebrating Hindu resistance to foreign rule. His 1882 novel Anandamath featured a poem, the Vande Mataram ("I Praise Thee, Mother"), which became the anthem of Indian nationalism. In it, "Mother" invoked the nation as a divine mother figure, Bengal and India sacralized as goddess. The Vande Mataram was sung at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress and became the anthem of the independence movement, but its explicitly Hindu imagery would later alienate Muslims.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856--1920), working among Marathi-speaking Hindus near Bombay, celebrated the Maratha warrior Shivaji, who had carved out a Hindu empire from the declining Mughal dynasty. Tilak proposed new annual festivals dedicated to the Hindu god Ganesh and to Shivaji. When a plague struck, Tilak denounced British anti-plague measures and cited the Bhagavad Gita as justification for resistance. British authorities blamed Tilak's writings for inflaming the atmosphere; when two Hindu teenagers assassinated a British officer shortly afterward, Tilak was convicted of sedition.
Vinayak Savarkar (1883--1966), a young Brahmin, took a vow before the family deity to drive the British from the Motherland. He founded secret societies throughout western and central India. His later work Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? insisted that all peoples of the subcontinent shared the core values of Hindu civilization. India's destiny was to become a great Hindu nation: Hindustan.
Tilak personally favored Hindu-Muslim unity. He declared in 1916: "He who does what is beneficial to the people of this country, be he a Muhammedan or an Englishman, is not alien. 'Alienness' has to do with interests. Alienness is certainly not concerned with white or black skin or religion." Yet his use of Ganesh festivals and Shivaji celebrations to propagate nationalist ideas created an ideological opening that made it difficult for the movement to separate Hindu symbolism from Indian nationalism. British propagandists exploited this conflation, and Muslim leaders pointed to it as evidence that Congress nationalism was really Hindu nationalism in disguise. The militant nationalists' sincerity about Hindu-Muslim unity did not prevent their methods from undermining it.
Meanwhile, Hindu revivalism was also shaped by pressure from below. Low-caste and Untouchable movements in western India publicly advocated rescinding Brahmin social privileges and demanded access to English-language schools. This forced high-caste Hindu nationalists to address caste reform, not primarily out of progressive impulse, but because their social dominance was under challenge. The revivalist appeal to a glorious Hindu past was always selective: as Justice Ranade asked, "What shall we revive? Shall we revive the old habits of our people when the most sacred of our castes indulged in all the abominations of animal food and intoxicating drink?" Every reformer who appealed to the past reinterpreted it to suit present purposes.
The Partition of Bengal, 1905. The British divided Bengal to create a Muslim-majority province in the east, enraging Bengali Hindus and igniting the swadeshi movement. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
In 1905, the governor general announced a plan to divide Bengal into two provinces. This made administrative sense, since Bengal had 78 million people, more than the entire United States. But Bengali Hindus saw it as a sinister ploy to fracture the epicenter of Hindu radicalism and create a new province in East Bengal with a Muslim majority.
They were right to be suspicious. In a secret communiqué, Home Secretary Risley wrote: "Bengal united is a power. Bengal divided will pull in different ways... One of our main objects is to split up and thereby to weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule." The administrative rationale was a cover for political strategy.
Nationalists proposed a boycott of all British-manufactured goods. This swadeshi movement, driven by Hindu revivalists, economic nationalists, and Congress moderates alike, sought to stem the flow of Indian wealth to Britain. It was economically effective: textile imports dropped by 35 percent. But it also exposed divisions within the nationalist movement. The boycott had asymmetric effects: urban Bengali Hindus, who were economically better off, could afford to refuse foreign cloth. Rural, poor Bengali Muslims---farmers and traders who needed the income---could not afford more expensive handmade Indian goods. The movement's rallying cry, Vande Mataram, drew on Hindu religious imagery, making Muslim participation uneven. The Nawab of Dhaka, given a loan by the British government, supported the partition, arguing that East Bengal's Muslim majority would benefit from its own province.
Savarkar proposed collecting heaps of British goods and burning them in public squares. By 1907 the INC was being pulled in two directions: one secular and Western, seeking independence through constitutional reform; the other Hindu and traditionalist, insisting that Indians must seize control by force.
The violence escalated. Small terrorist cells emerged among radicalized Bengali students. Two Bengalis threw a bomb intended for a British judge, killing two British women. Savarkar was captured and sentenced to 50 years in prison. The swadeshi movement demonstrated the power of economic protest but also its limits: it could not sustain itself, it could not reach the peasantry, and it could not hold together a coalition divided by class and religion. The question that would haunt Indian politics for decades was now in the open: Could the independence movement hold together people who agreed on expelling the British but disagreed on everything else?
The furor over Bengal's partition did not just fracture the INC; it unnerved Muslim leaders. For decades, educated Muslims had followed Syed Ahmad Khan (1817--1898), who urged Muslims to endorse British rule. If the British were driven from India, Khan warned, the overwhelming Hindu majority would impose their religion and culture upon Muslims.
Khan was a more complex figure than this summary suggests. He was a genuine modernizer who founded the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh (later Aligarh Muslim University) and advocated that Muslims embrace modern education and scientific thinking. The college was not communal in practice: in 1898, it enrolled 64 Hindu and 285 Muslim students. But Khan also made a strategic calculation that proved fateful. To prevent orthodox Muslims from opposing his college, he virtually gave up his advocacy for religious reform and instead encouraged communal separatism as a way to keep his modernizing educational project alive. His followers later "deviated from his broad-mindedness," taking his tactical warnings about Hindu domination and turning them into a permanent political ideology.
By 1906, Khan's warnings resonated with new force. Wealthy Muslims formed the All-India Muslim League to defend Muslim interests and promote "feelings of loyalty to the British government." British officials, appreciative of Muslim support, agreed to "reserve" seats in legislative councils for Muslims and, crucially, to allow Muslims to vote in separate electorates, where only Muslims could vote for Muslim candidates. This infuriated the INC, which saw separate electorates as a British strategy to institutionalize communal divisions.
Communalism, the political mobilization of religious identity, was not an expression of ancient theological hatreds. It was, as one historian put it, "political trade in religion." Its roots were economic as much as religious: under colonial conditions, there were far too few government jobs and professional positions for the growing number of educated Indians. Competition for scarce employment drove Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs to organize along communal lines, seeking reserved quotas for their own group. Religion came into politics not because Hindus and Muslims hated each other, but because communal identity became a rational strategy for competing over limited resources. The British constitutional framework, with its separate electorates and reserved seats, made this strategy not only rational but structurally necessary.
The British decision to codify separate electorates had consequences beyond its immediate politics. Colonial administration had already been reshaping Muslim identity for over a century. The census forced every Indian to declare a fixed religious affiliation, sharpening boundaries between communities that had historically been more fluid. Before the census, syncretic identities were common: families might visit both temples and Sufi shrines, observe both Hindu and Muslim festivals, and resist classification as exclusively one or the other. The census attacked this hybridity. By forcing Indians to choose a side, it said, in effect: you are either a Hindu or a Muslim, and there is no overlap between the two. And because the census was repeated every decade, each generation grew up with these categories more firmly entrenched than the last.
Meanwhile, newly prosperous Hindu merchant families---Marwaris, Vaishyas, and others who had accumulated capital under British rule---spent their fortunes on temples, festivals, and pilgrimage cities. Without a Muslim ruler to restrain public displays of religious assertion, Hindu traditions became more publicly visible than they had ever been under the Mughals. Cow protection societies emerged, directly threatening Muslim religious obligations during Eid al-Adha. The combination of census-driven identity hardening and assertive Hindu public religion made Muslim communities feel increasingly besieged.
Within Islam itself, the trauma of lost sovereignty sparked a major reform movement. After the British crushed the 1857 uprising and desecrated mosques in Delhi, displaced Muslim scholars founded the Deoband seminary in 1867. Cut off from state patronage for the first time in centuries, the Deobandi clerics turned to grassroots preaching and printed pamphlets to reach ordinary Muslims. They sought greater scriptural rigor, critiquing certain popular practices, such as elaborate shrine worship and gift-giving to holy men, that they considered insufficiently grounded in the Quran and Hadith. They adopted organizational techniques borrowed from Christian missionaries---bureaucratic school structures, printed curricula, systematic fundraising---to build an Islamic educational network from the ground up. The Deobandi movement made Indian Muslims more self-consciously Muslim than they had been under Mughal rule. The loss of political sovereignty, paradoxically, drove a deepening of religious identity.
Muslim artisans faced a double displacement that sharpened this consciousness. Muslim weavers had dominated large sections of the Indian textile market. They were outcompeted first by British manufactured goods after the 1830s, and then again by the new mills run by Hindu industrialists after the 1910s. Their economic decline was caused by both colonialism and the emerging Hindu-dominated domestic industry, a combination that made communal explanations of their suffering feel intuitively correct, even when the real causes were structural.
In 1914, all of Europe was plunged into the Great War. Most INC leaders endorsed the British war effort, reasoning that by helping Britain in its hour of need, Britain would reciprocate by transferring power after the war. They did not fully realize that the European powers were fighting precisely to safeguard their existing colonial empires.
India's contribution to the war was staggering. The British Indian Army raised 2.5 million volunteers---the largest army ever assembled without conscription in human history. The ratio of Indian to British soldiers ballooned from 2:1 to 5:1. For the first time since the 1850s, Indians were allowed to handle artillery. Nearly a million Indians saw action in the Middle East, North Africa, and France. In a bitter irony, close to 150,000 Punjabi Muslim soldiers fought to carve up the Ottoman Empire---the last Muslim caliphate. This irony would fuel the post-war Khilafat movement.
The war also shattered the martial race theory, the British doctrine that only certain ethnic groups (Punjabi Sikhs, Gurkhas) were suited for military service. Bengalis, Marathas, Tamils, and Telugus all served with distinction, proving the theory to be what it always was: a tool of colonial management, not a description of reality.
Not all Indians supported the war. M. N. Roy (1887--1954), drawn first to revolutionary nationalist networks and then to communist revolution, conspired with German agents to smuggle guns to Indian revolutionaries. He eventually fled to Mexico and became embroiled in theoretical disputes with Lenin and Stalin over revolutionary strategy. The Ghadar Party, a revolutionary organization of overseas Indians, was "strongly secular." Its leader Sohan Singh Bhakna declared: "We were not Sikhs or Punjabis. Our religion was patriotism." Their existence complicates any narrative that equates Indian nationalism solely with Hindu identity.
The Hindu radical Savarkar, imprisoned in the Andaman Islands, was delighted that Indians were volunteering to fight: "Thank God! Manliness after all is not dead yet in the land." For Savarkar, military service, even for Britain, built the martial spirit a future Hindu nation would need.
The war also broke British industrial dominance over India. German U-boats disrupted shipping, forcing Indian factories to produce wartime supplies domestically. Tata Steel and Ahmedabad textile mills boomed. Indian industrialists, sensing their newfound leverage, began cultivating links with Congress. But the war's costs fell disproportionately on ordinary Indians: army expenditures increased nearly 300 percent, and Britain raised an additional 100 million pounds in taxes from India. Prices of grain, cooking oil, and vegetables soared. The British war effort was paid for with the sweat of the Indian peasant.
After the war, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919) offered Indians a measure of self-governance, but only over matters the British did not care about. The "transferred list" included agriculture, local government, health, and education. The "reserved list" retained defense, foreign policy, taxes, and fiscal policy. Communal electorates were maintained. The message was clear: India could govern its own poverty, but the empire's strategic interests remained firmly in British hands.
Mohandas Gandhi (1868--1948) was born into a merchant caste in Gujarat. His parents sent him to local English-style schools and arranged his marriage at thirteen. When his father died, relatives sent him to study law in London.
Gandhi's time in London transformed him. He initially tried to assimilate, wearing a silk hat, taking dancing lessons, carrying a silver-mounted walking stick. But he could not stomach English food. He gravitated to vegetarian circles and rediscovered Hindu texts, viewing English society with growing skepticism.
In 1891 he passed the bar and returned to India, but failed to establish a law practice. He eventually found work defending Indian rights in South Africa, where he spent two decades (1893--1914) as a political organizer against South Africa's racially discriminatory colonial regime.
Gandhi was transformed. He repudiated Western materialism: the steel mills of Manchester, the oppressive conditions of industrial work, the hopelessness of urban tenements. He embraced the life of the simple Indian peasant, going barefoot and wearing handspun cloth (khadi). His choice of khadi was not merely symbolic: it was a deliberate response to the destruction of India's artisan economy. Former weavers and peasants forced to grow cash crops for British factories were reminded that they had once made their own cloth. The spinning wheel became a weapon aimed at the specific historical injury of deindustrialization.
He also developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. He urged oppressed peoples to pursue justice through civil disobedience, a strategy he called satyagraha ("truth force"). But Gandhi was not a pacifist in the way he is often portrayed. He explicitly said: "Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour, than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour." His commitment to nonviolence was strategic as well as moral: the sheer power of the modern British colonial state made violent confrontation suicidal. Satyagraha was the only form of resistance that could work against an empire with tanks and machine guns.
His political genius lay in refusing to separate morality from politics. The British treated them as separate domains; Gandhi insisted they were inseparable. Ahimsa (nonviolence) was not passivity but a weapon. If people refused to respond with violence when attacked, they exposed the authorities as bullies and proved that all political systems ultimately require the consent of those they governed. Combined with satyagraha, the insistence that truth itself was a force, ahimsa became, in Gandhi's words, "a sword which spills no blood."
Gandhi was also an outsider to the Congress elite. He did not wear Western clothes like the other Congress leaders. He traveled by train across India and was profoundly affected by the poverty he saw. The contrast between his asceticism and the Congress leadership's comfortable bungalows was itself a political statement. Yet Gandhi was also deeply contradictory. On caste, he preached Dalit emancipation but insisted it could only happen once lower castes adopted vegetarianism and other Brahmanical practices. He refused to disturb the broader caste system, believing reform should come from within. Ambedkar, the Untouchable leader, would later denounce this position as a strategy for keeping Dalits subordinate to caste Hindu control.
Gandhi also forged alliances across religious lines. He befriended Abul Kalam Azad (1888--1958), an Islamic scholar who insisted that Islam and Hinduism shared fundamental truths. He worked with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer who belonged to both Congress and the Muslim League and who, in 1916, brokered the Lucknow Pact, an agreement between Congress and the League on reserved seats for Muslims in provincial legislatures. For a brief moment, Hindu-Muslim unity seemed possible. Historians have called the years from 1916 to 1922 "a period of communal harmony never again to be recovered."
By 1915, Gandhi was the Mahatma---"the great soul." He had not yet led a mass movement. But he had developed the ideas and the authority to lead one.
On November 11, 1918, the armistice ended the Great War. Indian leaders expected independence, or at least major concessions, as a reward for their loyalty. Instead, Britain passed the Rowlatt Acts, repressive laws giving the government power to arrest suspects without warrant, imprison them without trial, and try them without juries. These were wartime emergency powers kept on the books after the war's end.
Gandhi called the Rowlatt Acts "a black act passed by a satanic government." He called for a general strike, a satyagraha campaign. Indians should stay home from work and school, pray, fast, and attend political meetings.
But in Amritsar, the largest city in the Punjab, protests turned violent and four Europeans were killed. Britain imposed martial law. When a crowd of unarmed civilians gathered peacefully in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled public garden with only narrow exits, British General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to open fire. There was no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal, no instruction to disperse. Dyer's soldiers fired 1,650 rounds directly into the crowd. The official British count was 379 killed and 1,137 wounded---nearly one casualty per bullet fired. Unofficial Indian estimates place the dead at over 1,000. Women and children were among the victims.
Gandhi cancelled the remainder of the satyagraha, calling it a "Himalayan miscalculation." The masses had not yet absorbed the discipline of nonviolence.
Bullet holes preserved in the walls of Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar. General Dyer's troops fired on an unarmed crowd in this walled garden, killing 379 and wounding over 1,000. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
But the Amritsar massacre transformed Indian politics. It proved what Gandhi had argued: British rule rested ultimately on violence. General Dyer said the massacre was intended as "a moral signal to India," a statement that confirmed every Indian's worst fears about the nature of the Raj. When Dyer was forced to resign but received a hero's welcome and a £30,000 prize upon returning to England, the message was clear.
The aftermath revealed how thoroughly the British understood the threat of Indian unity. Among the punishments imposed in Amritsar, authorities handcuffed Hindu and Muslim prisoners together in pairs---explicitly to demonstrate the consequences of Hindu-Muslim solidarity. Even in their reprisals, the British were punishing the very thing Indian nationalists most needed.
Gandhi saw Dyer as a rotten apple, but the Raj as the rotten orchard. The scales had tipped. The question was no longer whether India would seek independence, but how, and what kind of nation it would become.
Next reading: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Fracturing (1920--1945)
