From Non-Cooperation to the Eve of Simla (1920–1945)
The first two readings brought you to 1919: a subcontinent under British rule, with competing visions of independence just taking shape. This reading covers the next quarter-century, when those visions pulled apart. Gandhi's campaigns mobilized millions but could not hold them together. Ambedkar put caste on the national agenda. Jinnah made the case for Pakistan. By 1945, every faction at Simla had reasons to distrust every other, and this reading explains where those reasons came from.
After the Amritsar massacre, Gandhi proposed a new strategy: non-cooperation. Indians should boycott foreign goods, pull their children out of government schools, and refuse to take part in legislative elections. He urged them to spin their own cloth. "Love of foreign cloth," Gandhi declared, "brought foreign domination, pauperism and what is worse, shame to many a home." The simple white cap of homespun cloth (khadi), the "Gandhi cap," became the symbol of the nationalist cause.
The movement also remade Congress. At its Nagpur session in December 1920, the party reorganized its branches along linguistic provincial lines, created a 15-member Working Committee to run the party between annual sessions, and cut membership fees so that poor Indians in the countryside and the cities could join. These changes turned Congress into a mass organization that reached down to the villages, and they arguably mattered more than the boycotts.
Not everyone in Congress welcomed the change. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and other moderates left the party during non-cooperation, at first over method rather than Muslim identity. Jinnah was a constitutionalist who objected to mass politics of any kind. He opposed "the organisation of the masses, hartals, strikes, satyagraha, breaking of laws, courting of imprisonment." Religion was not the issue at first. Still, as Congress became a party of mass mobilization, Jinnah began building an alternative to it.
In 1921 Gandhi toured India, including long walks to remote villages, and his challenge to British rule electrified the country. A liquor boycott in southern India cost one provincial government 20 percent of its annual revenue, showing that non-cooperation could hurt the Raj financially. The campaign also inflamed tensions, and riots broke out in Bombay and elsewhere. Congress leaders wanted to escalate, and in early 1922 Gandhi endorsed the next step: nonviolent civil disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes.
A few days later, in the town of Chauri Chaura, a crowd surrounded a police station and set it on fire, killing 22 policemen. Gandhi was devastated. "God spoke clearly through Chauri Chaura," he said. "He has warned me that there is not yet in India that non-violent and truthful atmosphere which alone can justify mass civil disobedience."
He called off the entire campaign. Congress leaders were furious. Subhas Bose called it "nothing short of a national calamity." Nehru believed Congress "had the British at their knees." Muslim allies, who had staked their credibility on the movement, felt betrayed. The British then arrested Gandhi for sedition, and he spent two years in prison.
The episode showed a problem that would come back again and again. Congress needed popular energy to pressure the British, but once that energy was unleashed, the party could not control it. Gandhi stopped the movement because it was growing in directions he could not direct.
Congress's relationship with the masses had another tension. Gandhi appealed to the Indian peasant as a symbol, but Congress was cautious about backing peasants against Indian landlords. The party feared that if it sided too openly with tenant farmers, the zamindars would turn to the British, who could use them against Congress. Gandhi urged peasants not to rise against their Indian landlords, calling the British "the greatest zamindar of them all." The party that claimed to represent the masses could not afford to fully serve them.
Even so, Gandhi had done what no Indian leader had done before: he drew millions of ordinary Indians into political action. His most surprising follower was Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the Cambridge-educated son of a wealthy Congress lawyer. Nehru was drawn to Marxism and admired the Bolshevik revolution. He followed Gandhi because the Mahatma could win mass support in a way no Western-educated intellectual could.
Gandhi's campaign also helped revive Hindu nationalism. During non-cooperation, Congress allied with the Khilafat movement, a Muslim campaign to defend the Ottoman sultan's position as caliph. The alliance was meant to show Hindu-Muslim unity, but it provoked a backlash among Hindu nationalists inside Congress. Regional leaders saw it as giving in to Muslim demands and encouraged aggressive displays of Hindu strength: processions through Muslim neighborhoods, demands for cow protection, and insistence on Hindi as the national language. Muslim clerics responded by urging sharper separation from Hindu customs. The effort to build unity ended up deepening the divide.
Many of the Hindus drawn into politics during these years joined the Hindu Mahasabha, which championed Hindu values and practices. Savarkar, whose ideas you met in Reading 2, was moved from the Andaman Islands prison in 1921 and released in 1924 on condition that he stay out of politics. Once those restrictions were lifted in 1937, he became president of the Mahasabha.
The Mahasabha and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded 1925) were separate organizations with overlapping members and outlook, and both could mobilize large numbers of followers on short notice. Unlike Gandhi, they rejected nonviolence. Unlike Nehru and the Congress secularists, they insisted that India was at heart a Hindu country. They competed with Congress for Hindu loyalty and called its secularism a betrayal.
Hindu communalism also had a class side. In several provinces, Hindu communalists cooperated with the Muslim League against Congress, because both kinds of communal politics protected upper-class interests against the economic demands of ordinary people. The Punjab Hindu Sabha attacked Congress for trying to unite Indians across religious lines; its leader declared that "a Hindu should believe that he was a Hindu first and an Indian later." That was the mirror image of Muslim separatism.
Muslim leaders were alarmed. Their earlier hope that constitutional safeguards could protect the Muslim minority now looked naive. What would happen to Muslims in a nation run by Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha?
One answer came from Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938), a poet and philosopher educated at Cambridge and in Germany. Iqbal wrote mostly in Urdu and Persian and saw poetry as a way to address the problems facing India's Muslims. He stressed the Muslim community, "the single bond" that grew out of shared faith. In his view, Indian politics had become a welter of "dismembered tribes," each at odds with the others, and any attempt to stitch them into a single nation would fail.
In 1930, in his presidential address to the Muslim League, Iqbal argued that India's peoples were defined by their religious communities. "The construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of Islamic principles of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim." He called for a Muslim state in the northwest, where Muslims were a majority.
The idea got a name from Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Cambridge student who coined the word Pakistan ("Land of the Pure") in 1933. His concept was much vaguer than what came later. Ali never clearly said it would be a separate sovereign state; the closest he came was a separate Muslim federation, which could mean anything from full independence to a loose confederation. Bengal was not even part of his original acronym, an omission that would matter in 1947.
By the late 1930s, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had once belonged to both Congress and the League and had brokered the Lucknow Pact in 1916, had come around to Iqbal's view. Muslims, Jinnah argued, were a distinct political community whose interests could not be secured in a Hindu-majority democracy. They needed their own state.
The fear behind Muslim separatism was about numbers as much as faith. Hindus, counting Untouchables, outnumbered Muslims by roughly three to one, so in any democratic system Muslims could be outvoted no matter what the constitution promised. That was a political calculation, not only a religious grievance. Tellingly, the League was strongest in provinces where Muslims were a minority and felt most exposed. In the Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab, Bengal, and the North-West Frontier, where Muslims felt relatively secure, the League stayed weak through most of the 1930s.
Many Indian Muslims opposed the League. Most of the Deoband clerics believed that separate statehood mattered little so long as the British left Muslim religious life alone. Prominent Muslim leaders such as Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani fought the Pakistan project. Abul Kalam Azad, the Muslim president of Congress, answered the League directly: "I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality... Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism. If Hinduism has been the religion of the people here for several thousands of years, Islam has also been their religion for a thousand years." Muslims themselves disagreed about the two-nation theory.
Gandhi at Dandi, April 5, 1930. He walked 240 miles to defy the British salt monopoly. The march drew millions into political action. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
By 1930, riots between Hindus and Muslims had become frequent. Communists were organizing peasants and workers, and the Great Depression was deepening India's poverty.
Gandhi launched a new civil disobedience campaign aimed at the British monopoly on salt, a necessity in a hot country. Not everyone in Congress liked the choice; Nehru "admitted that salt was too eccentric for his fancy." But salt touched every Indian, whatever their caste, religion, or region. Even the governor-general, Lord Irwin, privately conceded that the choice "proved to have a unifying effect."
The campaign was also about the Depression's damage to the countryside. Five of the eleven demands Gandhi sent to Irwin were economic, including abolition of the salt tax, protection for Indian textiles, currency reform, and reserving coastal shipping for Indian firms. The Depression had set off a drain of wealth. When Britain left the gold standard in 1931, gold prices rose. Moneylenders pressed rural debtors to hand over gold ornaments to pay their debts, and that gold flowed to the cities, was melted down, and was shipped abroad. The total drain came to roughly 3.4 billion rupees.
Gandhi walked 240 miles from his ashram at Ahmedabad to the salt flats at Dandi on the Arabian Sea. Nehru never forgot the sight:
I saw him marching staff in hand... Here was a pilgrim on his quest of Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage regardless of consequences.
After more than three weeks on the road, Gandhi reached Dandi with thousands of followers. He picked up a handful of salty mud in defiance of British law. Protests spread across India in many forms: defiance of forest laws in Maharashtra, refusal to pay the chaukidari (village police) tax in eastern India, and peasant strikes against land revenue in several provinces. In Peshawar, two platoons of Garhwali soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators, a sign that nationalism was reaching the Indian army. Thousands of women left the seclusion of their homes to march and picket shops selling foreign cloth. Gandhi and tens of thousands of others were arrested.
At the Dharasana Salt Works, volunteers marched in rows toward police who beat them over the head with steel-tipped clubs. The wounded were carried off, bandaged, and replaced by the next row. United Press correspondent Webb Miller reported the scene, and newsreels carried the campaign to cinemas around the world. It was one of the first times mass media brought a nonviolent movement to a global audience.
The salt march drew millions into politics but did not end British rule, or even the salt tax. Critics attacked from all sides. The communist M. N. Roy called Gandhian nonviolence "a subtle intellectual device for concealing the capitalist exploitation of the country." The Hindu nationalist Savarkar scoffed: "We denounce the doctrine of absolute non-violence not because we are less saintly, but because we are more sensible." Many mainstream Congress leaders, sitting in prison, wondered what the campaign had achieved.
By the second round of civil disobedience, after Gandhi returned from failed negotiations in London in 1931, peasants in the countryside were pushing Congress to act rather than the other way around. The center of the movement moved from Gandhi's ashram to the villages of the Gangetic Plain.
B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). Born an Untouchable and educated at Columbia University, he fought for political power for India's 70 million Dalits and forced the question of caste onto the national agenda. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Another question complicated matters: what should be done about India's 70 million Untouchables?
B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) was himself an Untouchable whose father had served in the British army. As a boy, he was not allowed to sit at a desk with the other students and had to sit on the floor. Other children would not come near him, and his teachers would not touch his notebook. One kind teacher gave him extra instruction and food; that teacher's name was Ambedkar, and Bhimrao took it as his own. Later, a local prince paid for him to attend Columbia University in New York, where he earned a PhD in economics.
Ambedkar argued that constitutional promises of equality meant nothing without the political power to enforce them. The British had protected the Muslim minority with reserved seats and separate electorates, and he wanted the same for Untouchables. In 1932, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald announced the Communal Award, which reserved 71 seats in provincial legislatures for Untouchables and gave them separate electorates: Untouchable voters would choose their own representatives on a separate ballot, so the Hindu majority could not elect compliant Untouchable candidates.
Ambedkar did not start the anti-caste movement alone. It had deep roots in several regions: Jyotiba Phule's campaigns against Brahmin dominance in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Sri Narayana Guru's movement in Kerala (whose slogan was "One caste, one religion, one God for mankind"), and the Self-Respect Movement in south India in the 1920s. Ambedkar built on these, but he also saw that colonial rule was part of the problem. He argued that only a self-governing India, a swaraj government "of the people, for the people and by the people," could truly abolish untouchability. "This role the British Government will never be able to play." Ambedkar was not simply against Congress. He fought for both Untouchable political power and Indian independence and saw the two as linked.
Gandhi was outraged by the separate electorate plan. He had long championed the rights of Untouchables, whom he called Harijans ("children of God," a term many Untouchables found patronizing). But he opposed separate electorates absolutely. Untouchables, he said, should be brought into Hindu society, not set apart from it, and separate electorates were a British "divide and rule" strategy that would permanently split the Hindu community.
Gandhi announced he would fast unto death unless the plan was withdrawn.
As the fast went on, Ambedkar came under enormous pressure. Congress newspapers denounced him as a monster and a potential murderer. He had little choice but to give way. The result was the Poona Pact (1932). Untouchables would get more reserved seats than the British had offered, but in joint electorates, meaning all voters, including caste Hindus, would choose who filled those seats. Ambedkar considered it a bitter defeat: Gandhi had used his moral authority to silence the most oppressed group in India.
Ambedkar spent the next decade building the case that Congress and Gandhi did not speak for Untouchables. The choice between reserved seats and separate electorates, the technical question at the heart of the Poona Pact, will come up again at Simla.
Civil disobedience pushed Britain into further concessions. The Government of India Act (1935) created elected provincial governments, expanded voting rights (including for some women), and reserved seats for minorities. Provincial assemblies had reserved seats for groups such as the Depressed Classes (Untouchables), Muslims, Christians, and tribal peoples, alongside "general" seats open to everyone, which caste Hindus dominated in practice.
The act was meant to contain Indian nationalism as much as to satisfy it. Only about 14 percent of the population could vote. One senior British official privately described the goal as "some facade which will leave the essential mechanisms of power in our hands." The planned federation gave the princely states outsized representation, with delegates appointed by the princes rather than elected, so the princes could block democratic nationalists. That federal plan was never put into effect. Nehru called the act "a new charter of slavery."
Congress criticized the act for treating India as "an agglomeration of peoples rather than as a unified, emerging nation." It ran candidates in the 1937 elections anyway, won outright majorities in five provinces, and formed governments in seven of the eleven (later eight).
Congress ministries had limited formal power, but they meant a great deal symbolically. Ministers cut their own salaries and rode the railways in second or third class. Indians felt, as one observer put it, "as if they were breathing the air of victory and self-government, for was it not a great achievement that men who were in prison till the other day were now ruling in the secretariat?"
The results alarmed the Muslim League, which did poorly even in Muslim-majority provinces. Once in office, some Congress provincial governments also promoted Hindu symbols: flying the Congress flag, singing Vande Mataram, and backing Hindu-flavored education plans. Even small decisions about school textbooks became explosive. Bengali Muslims were outraged when new texts used the name of a Hindu goddess as a word for God.
These disputes confirmed Jinnah's fears. The 1937 election map became evidence for his case. Congress won across most of British India, including the Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province, but it did not win the Punjab, Bengal, or Sindh. The map backed Congress's claim to speak for the nation, and it also showed that much of the Muslim-majority northwest and east lay outside Congress's reach. In March 1940, the Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution, calling for "independent states" in the Muslim-majority zones of the northwest and east, the territory that would come to be called Pakistan.
The historian Ayesha Jalal has argued that Jinnah may never have wanted the Pakistan he eventually got. In her reading, the Lahore Resolution was a bargaining chip meant to win Muslims equal standing within a united India, and it spiraled into a real demand for partition. Whether or not she is right, in 1940 nobody, including Jinnah, had defined what Pakistan would actually be.
The All India Muslim League Working Committee, Lahore, 1940. At this session, Jinnah declared that Hindus and Muslims were "two nations" and the League formally demanded the creation of Pakistan. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
In September 1939, when Britain went to war with Germany, the governor-general, Lord Linlithgow, declared India at war without consulting any Indian leader. Congress offered to support the war in exchange for an immediate commitment to independence. Linlithgow refused, and in October and November 1939 the Congress provincial ministries resigned in protest.
The resignations may have been Congress's biggest strategic mistake of the period. They were principled, but they left a vacuum the Muslim League was quick to fill. The League joined or backed provincial governments and built up its organization in Bengal, the Punjab, Sindh, and the North-West Frontier. The British, who saw Jinnah as more reasonable, or at least less threatening, than Gandhi, were glad to work with it. League membership grew from about 112,000 in 1941 to over 2 million by 1945, almost all of it while Congress leaders sat in prison.
In 1942, with Japan threatening India from the east, Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps to offer a new constitution after the war. The Cripps proposal would make India a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth after the war but would let any province or princely state stay out of the new union. Churchill privately wanted the mission to fail; it was meant to "get the Yanks off his back," since Roosevelt was pressing Britain for concessions. Congress rejected the offer. It would not back Britain for a mere promise, especially one that left the door open to partition. Gandhi is said to have called it "a post-dated check on a crashing bank."
On August 8, 1942, Congress passed the "Quit India" resolution, demanding Britain's immediate withdrawal. "We shall either free India or die in the attempt," Gandhi declared.
Within hours, the British arrested Gandhi and every major Congress leader. What followed was the most serious challenge to British rule since 1857. This time Gandhi loosened the reins. He encouraged local protests and accepted that violence was likely, setting aside the tightly disciplined nonviolence of earlier campaigns. With its leaders in prison and no central direction, the movement "quickly descended into violence." Students rioted. Crowds attacked railway stations, post offices, and government buildings. Rail lines were sabotaged and telegraph wires cut, and in some areas rebels briefly took control of towns and set up their own governments. Britain answered with martial law, machine-gunned crowds, and even bombed from the air. The movement was crushed within months, but British prestige paid a heavy price.
Meanwhile, the groups that stayed out of Quit India used the moment to build their own power:
The war drained India's economy. Britain pulled Indian resources into the war effort on an unprecedented scale, and inflation soared. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated 3 million people. Bad harvests played a part, but most of the causes were man-made. Bengal's food-grain output per person had fallen nearly 40 percent between 1911 and 1941, a gap filled by rice imports from Burma. When Japan conquered Burma, those imports stopped. Fearing a Japanese invasion, the British carried out a "denial policy" in coastal Bengal, removing rice stocks and seizing or destroying tens of thousands of boats that local people depended on to move food and earn a living. The army bought up food for itself, and inflation priced the remaining grain out of reach. Churchill's government refused to divert shipping for relief. The famine grew out of decades of colonial agricultural policy as much as out of the war.
The fall of Singapore in 1942, when Japanese troops, some on bicycles, captured Britain's largest naval base east of Suez, destroyed the idea that Europeans could not be beaten. The sight of an Asian power defeating a European one energized Indian nationalists. Subhas Chandra Bose, a former Congress president who had broken with Gandhi over nonviolence, raised an Indian National Army (INA) from Indian prisoners of war held by Japan, and the INA fought alongside the Japanese against the British in Burma. Bose's alliance had its limits. The Japanese often treated Indians as inferiors, and Bose himself conceded that "it is easier to deal with our British enemies than our Japanese friends." But the INA showed that some Indians were willing to fight and die for independence by any means available.
By mid-1945, Germany had surrendered and Japan was losing. Britain had won, but it was nearly bankrupt.
British rule was also weakening from inside. By the 1940s, the Indian Civil Service was no longer staffed mainly by aristocratic Oxford and Cambridge graduates. Newer recruits came from more modest backgrounds and less prestigious universities. They were less paternalistic, more sympathetic to Indian demands, and less willing to use force to hold India. British officials also worried more and more about the loyalty of the Indian army and police, the forces that had always kept the Raj in place.
On June 14, 1945, the governor-general, Lord Wavell, announced a conference at Simla to decide India's future, and the next day the imprisoned Congress leaders were released. They came out into a changed world. The Muslim League had grown from a marginal party into a mass organization while they were in prison. Every faction now had its own vision:
The Gandhi-Jinnah talks of 1944 had already failed. Gandhi insisted India was one nation; Jinnah said it was two. Jinnah would negotiate with Congress only if Congress first admitted it was a Hindu party, which Congress could never do without giving up its claim to represent all Indians. One historian argued that Congress's mistake was relying too heavily on negotiating with communal leaders: "the more communalism was conciliated the more extreme it became."
Now the leaders are arriving at Simla.
The scenario begins.
