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 beginning to take shape. This reading covers the quarter-century that shattered any hope of easy agreement. Gandhi's campaigns mobilized millions but could not hold them together. Ambedkar forced the question of caste onto the national agenda. Jinnah made the case for Pakistan. By 1945, every faction at Simla had reason to distrust every other. Understanding how that happened is essential to playing your role.
After the Amritsar massacre, Gandhi proposed a new strategy: non-cooperation. Indians should boycott foreign goods, withdraw children from schools, and refuse to participate in legislative elections. He encouraged Indians 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 made of homespun cloth (khadi), the "Gandhi cap," became the symbol of the nationalist cause.
The movement transformed Congress itself. At the Nagpur session in December 1920, the party reorganized along linguistic provincial lines, created a 15-member Working Committee for continuous political functioning, and reduced membership fees so that the rural and urban poor could join. This structural revolution, making Congress a mass-mobilization machine reaching down to villages, was arguably more consequential than the boycotts themselves.
But not everyone in Congress welcomed the transformation. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, along with other moderates, left the party during non-cooperation, not initially over Muslim identity but over political method. 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." His departure was about the form of politics Gandhi had introduced, not about religion. But it had fateful consequences: as Congress became a party of mass mobilization, Jinnah began building an alternative.
In 1921 Gandhi traveled throughout India, including long walks to remote villages. His challenge to British rule electrified the country. A liquor boycott in southern India cost the provincial government 20 percent of its annual revenue---proof that non-cooperation had real fiscal teeth, not just moral force. But the campaign also inflamed tensions. Riots erupted in Bombay and elsewhere. Congress leaders sought to intensify the campaign, and in early 1922 Gandhi endorsed the next step: non-violent civil disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes.
A few days later, in the town of Chauri Chaura, rioters surrounded a police station and set it ablaze, killing 22 officers. 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 felt betrayed. They had staked their credibility on the movement. The British arrested Gandhi on charges of sedition. He spent two years in prison.
The episode revealed a structural tension that would recur throughout the independence struggle: Congress needed popular energy to pressure the British, but that energy, once mobilized, exceeded the party's capacity to direct it. Gandhi called off the movement not because it was failing but because it was succeeding in ways he could not control.
There was also a deeper contradiction in Congress's relationship with the masses. While Gandhi symbolically appealed to the Indian peasant, Congress was far more cautious when it came to directly supporting peasants against Indian landlords. The party feared that if it sided too openly with tenant farmers, the zamindars would be pushed into British arms, where they could be used as a counterweight against Congress mobilization. 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 the mass base on which it depended.
But Gandhi had achieved what no Indian leader had: he mobilized millions of ordinary Indians into political action. His most surprising convert was Jawaharlal Nehru (1889--1964), the Cambridge-educated son of a wealthy Congress lawyer. Nehru was drawn to Marxism and applauded the Bolshevik revolution. But he gravitated to Gandhi because the Mahatma, uniquely able to mobilize mass participation, could enlist popular support in ways that no Western-educated intellectual ever could.
One major consequence of Gandhi's campaign was the resurgence of Hindu nationalism. The Congress-Khilafat alliance, intended to demonstrate Hindu-Muslim unity, provoked a backlash among Hindu nationalists within Congress itself. Regional leaders saw the pact with the Muslim League as capitulation to Islam and encouraged aggressive displays of Hindu majoritarianism---processions through Muslim neighborhoods, demands for cow protection, insistence on Hindi as the national language. This in turn provoked Muslim clerics to urge sharper separation from Hindu customs. The very attempt at Hindu-Muslim unity generated the forces of communal separation.
Once mobilized for political action, many Hindus joined the Hindu Mahasabha, which championed Hindu values and practices. Savarkar, released from imprisonment in the early 1920s and later active in Hindu nationalist politics, became president of the Mahasabha in 1937. His Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923) insisted that all peoples of India shared the core values of Hindu civilization. India's destiny was to become Hindustan, a great Hindu nation.
The Mahasabha and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded 1925), separate organizations that often overlapped in personnel and outlook, could mobilize large numbers of followers on short notice. Unlike Gandhi, they rejected nonviolence. Unlike Congress secularists like Nehru, they insisted that India's identity was fundamentally Hindu. They competed with Congress for Hindu loyalty, arguing that Congress's secularism was a betrayal.
Hindu communalism also had a class dimension that is easy to overlook. In several provinces, Hindu communalists cooperated with the Muslim League against Congress---not out of solidarity across religious lines, but because both Hindu and Muslim communalism served upper-class interests and resisted the social and economic demands of the common people. The Punjab Hindu Sabha attacked the Congress for trying to unite Indians across religious lines, with its leader declaring that "a Hindu should believe that he was a Hindu first and an Indian later." This directly mirrored the logic of Muslim separatism.
Muslims were alarmed. Their earlier hope that constitutional structures could protect the Muslim minority now seemed naive. What would happen to Muslims in a nation dominated by Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha?
The answer came from Muhammad Iqbal (1873--1938), a poet and philosopher educated at Cambridge and in Germany. Iqbal wrote mostly in Urdu and Persian, which he saw as a way of addressing the problems confronting India's Muslims. He emphasized the importance of the Muslim community, "the single bond" that grew out of shared faith. Indian politics had become a welter of "dismembered tribes," each at odds with the other. Any attempt to stitch these remnants into a single nation would fail.
In 1930, in a major address to the Muslim League, Iqbal declared that the peoples of India were defined by their religious communities, and each required its own state. "The construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of Islamic principles of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim." Muslims must be given a homeland, most likely in the northwestern provinces where they comprised a majority.
The idea of a separate Muslim homeland was given a name by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a student at Cambridge who coined the word Pakistan ("Land of the Pure") in 1933. But the original concept was far vaguer than it later became. Ali never said it would be a separate sovereign nation-state; the closest he came was to call it a separate Muslim federation, which could mean anything from a sovereign state to a loose confederation. Critically, Bengal was not even mentioned in the original Pakistan acronym, which would have enormous consequences in 1947.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had once belonged to both Congress and the League and had brokered Hindu-Muslim unity at Lucknow in 1916, now endorsed Iqbal's vision. Jinnah argued that Muslims were a distinct political community whose interests could not be secured in a Hindu-majority democracy. They must have their own state.
But the fear driving Muslim separatism was demographic, not theological. India's Hindu supermajority of 80 to 85 percent meant that in any democratic system, Muslims would be structurally outvoted regardless of constitutional guarantees. This was a rational political calculation, not simply a religious grievance. The Muslim League was strongest, revealingly, in provinces where Muslims were a minority---precisely where they felt most politically vulnerable. In Muslim-majority provinces like Punjab, Bengal, and the Northwest Frontier, where Muslims felt relatively secure, the League remained weak through most of the 1930s.
The shift in Muslim politics was shaped by more than ideology. During the interwar years, the Muslim League had largely stayed aloof from Congress's mass campaigns. This had a practical consequence: the League learned far less about governing and administration than Congress did. But it also meant the League was positioned differently with the British, who saw Jinnah as more reasonable, or at least less threatening, than Gandhi. The League used the years of Congress's absence from provincial government to build support among Muslims in Bengal, the Punjab, and Sindh, precisely the provinces where any future Pakistan would be carved.
Indian Muslims were far from united behind the League. The Deoband seminary clerics largely believed that questions of the caliphate and separate statehood were irrelevant so long as the British did not interfere with Muslim religious freedom. Prominent Muslim leaders like Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani actively fought against the League's Pakistan project. Abul Kalam Azad, the Muslim president of Congress, articulated a powerful counter-argument: "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." The two-nation theory was contested within the Muslim community, not a unanimous demand.
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.
During the 1930s, communal riots between Muslim and Hindu communities erupted frequently. Communist revolutionaries incited unrest among peasants and workers. The Great Depression struck India, worsening poverty.
Gandhi launched a new civil disobedience campaign, targeting the British monopoly on salt, an essential commodity in such a hot land. The choice of salt was not universally embraced within Congress---Nehru "admitted that salt was too eccentric for his fancy." But Gandhi's genius lay in selecting an issue that affected every Indian regardless of caste, religion, or region. Even the viceroy privately conceded that the choice "proved to have a unifying effect."
This second campaign was shaped by the global depression's devastation of the Indian countryside in ways that went beyond moral protest. Five of Congress's eleven demands to the viceroy were economic: abolition of the salt tax, protection for Indian textiles, currency reform, and reservations for Indian coastal shipping. The depression had triggered a devastating chain of extraction: as Britain left the gold standard, gold's value rose; Indian moneylenders forced rural debtors to surrender gold ornaments to pay debts; this gold flowed to cities, was melted down, and ended up in British bank vaults. The total drain amounted to roughly 3.4 billion rupees.
He walked 240 miles from Ahmedabad to the salt flats at Dandi on the Arabian coast. Nehru, one of the marchers, would never forget 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.
Four weeks later, Gandhi arrived at Dandi with thousands of followers. He scooped up a handful of mud and salt and gave it away in defiance of British law. Protests erupted across India in radically different forms: defiance of forest laws in Maharashtra, refusal of the chaukidari tax in eastern India, peasant land-revenue strikes across multiple provinces. Two platoons of Garhwali soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators in Peshawar---nationalism was beginning to penetrate the Indian army. Thousands of women left the seclusion of their homes to join processions and picket shops selling foreign cloth. Gandhi and 50,000 supporters were arrested.
At the Dharasana Saltworks, individual volunteers marched into guards who beat them over the head with steel-tipped clubs. Bloodied, they were carried away, bandaged, and replaced by the next row of volunteers. The scene was covered by United Press journalist Webb Miller and projected through cinema newsreels worldwide. It was one of the first cases of mass media amplifying a nonviolent resistance movement to a global audience.
The salt march drew millions into political action but failed to end British rule, or even the salt tax. Critics attacked from all sides. The communist M. N. Roy denounced Gandhian nonviolence as "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." Even mainstream Congress leaders, many of whom ended up in prison, were perplexed. Gandhi had shaken the foundations of the British empire. But the empire still stood.
By the second round of civil disobedience, after Gandhi returned from failed negotiations in London, popular pressure from peasants in the countryside was driving Congress to act, rather than the reverse. The orbital center of mobilization shifted from Gandhi to the Gangetic plain. Instead of Congress directing the masses, the masses were directing Congress.
B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956). Born an Untouchable, 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 was to be done about India's 70 million Untouchables?
B. R. Ambedkar (1891--1956) was himself an Untouchable whose father had served in the British military. As a boy, he could not sit at desks with other students but was obliged to sit on the floor. Other children refused to come near him. His teachers would not touch his notebook. One kind teacher offered him special instruction and food; his name was Ambedkar, a name Bhimrao added to his own. Eventually, a local prince arranged for him to attend Columbia University in New York, where he earned a PhD in economics.
Ambedkar argued that constitutional promises of equality were worthless without the political power to enforce them. The British had protected the Muslim minority by reserving seats and creating separate electorates; they should do the same for Untouchables. In 1932, the viceroy agreed to reserve 71 seats in provincial legislatures for Untouchables, with separate electorates: Untouchable voters would choose their own representatives in a separate ballot, preventing the Hindu majority from electing compliant Untouchable candidates.
The anti-caste movement that Ambedkar led was not his invention alone. It had deep roots across multiple regions and generations: Jyotiba Phule's campaigns against Brahmin dominance in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Sri Narayan Guru's movement in Kerala (whose slogan was "One religion, one caste, and one God for mankind"), and the Self-Respect Movement in south India in the 1920s. Ambedkar built on these foundations, but he also recognized something his predecessors often had not: that colonial rule was itself 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." This complicates the simple narrative of Ambedkar versus Congress: he fought both for Untouchable political power and for Indian independence, seeing the two as inseparable.
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 considered patronizing). But he opposed separate electorates absolutely. Untouchables should not be set apart from Indian society but integrated within it. Separate electorates were a British strategy of "divide and rule" that would permanently fracture the Hindu community.
Gandhi announced he would fast unto death if Britain did not withdraw the plan.
As Gandhi's fast continued, Ambedkar was subjected to a firestorm. Congress editors denounced him as a monster and potential murderer. He had little choice but to withdraw his demand. The result was the Poona Pact (1932): Untouchables would receive more reserved seats than originally planned, but in joint electorates, meaning all voters, including caste Hindus, would choose who filled those seats. Ambedkar considered this a devastating defeat. Gandhi had used his moral authority to silence the most oppressed group in India.
Ambedkar, furious, would spend the next decade building the case that Congress and Gandhi did not speak for Untouchables. The question of reserved seats versus separate electorates, the technical distinction at the heart of the Poona Pact, would resurface at Simla with explosive force.
The salt march forced Britain to make further concessions. The Government of India Act (1935) provided for elected provincial legislatures, expanded voting rights (including to women), and reserved seats for minorities. Provincial assemblies included reserved seats for groups such as Depressed Classes (Untouchables), Muslims, Christians, and tribal peoples, alongside "general" seats open to all, which in practice were dominated by caste Hindus.
But the act was designed as much to contain Indian nationalism as to satisfy it. Only 14 percent of the population was enfranchised. The viceroy privately admitted that the act's purpose was to create "some facade which will leave the essential mechanisms of power in our hands." The proposed federal structure gave princely states disproportionate representation, with their delegates appointed by rulers rather than elected, ensuring the princes would serve as a structural veto on democratic nationalism. The federal provisions were never even implemented. 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." But Congress ran candidates anyway, and won legislative majorities in seven of eleven provinces.
Congress ministries had limited formal power, but their symbolic impact was enormous. Ministers reduced their own salaries drastically and traveled second or third class on the railways. Indians felt, as one observer noted, "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 terrified the Muslim League, which fared poorly even in Muslim-majority provinces. Worse, when Congress ministers took power, some provincial governments promoted Hindu symbols: flying the Congress flag, singing the Vande Mataram, endorsing Hindu educational schemes. Even seemingly minor decisions about school textbooks proved explosive. Bengali Muslims were outraged when new texts included a Hindu goddess as a synonym for God.
These disputes confirmed Jinnah's fears. The 1937 election map itself became evidence for his case: Congress dominated everywhere except the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab, Bengal, and Sindh. The map simultaneously bolstered Congress's claim to speak for the nation and made it obvious that the "nation" Congress represented did not encompass Muslim-majority provinces. In March 1940, the Muslim League endorsed the Lahore Resolution, calling for "independent states" in the Muslim-majority zones of the northwest and east, what would eventually be called Pakistan.
The historian Ayesha Jalal has argued that Jinnah may never have fully intended the Pakistan he eventually got---that the Lahore Resolution was a bargaining counter, a negotiating position designed to secure Muslim political parity within a united India, which spiraled out of control into an actual demand for partition. Whether or not this is correct, it captures the fundamental ambiguity of the Pakistan demand in 1940: nobody, including Jinnah, had defined what Pakistan would actually look like.
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.
By 1940, Britain was at war with Hitler's Germany. When Britain declared India at war without consulting any Indian leader, Congress offered to support the war effort in exchange for an immediate commitment to independence. The viceroy refused. Congress ministers resigned from their provincial governments in protest.
This was the single most consequential strategic error of the period. The resignation was constitutionally principled, but it created a political vacuum the Muslim League immediately filled. The League stepped into provincial governments Congress had vacated, building organizational strength in Bengal, Punjab, Sindh, and the Northwest Frontier. League membership swelled from roughly 112,000 in 1941 to over 2 million by 1945. This growth occurred almost entirely during the three years Congress leaders spent in prison.
In 1942, with Japan threatening to invade from the east, Churchill dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps to offer a new postwar constitution. The Cripps proposal would establish an Indian union within the British Dominion after the war, but allowed any province or princely state to remain outside the union. Churchill privately wanted the mission to fail; it was designed to "get the Yanks off his back," since Roosevelt was pressuring Britain to make concessions. Congress rejected the offer. They would not support Britain in exchange for a mere promise, especially one that conceded the possibility of partition. Gandhi 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 worst challenge to British rule since 1857---and it revealed something unexpected about Gandhi's strategy. In 1942, Gandhi deliberately loosened the reins. He encouraged widespread local protests and even accepted the likelihood of violence. The philosophy of controlled, disciplined ahimsa was effectively set aside. The movement "quickly descended into violence" and turned revolutionary. Left leaderless and without central organization, people reacted however they could. Students rioted. Protesters attacked railway stations, post offices, and government buildings. In some areas, rebels seized temporary control of towns and established parallel governments. Rail lines were sabotaged, telegraph lines cut, and government property attacked. Britain imposed martial law, machine-gunning crowds and even bombing from the air. The Quit India movement was crushed within months, but at enormous cost to British prestige.
Meanwhile, those who did not join Quit India used the moment to build their own power:
The war devastated India's economy. Britain marshaled Indian resources for the war effort at unprecedented levels. Wartime inflation skyrocketed. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated 3 million people, not from natural causes alone, but from the cumulative weight of colonial economic structures. Bengal's per capita food-grain output had declined nearly 40 percent between 1911 and 1941, a shortfall made good only by rice imports from Burma. When Japan conquered Burma, that lifeline was severed. The British destroyed floating grain storages in the Bay of Bengal to keep them from the Japanese. The military requisitioned food for itself. Wartime inflation made what grain remained unaffordable. Churchill's government refused to divert shipping for relief. The famine was not an accident but the culmination of decades of structural vulnerability created by colonial agricultural policy.
The fall of Singapore in 1942---where Japanese troops arriving on bicycles captured Britain's largest naval base east of Suez---shattered the myth of European invincibility. The idea that fellow Asians could defeat a European power gave new energy to Indian nationalism. Subhas Chandra Bose, a former Congress president who had broken with Gandhi over nonviolence, raised an Indian National Army (INA) from prisoners of war captured by Japan. The INA fought alongside the Japanese against the British in Burma. Bose's collaboration revealed the limits of anti-colonial solidarity. The Japanese often treated Indians as inferior servants, and Bose himself conceded that "it is easier to deal with our British enemies than our Japanese friends." But the INA's existence demonstrated that Indians were willing to fight and die for independence by any means available.
By mid-1945, Germany had surrendered and Japan was collapsing. Britain, though victorious, was exhausted: its economy shattered, its people weary, its treasury depleted.
The British colonial apparatus itself was crumbling from within. By the 1940s, the Indian Civil Service was no longer staffed by Oxford and Cambridge graduates from aristocratic backgrounds. Newer recruits came from more modest origins and less prestigious universities. They were less paternalistic, more sympathetic to Indian aspirations, and had growing reservations about using force to hold on to India. Even the viceroy admitted that "the tank of British prestige was running on empty."
When the British put captured INA officers on trial for treason, the Indian public welcomed them as national heroes. Far more alarming for the British, patriotic ideas had penetrated the professional Indian armed forces---the chief instrument of colonial rule. In 1946, the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay. Police in Bihar and Delhi went on strike. When all three pillars of colonial rule---army, police, bureaucracy---showed signs of nationalist sympathies, British rule was structurally finished.
On June 15, 1945, the viceroy released the imprisoned Congress leaders and announced a conference at Simla to determine India's future. Congress leaders emerged, as Nehru later wrote, blinking in the sunlight---into a world that had changed beyond recognition. The Muslim League's transformation from a marginal party to a mass organization had occurred entirely in their absence. Every faction arrived with a different vision:
The Gandhi-Jinnah talks of 1944 had already failed. Gandhi insisted India must remain one nation. Jinnah declared it contained two. Jinnah would negotiate with Congress only if Congress first admitted it was a Hindu party---a condition Congress could never accept without abandoning its claim to represent all Indians. Congress's major error, one historian argued, was relying too much on negotiating with communal leaders: "the more communalism was conciliated the more extreme it became."
Now the leaders are arriving at Simla. The stakes could not be higher. If they succeed, a new nation, or nations, will be born. If they fail, India may descend into the communal violence that has been smoldering for decades.
The scenario begins.
