From the Indian National Congress to Gandhi's Arrival (1885–1919)
The first reading described the India the British conquered. This one covers how Indians began to push back, and why they could not agree on what they were pushing for. It follows the rise of the Indian National Congress, the growth of Hindu revivalism and Muslim separatism, and Gandhi's arrival in Indian politics. Watch for two competing ideas of the Indian nation: one secular and constitutional, the other built on religious identity. The argument between them runs through every debate at Simla.
The British built schools and universities in India that would, within a generation, turn out the people who challenged British rule. In 1857 they founded universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras on the model of the University of London. Hundreds of primary and secondary schools followed. Most taught in regional languages, but nearly all included English.
The choice of English was partly about money. Running a government in two languages meant translating every document and paying translators at every level. When Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his 1835 Minute on Education, calling 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 budget problem. The policy had effects Macaulay did not plan. English became a shared language for a subcontinent that had never had one. A Tamil speaker in Madras could now talk with an Urdu speaker in Delhi and a Bengali speaker in Calcutta. Persian, the old language of government, had never spread widely enough to do this. Without a common language, an all-India nationalist movement would have been much harder to build.
The schools reached few people. According to the 1881 census, 95 percent of Indians could not read or write in any language. But one group took full advantage. High-caste Hindus saw that English, and knowledge of British law and customs, opened careers in government, law, and medicine. By the 1880s, a generation of young Indian men who had learned English and British manners were working their way up the lower ranks of the civil service. Then they hit a ceiling. The Indian Civil Service exam was held only in London, so candidates had to pay their own way to England. It tested European classical learning and, in at least one case, horsemanship. Before World War I, Indians made up only about five percent of ICS officers. Queen Victoria's 1858 proclamation had promised that Indians would be "freely and impartially admitted to office," but the exam system kept them out.
Indian Muslims were hit hard by the change. Persian had been the language of government for centuries. When the British replaced it with English after the 1830s, Muslim elites were slow to follow, and many saw English schooling as a threat to Islamic learning. Some clerics in Delhi issued fatwas calling English education a form of apostasy. Hindu families had fewer religious objections and moved into English schools quickly. In parts of North India, Muslims went from holding roughly 64 percent of subordinate government posts in the mid-nineteenth century to about 35 percent by 1913. The colonial government came to be staffed more and more by English-educated Hindus, and that imbalance would feed later arguments for partition.
English-educated Indians also read John Stuart Mill on liberty, studied the French Revolution, and took in the liberal philosophy the British themselves championed. Then they used those ideas against their rulers. The British official Mount Stuart Elphinstone saw this coming early, calling English education "our high road back to Europe."
These young, British-educated Indians lived in two worlds. They had absorbed British values but were shut out of British power. Their careers depended on British institutions, and those same institutions blocked their promotion.
Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1926) was one of them. His father, a Brahmin doctor, sent him to London to take the civil service exam. Banerjea passed and became a magistrate in Bengal, one of the first Indians to hold the post, but he was dismissed over a subordinate's clerical error, and his appeals failed. He went back to Calcutta and gave his life to "redressing our wrongs and protecting our rights."
In 1885, Indian leaders organized the Indian National Congress (INC). Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant sympathetic to Indian demands, helped found it. Both sides had their own reasons. Hume hoped the Congress would be a "safety valve" that steered Indian frustration into petitions instead of revolt. Indian leaders hoped Hume would serve as a "lightning conductor," drawing official hostility away 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. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Early Congress leaders admired British civilization and expected to inherit power through constitutional means. Their caution was a considered strategy. They saw India as, in their own phrase, "a nation-in-the-making," so divided by language, region, caste, and religion that mass protest would be premature. Their petitions to the government were really meant to educate Indians. Justice Ranade explained this 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."
The Congress had a problem, though. It claimed to speak for all Indians, but its leaders were far removed from most of them. It focused on discrimination in the civil service, which meant little to a peasant whose hut had washed away in a storm or to an Untouchable barred from the village well. The same British education that made the leaders politically skilled cut them off from ordinary Indians. They held their annual meetings over the Christmas holidays because, as lawyers, that was when they had time off. They could not build a nation through elite petitions alone, yet they were wary of mass politics because they believed the nation did not exist yet.
A different group of leaders rejected the Congress path of reforming British rule from within. They wanted to revive Hindu values and make them the basis of the nation.
It helps to know that "Hinduism" as a single, unified religion is partly a product of colonial rule. Before the British, the subcontinent's many traditions (Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shakta, and countless local practices) were not understood as branches of one religion in the way Protestantism and Catholicism are branches of Christianity. The colonial census, which made every Indian declare one religion, and Christian missionaries, who treated Hinduism as a rival to defeat, pushed these traditions to organize along more unified lines. Hindu revivalists were building a new identity as much as recovering an old one.
Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838–1894), a Bengali civil servant and novelist, wrote fiction celebrating Hindu resistance to foreign rule. His 1882 novel Anandamath included the poem Vande Mataram ("I Praise Thee, Mother"), which pictured Bengal, and by extension India, as a divine mother goddess. It was sung at the 1896 Congress session and became the anthem of the independence movement. Its openly Hindu imagery would later alienate Muslims.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), working among Marathi-speaking Hindus in the Bombay region, celebrated Shivaji, the Maratha warrior who had carved a Hindu kingdom out of the weakening Mughal Empire. Tilak started new annual festivals for the god Ganesh and for Shivaji. When plague struck in 1897, he denounced British anti-plague measures and cited the Bhagavad Gita to justify resistance. After two brothers assassinated the British plague commissioner, the authorities blamed Tilak's writings and convicted him of sedition.
Vinayak Savarkar (1883–1966), a young Brahmin, vowed before his family's deity to drive the British out of India. He founded secret revolutionary societies in western and central India. His later book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? argued that all the peoples of the subcontinent shared the core values of Hindu civilization and that India's destiny was to become a Hindu nation: Hindustan.
Tilak himself favored Hindu-Muslim unity. In 1916 he declared: "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." But by spreading nationalism through Ganesh festivals and Shivaji celebrations, he made it hard to separate Hindu symbols from Indian nationalism. British officials made use of this, and Muslim leaders pointed to it as proof that Congress nationalism was Hindu nationalism in disguise. However sincere the militant nationalists were about unity, their methods worked against it.
Pressure from below also shaped Hindu revivalism. Low-caste and Untouchable movements in western India called for ending Brahmin privileges and demanded access to English schools. High-caste nationalists had to respond to caste reform mainly because their own dominance was being challenged. And the glorious Hindu past the revivalists invoked was always selective. 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 reshaped it to fit present needs.
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 split Bengal into two provinces. On paper this made administrative sense: Bengal had 78 million people, nearly as many as the entire United States. But Bengali Hindus saw it as a scheme to break up the center of Hindu radicalism and create a new, Muslim-majority province in East Bengal.
They were right to be suspicious. In a confidential note, Home Secretary Herbert 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."
Nationalists answered with a boycott of British-made goods. This swadeshi movement drew in Hindu revivalists, economic nationalists, and Congress moderates alike, and it aimed to stop the flow of Indian wealth to Britain. It worked economically: textile imports fell by about 35 percent. It also exposed divisions among nationalists. Better-off urban Bengali Hindus could afford to refuse foreign cloth. Poor rural Bengali Muslims, many of them farmers and traders, could not afford the more expensive Indian handmade goods. The movement's rallying cry, Vande Mataram, drew on Hindu religious imagery, and Muslim participation was uneven. The Nawab of Dhaka, who had received a loan from the British government, backed the partition, arguing that East Bengal's Muslims would benefit from a province of their own.
Savarkar, then a student in Pune, organized a public bonfire of British cloth. By 1907 the Congress had split at its Surat session. The "moderates" wanted to keep working through petitions and constitutional reform. The "extremists," led by Tilak, wanted mass agitation, boycott, and a more openly Hindu style of politics.
Some radicals went further. Small terrorist cells formed among Bengali students. In 1908, two young Bengalis threw a bomb meant for a British judge and killed two British women instead. Savarkar was later arrested and sentenced to 50 years in prison. The swadeshi movement showed what economic protest could do and where it fell short: it could not last, it did not reach the peasantry, and it could not hold together people divided by class and religion. A question that would dog Indian politics for decades was now out in the open. Could one movement hold together people who agreed on expelling the British and disagreed on almost everything else?
The fight over Bengal's partition also alarmed Muslim leaders. For decades, educated Muslims had followed Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), who urged Muslims to support British rule. If the British were driven out, Khan warned, the Hindu majority would impose its religion and culture on Muslims.
Khan was more complicated than that warning suggests. He was a committed modernizer who founded the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh (later Aligarh Muslim University) and urged Muslims to embrace modern education and science. The college was not closed to Hindus: in 1898 it enrolled 64 Hindu and 285 Muslim students. But Khan made a tactical choice with lasting effects. To keep orthodox Muslims from opposing his college, he largely dropped his calls for religious reform and leaned on warnings about Hindu domination instead. His followers later abandoned his broader outlook and turned those tactical warnings into a permanent political creed.
By 1906, Khan's warnings carried new weight. Wealthy Muslims founded the All-India Muslim League to defend Muslim interests and promote "feelings of loyalty to the British government." The British, glad of Muslim support, responded in the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. These reforms gave Muslims "reserve" seats in the legislative councils and separate electorates, in which only Muslims could vote for Muslim candidates. The Congress was furious, seeing separate electorates as a British device to write religious division into law.
Communalism, the political mobilization of religious identity, did not grow out of ancient theological hatreds. One historian calls it "political trade in religion." Its roots were as much economic as religious. Under colonial rule there were far too few government jobs and professional posts for the growing number of educated Indians. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs organized as religious communities to claim quotas for their own group. Religion entered politics because organizing by community was an effective way to compete for scarce jobs and seats. Once the British built separate electorates and reserved seats into the constitution, organizing by religion became close to unavoidable.
Colonial rule had been reshaping Muslim identity for a long time before 1909. The census made every Indian declare a single religion, which sharpened boundaries that had been blurry. Before the census, mixed identities were common. Families might visit both temples and Sufi shrines, observe both Hindu and Muslim festivals, and resist being classed as only one or the other. The census told them they had to pick one. Because it was repeated every ten years, each generation grew up with the categories more firmly fixed than the last.
Meanwhile, newly rich Hindu merchant families, including Marwaris and others who had built fortunes under British rule, spent heavily on temples, festivals, and pilgrimage towns. With no Muslim ruler to restrain public displays of religion, Hindu traditions became more visible in public life than they had been under the Mughals. Cow protection societies appeared, putting pressure on the Muslim practice of animal sacrifice at Eid al-Adha. Together, the census and more assertive Hindu public religion left many Muslim communities feeling under siege.
Within Islam, the loss of political power set off a reform movement. After the British crushed the 1857 uprising and desecrated mosques in Delhi, displaced Muslim scholars founded the Deoband seminary in 1867. Without state patronage for the first time in centuries, the Deobandi clerics turned to preaching and printed pamphlets to reach ordinary Muslims. They pushed for stricter adherence to scripture and criticized popular practices, such as elaborate shrine worship and gifts to holy men, that they saw as lacking a basis in the Quran and Hadith. They borrowed methods from Christian missionaries, including school bureaucracies, printed curricula, and organized fundraising, to build an Islamic school network from the ground up. The movement made Indian Muslims more conscious of being Muslim than they had been under the Mughals. Losing political power deepened religious identity.
Muslim artisans were squeezed twice. Muslim weavers had dominated large parts of the Indian textile market. British factory cloth undercut them after the 1830s, and new mills owned by Hindu industrialists undercut them again after the 1910s. With both colonial and Hindu-owned industry driving their decline, many found it natural to explain their hardship in religious terms, even when the causes were economic.
In 1914, Europe went to war. Most Congress leaders backed the British war effort, reasoning that if India helped Britain in its hour of need, Britain would reward India with self-government after the war. Few of them recognized that the European powers were fighting in part to hold on to their empires.
India's contribution was enormous. Roughly 1.3 to 1.5 million Indians served in the war, about a million of them overseas in the Middle East, East Africa, and France. The ratio of Indian to British soldiers in the Indian Army grew from about 2:1 to 5:1, and for the first time since the 1850s, Indians were allowed to handle artillery. Close to 150,000 Punjabi Muslim soldiers fought against the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan was the caliph, the symbolic leader of the Muslim world. Anger over the caliphate's fate would fuel the postwar Khilafat movement.
The war also undercut the martial race theory, the British doctrine that only certain groups, such as Punjabi Sikhs and Gurkhas, were fit to be soldiers. Bengalis, Marathas, Tamils, and Telugus all served with distinction. The theory had always been a tool for managing the colony, and the war showed it.
Not all Indians supported the war. M. N. Roy (1887–1954), who moved from revolutionary nationalism to communism, worked with German agents to smuggle guns to Indian revolutionaries. He later fled to Mexico and argued with Lenin and Stalin over revolutionary strategy. The Ghadar Party, a revolutionary organization of Indians living abroad, was strongly secular. Its leader Sohan Singh Bhakna said: "We were not Sikhs or Punjabis. Our religion was patriotism." Groups like the Ghadar Party show that Indian nationalism was never only a Hindu project.
Savarkar, by then 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." In his view, military service, even for Britain, built the fighting spirit a future Hindu nation would need.
The war also weakened Britain's industrial hold on India. German U-boats disrupted shipping, so Indian factories had to produce war supplies at home. Tata Steel and the Ahmedabad textile mills boomed, and Indian industrialists, newly confident, began building ties with the Congress. Ordinary Indians paid most of the costs. Military spending rose nearly 300 percent, India contributed £100 million toward Britain's war costs, and the prices of grain, cooking oil, and vegetables soared.
After the war, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919) gave Indians a limited share of government. In the provinces, "transferred" subjects such as agriculture, local government, health, and education went to elected Indian ministers. "Reserved" subjects such as police, land revenue, and finance stayed with British officials, and defense and foreign policy remained entirely in British hands. Separate electorates were kept. Indians could manage schools and clinics; Britain kept control of the army, the police, and the money.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) was born into a merchant caste in Gujarat. His parents sent him to local English-style schools and arranged his marriage at thirteen. After his father died, relatives sent him to London to study law.
London changed him. At first he tried to fit in, wearing a silk hat, taking dancing lessons, and carrying a silver-mounted walking stick. But he could not stomach English food. He drifted into vegetarian circles, rediscovered Hindu texts, and grew skeptical of English society.
In 1891 he qualified as a barrister and returned to India, but he could not build a law practice. He eventually found work in South Africa, where he spent two decades (1893–1914) organizing Indians against the colony's racial discrimination.
There Gandhi turned against Western materialism: the steel mills and factories, the grim conditions of industrial work, the misery of city slums. He took up the life of a simple Indian peasant, going barefoot and wearing handspun cloth (khadi). Khadi was a direct answer to the destruction of India's artisan economy. It reminded former weavers, and peasants pushed into growing cash crops for British factories, that India had once made its own cloth. The spinning wheel became a way to fight back against deindustrialization.
He also developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. He urged oppressed people to seek justice through civil disobedience, a method he called satyagraha ("truth force"). Gandhi was not a pacifist in the way he is often portrayed. He said plainly: "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 practical as well as moral. Armed revolt against the modern colonial state would have been suicidal. Satyagraha was a form of resistance that could work against an empire with machine guns.
Gandhi refused to separate morality from politics. The British treated them as separate spheres; Gandhi insisted they were one. For him, ahimsa (nonviolence) was an active weapon. People who refused to answer violence with violence exposed the authorities as bullies and showed that every government depends in the end on the consent of the governed. Combined with satyagraha, ahimsa became, in Gandhi's words, "a sword which spills no blood."
Gandhi was an outsider to the Congress elite. He did not wear Western clothes like the other leaders. He traveled across India by train, and the poverty he saw affected him deeply. His austere life stood in pointed contrast to the comfortable bungalows of the Congress leadership. He was also full of contradictions. On caste, he preached the uplift of Dalits but held that it depended on lower castes adopting vegetarianism and other upper-caste practices. He would not challenge the caste system as a whole, believing reform had to come from within Hinduism. Ambedkar, the Untouchable leader, would later denounce this position as a way of keeping Dalits under caste Hindu control.
Gandhi also built alliances across religious lines. He befriended Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), an Islamic scholar who held that Islam and Hinduism shared core truths. He worked with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer who belonged to both the Congress and the Muslim League. In 1916 Jinnah helped broker the Lucknow Pact, in which the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims and gave them more seats in several provincial legislatures than their share of the population. For a short time, Hindu-Muslim unity looked possible. Historians have called the years 1916 to 1922 "a period of communal harmony never again to be recovered."
By 1915, people were calling Gandhi the Mahatma, "the great soul." He had not yet led a mass movement, but he had the ideas and the standing to lead one.
The war ended on November 11, 1918. Indian leaders expected independence, or at least major concessions, in return for their loyalty. Instead, Britain passed the Rowlatt Acts, which let the government arrest suspects without a warrant, jail them without trial, and try them without juries. These were wartime emergency powers, extended into peacetime.
Gandhi called the Rowlatt Acts "a black act passed by a satanic government." He called for a nationwide satyagraha: Indians should stay home from work and school, pray, fast, and attend political meetings.
In the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, in the Punjab, protests turned violent, and five Europeans were killed. The British imposed martial law. On April 13, 1919, a crowd of unarmed civilians gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled public garden with only narrow exits. British General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to open fire. He gave no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal, and no order to disperse. His soldiers fired 1,650 rounds into the crowd. The official British count was 379 killed and more than 1,000 wounded, nearly one casualty for every bullet fired. Indian estimates put the dead at over 1,000. Women and children were among the victims.
Gandhi called off the satyagraha, calling his decision to launch it before the public was ready a "Himalayan miscalculation." In his view, the people had not yet learned 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.
The massacre changed Indian politics. It seemed to prove what Gandhi had been saying: British rule rested, in the end, on force. Dyer defended the shooting as necessary to produce "a sufficient moral effect" across the Punjab. He was relieved of his command and forced to retire, but supporters in Britain hailed him as a hero, and a fund organized by the Morning Post newspaper raised about £26,000 for him. To many Indians, that response said more about the Raj than the shooting itself.
Martial law in the Punjab brought public floggings and humiliating punishments, and Hindu and Muslim prisoners were reportedly handcuffed together in pairs, as if to mock their show of unity. Gandhi concluded that Dyer was a symptom and the Raj itself was the disease. After Amritsar, the debate among Indians was no longer about whether to seek independence. It was about how to win it and what kind of nation would follow.
Next reading: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Fracturing (1920–1945)
