Indian National Movement (1885–1919)

The Indian National Congress did not fall from the sky in 1885. It was the end of a long road. For nearly fifty years before that, educated Indians in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Poona had been forming small associations to put their grievances before the British. Each was limited to one city or one region, and many were led by landlords. Yet each taught the same lesson: a united voice is heard louder than a scattered one.

Why did the mood change in the 1870s and 1880s? Because the rulers themselves handed the educated class its reasons. Lord Lytton (Viceroy 1876-80) held a lavish Delhi Durbar in 1877 while a great famine was killing millions; lowered the maximum age for the Indian Civil Service exam from 21 to 19, which closed the door on most Indians; passed the Vernacular Press Act (1878) to gag Indian-language newspapers; and the Arms Act (1878), which disarmed Indians but not Europeans. Then in 1883, under Lord Ripon, the Ilbert Bill, which would have let Indian judges try Europeans, was watered down after a loud European protest. The educated Indian saw plainly that justice was not equal, and that only an all-India organisation could fight for it.

The man who gave the idea its final push was Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant (ICS), who in 1884 formed the Indian National Union. After talks with the then Viceroy Lord Dufferin and Indian leaders, the first session was held from 28 to 31 December 1885 at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay. It was first planned for Poona, but an outbreak of cholera there moved it to Bombay. 72 delegates attended and W. C. (Womesh Chandra) Bonnerjee presided. Hume became the first General Secretary, a post he held till 1906. The name 'Congress' was borrowed from the American usage for a national assembly.

The 'Safety Valve' theory says Hume and Dufferin wanted the Congress to act as a safety valve, letting educated Indians blow off steam so that a violent outburst like 1857 would not happen. The idea is linked to Hume's biographer Wedderburn, and nationalists such as Lala Lajpat Rai later used it to criticise the early Congress. Modern historians like Bipan Chandra prefer the 'lightning conductor' view: the young nationalist leaders used Hume's name and British goodwill as a shield against official suspicion, while building a genuine national platform.

The table below lists only the Congress sessions that exams really ask about. Read down the 'Why remember it' column, because a session is rarely asked for its own sake; it is asked for the first, the split, the resolution or the president's identity.

For its first twenty years the Congress was a polite body. Its leaders were lawyers, teachers and journalists who believed in British fair play and thought India would be given its rights step by step if Indians asked sensibly. History calls them the Moderates (also called Liberals or Constitutionalists), and the period 1885-1905 is the Moderate phase. Their famous names were Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, W. C. Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, M. G. Ranade, Badruddin Tyabji and R. C. Dutt.

Their method was 'prayer, petition and protest': resolutions at annual sessions, memorials to the government, speeches, and delegations to England. Their demands were practical: expansion of the legislative councils, simultaneous ICS examinations in India and England, Indianisation of the higher services, separation of the judiciary from the executive, less military spending, and relief from the salt tax and land revenue. Their biggest intellectual gift was the Drain of Wealth theory, which showed that India's wealth was flowing to Britain without return. Naoroji put it in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), and R. C. Dutt in The Economic History of India.

The Moderates did win something: the Indian Councils Act, 1892 let members of the councils discuss the budget and ask questions, and some members were recommended by non-official bodies (an indirect form of election). The Welby Commission (1895) looked into Indian expenditure. But the gains were small, and by 1900 a younger generation asked: 'How long can we keep begging?' This question is the seed of Extremism.

Tilak was the fiery centre of the Extremists. He turned the Ganesh festival (1893) and the Shivaji festival (1895) into public events that stirred national pride, and ran the papers Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English). He was jailed for sedition in 1897 (18 months) after his writings were linked to the Rand murder in Poona, and again in 1908 (six years at Mandalay) for articles defending the Muzaffarpur bomb. The British Journalist Valentine Chirol called him the 'Father of Indian Unrest'. His slogan 'Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it' became the voice of the age. Aurobindo Ghose wrote the 'Doctrine of Passive Resistance' in Bande Mataram and was the first to openly demand complete independence in print.

The quarrel finally broke out at Surat in December 1907. The session was first planned for Nagpur, where the Extremists were strong and wanted Tilak or Lajpat Rai as president, so the Moderates moved it to Surat and proposed Rash Behari Ghosh. The Extremists wanted the resolutions of 1906 (Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education) kept intact; the Moderates wanted to water them down. When Tilak rose to speak, the meeting collapsed in noise, chairs were thrown, and a shoe flew at the platform. The Congress split in two. The Moderates kept control, and in April 1908 a convention at Allahabad adopted a Congress constitution that made the aim 'self-government like the rest of the British Empire by constitutional means' and shut the Extremists out.

In 1905 Lord Curzon did what no Viceroy before him had dared: he cut the province of Bengal in two. The Bengal Presidency then covered Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, with some 78 million people, and the official reason was simple: it was too large for one Lieutenant-Governor to manage. The real reason was political. Bengal was the home of the educated Indian middle class, the press and the Congress's best speakers, and a government note by Herbert Risley said the quiet part aloud: 'Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways.' The aim was to divide the Bengali Hindus from the Muslims and to break the back of Bengali nationalism.

Notice the trap in the 'administrative' reason. The partition was drawn on religious and linguistic lines that suited the rulers: the East, with a Muslim majority, would feel favoured; the West would be left with Bengalis outnumbered by Hindi and Oriya speakers. That is why the Indians called it a 'divide and rule' move, and why the same measure that was meant to weaken nationalism ended up creating a mass movement.

The reply came as the Swadeshi and Boycott movement. On 7 August 1905 a meeting at the Calcutta Town Hall, led by Surendranath Banerjee and Krishna Kumar Mitra, passed the Boycott resolution against British goods, and the movement began. On 16 October 1905, the day partition took effect, Bengal observed a day of mourning: people fasted, bathed in the Ganga, tied rakhi on each other's wrists as a pledge of unity (an idea of Rabindranath Tagore, who also wrote 'Amar Sonar Bangla', the song later adopted as Bangladesh's national anthem), and laid the foundation of the Federation Hall, a symbol of undivided Bengal. The slogan was 'Bande Mataram'.

The government fought back hard. Risley and Carlyle circulars forbade students from joining political activity, and the Anti-Circular Society was formed to resist them. The slogan 'Bande Mataram' was banned in public, and in April 1906 the police beat up delegates at the Barisal Provincial Conference. Leaders such as Ashwini Kumar Dutta, Krishna Kumar Mitra were deported. Yet the movement reached beyond Bengal: Tilak spread it to Poona and Bombay, Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh to Punjab (the 1907 'Pagri Sambhal Jatta' peasant agitation), V. O. Chidambaram Pillai to Tuticorin (where he was jailed in 1908), and Syed Haider Raza to Delhi. A new tricolour of green, yellow and red, with lotuses and 'Bande Mataram', was hoisted at Calcutta in August 1906. Muslim participation was limited. The Nawab of Dacca, Salimullah, backed the partition (and received a government loan), and the Muslim League was founded in Dacca in December 1906. The movement slowly lost steam after the Surat split (1907) and the arrest of leaders (Tilak 1908).

In 1911, at the Delhi Durbar, King George V announced that the partition was annulled (it took effect in 1912, under Viceroy Lord Hardinge). Bengal was reunited as one Bengali-speaking province, Bihar and Orissa were carved out as a separate province, and Assam became a separate unit under a Chief Commissioner. The capital shifted from Calcutta to Delhi. The government wanted to please the Bengali Hindus but disappointed the Muslims, who had seen the East Bengal province as their gain.

To understand the rise of Muslim politics, begin with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98). After 1857 he told Muslims to modernise through English education, founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh (1875), and urged them to stay away from the Congress, arguing that in an all-India democracy the Muslim minority would always be outvoted. This was a political strategy, not a religious one, but it left a gap that the British learned to use. The partition of Bengal (1905) widened it, because the new Muslim-majority province in the east seemed to favour Muslims, and the Swadeshi movement was often led in a Hindu religious idiom (Bande Mataram, Ganapati and Shivaji festivals).

On 1 October 1906, a delegation of 35 Muslim leaders led by Aga Khan III met Viceroy Lord Minto at Simla (the Simla Deputation). They asked that Muslims be treated as a separate community in any new reform: separate electorates and extra seats ('weightage') in proportion to their 'political importance'. Minto agreed warmly. Two months later, on 30 December 1906, at the sidelines of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference at Dacca, the All-India Muslim League was born. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca hosted and proposed it; Aga Khan became its first (honorary) president, helped by Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk and Waqar-ul-Mulk. Its early aims were loyalty to the British Crown, protecting Muslim political rights and keeping good relations with other communities.

The British answered the unrest of 1905-08 with a 'carrot and stick' policy. The stick was repression (press laws, deportations, the arrest of Tilak). The carrot was the Indian Councils Act, 1909, popularly called the Morley-Minto Reforms after John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, and Lord Minto, the Viceroy. Their plan was to rally the Moderates and Muslims to the government and isolate the Extremists. The table below gives the provisions that exams use.

Separate (communal) electorate means that Muslim candidates are elected only by Muslim voters, in constituencies set apart for them. The system gave Muslims safe seats, but it also taught politicians to appeal to their own community alone, and it hardened divisions. Because Minto pushed it hardest, he is called the 'Father of Communal Electorates'. Morley himself admitted he had no wish to bring parliamentary government to India. Many nationalists later argued that the 1909 Act planted the seeds of Partition.

By 1900 a section of educated youth had lost patience with both petitions and boycott. They asked a bolder question: if the British rule by force, why must freedom come only through speeches? These young men were not criminals; they were inspired by the stories of Shivaji, by Bankim Chandra's Anandamath, by the Irish, Russian and Italian revolutionaries, and by Japan's victory over Russia in 1905. They formed secret societies, made bombs, shot hated officials and went to the gallows singing. This is the first phase of the revolutionary movement (c. 1897-1915), which had three centres: Maharashtra, Bengal and Punjab, and a fourth abroad.

Maharashtra. In June 1897, when the plague in Poona was handled brutally by Commissioner W. C. Rand, the Chapekar brothers (Damodar, Balkrishna, Vasudeo) shot Rand and Lt. Ayerst; Damodar was hanged in 1898. Later, the Savarkar brothers turned the Mitra Mela into the Abhinav Bharat Society (1904). In 1909 Anant Kanhere shot A. M. T. Jackson, the Collector of Nasik; Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was arrested in London and sentenced to transportation for life to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans (1911).

Bengal. The Anushilan Samiti (Calcutta, 1902; Dacca branch under Pulin Das, 1905) trained young men in physical culture and weapons. The Jugantar group (1906) of Barindra Kumar Ghosh, Aurobindo's younger brother, and Bhupendranath Dutta (Swami Vivekananda's brother) ran a weekly of the same name. On 30 April 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at a carriage at Muzaffarpur, aiming at the unpopular Judge Kingsford, but killed two English women, the Kennedys. Prafulla Chaki shot himself on being cornered; Khudiram was hanged on 11 August 1908, aged 18. The police raided the garden house at Maniktola (Calcutta), and in the Alipore Bomb Case (1908-09) Barindra Ghosh and many others were tried; Aurobindo was defended by C. R. Das and acquitted. Inside the jail, Kanailal Dutta and Satyendranath Bose shot the approver Naren Gosain.

Abroad. In London, Shyamji Krishna Varma opened India House (1905) as a hostel for Indian students and started the journal The Indian Sociologist. V. D. Savarkar and Madan Lal Dhingra were its fiery members. On 1 July 1909 Dhingra shot Sir William Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp of the India Secretary, and was hanged. In Paris, Madame Bhikaji Cama and S. R. Rana ran the Paris Indian Society and, at the Second International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart (1907), Madame Cama unfurled an Indian flag and appealed for freedom. In 1912 Rash Behari Bose and Sachindra Sanyal planned the bomb on Viceroy Hardinge at Delhi (the day the capital was formally entered), who survived; Rash Behari escaped to Japan.

The strongest revolutionary push came from the Ghadar Party. In California and Canada, thousands of Punjabi farmers and labourers faced racial humiliation and strict immigration laws. In 1913, with headquarters at San Francisco, they founded the Hindustan Association of the Pacific Coast, known after its weekly paper (first issue 1 November 1913) as the Ghadar Party ('ghadar' = mutiny). Sohan Singh Bhakna was its president and Lala Har Dayal its brain and secretary; Kartar Singh Sarabha, Bhai Parmanand and Taraknath Das joined them. When the First World War began, they returned to India to start a mutiny in the army in February 1915, but spies leaked the plan. Many were arrested in the Lahore Conspiracy Case; Kartar Singh Sarabha, still a teenager, was hanged in November 1915.

The Komagata Maru (1914) was a Japanese ship hired by Baba Gurdit Singh that carried 376 Punjabi passengers (mostly Sikhs) to Vancouver. Canada's exclusion laws kept them on board for two months, and the ship was forced to sail back. On reaching Budge Budge near Calcutta (29 September 1914), the government tried to arrest the leaders, firing broke out, and about 19 passengers died. The incident turned much Punjabi opinion against the Raj and fed into the Ghadar movement. The Berlin Committee (Indian Independence Committee), led by Virendranath Chattopadhyay (Chatto) with Champakaraman Pillai and Har Dayal, sought German help for an uprising, and Raja Mahendra Pratap set up a Provisional Government of India at Kabul (1 December 1915), with Barkatullah as Prime Minister.

The First World War (1914-18) changed India's politics. Britain asked Indians for men, money and goods, and Indians, hoping for a reward, gave them: over a million soldiers served abroad, and India's war contribution in cash and supplies was huge. But prices rose, taxes grew, and the promised reward looked far away. At the same time the leaders were coming back together: Tilak was released in June 1914; Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta died in 1915, removing the senior Moderates who had opposed the Extremists' return; and the idea of Home Rule, borrowed from Ireland, caught the educated mind. The stage was set for Congress unity and for a new kind of leader.

The Home Rule agitation was the first all-India political campaign after the Swadeshi days. It took the message to the villages, brought in students, young professionals and women, and forced the government to take notice. In June 1917 the government interned Annie Besant, Arundale and Wadia at Ooty, which raised a storm of protest and made Besant a hero. In August 1917 the Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu, announced in the House of Commons the policy of 'the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire' (the August Declaration). It was the first time Britain used the phrase 'responsible government'. Besant was elected president of the Congress at Calcutta in December 1917.

The Lucknow session of December 1916, presided over by Ambica Charan Majumdar, achieved two reunions at once. First, the Extremists returned to the Congress after nine years, led by Tilak. Second, the Congress and the Muslim League, which was meeting at Lucknow at the same time under Jinnah's presidency, signed the Lucknow Pact. The Pact was drafted on the basis of the 'Memorandum of the Nineteen' sent to the Viceroy (Chelmsford) by 19 elected members of the Imperial Council. The Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims and agreed on Muslim shares in provincial councils (about one-third in the Imperial Council), and the two bodies made a joint demand for self-government after the war. Jinnah was hailed by Sarojini Naidu as the 'ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity'.

The Lucknow Pact had a double edge. It showed that Hindus and Muslims could unite against the British. But by accepting separate electorates, the Congress also accepted the communal principle it had opposed in 1909, and this recognition later made Muslim political demands harder to resolve. Students must remember both: unity in 1916 and separate electorates accepted.

Meanwhile a new figure had arrived. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi came back from South Africa on 9 January 1915 (celebrated as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas), after two decades there. In South Africa he had fought against racial laws with a new method, Satyagraha (holding on to truth), formed the Natal Indian Congress (1894), run the paper Indian Opinion, and built the Phoenix Settlement (1904) and Tolstoy Farm (1910). His political guru Gopal Krishna Gokhale advised him to travel across India for a year, with his ears open and his mouth shut, before speaking. Gandhi set up the Satyagraha Ashram at Ahmedabad (1915, later moved to Sabarmati). Rabindranath Tagore is popularly credited with calling him 'Mahatma'. Then, within two years, he tested his weapon on three local causes.