Indian textiles in European markets

• By the early 18^th century, worried by the popularity of Indian textiles, wool and silk makers in England began protesting against the import of Indian cotton textiles.
• In 1720, the British government enacted a legislation banning the use of printed cotton textiles– chintz – in England.
• Interestingly, this Act was known as the Calico Act.
• At this time textile industries had just begun to develop in England.
• Unable to compete with Indian textiles, English producers wanted a secure market within the country by preventing the entry of Indian textiles.
• The first to grow under government protection was the calico printing industry.
• Indian designs were now imitated and printed in England on white muslin or plain unbleached Indian cloth.
• Competition with Indian textiles also led to a search for technological innovation in England.
• In 1764, the spinning jenny was invented by John Kaye which increased the productivity of the traditional spindles.
• The invention of the steam engine by Richard Arkwright in 1786 revolutionised cotton textile weaving.
• Cloth could now be woven in immense quantities and cheaply too.

Spinning Jenny –

• A machine by which a single worker could operate several spindles on to which thread was spun.
• When the wheel was turned all the spindles rotated.
• However, Indian textiles continued to dominate world trade till the end of the 18^th century.
• European trading companies– the Dutch, the French and the English– made enormous profits out of this flourishing trade.
• These companies purchased cotton and silk textiles in India by importing silver.
• When the English EIC gained political power in Bengal, it no longer had to import precious metal to buy Indian goods.
• Instead, they collected revenues from peasants and zamindars in India, and used this revenue to buy Indian textiles.
• As European trade expanded, trading settlements were established at various ports.
• The Dutch settlements in Cochin came up in the 17^th century.

Cotton mills come up

• 1^st cotton mill in India was set up as a spinning mill in Bombay in 1854
• From the early 19^th century, Bombay had grown as an important port for the export of raw cotton from India to England and China.
• It was close to the vast black soil tract of western India where cotton was grown.
• When the cotton textile mills came up they could get supplies of raw material with ease.
• Many of these were established by Parsi and Gujarati businessmen who had made their money through trade with China.
• The first mill in Ahmedabad was started in 1861; then in Kanpur and United Provinces.
• Growth of cotton mills led to a demand for labour.
• Thousands of poor peasants, artisans and agricultural labourers moved to the cities to work in the mills.
• In the first few decades of its existence, the textile factory industry in India faced many problems.
• It found it difficult to compete with the cheap textiles imported from Britain.
• In most countries, governments supported industrialisation by imposing heavy duties on imports.
• This eliminated competition and protected infant industries.
• The colonial government in India usually refused such protection to local industries.
• The first major spurt in the development of cotton factory production in India, therefore, was during WW1 when textile imports from Britain declined and Indian factories were called upon to produce cloth for military supplies.

Smelting – The process of obtaining a metal from rock (or soil) by heating it to a very high temperature, or of melting objects made from metal in order to use the metal to make something new

Abandoned furnaces in villages

• Production of Wootz steel required a highly specialised technique of refining iron.
• But iron smelting in India was extremely common till the end of 19^th century.
• In Bihar and Central India, in particular, every district had smelters that used local deposits of ore to produce iron which was widely used for the manufacture of implements and tools of daily use.
• The furnaces were most often built of clay and sun-dried bricks.
• The smelting was done by men while women worked the bellows, pumping air that kept the charcoal burning.

Bellows–

• A device or equipment that can pump air
• Some communities like the Agarias specialised in the craft of iron smelting.
• In the late 19^th century a series of famines devastated the dry tracts of India.
• In Central India, many of the Agaria iron smelters stopped work, deserted their villages and migrated, looking for some other work to survive the hard times.
• A large number of them never worked their furnaces again.
• By the late nineteenth century, however, the craft of iron smelting was in decline.
• In most villages, furnaces fell into disuse and the amount of iron produced came down.
• Iron smelters had to pay a very high tax to the forest department for every furnace they used which reduced their income.
• Moreover, by the late 19^th century iron and steel was being imported from Britain.
• Ironsmiths in India began using the imported iron to manufacture utensils and implements.
• This inevitably lowered the demand for iron produced by local smelters.
• By the early 20^th century, the artisans producing iron and steel faced a new competition.

Iron and steel factories come up in India

• In 1904, Charles Weld, an American geologist and Dorabji Tata, the eldest son of Jamsetji Tata, were travelling in Chhattisgarh in search of iron ore deposits.
• They had spent many months on a costly venture looking for sources of good iron ore to set up a modern iron and steel plant in India.
• Jamsetji Tata had decided to spend a large part of his fortune to build a big iron and steel industry in India.
• One day, after travelling for many hours in the forests, Weld and Dorabji came upon a small village and found a group of men and women carrying basket loads of iron ore.
• These people were the Agarias. They got iron ore, from Rajhara Hills
• But the region was dry and water– necessary for running the factory – was not to be found nearby.
• The Agarias helped in the discovery of a source of iron ore that would later supply the Bhilai Steel Plant.
• A few years later a large area of forest was cleared on the banks of the river Subarnarekha to set up the factory and an industrial township – Jamshedpur.
• The Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) that came up began producing steel in 1912.
• All through the late 19^th century, India was importing steel that was manufactured in Britain.
• Expansion of the railways in India had provided a huge market for rails that Britain produced.
• For a long while, British experts in the Indian Railways were unwilling to believe that good quality steel could be produced in India.
• In 1914 the First World War broke out.
• Steel produced in Britain now had to meet the demands of war in Europe.
• So imports of British steel into India declined dramatically and the Indian Railways turned to TISCO for supply of rails.
• As the war dragged on for several years, TISCO had to produce shells and carriage wheels for the war.
• By 1919 the colonial government was buying 90 per cent of the steel manufactured by TISCO.
• Over time TISCO became the biggest steel industry within the British empire.
• In the case of iron and steel, as in the case of cotton textiles, industrial expansion occurred only when British imports into India declined and the market for Indian industrial goods increased.
• This happened during the First World War and after.
• As the nationalist movement developed and the industrial class became stronger, the demand for government protection became louder.

Chapter 8
 Civilising the “Native”, Educating the Nation

• British in India wanted not only territorial conquest and control over revenues.
• They also felt that they had a cultural mission: they had to “civilise the natives”, change their customs and values.

How the British saw Education

The tradition of Orientalism

• In 1783, a person named William Jones arrived in Calcutta.
• He had an appointment as a junior judge at the Supreme Court that the Company had set up.
• In addition to being an expert in law, Jones was a linguist (Someone who knows and studies several Languages).
• He had studied Greek and Latin at Oxford, knew French and English, had picked up Arabic from a friend, and had also learnt Persian.
• At Calcutta, he began spending many hours a day with pandits who taught him the subtleties of Sanskrit language, grammar and poetry.
• Soon he was studying ancient Indian texts on law, philosophy, religion, politics, morality, arithmetic, medicine and the other sciences.
• Henry Thomas Colebrooke- He was a scholar of Sanskrit and ancient sacred writings of Hinduism.
• Jones discovered that his interests were shared by many British officials living in Calcutta at the time.
• Englishmen like Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Halhed were also busy discovering the ancient Indian heritage, mastering Indian languages and translating Sanskrit and Persian works into English.
• Together with them, Jones set up the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and started a journal called Asiatick Researches.
• Jones and Colebrooke came to represent a particular attitude towards India.
• They shared a deep respect for ancient cultures, both of India and the West.
• Indian civilisation, they felt, had attained its glory in the ancient past, but had subsequently declined.
• Texts could reveal the real ideas and laws of the Hindus and Muslims, and only a new study of these texts could form the basis of future development in India.
• So Jones and Colebrooke went about discovering ancient texts, understanding their meaning, translating them, and making their findings known to others.
• Many Company officials argued that the British ought to promote Indian rather than Western learning.
• They felt that institutions should be set up to encourage the study of ancient Indian texts and teach Sanskrit and Persian literature and poetry.
• They thought that Hindus and Muslims ought to be taught what they were already familiar with, and what they valued and treasured, not subjects that were alien to them.
• With this object in view a madrasa (An Arabic word for a place of learning; any type of school or college) was set up in Calcutta in 1781 to promote the study of Arabic, Persian and Islamic law; and the Hindu College was established in Benaras in 1791 to encourage the study of ancient Sanskrit texts that would be useful for the administration of the country.
• Some were very strong in their criticism of the Orientalists

Orientalists –

• Those with a scholarly knowledge of the language and culture of Asia
• James Mill was one of those who attacked the Orientalists and thought the aim of education ought to be to teach what was useful and practical.
• So Indians should be made familiar with the scientific and technical advances that the West had made, rather than with the poetry and sacred literature of the Orient.
• By the 1830s the attack on the Orientalists became sharper.
• One of the most outspoken and influential of such critics of the time was Thomas Babington Macaulay.
• He saw India as an uncivilised country that needed to be civilised.
• He urged that the British government in India stop wasting public money in promoting Oriental learning, for it was of no practical use.

Macaulay emphasised the need to teach the English language.

• He felt that knowledge of English would allow Indians to read some of the finest literature the world had produced; it would make them aware of the developments in Western science and philosophy.
• Teaching of English could thus be a way of civilising people, changing their tastes, values and culture.
• Following Macaulay’s minute, the English Education Act of 1835 was introduced.
• The decision was to make English the medium of instruction for higher education, and to stop the promotion of Oriental institutions like the Calcutta Madrasa and Benaras Sanskrit College.
• These institutions were seen as “temples of darkness that were falling of themselves into decay”.
• English textbooks now began to be produced for schools.

Education for commerce

• In 1854, the Court of Directors of the East India Company in London sent an educational despatch to the Governor-General in India.
• Issued by Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control of the Company, it has come to be known as Wood’s Despatch.
• Outlining the educational policy that was to be followed in India, it emphasised once again the practical benefits of a system of European learning, as opposed to Oriental knowledge.
• One of the practical uses the Despatch pointed to was economic.
• European learning, it said, would enable Indians to recognise the advantages that flow from the expansion of trade and commerce, and make them see the importance of developing the resources of the country.
• Introducing them to European ways of life, would change their tastes and desires, and create a demand for British goods, for Indians would begin to appreciate and buy things that were produced in Europe.
• European learning would improve the moral character of Indians.
• It would make them truthful and honest, and thus supply the Company with civil servants who could be trusted and depended upon.
• Following the 1854 Despatch, several measures were introduced by the British.
• Education departments of the government were set up to extend control over all matters regarding education.
• Steps were taken to establish a system of university education.
• In 1857, while the sepoys rose in revolt in Meerut and Delhi, universities were being established in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.
• Attempts were also made to bring about changes within the system of school education.

The demand for moral education

• The argument for practical education was strongly criticised by the Christian missionaries in India in 19^th century.
• The missionaries felt that education should attempt to improve the moral character of the people, and morality could be improved only through Christian education.
• Until 1813, the East India Company was opposed to missionary activities in India. It feared that missionary activities would provoke reaction amongst the local population and make them suspicious of British presence in India.
• Unable to establish an institution within British-controlled territories, the missionaries set up a mission at Serampore in an area under the control of the Danish East India Company.
• A printing press was set up in 1800 and a college established in 1818.
• Over the 19^th century, missionary schools were set up all over India.
• After 1857, however, the British government in India was reluctant to directly support missionary education.
• William Carey was a Scottish missionary who helped establish the Serampore Mission

New routines, new rules

• Up to the mid 19^th century, the Company was concerned primarily with higher education.
• So it allowed the local pathshalas to function without much interference.
• After 1854 the Company decided to improve the system of vernacular education.
• It felt that this could be done by introducing order within the system, imposing routines, establishing rules, ensuring regular inspections.
• It appointed a number of government pandits, each in charge of looking after four to five schools.
• The task of the Pandit was to visit the pathshalas and try and improve the standard of teaching.
• Each guru was asked to submit periodic reports and take classes according to a regular timetable.
• Teaching was now to be based on textbooks and learning was to be tested through a system of annual examination.
• Students were asked to pay a regular fee, attend regular classes, sit on fixed seats, and obey the new rules of discipline.
• Pathshalas which accepted the new rules were supported through government grants.
• Those who were unwilling to work within the new system received no government support.
• Over time gurus who wanted to retain their independence found it difficult to compete with the government aided and regulated pathshalas.
• The new rules and routines had another consequence.
• In the earlier system children from poor peasant families had been able to go to pathshalas, since the timetable was flexible.
• The discipline of the new system demanded regular attendance, even during harvest time when children of poor families had to work in the fields.

The Agenda for a National Education

• From the early 19^th century many thinkers from different parts of India began to talk of the need for a wider spread of education.
• Impressed with the developments in Europe, some Indians felt that Western education would help modernise India
• They urged the British to open more schools, colleges and universities, and spend more money on education.
• There were other Indians, however, who reacted against Western education.

Example- Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore

“English education has enslaved us”

• Mahatma Gandhi argued that colonial education created a sense of inferiority in the minds of Indians.
• It made them see Western civilisation as superior, and destroyed the pride they had in their own culture.
• There was poison in this education, said Mahatma Gandhi
• Charmed by the West, appreciating everything that came from the West, Indians educated in these institutions began admiring British rule.

Mahatma Gandhi wanted an education that could help Indians recover their sense of dignity and self-respect.

• During the national movement he urged students to leave educational institutions in order to show to the British that Indians were no longer willing to be enslaved.
• Mahatma Gandhi strongly felt that Indian languages ought to be the medium of teaching.
• Speaking a foreign tongue, despising local culture, the English educated did not know how to relate to the masses.
• Western education, Mahatma Gandhi said, focused on reading and writing rather than oral knowledge; it valued textbooks rather than lived experience and practical knowledge.
• Literacy – or simply learning to read and write – by itself did not count as education.
• People had to work with their hands, learn a craft, and know how different things operated.
• This would develop their mind and their capacity to understand.
• As nationalist sentiments spread, other thinkers also began thinking of a system of national education which would be radically different from that set up by the British.

Tagore’s “abode of peace”

• Rabindranath Tagore started Shantiniketan institution in 1901.
• As a child, Tagore hated going to school.
• The experience of his schooldays in Calcutta shaped Tagore’s ideas of education.
• On growing up, he wanted to set up a school where the child was happy, where he could be free and creative, where he was able to explore her own thoughts and desires.
• Tagore felt that childhood ought to be a time of self-learning, outside the rigid and restricting discipline of the schooling system set up by the British.
• Teachers had to be imaginative, understand the child, and help the child develop her curiosity.
• Tagore was of the view that creative learning could be encouraged only within a natural environment.
• So he chose to set up his school 100 kilometres away from Calcutta, in a rural setting.
• He saw it as an abode of peace (Shantiniketan), where living in harmony with nature, children could cultivate their natural creativity.
• In many senses Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi thought about education in similar ways.

Chapter 9
 Women, Caste and Reform

• All women, like all men, can vote and stand for elections but not enjoyed by all.
• Poor people have little or no access to education, and in many families, women cannot choose their husbands.
• Two hundred years ago, most children were married off at an early age.
• Both Hindu and Muslim men could marry more than one wife.
• In some parts of the country, widows were praised if they chose death by burning themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands.
• Women who died in this manner, whether willingly or otherwise, were called “sati”, meaning virtuous women.
• Women’s rights to property were also restricted.
• no access to education.
• In many parts of the country people believed that if a woman was educated, she would become a widow.
• In most regions, people were divided along lines of caste.
• Brahmans and Kshatriyas considered themselves as “upper castes”.
• Others, such as traders and moneylenders (often referred to as Vaishyas) were placed after them.
• Then came peasants, and artisans such as weavers and potters (referred to as Shudras).
• At the lowest rung were those who laboured to keep cities and villages clean or worked at jobs that upper castes considered “polluting”, that is, it could lead to the loss of caste status.
• The upper castes also treated many of these groups at the bottom as “untouchable”.
• They were not allowed to enter temples, draw water from the wells used by the upper castes, or bathe in ponds where upper castes bathed.
• They were seen as inferior human beings.
• Over 19^th and 20^th centuries, many of these norms and perceptions slowly changed.

Working Towards Change

• Development of new forms of communication.
• For the first time, books, newspapers, magazines, leaflets and pamphlets were printed.
• These were far cheaper and far more accessible than the manuscripts.
• Therefore ordinary people could read these, and many of them could also write and express their ideas in their own languages.
• All kinds of issues – social, political, economic and religious – could now be debated and discussed by men (and sometimes by women as well) in the new cities.
• The discussions could reach out to a wider public, and could become linked to movements for social change.
• These debates were often initiated by Indian reformers and reform groups.
• One such reformer was Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833). He founded a reform association known as the Brahmo Sabha (later known as the Brahmo Samaj) in Calcutta.
• People such as Rammohun Roy are described as reformers because they felt that changes were necessary in society, and unjust practices needed to be done away with.
• They thought that the best way to ensure such changes was by persuading people to give up old practices and adopt a new way of life.
• Rammohun Roy was keen to spread the knowledge of Western education in the country and bring about greater freedom and equality for women.
• He wrote about the way women were forced to bear the burden of domestic work, confined to the home and the kitchen, and not allowed to move out and become educated.

Changing the lives of widows

• Rammohun Roy was particularly moved by the problems widows faced in their lives.
• He began a campaign against the practice of sati.
• Rammohun Roy was well versed in Sanskrit, Persian and several other Indian and European languages.
• He tried to show through his writings that the practice of widow burning had no sanction in ancient texts.
• By the early 19^th century, many British officials had also begun to criticise Indian traditions and customs.
• They were therefore more than willing to listen to Rammohun who was reputed to be a learned man. In 1829, sati was banned.
• The strategy adopted by Rammohun was used by later reformers as well.
• Whenever they wished to challenge a practice that seemed harmful, they tried to find a verse or sentence in the ancient sacred texts that supported their point of view.
• They then suggested that the practice as it existed at present was against early tradition.
• Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, used the ancient texts to suggest that widows could remarry.
• His suggestion was adopted by British officials, and a law was passed in 1856 permitting widow remarriage.
• Those who were against the remarriage of widows opposed Vidyasagar, and even boycotted him.
• By the second half of the nineteenth century, the movement in favour of widow remarriage spread to other parts of the country.
• In the Telugu-speaking areas of the Madras Presidency, Veerasalingam Pantulu formed an association for widow remarriage.
• Around the same time young intellectuals and reformers in Bombay pledged themselves to working for the same cause.
• In the north, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the reform association called Arya Samaj (1875) to reform Hinduism, also supported widow remarriage.
• Those who married were not easily accepted in society and conservative groups continued to oppose the new law.

Girls begin going to school

• To improve the condition of women.
• Vidyasagar in Calcutta and many other reformers in Bombay set up schools for girls.
• When the first schools were opened in the mid 19^th century, many people were afraid of them.
• They feared that schools would take girls away from home, prevent them from doing their domestic duties.
• Moreover, girls had to travel through public places in order to reach school.
• Many people felt that this would have a corrupting influence on them.
• They felt that girls should stay away from public spaces.
• Therefore, throughout 19^th century, most educated women were taught at home by liberal fathers or husbands.
• Rashsundari Debi was one of those who secretly learned to read and write in the flickering light of candles at night.
• In the latter part of the century, schools for girls were established by the Arya Samaj in Punjab, and Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra.
• In aristocratic Muslim households in North India, women learnt to read the Koran in Arabic.
• They were taught by women who came home to teach.
• Some reformers such as Mumtaz Ali reinterpreted verses from the Koran to argue for women’s education.
• The first Urdu novels began to be written from the late 19^th century.
• Amongst other things, these were meant to encourage women to read about religion and domestic management in a language they could understand.
• Hindu Mahila Vidyalaya, 1875 was one of the first institutions to provide girls with the kind of learning that was usual for boys at the time.

Women write about women

• From the early 20^th century, Muslim women like the Begums of Bhopal played a notable role in promoting education among women.
• They founded a primary school for girls at Aligarh.
• Another remarkable woman, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain started schools for Muslim girls in Patna and Calcutta.
• She was a fearless critic of conservative ideas, arguing that religious leaders of every faith accorded an inferior place to women.
• By the 1880s, Indian women began to enter universities.
• Some of them trained to be doctors, some became teachers.
• Many women began to write and publish their critical views on the place of women in society.
• Tarabai Shinde, a woman educated at home at Poona, published a book, Stripurushtulna, (A Comparison between Women and Men), criticising the social differences between men and women.
• Pandita Ramabai, a great scholar of Sanskrit, felt that Hinduism was oppressive towards women, and wrote a book about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women.
• She founded a widows’ home at Poona to provide shelter to widows who had been treated badly by their husbands’ relatives.
• Here women were trained so that they could support themselves economically.
• Needless to say, all this more than alarmed the orthodox.
• For instance, many Hindu nationalists felt that Hindu women were adopting Western ways and that this would corrupt Hindu culture and erode family values.
• From the early 20^th century, they formed political pressure groups to push through laws for female suffrage (the right to vote) and better health care and education for women.
• Some of them joined various kinds of nationalist and socialist movements from the 1920s.
• In 20^th  century, leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose lent their support to demands for greater equality and freedom for women.
• Nationalist leaders promised that there would be full suffrage for all men and women after Independence.
• However, till then they asked women to concentrate on the anti-British struggles.

Law against child marriage

• With the growth of women’s organisations and writings on these issues, the momentum for reform gained strength.
• People challenged another established custom– that of child marriage.
• There were a number of Indian legislators in the Central Legislative Assembly who fought to make a law preventing child marriage.
• In 1929 the Child Marriage Restraint Act was passed without the kind of bitter debates and struggles that earlier laws had seen.
• According to the Act no man below the age of 18 and woman below the age of 16 could marry.
• Subsequently these limits were raised to 21 for men and 18 for women.

Caste and Social Reform

• Rammohun Roy translated an old Buddhist text that was critical of caste.
• The Prarthana Samaj adhered to the tradition of Bhakti that believed in spiritual equality of all castes.
• In Bombay, the Paramhans Mandali was founded in 1840 to work for the abolition of caste.
• Many of these reformers and members of reform associations were people of upper castes.
• Often, in secret meetings, these reformers would violate caste taboos on food and touch, in an effort to get rid of the hold of caste prejudice in their lives.
• There were also others who questioned the injustices of the caste social order.
• During the course of 19^th century, Christian missionaries began setting up schools for tribal groups and “lower”-caste children.
• These children were thus equipped with some resources to make their way into a changing world.
• At the same time, the poor began leaving their villages to look for jobs that were opening up in the cities.
• There was work in the factories that were coming up, and jobs in municipalities.
• Think of the new demands of labour this created. Drains had to be dug, roads laid, buildings constructed, and cities cleaned.
• This required coolies, diggers, carriers, bricklayers, sewage cleaners, sweepers, palanquin bearers, rickshaw pullers.
• The poor from the villages and small towns, many of them from low castes, began moving to the cities where there was a new demand for labour.
• Some also went to work in plantations in Assam, Mauritius, Trinidad and Indonesia.
• Work in the new locations was often very hard.
• But the poor, the people from low castes, saw this as an opportunity to get away from the oppressive hold that upper-caste landowners exercised over their lives and the daily humiliation they suffered.
• Coolie ship – named John Allen – carried many Indian labourers to Mauritius where they did a variety of forms of hard labour. Most of these labourers were from low castes.
• The army, for instance, offered opportunities. A number of Mahar people, who were regarded as untouchable, found jobs in the Mahar Regiment.
• The father of B.R. Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalit movement, taught at an army school.
• Madigas were an important untouchable caste of present-day Andhra Pradesh.
• They were experts at cleaning hides, tanning shoes for use, and sewing sandals.
• Dublas of Gujarat laboured for upper-caste landowners, cultivating their fields, and working at a variety of odd jobs at the landlord’s house.
• In the Bombay Presidency, as late as 1829, untouchables were not allowed into even government schools.
• When some of them pressed hard for that right, they were allowed to sit on the veranda outside the classroom and listen to the lessons, without “polluting” the room where upper-caste boys were taught.

Demands for equality and justice

• Gradually, by the second half of 19^th century, people from within the Non-Brahman castes began organising movements against caste discrimination, and demanded social equality and justice.
• The Satnami movement in Central India was founded by Ghasidas who worked among the leatherworkers and organised a movement to improve their social status.
• In eastern Bengal, Haridas Thakur’s Matua sect worked among Chandala cultivators. Haridas questioned
• Brahmanical texts that supported the caste system.
• From Kerala, a guru from Ezhava caste, Shri Narayana Guru, proclaimed the ideals of unity for his people.
• He argued against treating people unequally on the basis of caste differences.
• According to him, all humankind belonged to the same caste. one caste, one religion, one god for humankind
• All these sects were founded by leaders who came from Non-Brahman castes and worked amongst them.
• They tried to change those habits and practices which provoked the contempt of dominant castes.
• They tried to create a sense of self-esteem among the subordinate castes.

Gulamgiri

• One of the most vocal amongst the “low-caste” leaders was Jyotirao Phule.
• Born in 1827, he studied in schools set up by Christian missionaries.
• On growing up he developed his own ideas about the injustices of caste society.

Jyotirao Phule

• He set out to attack the Brahmans’ claim that they were superior to others, since they were Aryans.
• Phule argued that the Aryans were foreigners, who came from outside the subcontinent, and defeated and subjugated the true children of the country – those who had lived here from before the coming of the Aryans.
• As the Aryans established their dominance, they began looking at the defeated population as inferior, as low- caste people.
• According to Phule, the “upper” castes had no right to their land and power: in reality, the land belonged to indigenous people, the so-called low castes.
• Phule claimed that before Aryan rule there existed a golden age when warrior-peasants tilled the land and ruled the Maratha countryside in just and fair ways.
• He proposed that Shudras (labouring castes) and Ati Shudras (untouchables) should unite to challenge caste discrimination.
• The Satyashodhak Samaj, an association Phule founded, propagated caste equality
• American Civil War leading to the end of slavery in America.
• Phule dedicated his book to all those Americans who had fought to free slaves, thus establishing a link between the conditions of the “lower” castes in India and the black slaves in America.
• As this example shows, Phule extended his criticism of the caste system to argue against all forms of inequality.
• He was concerned about the plight of “upper”-caste women, the miseries of the labourer, and the humiliation of the “low” castes.
• This movement for caste reform was continued in 20^th century by other great Dalit leaders like Dr B.R. Ambedkar in western India and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker in the south.

Who could enter temples?

• Ambedkar belong to Mahar family
• In school he was forced to sit outside the classroom on the ground, and was not allowed to drink water from taps that upper-caste children used.
• After finishing school, he got a fellowship to go to the US for higher studies.
• On his return to India in 1919, he wrote extensively about “upper”-caste power in contemporary society.
• In 1927, Ambedkar started a temple entry movement, in which his Mahar caste followers participated.
• Brahman priests were outraged when the Dalits used water from the temple tank.
• Ambedkar led three such movements for temple entry between 1927 and 1935.
• His aim was to make everyone see the power of caste prejudices within society.

The Non-Brahman movement

• In the early 20^th century, the non-Brahman movement started.
• The initiative came from those non-Brahman castes that had acquired access to education, wealth and influence.
• They argued that Brahmans were heirs of Aryan invaders from the north who had conquered southern lands from the original inhabitants of the region – the indigenous Dravidian races.
• They also challenged Brahmanical claims to power.
• E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, or Periyar, as he was called, came from a middle-class family.
• Interestingly, he had been an ascetic in his early life and had studied Sanskrit scriptures carefully.
• Later, he became a member of the Congress, only to leave it in disgust when he found that at a feast organised by nationalists, seating arrangements followed caste distinctions – that is, the lower castes were made to sit at a distance from the upper castes.
• Founded the Self Respect Movement.
• He argued that untouchables were the true upholders of an original Tamil and Dravidian culture which had been subjugated by Brahmans.
• He felt that all religious authorities saw social divisions and inequality as God-given.
• Periyar was an outspoken critic of Hindu scriptures, especially the Codes of Manu, the ancient lawgiver, and the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana.
• He said that these texts had been used to establish the authority of Brahmans over lower castes and the domination of men over women.
• These assertions did not go unchallenged. The forceful speeches, writings and movements of lower- caste leaders did lead to rethinking and some self- criticism among upper-caste nationalist leaders.
• But orthodox Hindu society also reacted by founding Sanatan Dharma Sabhas and the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal in the north, and associations like the Brahman Sabha in Bengal.
• The object of these associations was to uphold caste distinctions as a cornerstone of Hinduism, and show how this was sanctified by scriptures.

Organising for reform

The Brahmo Samaj

• 1830
• Prohibited all forms of idolatry and sacrifice, believed in the Upanishads
• Forbade its members from criticising other religious practices.
• It critically drew upon the ideals of religions – especially of Hinduism and Christianity– looking at their negative and positive dimensions.

Derozio and Young Bengal

• Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a teacher at Hindu College, Calcutta, in the 1820s, promoted radical ideas and encouraged his pupils to question all authority.
• Referred to as the Young Bengal Movement, his students attacked tradition and custom, demanded education for women and campaigned for the freedom of thought and expression

The Ramakrishna Mission and Vivekananda

• Named after Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Swami Vivekananda’s guru, the Ramakrishna Mission stressed the ideal of salvation through social service and selfless action.

The Prarthana Samaj

• Established in 1867 at Bombay, the Prarthana Samaj sought to remove caste restrictions, abolish child marriage, encourage the education of women, and end the ban on widow remarriage
• Its religious meetings drew upon Hindu, Buddhist and Christian texts.

The Veda Samaj

• Established in Madras (Chennai) in 1864, the Veda Samaj was inspired by the Brahmo Samaj.
• It worked to abolish caste distinctions and promote widow remarriage and women’s education.
• Its members believed in one God.
• They condemned the superstitions and rituals of orthodox Hinduism.

The Aligarh Movement

• The Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, founded by Sayyid Ahmed Khan in 1875 at Aligarh, later became the Aligarh Muslim University.
• The institution offered modern education, including Western science, to Muslims.
• The Aligarh Movement, as it was known, had an enormous impact in the area of educational reform.

The Singh Sabha Movement

• Reform organisations of the Sikhs, the first Singh Sabhas were formed at Amritsar in 1873 and at Lahore in 1879.
• The Sabhas sought to rid Sikhism of superstitions, caste distinctions and practices seen by them as non-Sikh.
• They promoted education among the Sikhs, often combining modern instruction with Sikh teachings.
• Khalsa College, Amritsar, established in 1892 by the leaders of the Singh Sabha movement

• This image of British rule bringing modern civilisation to India is powerfully emphasised in the numerous pictures of late 18^th century Calcutta drawn by the Daniells.
• Making of a new Calcutta, with wide avenues, majestic European-style buildings, and new modes of transport
• There is life and activity on the roads, there is drama and excitement.
• Daniells contrast the image of traditional India with that of life under British rule

Portraits of auhority

• Unlike the existing Indian tradition of painting portraits in miniature, colonial portraits were life-size images that looked lifelike and real.
• This new style of portraiture also served as an ideal means of displaying the lavish lifestyles, wealth and status that the empire generated.
• As portrait painting became popular, many European portrait painters came to India in search of profitable commissions.
• One of the most famous of the visiting European painters was Johann Zoffany.
• He was born in Germany, migrated to England and came to India in the mid-1780s for five years.
• Indians are shown as submissive, as inferior, as serving their white masters, while the British are shown as superior and imperious: they flaunt their clothes, stand regally or sit arrogantly, and live a life of luxury.
• Some of these nawabs reacted against this interference; others accepted the political and cultural superiority of the British.
• They hoped to socialise with the British, and adopt their styles and tastes.
• Muhammad Ali Khan was one such nawab.
• After a war with the British in the 1770s he became a dependant pensioner of the East India Company.
• Tilly Kettle and George Willison, to paint his portraits, and gifted these paintings to the King of England and the Directors of the East India Company.
• The nawab had lost political power, but the portraits allowed him to look at himself as a royal figure.
• The British had just defeated Sirajuddaulah in the famous Battle of Plassey and installed Mir Jafar as the Nawab of Murshidabad.
• It was a victory won through conspiracy, and the traitor Mir Jafar was awarded the title of Nawab.
• Tipu Sultan of Mysore, was defeated in 1799 at the famous battle of Seringapatam.
• The British troops are shown storming the fort from all sides, cutting Tipu’s soldiers to pieces, climbing the walls, raising the British flag aloft on the ramparts of Tipu’s fort.
• Battle of Polilur- Haidar Ali’s victory over the English army

Condition of Court Artists

• In Mysore, Tipu Sultan not only fought the British on the battlefield but also resisted the cultural traditions associated with them.
• He continued to encourage local traditions, and had the walls of his palace at Seringapatam covered with mural paintings (wall painting) done by local artists.
• After defeating Sirajuddaulah the British had successfully installed their puppet Nawabs on the throne, first Mir Zafar and then Mir Qasim.
• The court at Murshidabad encouraged local miniature artists to absorb the tastes and artistic styles of the British.
• The local miniature artists at Murshidabad began adopting elements of European realism.
• They use perspective, which creates a sense of distance between objects that are near and those at a distance.
• They use light and shade to make the figures look life like and real.
• With the establishment of British power many of the local courts lost their influence and wealth.

Perspective –

• The way that objects appear smaller when they are further away and the way parallel lines appear to meet each other at a point in the distance
• At the same time, British officials, who found the world in the colonies different from that back home, wanted images through which they could understand India, remember their life in India, and depict India to the Western world.
• These pictures, eagerly collected by the East India Company officials, came to be known as Company paintings.

The New Popular Indian Art

• In 19^th century a new world of popular art developed in many of the cities of India.
• In Bengal, around the pilgrimage centre of the temple of Kalighat, local village scroll painters (called patuas) and potters (called kumors in eastern India and kumhars in north India) began developing a new style of art.
• They moved from the surrounding villages into Calcutta in the early 19^th century.
• Before 19^th century, the village patuas and kumors had worked on mythological themes and produced images of gods and goddesses.
• On shifting to Kalighat, they continued to paint these religious images.
• Traditionally, the figures in scroll paintings looked flat, not rounded.
• Now Kalighat painters began to use shading to give them a rounded form, to make the images look three-dimensional.
• In the early Kalighat paintings is the use of a bold, deliberately non-realistic style, where the figures emerge large and powerful, with a minimum of lines, detail and colours.
• After the 1840s, we see a new trend within the Kalighat artists.
• Living in a society where values, tastes, social norms and customs were undergoing rapid changes.
• Kalighat artists produced paintings on social and political themes. (social life under British rule)
• Often the artists mocked at the changes they saw around, ridiculing the new tastes of those who spoke in English and adopted Western habits, dressed like sahibs, smoked cigarettes, or sat on chairs.
• Initially, the images were engraved in wooden blocks.
• The carved block was inked, pressed against paper, and then the woodcut prints that were produced were coloured by hand
• By the late-nineteenth century, mechanical printing presses were set up in different parts of India, which allowed prints to be produced in even larger numbers.
• Popular prints were not painted only by the poor village Kalighat patuas.
• Often, middle-class Indian artists set up printing presses and produced prints for a wide market.
• They were trained in British art schools in new methods of life study, oil painting and print making.
• Calcutta Art Studio produced lifelike images of eminent Bengali personalities as well as mythological pictures. (Realistic)
• The figures were located in picturesque landscape settings, with mountains, lakes, rivers and forests.
• Mythological scene from the legend of Nala and Damayanti, produced by Calcutta Art Studio, 1878-1880
• With the spread of nationalism, popular prints of the early 20^th century began carrying nationalist messages.
• In many of them you see Bharat Mata appearing as a goddess carrying the national flag, or nationalist heroes sacrificing their head to the Mata, and gods and goddesses slaughtering the British.
• Kali, produced by Calcutta Art Studio, 1880s- an advertisement of an Indian brand of cigarette that was banned by the British in 1905

New buildings and new styles

• New styles were introduced as new cities were built, new buildings came up.
• The new buildings that came up in the mid-19^th century in Bombay, were mostly in this style
• The rounded arches and the pillars that you see were typical of another style that the British used in Calcutta.
• It was borrowed from the Classical style of Greece and Rome.
• The British wanted their buildings to express their power and glory, and their cultural achievements.

Central Post Office, Calcutta, built in the1860s

The Search for a National Art

The art of Raja Ravi Varma

• Raja Ravi Varma was one of the first artists who tried to create a style that was both modern and national.
• Ravi Varma belonged to the family of the Maharajas of Travancore in Kerala, and was addressed as Raja.
• He mastered the Western art of oil painting and realistic life study, but painted themes from Indian mythology.
• He dramatised on canvas, scene after scene from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, drawing on the theatrical performances of mythological stories that he witnessed during his tour of the Bombay Presidency.
• From the 1880s, Ravi Varma’s mythological paintings became the rage among Indian princes and art collectors, who filled their palace galleries with his works.

A different vision of national art

• In Bengal, a new group of nationalist artists gathered around Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore.
• They rejected the art of Ravi Varma as imitative and westernised, and declared that such a style was unsuitable for depicting the nation’s ancient myths and legends.
• They felt that a genuine Indian style of painting had to draw inspiration from non-Western art traditions, and try to capture the spiritual essence of the East.
• So they broke away from the convention of oil painting and the realistic style, and turned for inspiration to medieval Indian traditions of miniature painting and the ancient art of mural painting in the Ajanta caves.
• They were also influenced by the art of Japanese artists who visited India at that time to develop an Asian art movement.
• Abanindranath and Nandalal did not simply follow an earlier style.
• They modified it and made it their own.
• In this painting you can see how Nandalal uses shading to give a three dimensional effect to the figures.
• After the 1920s, a new generation of artists began to break away from the style popularised by Abanindranath Tagore.
• Some saw it as sentimental, others thought that spiritualism could not be seen as the central feature of Indian culture.
• They felt that artists had to explore real life instead of illustrating ancient books, and look for inspiration from living folk art and tribal designs rather than ancient art forms.

Chapter 11
The Making of National Movement: 1870s-1947

The Emergence of Nationalism

• Though many of these associations functioned in specific parts of the country, their goals were stated as the goals of all the people of India, not those of any one region, community or class.
• They worked with the idea that the people should be sovereign – a modern consciousness and a key feature of nationalism.
• The dissatisfaction with British rule intensified in the 1870s and 1880s.
• The Arms Act was passed in 1878, disallowing Indians from possessing arms.
• In the same year the Vernacular Press Act was also enacted in an effort to silence those who were critical of the government.
• The Act allowed the government to confiscate the assets of newspapers including their printing presses if the newspapers published anything that was found “objectionable”.
• In 1883, there was a furore over the attempt by the government to introduce the Ilbert Bill.
• The bill provided for the trial of British or European persons by Indians, and sought equality between British and Indian judges in the country.
• But when white opposition forced the government to withdraw the bill, Indians were enraged.
• The need for an all-India organisation of educated Indians had been felt since 1880, but the Ilbert Bill controversy deepened this desire.
• The Indian National Congress was established when 72 delegates from all over the country met at Bombay in December 1885.
• The early leadership – Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, W.C. Bonnerji, Surendranath Banerji, Romesh Chandra Dutt, S. Subramania Iyer, among others – was largely from Bombay and Calcutta.
• Naoroji, a businessman and publicist settled in London, and for a time member of the British Parliament, guided the younger nationalists.
• A retired British official, A.O. Hume, also played a part in bringing Indians from the various regions together.
• Dadabhai Naoroji’s book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India offered a scathing criticism of the economic impact of British rule.

A nation in the making

• Congress in the first twenty years was “moderate” in its objectives and methods.
• During this period it demanded a greater voice for Indians in the government and in administration.
• It wanted the Legislative Councils to be made more representative, given more power, and introduced in provinces where none existed.
• It demanded that Indians be placed in high positions in the government.
• For this purpose it called for civil service examinations to be held in India as well, not just in London.
• The demand for Indianisation of the administration was part of a movement against racisim, since most important jobs at the time were monopolised by white officials, and the British generally assumed that Indians could not be given positions of responsibility.
• Since British officers were sending a major part of their large salaries home, Indianisation, it was hoped, would also reduce the drain of wealth to England.
• Other demands included the separation of the judiciary from the executive, the repeal of the Arms Act and the freedom of speech and expression.
• The early Congress also raised a number of economic issues.
• It declared that British rule had led to poverty and famines: increase in the land revenue had impoverished peasants and zamindars, and exports of grains to Europe had created food shortages.
• The Congress demanded reduction of revenue, cut in military expenditure, and more funds for irrigation.
• It passed many resolutions on the salt tax, treatment of Indian labourers abroad, and the sufferings of forest dwellers – caused by an interfering forest administration.
• The Moderate leaders wanted to develop public awareness about the unjust nature of British rule.
• They published newspapers, wrote articles, and showed how British rule was leading to the economic ruin of the country.
• They criticised British rule in their speeches and sent representatives to different parts of the country to mobilise public opinion.
• They felt that the British had respect for the ideals of freedom and justice, and so they would accept the just demands of Indians.

“Freedom is our birthright”

• In Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab, leaders such as Bepin Chandra Pal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai were beginning to explore more radical objectives and methods.
• They criticised the Moderates for their “politics of prayers”, and emphasised the importance of self-reliance and constructive work.
• They argued that people must rely on their own strength, not on the “good” intentions of the government; people must fight for swaraj.
• Tilak raised the slogan, “Freedom is my birthright and I shall have it!”
• In 1905 Viceroy Curzon partitioned Bengal.
• At that time Bengal was included Bihar and parts of Orissa.
• The British argued for dividing Bengal for reasons of administrative convenience.
• But in real, it was closely tied to the interests of British officials and businessmen.
• Even so, instead of removing the non-Bengali areas from the province, the government separated East Bengal and merged it with Assam.
• But the main British motives were to curtail the influence of Bengali politicians and to split the Bengali people.
• The partition of Bengal infuriated people all over India.
• All sections of the Congress– the Moderates and the Radicals, as they may be called – opposed it.
• Large public meetings and demonstrations were organised and novel methods of mass protest developed.
• The struggle that unfolded came to be known as the Swadeshi movement, strongest in Bengal but with echoes elsewhere too – in deltaic Andhra for instance, it was known as the Vandemataram Movement.
• Kesari, a Marathi newspaper edited by Tilak, became one of the strongest critics of British rule.
• The Swadeshi movement sought to oppose British rule and encourage the ideas of self-help, swadeshi enterprise, national education, and use of Indian languages.
• To fight for swaraj, the radicals advocated mass mobilisation and boycott of British institutions and goods.
• Some individuals also began to suggest that “revolutionary violence” would be necessary to overthrow British rule.
• The opening decades of 20^th century were marked by other developments as well.
• A group of Muslim landlords and nawabs formed the All India Muslim League at Dacca in 1906.
• The League supported the partition of Bengal.
• It desired separate electorates for Muslims, a demand conceded by the government in 1909.
• Some seats in the councils were now reserved for Muslims who would be elected by Muslim voters.
• This tempted politicians to gather a following by distributing favours to their own religious groups.
• Meanwhile, the Congress split in 1907.
• The Moderates were opposed to the use of boycott.
• They felt that it involved the use of force.
• After the split the Congress came to be dominated by the Moderates with Tilak’s followers functioning from outside.
• The two groups reunited in December 1915.
• Next year the Congress and the Muslim League signed the historic Lucknow Pact and decided to work together for representative government in the country.

Lala Lajpat Rai

• A nationalist from Punjab, he was one of the leading members of the Radical group which was critical of the politics of petitions.
• He was also an active member of the Arya Samaj.

The Growth of Mass Nationalism

• After 1919 the struggle against British rule gradually became a mass movement, involving peasants, tribals, students and women in large numbers and occasionally factory workers as well.
• Certain business groups too began to actively support the Congress in the 1920s.
• The First World War altered the economic and political situation in India.
• It led to a huge rise in the defence expenditure of the Government of India.
• The government in turn increased taxes on individual incomes and business profits. Increased military expenditure and the demands for war supplies led to a sharp rise in prices which created great difficulties for the common people.
• On the other hand, business groups reaped fabulous profits from the war.
• The war created a demand for industrial goods (jute bags, cloth, rails) and caused a decline of imports from other countries into India.
• Indian industries expanded during the war, and Indian business groups began to demand greater opportunities for development.
• The war also leads the British to expand their army.
• Villages were pressurised to supply soldiers for an alien cause.
• A large number of soldiers were sent to serve abroad.
• Many returned after the war with an understanding of the ways in which imperialist powers were exploiting the peoples of Asia and Africa and with a desire to oppose colonial rule in India.
• Furthermore, in 1917 there was a revolution in Russia.

The advent of Mahatma Gandhi

• Gandhiji, aged 46, arrived in India in 1915 from South Africa
• Having led Indians in that country in non-violent marches against racist restrictions, he was already a respected leader, known internationally.
• His South African campaigns had brought him in contact with various types of Indians: Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians; Gujaratis, Tamils and north Indians; and upper-class merchants, lawyers and workers.
• In 1895, along with other Indians, Mahatma Gandhi established the Natal Congress to fight against racial discrimination.
• Mahatma Gandhi spent his first year in India travelling throughout the country, understanding the people, their needs and the overall situation.
• His earliest interventions were in local movements in Champaran, Kheda and Ahmedabad where he came into contact with Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel.
• In Ahmedabad he led a successful millworkers’ strike in 1918.

The Rowlatt Satyagraha

• In 1919 Gandhiji gave a call for a satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act that the British had just passed.
• The Act curbed fundamental rights such as the freedom of expression and strengthened police powers.
• Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and others felt that the government had no right to restrict people’s basic freedoms.
• Gandhiji asked the Indian people to observe 6 April 1919 as a day of non-violent opposition to this Act, as a day of “humiliation and prayer” and hartal (strike).
• Satyagraha Sabhas were set up to launch the movement.
• The Rowlatt Satyagraha turned out to be the first all-India struggle against the British government although it was largely restricted to cities.
• In April 1919 there were a number of demonstrations and hartals in the country and the government used brutal measures to suppress them.
• The Jallianwala Bagh atrocities, inflicted by General Dyer in Amritsar on Baisakhi day (13 April), were a part of this repression.
• On learning about the massacre, Rabindranath Tagore expressed the pain and anger of the country by renouncing his knighthood.
• During the Rowlatt Satyagraha the participants tried to ensure that Hindus and Muslims were united in the fight against British rule.
• This was also the call of Mahatma Gandhi who always saw India as a land of all the people who lived in the country – Hindus, Muslims and those of other religions.
• He was keen that Hindus and Muslims support each other in any just cause.

Khilafat agitation and the Non- Cooperation Movement

• In 1920 the British imposed a harsh treaty on the Turkish Sultan or Khalifa.
• People were furious about this as they had been about the Jallianwala massacre.
• Also, Indian Muslims were keen that the Khalifa be allowed to retain control over Muslim sacred places in the erstwhile Ottoman Empire.
• The leaders of the Khilafat agitation, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, now wished to initiate a full-fledged Non-Cooperation Movement.
• Gandhiji supported their call and urged the Congress to campaign against “Punjab wrongs” (Jallianwala massacre), the Khilafat wrong and demand swaraj.
• The Non-Cooperation Movement gained momentum through 1921-22.
• Thousands of students left government controlled schools and colleges.
• Many lawyers such as Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, C. Rajagopalachari and Asaf Ali gave up their practices.
• British titles were surrendered and legislatures boycotted.
• People lit public bonfires of foreign cloth.
• The imports of foreign cloth fell drastically between 1920 and 1922.
• But all this was merely the tip of the iceberg.
• Large parts of the country were on the brink of a formidable revolt.

People’s initiatives

• In many cases people resisted British rule non-violently.
• In others, different classes and groups, interpreting Gandhiji’s call in their own manner, protested in ways that were not in accordance with his ideas.
• In either case, people linked their movements to local grievances.
• In Kheda, Gujarat, Patidar peasants organised nonviolent campaigns against the high land revenue demand of the British.
• In coastal Andhra and interior Tamil Nadu, liquor shops were picketed.
• In the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, tribals and poor peasants staged a number of “forest satyagrahas”, sometimes sending their cattle into forests without paying grazing fee.
• They were protesting because the colonial state had restricted their use of forest resources in various ways.
• They believed that Gandhiji would get their taxes reduced and have the forest regulations abolished. In many forest villages, peasants proclaimed swaraj and believed that “Gandhi Raj” was about to be established.
• In Sind (now in Pakistan), Muslim traders and peasants were very enthusiastic about the Khilafat call.
• In Bengal too, the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation alliance gave enormous communal unity and strength to the national movement.
• In Punjab, the Akali agitation of the Sikhs sought to remove corrupt mahants – supported by the British – from their gurdwaras.
• This movement got closely identified with the Non-Cooperation Movement.
• In Assam, tea garden labourers, shouting “Gandhi Maharaj ki Jai”, demanded a big increase in their wages.
• They left the British-owned plantations amidst declarations that they were following Gandhiji’s wish.
• Interestingly, in the Assamese Vaishnava songs of the period the reference to Krishna was substituted by “Gandhi Raja”.

The people’s Mahatma

• People thought of Gandhiji as a kind of messiah, as someone who could help them overcome their misery and poverty.
• Gandhiji wished to build class unity, not class conflict, yet peasants could imagine that he would help them in their fight against zamindars, and agricultural labourers believed he would provide them land.
• At times, ordinary people credited Gandhiji with their own achievements.
• For instance, at the end of a powerful movement, peasants of Pratapgarh in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) managed to stop illegal eviction of tenants; but they felt it was Gandhiji who had won this demand for them.
• At other times, using Gandhiji’s name, tribals and peasants undertook actions that did not conform to Gandhian ideals.

The happenings of 1922-1929

• Mahatma Gandhi, was against violent movements.
• He abruptly called off the Non-Cooperation Movement when in February 1922 a crowd of peasants set fire to a police station in Chauri Chaura.
• Twenty two policemen were killed on that day.
• The peasants were provoked because the police had fired on their peaceful demonstration. Once the Non-Cooperation movement was over, Gandhiji’s followers stressed that the Congress must undertake constructive work in the rural areas.
• Other leaders such as Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru argued that the party should fight elections to the councils and enter them in order to influence government policies.
• Through sincere social work in villages in the mid-1920s, the Gandhians were able to extend their support base.
• This proved to be very useful in launching the Civil Disobedience movement in 1930.
• Two important developments of the mid-1920s were the formation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu organisation, and the Communist Party of India.
• Revolutionary nationalists such as Bhagat Singh and his comrades wanted to fight colonial rule and the rich exploiting classes through a revolution of workers and peasants.
• For this purpose they founded the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) in 1928 at Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi.
• Members of the HSRA assassinated Saunders, a police officer who had led a lathicharge that caused the death of Lala Lajpat Rai.
• Along with his fellow nationalist B.K. Dutt, he threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929.
• The aim, as their leaflet explained, was not to kill but, “to make the deaf hear”, to remind the foreign government of its callous exploitation.
• Bhagat Singh was tried and executed at the age of 23.

Chitta Ranjan Das

• A major figure in the freedom movement, Das was a lawyer from East Bengal.
• He was especially active in the Non- Cooperation Movement.

Demonstrators oppose the Simon Commission

• In 1927 the British government in England decided to send a commission headed by Lord Simon to decide India’s political future.
• The Commission had no Indian representative.
• The decision created an outrage in India.
• All political groups decided to boycott the Commission. When the Commission arrived it was met with demonstrations with banners saying “Simon Go Back”.
• The decade closed with the Congress resolving to fight for Purna Swaraj (complete independence) in 1929 under the president ship of Jawaharlal Nehru.
• Consequently, “Independence Day” was observed on 26 January 1930 all over the country.

The March to Dandi

• In 1930, Gandhiji declared that he would lead a march to break the salt law.
• According to this law, the state had a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of salt.
• Mahatma Gandhi along with other nationalists reasoned that it was sinful to tax salt since it is such an essential item of our food.
• The Salt March related the general desire of freedom to a specific grievance shared by everybody, and thus did not divide the rich and the poor.
• Gandhiji and his followers marched for over 240 miles from Sabarmati to the coastal town of Dandi where they broke the government law by gathering natural salt found on the seashore, and boiling sea water to produce salt.
• Peasants, tribals and women participated in large numbers.
• A business federation published a pamphlet on the salt issue.
• The government tried to crush the movement through brutal action against peaceful satyagrahis.
• The combined struggles of the Indian people bore fruit when the Government of India Act of 1935 prescribed provincial autonomy and the government announced elections to the provincial legislatures in 1937.
• The Congress formed governments in 7 out of 11 provinces.
• In September 1939, after two years of Congress rule in the provinces, the Second World War broke out.
• Critical of Hitler, Congress leaders were ready to support the British war effort. But in return they wanted that India be granted independence after the war.
• The British refused to concede the demand. The Congress ministries resigned in protest.

Sarojini Naidu

• Active in the national movement since the early 1920s, Naidu was a significant leader of the Dandi March.
• She was the first Indian woman to become President of the Indian National Congress (1925).

Women in the freedom struggle: Ambabai from Karnataka

• Women from diverse backgrounds participated in the national movement.
• Their involvement was significant for the freedom struggle, for the women’s movement, and for themselves personally.
• Both British officials and Indian nationalists felt that women’s participation gave the national struggle an immense force.
• Ambabai of Karnataka had been married at age twelve.
• Widowed at sixteen, she picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops in Udipi. She was arrested, served a sentence and was rearrested.
• Between prison terms she made speeches, taught spinning, and organised prabhat pheris. Ambabai regarded these as the happiest days of her life because they gave it a new purpose and commitment.
• Women, however, had to fight for their right to participate in the movement.
• During the Salt Satyagraha, for instance, even Mahatma Gandhi was initially opposed to women’s participation. Sarojini Naidu had to persuade him to allow women to join the movement.

Quit India and Later

• Mahatma Gandhi decided to initiate a new phase of movement against the British in the middle of the Second World War.
• The British must quit India immediately, he told them. To the people he said, “do or die” in your effort to fight the British – but you must fight non-violently. Gandhiji and other leaders were jailed at once but the movement spread.
• It specially attracted peasants and the youth who gave up their studies to join it.
• Communications and symbols of state authority were attacked all over the country.
• In many areas the people set up their own governments.
• The first response of the British was severe repression.
• By the end of 1943 over 90,000 people were arrested, and around 1,000 killed in police firing.
• In many areas orders were given to machine-gun crowds from airplanes.
• The rebellion, however, ultimately brought the Raj to its knees.
• Quit India movement, August 1942

Subhas Chandra Bose

• A radical nationalist, with socialist leanings, Bose did not share Gandhiji’s ideal of ahimsa, though he respected him as the “Father of the Nation”.
• In January 1941, he secretly left his Calcutta home, went to Singapore, via Germany, and raised the Azad Hind Fauj or the Indian National Army (INA).
• To free India from British control, in 1944, the INA tried to enter India through Imphal and Kohima but the campaign failed.
• The INA members were imprisoned and tried.
• People across the country, from all walks of life, participated in the movement against the INA trials.

Towards Independence and Partition

• Meanwhile, in 1940 the Muslim League had moved a resolution demanding “Independent States” for Muslims in the north-western and eastern areas of the country.
• The resolution did not mention partition or Pakistan.
• From the late 1930s, the League began viewing the Muslims as a separate “nation” from the Hindus.
• In developing this notion it may have been influenced by the history of tension between some Hindu and Muslim groups in the 1920s and 1930s.
• More importantly, the provincial elections of 1937 seemed to have convinced the League that Muslims were a minority, and they would always have to play second fiddle in any democratic structure.
• It feared that Muslims may even go unrepresented.
• The Congress’s rejection of the League’s desire to form a joint Congress- League government in the United Provinces in 1937 also annoyed the League.
• The Congress’s failure to mobilise the Muslim masses in the 1930s allowed the League to widen its social support.
• It sought to enlarge its support in the early 1940s when most Congress leaders were in jail.
• At the end of the war in 1945, the British opened negotiations between the Congress, the League and themselves for the independence of India.
• The talks failed because the League saw itself as the sole spokesperson of India’s Muslims.
• The Congress could not accept this claim since a large number of Muslims still supported it.
• Elections to the provinces were again held in 1946.
• The Congress did well in the “General” constituencies but the League’s success in the seats reserved for Muslims was spectacular.
• It persisted with its demand for “Pakistan”.
• In March 1946 the British cabinet sent a three-member mission to Delhi to examine this demand and to suggest a suitable political framework for a free India.
• This mission suggested that India should remain united and constitute itself as a loose confederation with some autonomy for Muslim-majority areas.
• But it could not get the Congress and the Muslim League to agree to specific details of the proposal. Partition now became more or less inevitable.
• After the failure of the Cabinet Mission, the Muslim League decided on mass agitation for winning its Pakistan demand.
• It announced 16 August 1946 as “Direct Action Day”. On this day riots broke out in Calcutta, lasting several days and resulting in the death of thousands of people.
• By March 1947 violence spread to different parts of northern India.
• Many hundred thousand people were killed and numerous women had to face untold brutalities during the Partition.
• Millions of people were forced to flee their homes.
• Torn asunder from their homelands, they were reduced to being refugees in alien lands. Partition also meant that India changed, many of its cities changed, and a new country – Pakistan – was born.
• So, the joy of our country’s independence from British rule came mixed with the pain and violence of Partition.

Maulana Azad

• Azad was born in Mecca to a Bengali father and an Arab mother.
• Well-versed in many languages, Azad was a scholar of Islam and an exponent of the notion of wahadat-i-deen, the essential oneness of all religions.
• An active participant in Gandhian movements and a staunch advocate of Hindu- Muslim unity, he was opposed to Jinnah’s two-nation theory.

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari

A veteran nationalist and leader of the Salt Satyagraha in the south, C. Rajagopalachari, popularly known as Rajaji, served as member of the Interim Government of 1946 and as free India’s first Indian Governor-General.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

• Patel hailed from an impoverished peasant proprietor family of Nadiad, Gujarat.
• A foremost organiser of the freedom movement from 1918 onwards, Patel served as President of the Congress in 1931.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah

• An ambassador of Hindu- Muslim unity until 1920, Jinnah played an important role in the making of the Lucknow Pact.
• He reorganised the Muslim League after 1934, and became the major spokesperson for the demand for Pakistan.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

• Pashtun leader from the North West Frontier Province, with his colleagues at a peace march through Bihar, March 1947
• Also known as Badshah Khan, he was the founder of the Khudai Khidmatgars, a powerful non-violent movement among the Pathans of his province.
• Badshah Khan was strongly opposed to the Partition of India.
• He criticised his Congress colleagues for agreeing to the 1947 division.

Indian States in 1975

Planning for Development

• There was a need of lifting India and Indians out of poverty, and building a modern technical and industrial base
• In 1950, the government set up a Planning Commission to help design and execute suitable policies for economic development.
• “Mixed economy” model accepted which means both the State and the private sector would play important and complementary roles in increasing production and generating jobs.

Second Five Year Plan- 1956

• Focus on the development of heavy industries such as steel, and on the building of large dams.
• These sectors would be under the control of the State.
• This focus on heavy industry, and the effort at state regulation of the economy was to guide economic policy for the next few decades.

The search for an independent foreign policy

• India gained freedom soon after the devastations of WWII.
• At that time a new international body – the United Nations – formed in 1945
• The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of the Cold War, that is, power rivalries and ideological conflicts between the USA and the USSR, with both countries creating military alliances.
• This was also the period when colonial empires were collapsing and many countries were attaining independence.
• Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was also the foreign minister of newly independent India, developed free India’s foreign policy in this context.
• Non-alignment formed the bedrock of this foreign policy.
• Led by statesmen from Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Ghana and India, the non-aligned movement urged countries not to join either of the two major alliances
• But this policy of staying away from alliances was not a matter of remaining “isolated” or “neutral”.
• The former means remaining aloof from world affairs whereas non-aligned countries such as India played an active role in mediating between the American and Soviet alliances.
• They tried to prevent war—often taking a humanitarian and moral stand against war.
• However, for one reason or another, many non-aligned countries including India got involved in wars.
• By the 1970s, a large number of countries had joined the non-aligned movement.