1. THE FIRST MAJOR
CHALLENGE:
THE REVOLT OF 1857
It was the morning of 11 May 1857. The city of Delhi had not
yet woken up when a band of Sepoys from Meerut, who had defied and killed the
European officers the previous day, crossed the Jamuna, set the toll house on
fire and marched to the Red Fort. They entered the Red Fort through the Raj
Ghat gate, followed by an excited crowd, to appeal to Bahadur Shah II, the
Moghul Emperor— a pensioner of the British East India Company, who possessed
nothing but the name of the mighty Mughals — to become their leader, thus, give
legitimacy to their cause. Bahadur Shah vacillated as he was neither sure of
the intentions of the sepoys nor of his own ability to play an effective role.
He was however persuaded, if not coerced, to give in and was proclaimed the
Shahenshah-e-Hindustan. The sepoys, then, set out to capture and control the
imperial city of Delhi. Simon Fraser, the Political Agent and several other
Englishmen were killed; the public offices were either occupied or destroyed.
The Revolt of an unsuccessful but heroic effort to eliminate foreign rule, had
begun. The capture of Delhi and the proclamation of Bahadur Shah as the Emperor
of Hindustan gave a positive political meaning to the revolt and provided a
rallying point for the rebels by recalling the past glory of the imperial
city.The Revolt at Meerut and the capture of Delhi was the precursor to a
widespread mutiny by the sepoys and rebellion almost all over North India, as
well as Central and Western India. South India remained quiet and Punjab and
Bengal were only marginally affected. Almost half the Company’s sepoy strength
of 2,32,224 opted out of their loyalty to their regimental colors and overcame
the ideology of the army, meticulously constructed over a period of time
through training and discipline. Even before the Meerut incident, there were
rumblings of resentment in various cantonments. The 19th Native Infantry at Berhampur which refused to use the newly
introduced Enfield Rifle, was disbanded in March 1857. A young sepoy of the 34th
Native Infantry, Mangal Pande, went a step further and fired at the Sergeant
Major of his regiment. He was overpowered and executed and his regiment too,
was disbanded. The 7th Oudh regiment which defied its officers met with a
similar fate.Within a month of capture of Delhi, the Revolt spread to different
parts of the country: Kanpur, Lucknow, Benares, Allahabad, Bareilly, Jagdishpur
and Jhansi. The rebel activity was marked by intense anti-British feelings and
the administration was invariably toppled. In the absence of any leaders from
their own ranks, the insurgents turned to the traditional leaders of Indian
society — the territorial aristocratsand feudal chiefs who had suffered at the
hands of the British. At Kanpur, the natural choice was Nana Saheb, the adopted
son of the last Peshwa,Baji Rao II. He had refused the family title and,
banished from Poona, was living near Kanpur. BegumHazrat Mahal took over the
reigns where popular sympathy was overwhelmingly in favour of the deposed
Nawab. Her son, Birjis Qadir, was proclaimed the Nawab and a regular
administration was organized with important offices shared equally by Muslims
and Hindus. At Barielly, Khan Bahadur, a descendant of the former ruler of
Rohilkhand was placed in command. Living on a pension granted by the British,
he was not too enthusiastic about this and had in fact, warned the Commissioner
of the impending mutiny. Yet, once the Revolt broke out, he assumed the
administration, organized an army of 40,000 soldiers and offered stiff
resistance to the British. In Bihar the Revolt was led by Kunwar Singh, the zamindar
of Jagdishpur,a 70 year-old man on the brink of bankruptcy. He nursed a grudge
against the British. He had been deprived of his estates by them and his
repeated appeals to be entrusted with their management again fell on deaf ears.
Even though he had not planned an uprising, he unhesitatingly joined the sepoys
when they reached Arrah from Dinapore. The most outstanding leader of the
Revolt was Rani Lakshmibai, who assumed the leadership of the sepoys at Jhansi.
Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, had refused to allow her adopted son to
succeed to the throne after her husband died and had annexed the state by the
application of the Doctrine of Lapse. The Rani had tried everything to reverse
the decision. She even offered to keep Jhansi ‘safe’ for the British if they
would grant her wishes. When it was clear nothing was working she joined the
sepoys and, in time, became one of the most formidable enemies the British had
to contend with. The Revolt was not confined to these major centres. It had embraced
almost every cantonment in the Bengal and a few in Bombay. Only the Madras army
remained totally loyal. Why did the sepoys revolt? It was considered
prestigious to be in the service of the Company; it provided economic
stability. Why, then, did the sepoys choose to forego these advantages for the
sake of an uncertain future? A proclamation issued at Delhi indicates the
immediate cause: ‘it is well known that in these days all the English have
entertained these evil designs — first, to destroy the religion of the whole
Hindustani Army, and then to make the people by compulsion Christians.
Therefore, we, solely on account of our religion, have combined with the
people, and have not spared alive one infidel, and have re-established the
Delhi dynasty on these terms’.It is certainly true that the conditions of
service in the Company’s army and cantonments increasingly came into conflict
with the religious beliefs and prejudices of the sepoys, who were predominantly
drawn from the upper caste Hindus of the North Western Provinces and Oudh.
Initially, the administration sought to accommodate the sepoys’ demands:
facilities were provided to them to live according to the dictates of their
caste and religion. But, with the extension of the Army’s operation not only to
various parts of India, but also to countries outside, it was not possible to
do so any more. Moreover, caste distinctions and segregation within a regiment
were not conducive to the cohesiveness of a fighting unit. To begin with, the
administration thought of an easy way out: discourage the recruitment of
Brahmins; this apparently did not succeed and, by 4 | India’s Struggle for
Independencethe middle of the nineteenth century, the upper castes predominated
in the Bengal Army, for instance. The unhappiness of the sepoys first surfaced
in 1824 when the 47th Regiment at Barrackpur was ordered to go to Burma. To the
religious Hindu, crossing the sea meant loss of caste. The sepoys, therefore,
refused to comply. The regiment was disbanded and those who led the opposition
were hanged. The religious sensibilities of the sepoys who participated in the
Afghan War were more seriously affected. During the arduous and disastrous
campaigns, the fleeing sepoys were forced to eat and drink whatever came their
way. When they returned to India, those at home correctly sensed that they
could not have observed caste stipulations and therefore, were hesitant to
welcome them back into the biradiri (caste fraternity). Sitaram who had gone to
Afghanistan found himself outcaste not only in his village, but even in his own
barracks. The Prestige of being in the pay of the Company was not enough to
hold his Position in society; religion and caste proved to be more
powerful.*The rumours about the Government’s secret designs to promote
conversions to Christianity further exasperated the sepoys. The
official-missionary nexus gave credence to the rumour. In some cantonments
missionaries were permitted to preach openly and their diatribe against other
religions angered the sepoys. The reports about the mixing of bone dust in atta
and the introduction of the Enfield rifle enhanced the sepoys’ growing
disaffection with the Government. The cartridges of the new rifle had to be
bitten off before loading and the grease was reportedly made of beef and pig
fat. The army administration did nothing to allay these fears, and the sepoys
felt their religion was in real danger. The sepoys’ discontent was not limited
to religion alone. They were equally unhappy with their emoluments. A sepoy in
the infantry got seven rupees a month. A sawar in the cavalry was paid Rs. 27,
out of which he had to pay for his own uniform, food and the upkeep of his
mount, and he was ultimately left with only a rupee or two. What was more
galling was the sense of deprivation compared to his British counterparts. He
was made 5 | The First Major Challenge: The Revolt of 1857to feel a subordinate
at every step and was discriminated against racially and in matters of
promotion and privileges. ‘Though he might give the signs of a military genius
of Hyder,’ wrote T.R. Holmes, ‘he knew that he could never attain the pay of an
English subaltern and that the rank to which he might attain, after 30 years of
faithful service, would not protect him from the insolent dictation of an ensign
fresh from England.” The discontent of the sepoys was not limited to matters
military; they felt the general disenchantment with and opposition to British
rule. The sepoy, in fact, was a peasant in uniform,’ whose consciousness was
not divorced from that of the rural population. A military officer had warned
Dalhousie about the possible consequences of his policies: ‘Your army is
derived from the peasantry of the country who have rights and if those rights
are infringed upon, you will no longer have to depend on the fidelity of the
army . . . If you infringe the institutions of the people of India, that army
will sympathize with them; for they are part of the population, and in every
infringement you may make upon the rights of the individuals, you infringe upon
the rights of men who are either themselves in the army or upon their sons,
their fathers or their relations.’*Almost every agricultural family in Oudh had
a representative in the army; there were 75,000 men from Oudh. Whatever
happened there was of immediate concern to the sepoy. The new land revenue
system introduced after the annexation and the confiscation of lands attached
to charitable institutions affected his well-being. That accounted for the
14,000 petitions received from the sepoys about the hardships of the revenue
system. A proclamation issued by the Delhi rebels clearly reflected the sepoy’s
awareness of the misery brought about by British rule. The mutiny in itself,
therefore, was a revolt against the British and, thus, a political act. What
imparted this character to the mutiny was the sepoy’s identity of interests
with the general population. The Revolt of the sepoys was accompanied by a
rebellion of the civil population, particularly in the North Western Provinces
6 | India’s Struggle for Independenceand Oudh, the two areas from which the
sepoys of the Bengal army were recruited. Except in Muzzafarnagar and
Saharanpur, civil rebellion followed the Revolt of the sepoys. The action of
the sepoys released the rural population from fear of the state and the control
exercised by the administration. Their accumulated grievances found immediate
expression and they rose en masse to give vent to their opposition to British
rule. Government buildings were destroyed, the “treasury was plundered, the
magazine was sacked, barracks and court houses were burnt and prison gates were
flung open.” The civil rebellion had a broad social base, embracing all
sections of society — the territorial magnates, peasants, artisans, religious
mendicants and priests, civil servants, shopkeepers and boatmen. The Revolt of
the sepoys, thus, resulted in a popular uprising. *The reason for this mass
upsurge has to be sought in the nature of British rule which adversely affected
the interests of almost all sections of society Under the burden of excessive
taxes the peasantry became progressively indebted and impoverished. The only
interest of the Company was the realization of maximum revenue with minimum
effort. Consequently settlements were hurriedly undertaken, often without any
regard for the resources of the land. For instance, in the district of Bareilly
in 1812, the settlement was completed in the record time often months with a
dramatic increase of Rs. 14.73,188 over the earlier settlement. Delighted by
this increase, the Government congratulated the officers for their ‘zeal,
ability and indefatigable labour.’ It did not occur to the authorities that
such a sharp and sudden increase would have disastrous consequences on the
cultivators. Naturally, the revenue could not be collected without coercion and
torture: in Rohilkhand there were as many as 2,37,388 coercive collections
during 1848-56. Whatever the conditions, the Government was keen on collecting
revenue. Even in very adverse circumstances, remissions were rarely granted. A
collector, who repeatedly reported his inability to realize revenue from an
estate, as only grass was grown there, was told that grass was a very good
produce and it should be sold for collecting revenue! 7 | The First Major
Challenge: The Revolt of 1857The traditional landed aristocracy suffered no
less. In Oudh, which was a storm centre of the Revolt, the taluqdars lost
alltheir power and privileges. About 21,000 taluqdars whose estates were
confiscated suddenly found themselves without a source of income, ‘unable to
work, ashamed to beg, condemned to penury.’ These dispossessed taluqdars
smarting under the humiliation heaped on them, seized the opportunity presented
by the Sepoy Revolt to oppose the British and regain what they had lost. *British
rule also meant misery to the artisans and handicraftsmen. The annexation of
Indian states by the Company cut off their major source of patronage. Added to
this, British policy discouraged Indian handicrafts and promoted British goods.
The highly skilled Indian craftsmen were deprived of their source of income and
were forced to look for alternate sources of employment that hardly existed, as
the destruction of Indian handicrafts was not accompanied by the development of
modem industries.The reforming zeal of British officials under the influence of
utilitarianism had aroused considerable suspicion, resentment, and opposition.
The orthodox Hindus and Muslims feared that through social legislation the
British were trying to destroy their religion and culture. Moreover, they
believed that legislation was undertaken to aid the missionaries in their quest
for evangelization. The orthodox and the religious, therefore, arrayed against
the British. Several proclamations of the rebels expressed this cultural concern
in no uncertain terms. The coalition of the Revolt of the sepoys and that of
the civil population made the 1857 movement an unprecedented popular upsurge.
Was it an organized and methodically planned Revolt or a spontaneous
insurrection? In the absence of any reliable account left behind by the rebels
it is difficult to be certain. The attitude and activities of the leaders
hardly suggest any planning or conspiracy on their part and if at all it
existed it was at an embryonic stage. 8 | India’s Struggle for IndependenceWhen
the sepoys arrived from Meerut, Bahadur Shah seems to have been taken by
surprise and promptly conveyed the news to the Lt.Governor at Agra. So did Rani
Lakshmibhai of Jhansi who took quite some time before openly joining the rebels.
Whether Nana Saheb and Maulvi Ahmad Shah of Faizabad had established links with
various cantonments and were instrumental in instigating Revolt is yet to be
proved beyond doubt. Similarly, the message conveyed by the circulation of
chappatis and lotus flowers is also uncertain. The only positive factor is that
within a month of the Meerut incident the Revolt became quite widespread. *Even
if there was no planning and organization before the revolt, it was important
that it was done, once it started. Immediately after the capture of Delhi a
letter was addressed to the rulers of all the neighboring states and of
Rajasthan soliciting their support and inviting them to participate. In Delhi,
a court of administrators was established which was responsible for all matters
of state. The court consisted of ten members, six from the army and four from
the civilian departments. All decisions were taken by a majority vote. The
court conducted the affairs of the state in the name of the Emperor. ‘The
Government at Delhi,’ wrote a British official, ‘seems to have been a sort of
constitutional Milocracy. The king was king and honoured as such, like a
constitutional monarch; but instead of a Parliament,he had a council of
soldiers, in whom power rested, and of whom he was no degree a military
commander.’ In other centres, also attempts were made to bring about an
organization. Bahadur Shah was recognized as the Emperor by all rebel leaders
Coins were struck and orders were issued in his name. At Bareilly, Khan Bahadur
Khan conducted the administration in the name of the Mughal Emperor. It is also
significant that the first impulse of the rebels was always to proceed to Delhi
whether they were at Meerut, Kanpur or Jhansi. The need to create an
organization and a political institution to preserve the gains was certainly
felt. But in the face of the British counter-offensive, there was no chance to
build on these early nebulous ideas.9 | The First Major Challenge: The Revolt
of 1857For more than a year, the rebels carried on their struggle against heavy
odds. They had no source of arms and ammunition; what they had captured from
the British arsenals could not carry them far. They ‘were often forced to fight
with swords and pikes against an enemy supplied with the most modern weapons.
They had no quick system of communication at their command and, hence, no
coordination was possible. Consequently, they were unaware of the strength and
weaknesses of their compatriots and as a result could not come to each other’s
rescue in times of distress. Every one was left to play a lonely hand.
*Although the rebels received the sympathy of the people, the country as a
whole was not behind them. The merchants, intelligentsia and Indian rulers not
only kept aloof, but actively supported the British. Meetings were organized in
Calcutta and Bombay by them to pray for the success of the British. Despite the
Doctrine of Lapse, the Indian rulers who expected their future to be safer with
the British liberally provided them with men and materials. Indeed, the sepoys
might have made a better fight of it if they had received their support. Almost
half the Indian soldiers not only did not Revolt but fought against their own
countrymen. The recapture of Delhi was effected by five columns consisting of
1700 British troops and 3200 Indians. The blowing up of Kashmere Gate was
conducted by six British officers and NCOs and twenty-four Indians, of whom ten
were Punjabis and fourteen were from Agra and Oudh. Apart from some honourable
exceptions like the Rani of Thansi, Kunwar Singh and Maulvi Ahmadullah, the
rebels were poorly served by their leaders. Most of them failed to realize the
significance of the Revolt and simply did not do enough. Bahadur Shah and
Zeenat Mahal had no faith in the sepoys and negotiated with the British to
secure their safety. Most of the taluqdars tried only to protect their own
interests. Some of them, 10 | India’s Struggle for Independencelike Man Singh,
changed sides several times depending on which side had the upper hand. Apart
from a commonly shared hatred for alien rule, the rebels had no political
perspective or a definite vision of the future. They were all prisoners of
their own past, fighting primarily to regain their lost privileges.
Unsurprisingly, they proved incapable of ushering in a new political order.
John Lawrence rightly remarked that had a single leader of ability arisen among
them (the rebels) we must have been lost beyond redemption.’ That was not to
be, yet the rebels showed exemplary courage, dedication and commitment.
Thousands of men courted death, fighting for a cause they held dear. Their
heroism alone, however, could not stem the onslaught of a much superior British
army. The first to fall was Delhi on 20 September 1857 after a prolonged
battle. Bahadur Shah, who took refuge in Humayun’s tomb, was captured, tried
and deported to Burma. With that the back of the Revolt was broken, since Delhi
was the only possible rallying point. The British military then dealt with the
rebels in one centre after another. The Rani of Jhansi died fighting on 17 June
1858. General Hugh Rose, who defeated her, paid high tribute to his enemy when
he said that ‘here lay the woman who was the only man among the rebels.’ Nana
Saheb refused to give in and finally escaped to Nepal in the beginning of 1859,
hoping to renew the struggle. Kunwar Singh, despite his old age, was too quick
for the British troops and constantly kept them guessing till his death on 9
May 1858. Tantia Tope, who successfully carried on guerrilla warfare against
the British until April 1859, was betrayed by a zamindar, captured and put to
‘death by the British. Thus, came to an end the most formidable challenge the
British Empire had to face in India. It is a matter of speculation as to what
the course of history would have been had the rebels succeeded. Whether they
would have put the clock back’ and resurrected and reinforced a feudal order
need not detain us here; although that was not necessarily the only option.
Despite the sepoys’ limitations and weaknesses, their effort to emancipate the
country from foreign rule was a patriotic act and a Progressive step. If the
importance of a historical event is not 11 | The First Major Challenge: The
Revolt of 1857limited to its immediate achievements the Revolt of 1857 was not
a pure historical tragedy. Even in failure it served a grand purpose: a source
of inspiration for the national liberation movement which later achieved what
the Revolt could not.
CHAPTER 2. CIVIL REBELLIONS AND TRIBAL UPRISINGS
The Revolt of 1857 was the most dramatic instance of
traditional India’s struggle against foreign rule. But it was no sudden
occurrence. It was the culmination of a century long tradition of fierce
popular resistance to British domination. The establishment of British power in
India was a prolonged process of piecemeal conquest and consolidation and the
colonialization of the economy and society. This process produced discontent,
resentment and resistance at every stage. This popular resistance took three
broad forms: civil rebellions, tribal uprisings and peasant movements. We will
discuss the first two in this chapter. *The series of civil rebellions, which
run like a thread through the first 100 years of British rule, were often led
by deposed rajas and nawabs or their descendants, uprooted and impoverished
zamindars, landlords and poligars (landed military magnates in South India),
and ex-retainers and officials of the conquered Indian states. The backbone of
the rebellions, their mass base and striking power came from the rack-rented
peasants, ruined artisans and demobilized soldiers. These sudden, localized
revolts often took place because of local grievances although for short periods
they acquired a broad sweep, involving armed bands of a few hundreds to several
thousands. The major cause of all these civil rebellions taken as a whole was
the rapid changes the British introduced in the economy, administration and
land revenue system. These changes led to the disruption of the agrarian
society, causing prolonged and widespread suffering among its constituents
Above all, the colonial policy of intensifying demands for land revenue and
extracting as large an amount as possible produced a veritable upheaval in
Indian villages. In Bengal, for example, in less than thirty years land revenue
collection was raised to nearly double the amount collected under the Mughals.
The pattern was repeated in other us of the country as British rule spread. And
aggravating the unhappiness of the farmers was the fact that not even a part of
the enhanced revenue was spent on the development of agriculture or the welfare
of the cultivator. Thousands of zamindars and poligars lost control over their
land and its revenues either due to the extinction of their rights by the
colonial state or by the forced sale of their rights over land because of their
inability to meet the exorbitant land revenue demanded. The proud zamindars and
poligars resented this loss even more when they were displaced by rank
outsiders —government officials and the new men of money — merchants and
moneylenders. Thus they, as also the old chiefs, who had lost their
principalities, had personal scores to settle with the new rulers. Peasants and
artisans, as we have seen earlier, had their own reasons to rise up in arms and
side with the traditional elite. Increasing demands for land revenue were
forcing large numbers of peasants into growing indebtedness or into selling
their lands. The new landlords, bereft of any traditional paternalism towards
their tenants, pushed up rents to ruinous heights and evicted them in the case
of non-payment. The economic decline of the peasantry was reflected in twelve
major and numerous minor famines from 1770 to 1857. The new courts and legal
system gave a further fillip to the dispossessors of land and encouraged the
rich to oppress the poor. Flogging, torture and jailing of the cultivators for
arrears of rent or land revenue or interest on debt were quite common. The
ordinary people were also hard hit by the prevalence of corruption at the lower
levels of the police, judiciary and general administration. The petty officials
enriched themselves freely at the cost of the poor. The police looted,
oppressed and tortured the common people at will. William Edwards, a British
official, wrote in 1859 that the police were ‘a scourge to the people’ and that
‘their oppression and exactions form one of the chief grounds of
dissatisfaction with our government.’ The ruin of Indian handicraft industries,
as a result of the imposition of free trade in India and levy of discriminatory
tariffs against Indian goods in Britain, pauperized millions of artisans. The
misery of the artisans was further compounded by the disappearance of their
traditional patrons and buyers, the princes, chieftains, and zamindars. The
scholarly and priestly classes were also active in inciting hatred and
rebellion against foreign rule. The traditional rulers and ruling elite had
financially supported scholars, religious preachers, priests, pandits and
maulvis and men of arts and literature. With the coming of the British and the
ruin of the traditional landed and bureaucratic elite, this patronage came to
an end, and all those who had depended on it were impoverished. Another major
cause of the rebellions was the very foreign character of British rule. Like
any other people, the Indian people too felt humiliated at being under a
foreigner’s heel. This feeling of hurt pride inspired efforts to expel the
foreigner from their lands. The civil rebellions began as British rule was
established in Bengal and Bihar, arid they occurred in area after area as it
was incorporated into colonial rule. There was hardly a year without armed
opposition or a decade without a major armed rebellion in one part of the
country or the other. From 1763 to 1856, there were more than forty major
rebellions apart from hundreds of minor ones.Displaced peasants and demobilized
soldiers of Bengal led by religious monks and dispossessed zamindars were the
first to rise up in the Sanyasi rebellion, made famous by Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee in his novel Anand Math, that lasted from 1763 to 1800. It was
followed by the Chuar uprising which covered five districts of Bengal and Bihar
from 1766 to 1772 and then, again, from 1795 to 1816. Other major rebellions in
Eastern India were those of Rangpur and Dinajpur, 1783; Bishnupur and Birbhum,
1799; Orissa zamindars, 1804-17; and Sambalpur, 1827-40. In South India, the
Raja of Vizianagram revolted in 1794, the poligars of Tamil Nadu during the
1790’s, of Malabar and coastal Andhra during the first decade of the 19th
century, of Parlekamedi during 1813- 14. Dewan Velu Thampi of Travancore
organized a heroic revolt in 1805. The Mysore peasants too revolted in 1830-31.
There were major uprisings in Visakhapatnam from 1830-34, Ganjam in 1835 and
Kurnool in 1846-47. In Western India, the chiefs of Saurashtra rebelled
repeatedly from 1816 to 1832. The Kolis of Gujarat did the same during 1824-28,
1839 and 1849. Maharashtra was in a perpetual state of revolt after the final
defeat of the Peshwa. Prominent were the Bhil uprisings, 1818-31; the Kittur
uprising, led by Chinnava, 1824; the Satara uprising, 1841; and the revolt of
the Gadkaris. 1844. Northern India was no less turbulent. The present states of
Western U.P. and Haryana rose up in arms in 1824. Other major rebellions were
those of Bilaspur, 1805; the taluqdars of Aligarh, 18 14-17; the Bundelas of
Jabalpur, 1842; and Khandesh, 1852. The second Punjab War in 1848- 49 was also
in the nature of a popular revolt by the people and the army. These almost continuous
rebellions were massive in their totality, but were wholly local in their
spread and isolated from each other. They were the result of local causes and
grievances, and were also localized in their effects. They often bore the same
character not because they represented national or common efforts but because
they represented common conditions though separated in time and space.
Socially, economically and politically, the semi-feudal leaders of these
rebellions were backward looking and traditional in outlook. They still lived
in the old world, blissfully unaware and oblivious of the modern world which
had knocked down the defences of their society. Their resistance represented no
societal alternative. It was centuries-old in form and ideological and cultural
content. Its basic objective was to restore earlier forms of rule and social
relations. Such backward looking and scattered, sporadic and disunited
uprisings were incapable of fending off or overthrowing foreign rule. The
British succeeded in pacifying the rebel areas one by one. They also gave
concessions to the less fiery rebel chiefs and zamindars in the form of
reinstatement, the restoration of their estates and reduction in revenue
assessments so long as they agreed to live peacefully under alien authority.
The more recalcitrant ones were physically wiped out. Velu Thampi was, for
example, publicly hanged even after he was dead. The suppression of the civil
rebellions was a major reason why the Revolt of 1857 did not spread to South
India and most of Eastern and Western India. The historical significance of
these civil uprisings lies in that they established strong and valuable local
traditions of resistance to British rule. The Indian people were to draw
inspiration from these traditions in the later nationalist struggle for
freedom. The tribal people, spread over a large part of India, organized
hundreds of militant outbreaks and insurrections during the 19th century. These
uprisings were marked by immense courage and sacrifice on their part and brutal
suppression and veritable butchery on the part of the rulers. The tribals had
cause to be upset for a variety of reasons. The colonial administration ended
their relative isolation and brought them fully within the ambit of
colonialism. It recognized the tribal chiefs as zamindars and introduced a new
system of land revenue and taxation of tribal products. It encouraged the
influx of Christian missionaries into the tribal areas. Above all, it
introduced a large number of moneylenders, traders arid revenue farmers as
middlemen among the tribals. These middlemen were the chief instruments for
bringing the tribal people within the vortex of the colonial economy and
exploitation. The middlemen were outsiders who increasingly took possession of
tribal lands and ensnared the tribals in a web of debt. hi time, the tribal
people increasingly lost their lands and were reduced to the position of
agricultural labourers, share-croppers and rackrented tenants on the land they
had earlier brought under cultivation and held on a communal basis. Colonialism
also transformed their relationship with the forest. They had depended on the
forest for food, fuel and cattlefeed. They practiced shifting cultivation
(jhum, podu, etc.), taking recourse to fresh forest lands when their existing
lands showed signs of exhaustion. The colonial government changed all this. It
usurped the forest lands and placed restrictions on access to forest products,
forest lands and village common lands. It refused to let cultivation shift to new
areas. Oppression and extortion by policemen and other petty officials further
aggravated distress among the tribals. The revenue farmers and government
agents also intensified and expanded the system of begar — making the tribals
perform unpaid labour. All this differed in intensity from region to region,
but the complete disruption of the old agrarian order of the tribal communities
provided the common factor for all the tribal uprisings. These uprisings were
broad-based, involving thousands of tribals, often the entire population of a
region. The colonial intrusion and the triumvirate of trader, moneylender and
revenue farmer in sum disrupted the tribal identity to a lesser or greater
degree. In fact, ethnic ties were a basic feature of the tribal rebellions. The
rebels saw themselves not as a discreet class but as having a tribal identity.
At this level the solidarity shown was of a very high order. Fellow tribals
were never attacked unless they had collaborated with the enemy.At the same
time, not all outsiders were attacked as enemies. Often there was no violence
against the non-tribal poor, who worked in tribal villages in supportive
economic roles, or who had social relations with the tribals such as telis,
gwalas, lohars, carpenters, potters, weavers, washermen, barbers, drummers, and
bonded labourers and domestic servants of the outsiders. They were not only
spared, but were seen as allies. In many cases, the rural poor formed a part of
the rebellious tribal bands. The rebellions normally began at the point where
the tribals felt so oppressed that they felt they had no alternative but to
fight. This often took the form of spontaneous attacks on outsiders, looting
their property and expelling them from their villages. This led to clashes with
the colonial authorities. When this happened, the tribals began to move towards
armed resistance and elementary organization. Often, religious and charismatic
leaders — messiahs emerged at this stage and promised divine intervention and
an end to their suffering at the hands of the outsiders, and asked their fellow
tribals to rise and rebel against foreign authority. Most of these leaders
claimed to derive their authority from God. They also often claimed that they
possessed magical powers, for example, the power to make the enemies’ bullets
ineffective. Filled with hope and confidence, the tribal masses tended to
follow these leaders to the very end. The warfare between the tribal rebels and
the British armed forces was totally unequal. On one side were drilled regiments
armed with the latest weapons and on the other were men and women fighting in
roving bands armed with primitive weapons such as stones, axes, spears and bows
and arrows, believing in the magical powers of their commanders. The tribals
died in lakhs in this unequal warfare. *Among the numerous tribal revolts, the
Santhal hool or uprising was the most massive. The Santhals, who live in the
area between Bhagalpur and Rajmahal, known as Daman-i-koh, rose in revolt; made
a determined attempt to expel the outsiders — the dikus — and proclaimed the
complete ‘annihilation’ of the alien regime. The social conditions which drove
them to insurrection were described by a contemporary in the Calcutta Review as
follows: ‘Zamindars, the police, the revenue and court alas have exercised a
combined system of extortions, oppressive exactions, forcible dispossession of
property, abuse and personal violence and a variety of petty tyrannies upon the
timid and yielding Santhals. Usurious interest on loans of money ranging from
50 to 500 per cent; false measures at the haul and the market; wilful and
uncharitable trespass by the rich by means of their untethered cattle, tattoos,
ponies and even elephants, on the growing crops of the poorer race; and, such
like illegalities have been prevalent.’The Santhals considered the dikus and
government servants morally corrupt being given to beggary, stealing, lying and
drunkenness. By 1854, the tribal heads, the majhis and parganites, had begun to
meet and discuss the possibility of revolting. Stray cases of the robbing of
zamindars and moneylenders began to occur. The tribal leaders called an
assembly of nearly 6000 Santhals, representing 400 villages, at Bhaganidihi on
30 June 1855. It was decided to raise the banner of revolt, get rid of the
outsiders and their colonial masters once and for all, the usher in Salyug,
‘The Reign of Truth,’ and ‘True Justice.’ The Santhals believed that their
actions had the blessings of God. Sido and Kanhu, the principal rebel leaders,
claimed that Thakur (God) had communicated with them and told them to take up
arms and fight for independence. Sido told the authorities in a proclamation:
‘The Thacoor has ordered me saying that the country is not Sahibs . . . The
Thacoor himself will fight. Therefore, you Sahibs and Soldiers (will) fight the
Thacoor himself.’The leaders mobilized the Santhal men and women by organizing
huge processions through the villages accompanied by drummers and other
musicians. The leaders rode at the “d on horses and elephants and in palkis.
Soon nearly 60,000 Santhals had been mobilized. Forming bands of 1,500 to
2,000, but rallying in many thousands at the call of drums on particular
occasions, they attacked the mahajans and zamindars and their houses, police
stations, railway construction sites, the dak (post) carriers — in fact all the
symbols of dila4 exploitation and colonial power. The Santhal insurrection was
helped by a large number of non-tribal and poor dikus. Gwalas (milkmen) and
others helped the rebels with provisions and services; lohars (blacksmiths)
accompanied the rebel bands, keeping their weapons in good shape. Once the
Government realized the scale of the rebellion, it organized a major military
campaign against the rebels. It mobilized tens of regiments under the command
of a major-general, declared Martial Law in the affected areas and offered
rewards of upto Rs. 10,000 for the capture of various leaders. The rebellion
was crushed ruthlessly. More than 15,000 Santhals were killed while tens of
villages were destroyed. Sido was betrayed and captured and killed in August
1855 while Kanhu was arrested by accident at the tail-end of the rebellion in
February 1866. And ‘the Rajmahal Hills were drenched with the blood of the
fighting Santhal peasantry.’ One typical instance of the heroism of Santhal
rebels has been narrated by L.S.S. O’Malley: ‘They showed the most reckless
courage never knowing when they were beaten and refusing to surrender. On one
occasion, forty- five Santhals took refuge in a mud hut which they held against
the Sepoy’s. Volley after volley was fired into it… Each time the Santhals
replied with a discharge of arrows. At last, when their fire ceased, the Sepoys
entered the hut and found only one old man was left alive. A Sepoy called on
him to surrender, whereupon the old man rushed upon him and cut him down with
his battle axe.” *I shall describe briefly three other major tribal rebellions.
The Kols of Chhotanagpur rebelled from 1820 to 1837. Thousands of them were
massacred before British authority could be re-imposed. The hill tribesmen of
Rampa in coastal Andhra revolted in March 1879 against the depredations of the
government-supported mansabdar and the new restrictive forest regulations. The
authorities had to mobilize regiments of infantry, a squadron of cavalry and
two companies of sappers and miners before the rebels, numbering several
thousands, could be defeated by the end of 1880.The rebellion (ulgulan) of the
Munda tribesmen, led by Birsa Munda, occurred during 1899-19. For over thirty
years the Munda sardars had been struggling against the destruction of their
system of common land holdings by the intrusion of jagirdar, thikadar (revenue
farmers) and merchant moneylenders.Birsa, born in a poor share-cropper
household in 1874, had a vision of God in 1895. He declared himself to be a
divine messenger, possessing miraculous healing powers. Thousands gathered
around him seeing in him a Messiah with a new religious message. Under the
influence of the religious movement soon acquired an agrarian and political
Birsa began to move from village to village, organizing rallies and mobilizing
his followers on religious and political grounds. On Christmas Eve, 1899, Birsa
proclaimed a rebellion to establish Munda rule in the land and encouraged ‘the
killing of thikadars and jagirdars and Rajas and Hakims (rulers) and
Christians.’ Saiyug would be established in place of the present-day Kalyug. He
declared that ‘there was going to be a fight with the dikus, the ground would
be as red as the red flag with their blood.’ The non-tribal poor were not to be
attacked. To bring about liberation, Birsa gathered a force of 6,000 Mundas
armed with swords, spears, battle-axes, and bows and arrows. He w, however,
captured in the beginning of February 1900 and he died in jail in June. The
rebellion had failed. But Birsa entered the realms of legend.
CHAPTER 3. PEASANT MOVEMENTS AND UPRISINGS AFTER 1857
It is worth taking a look at the effects of colonial
exploitation of the Indian peasants. Colonial economic policies, the new land
revenue system, the colonial administrative and judicial systems, and the ruin
of handicraft leading to the over-crowding of land, transformed the agrarian
structure and impoverished the peasantry. In the vast zamindari areas, the
peasants were left to the tender mercies of the zamindars who rack-rented them
and compelled them to pay the illegal dues and perform begar. In Ryotwari
areas, the Government itself levied heavy land revenue. This forced the
peasants to borrow money from the moneylenders. Gradually, over large areas,
the actual cultivators were reduced to the status of tenants-at-will,
share-croppers and landless labourers, while their lands, crops and cattle
passed into the hands of landlords, trader-moneylenders and rich peasants. When
the peasants could take it no longer, they resisted against the oppression and
exploitation; and, they found whether their target was the indigenous exploiter
or the colonial administration, that their real enemy, after the barriers
weredown, was the colonial state. One form of elemental protest, especially
when individuals and small groups found that collective action was not possible
though their social condition was becoming intolerable, was to take to crime.
Many dispossessed peasants took to robbery, dacoity and what has been called
social banditry, preferring these to starvation and social degradation. *The
most militant and widespread of the peasant movements was the Indigo Revolt of
1859-60. The indigo planters, nearly all Europeans, compelled the tenants to
grow indigo which they processed in factories set up in rural (mofussil) areas.
From After 1857the beginning, indigo was grown under an extremely oppressive
system which involved great loss to the cultivators. The planters forced the
peasants to take a meager amount as advance and enter into fraudulent
contracts. The price paid for the indigo plants was far below the market price.
The comment of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, J.B. Grant, was that ‘the
root of the whole question is the struggle to make the raiyats grow indigo
plant, without paying them the price of it.’ The peasant was forced to grow
indigo on the best land he had whether or not he wanted to devote his land and
labour to more paying crops like rice. At the time of delivery, he was cheated
even of the due low price. He also had to pay regular bribes to the planter’s
officials. He was forced to accept an advance. Often he was not in a position
to repay it, but even if he could he was not allowed to do so. The advance was
used by the planters to compel him to go on cultivating indigo. Since the
enforcement of forced and fraudulent contracts through the courts was a
difficult and prolonged process, the planters resorted to a reign of terror to
coerce the peasants. Kidnapping, illegal confinement in factory godowns,
flogging, attacks on women and children, carrying off cattle, looting, burning
and demolition of houses and destruction of crops and fruit trees were some of
the methods used by the planters. They hired or maintained bands of lathyals
(armed retainers) for the purpose. In practice, the planters were also above
the law. With a few exceptions, the magistrates, mostly European, favoured the
planters with whom they dined and hunted regularly. Those few who tried to be
fair were soon transferred. Twenty-nine planters and a solitary Indian zamindar
were appointed as Honorary Magistrates in 1857, which gave birth to the popular
saying ‘je rakhak se bhakak’ (Our protector is also our devourer). The
discontent of indigo growers in Bengal boiled over in the autumn of 1859 when
their case seemed to get Government support. Misreading an official letter and
exceeding his authority, Hem Chandra Kar, Deputy Magistrate of Kalaroa,
published on 17 August a proclamation to policemen that ‘in case of disputes
relating to Indigo Ryots, they (ryots) shall retain possession of their own
lands, and shall sow on them what crops they please, and the Police will be
careful that no Indigo Planter nor anyoneelse be able to interface in the
matter.The news of Kar’s proclamation spread all over Bengal, and peasant felt
that the time for overthrowing the hated system had come. Initially, the
peasants made an attempt to get redressal through peaceful means. They sent
numerous petitions to the authorities and organized peaceful demonstrations.
Their anger exploded in September 1859 when they asserted their right not to
grow indigo under duress and resisted the physical pressure of the planters and
their lathiyals backed by the police and the courts. The beginning was made by
the ryots of Govindpur village in Nadia district when, under the leadership of
Digambar Biswas and Bishnu Biswas, ex-employees of a planter, they gave up
indigo cultivation. And when, on 13 September, the planter sent a band of 100
lathyals to attack their village, they organized a counter force armed with
lathis and spears and fought back. The peasant disturbances and indigo strikes
spread rapidly to other areas. The peasants refused to take advances and enter
into contracts, pledged not to sow indigo, and defended themselves from the
planters’ attacks with whatever weapons came to hand — spears, slings, lathis,
bows and arrows, bricks, bhel-fruit, and earthen-pots (thrown by women). The
indigo strikes and disturbances flared up again in the spring of 1860 and
encompassed all the indigo districts of Bengal. Factory after factory was
attacked by hundreds of peasants and village after village bravely defended
itself. In many cases, the efforts of the police to intervene and arrest
peasant leaders were met with an attack on policemen and police posts. The
planters then attacked with another weapon, their zamindari powers. They
threatened the rebellious ryots with eviction or enhancement of rent. The ryots
replied by going on a rent strike. They refused to pay the enhanced rents; and
they physically resisted attempts to evict them. They also gradually learnt to
use the legal machinery to enforce their rights. They joined together and
raised funds to fight court cases filed against them, and they initiated legal
action on their own against the planters. They also used the weapon of social
boycott to force a planter’s servants to leave him.Ultimately, the planters
could not withstand the united resistance of the ryots, and they gradually
began to close their factories. The cultivation of indigo was virtually wiped
out from the districts of Bengal by the end of 1860. A major reason for the
success of the Indigo Revolt was the tremendous initiative, cooperation,
organization and discipline of the ryots. Another was the complete unity among
Hindu and Muslim peasants. Leadership for the movement was provided by the more
well-off ryots and in some cases by petty zamindars, moneylenders and
ex-employees of the planters. A significant feature of the Indigo Revolt was the
role of the intelligentsia of Bengal which organized a powerful campaign in
support of the rebellious peasantry. It carried on newspaper campaigns,
organized mass meetings, prepared memoranda on peasants’ grievances and
supported them in their legal battles. Outstanding in this respect was the role
of Harish Chandra Mukherji, editor of the Hindoo Patriot. He published regular
reports from his correspondents in the rural areas on planters’ oppression,
officials’ partisanship and peasant resistance. He himself wrote with passion,
anger and deep knowledge of the problem which, he raised to a high political
plane. Revealing an insight into the historical and political significance of
the Indigo Revolt, he wrote in May 1860: Bengal might well be proud of its peasantry.
. Wanting power, wealth, political knowledge and even leadership, the peasantry
of Bengal have brought about a revolution inferior in magnitude and importance
to none that has happened in the social history of any other country . . . With
the Government against them, the law against them, the tribunals against them,
the Press against them, they have achieved a success of which the benefits will
reach all orders and the most distant generations of our countrymen.’Din Bandhu
Mitra’s play, Neel Darpan, was to gain great fame for vividly portraying the
oppression by the planters. The intelligentsia’s role in the Indigo Revolt was
to have an abiding impact on the emerging nationalist intellectuals. In their
very political childhood they had given support to a popular peasant movement
against the foreign planters. This was to establish a tradition with long run
implications for the national movement. Missionaries were another group which
extended active support to the indigo ryots in their struggle. The Government’s
response to the Revolt was rather restrained and not as harsh as in the case of
civil rebellions and tribal uprisings. It had just undergone the harrowing
experience of the Santhal uprising and the Revolt of 1857. It was also able to
see, in time, the changed temper of the peasantry and was influenced by the
support extended to the Revolt by the intelligentsia and the missionaries. It
appointed a commission to inquire into the problem of indigo cultivation.
Evidence brought before the Indigo Commission and its final report exposed the
coercion and corruptio0 underlying the entire system of indigo cultivation. The
result was the mitigation of the worst abuses of the system. The Government
issued a notification in November 1860 that ryots could not be compelled to sow
indigo and that it would ensure that all disputes were settled by legal means.
But the planters were already closing down the factories they felt that they
could not make their enterprises pay without the use of force and fraud.*Large
parts of East Bengal were engulfed by agrarian unrest during the 1870s and
early 1880s. The unrest was caused by the efforts of the zamindars to enhance
rent beyond legal limits and to prevent the tenants from acquiring occupancy
rights under Act X of 1859. This they tried to achieve through illegal coercive
methods such as forced eviction and seizure of crops and cattle as well as by
dragging the tenants into costly litigation in the courts. The peasants were no
longer in a mood to tolerate such oppression. In May 1873, an agrarian league
or combination was formed in Yusufshahi Parganah in Pabna district to resist
the demands of the zamindars. The league organized mass meetings of peasants.
Large crowds of peasants would gather and march through villages frightening
the zamindars and appealing to other peasants to join them. The league
organized a rent- strike — the ryots were to refuse to pay the enhanced rents —
and challenged the zamindars in the courts. Funds were raised from the ryots to
meet the costs. The struggle gradually spread throughout Pabna and then to the
other districts of East Bengal. Everywhere agrarian leagues were organized,
rents were withheld and zamindars fought in the courts. The main form of
struggle was that of legal resistance. There was very little violence — it only
occurred when the zamindars tried to compel the ryots to submit to their terms
by force. There were only a few cases of looting of the houses of the
zamindars. A few attacks on police stations took place and the peasants also
resisted attempts to execute court decrees. But such cases were rather rare.
Hardly any zamindar or zamindar‘s agent was killed or seriously injured. In the
course of the movement, the ryots developed a strong awareness of the law and
their legal rights and the ability to combine and form associations for
peaceful agitation. Though peasant discontent smouldered till 1885, many of the
disputes were settled partially under official pressure and persuasion and
partially out of the zamindar‘s fear that the united peasantry would drag them
into prolonged and costly litigation. Many peasants were able to acquire
occupancy rights and resist enhanced rents. The Government rose to the defence
of the zamindars wherever violence took place. Peasants were then arrested on a
large sale. But it assumed a position of neutrality as far as legal battles or
peaceful agitations were concerned. The Government also promised to undertake
legislation to protect the tenants from the worst aspects of zamindari
oppression, a promise it fulfilled however imperfectly in 1885 when the Bengal
Tenancy Act was passed. What persuaded the zamindars and the colonial regime to
reconcile themselves to the movement was the fact that its aims were limited to
the redressal of the immediate grievances of the peasants and the enforcement
of the existing legal rights and norms. It was not aimed at the zamindari
system. It also did not have at any stage an anti-colonial political edge. The
agrarian leagues kept within the bounds of law, used the legal machinery to
fight the zamindars, and raised no anti-British demands. The leaders often
argued that they were against zamindars and not the British. In fact, the
leaders raised the slogan that the peasants want ‘to be the ryots of Her
Majesty the Queen and of Her only.’ For this reason, official action was based
on the enforcement of the Indian Penal Code and it did not take the form of
armed repression as in the case of the Santhal and Munda uprisings. Once again
the Bengal peasants showed complete HinduMuslim solidarity, even though the
majority of the ryots were Muslim and the majority of zamindars Hindu. There
was also no effort to create peasant solidarity on the grounds of religion or
caste. In this case, too, a number of young Indian intellectuals supported the
peasants’ cause. These included Bankim Chandra Chatterjea and R.C. Dutt. Later,
in the early I 880s, during the discussion of the Bengal Tenancy Bill, the
Indian Association, led by Surendranath Banerjee, Anand Mohan Bose and
Dwarkanath Ganguli, campaigned for the rights of tenants, helped form ryot’
unions, and organized huge meetings of upto 20,000 peasants in the districts in
support of the Rent Bill. The Indian Association and many of the nationalist
newspapers went further than the Bill. They asked for permanent fixation of the
tenant’s rent. They warned that since the Bill would confer occupancy rights
even on non-cultivators, it would lead to the growth of middlemen — the
jotedars — who would be as oppressive as the zamindars so far as the actual
cultivators were concerned. They, therefore, demanded that the right of
occupancy should go with actual cultivation of the soil, that is, in most cases
to the under ryots and the tenants-at-will. *A major agrarian outbreak occurred
in the Poona and Ahmednagar districts of Maharashtra in 1875. Here, as part of
the Ryotwari system, land revenue was settled directly with the peasant who was
also recognized as the owner of his land. Like the peasants in other Ryotwari
areas, the Deccan peasant also found it difficult to pay land revenue without
getting into the clutches of the moneylender and increasingly losing his land.
This led to growing tension between the peasants and the moneylenders most of
whom were outsiders — Marwaris or Gujaratis. Three other developments occurred
at this time. During the early I 860s, the American Civil War had led to a rise
in cotton exports which had pushed up prices. The end of the Civil War in 1864
brought about an acute depression in cotton exports and a crash in prices. The
ground slipped from under the peasants’ feet. Simultaneously, in 1867, ‘the
Government raised land revenue by nearly 50 per cent. The situation was
worsened by a succession of bad harvests.To pay the land revenue under these
conditions, the peasants had to go to the moneylender who took the opportunity
to further tighten his grip on the peasant and his land. The peasant began to
turn against the perceived cause of his misery, the moneylender. Only a spark
was needed to kindle the fire. A spontaneous protest movement began in December
1874 in Kardab village in Sirur taluq. When the peasants of the village failed
to convince the local moneylender, Kalooram, that he should not act on a court
decree and pull down a peasant’s house, they organized a complete social
boycott of the ‘outsider’ moneylenders to compel them to accept their demands a
peaceful manner. They refused to buy from their shops. No peasant would
cultivate their fields. The bullotedars (village servants) — barbers,
washermen, carpenters, ironsmiths, shoemakers and others would not serve them.
No domestic servant would work in their houses and when the socially isolated
moneylenders decided to run away to the taluq headquarters, nobody would agree
to drive their carts. The peasants also imposed social sanctions against those
peasants and bullotedars who would not join the boycott of moneylenders. This
social boycott spread rapidly to the villages of Poona, Ahmednagar, Sholapur
and Satara districts. The social boycott was soon transformed into agrarian
riots when it did not prove very effective. On 12 May, peasants gathered in
Supa, in Bhimthari taluq, on the bazar day and began a systematic attack on the
moneylenders’ houses and shops. They seized and publicly burnt debt bonds and
deeds —signed under pressure, in ignorance, or through fraud — decrees, and
other documents dealing with their debts. Within days the disturbances spread
to other villages of the Poona and Ahmednagar districts. There was very little
violence in this settling of accounts. Once the moneylenders’ instruments of
oppression — debt bonds — were surrendered, no need for further violence was
felt. In most places, the ‘riots’ were demonstrations of popular feeling and of
the peasants’ newly acquired unity and strength. Though moneylenders’ houses
and shops were looted and burnt in Supa, this did not occur in other places.
The Government acted with speed and soon succeeded in repressing the movement.
The active phase of the movement lasted about three weeks, though stray incidents
occurred for another month or two. As in the case of the Pabna Revolt, the
Deccan disturbances had very limited objectives. There was once again an
absence of anti-colonial consciousness. It was, therefore, possible for the
colonial regime to extend them a certain protection against the moneylenders
through the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act of 1879. Once again, the modern
nationalist intelligentsia of Maharashtra supported the peasants’ cause.
Already, in 1873-74, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, led by Justice Ranade, had
organized a successful campaign among the peasants, as well as at Poona and
Bombay against the land revenue settlement of 1867. Under its impact, a large
number of peasants had refused to pay the enhanced revenue. This agitation had generated
a mentality of resistance among the peasants which contributed to the rise of
peasant protest in 1875. The Sabha as well as many of the nationalist
newspapers also supported the D.A.R. Bill. Peasant resistance also developed in
other parts of the country. Mappila outbreaks were endemic in Malabar. Vasudev
Balwant Phadke, an educated clerk, raised a Ramosi peasant force of about 50 in
Maharashtra during 1879, and organized social banditry on a significant scale.
The Kuka Revolt in Punjab was led by Baba Ram Singh and had elements of a
messianic movement. It was crushed when 49 of the rebels were blown up by a
cannon in 1872. High land revenue assessment led to a series of peasant riots
in the plains of Assam during 1893-94. Scores were killed in brutal firings and
bayonet charges. *There was a certain shift in the nature of peasant movements
after 1857. Princes, chiefs and landlords having been crushed or co-opted,
peasants emerged as the main force in agrarian movements. They now fought
directly for their own demands, centered almost wholly on economic issues, and
against their immediate enemies, foreign planters and indigenous zamindaris and
moneylenders. Their struggles were directed towards specific and limited
objectives and redressal of particular grievances. They did not make
colonialism their target. Nor was their objective the ending of the system of
their subordination and exploitation. They did not aim at turning the world
upside down.’ The territorial reach of these movements was also limited. They
were confined to particular localities with no mutual communication or
linkages. They also lacked continuity of struggle or long-term organization.
Once the specific objectives of a movement were achieved, its organization, as
also peasant solidarity built around it, dissolved and disappeared. Thus, the
Indigo strike, the Pabna agrarian leagues and the social-boycott movement of
the Deccan ryots left behind no successors. Consequently, at no stage did these
movements threaten British supremacy or even undermine it. Peasant protest
after 1857 often represented an instinctive and spontaneous response of the
peasantry to its social condition. It was the result of excessive and
unbearable oppression, undue and unusual deprivation and exploitation, and a threat
to the peasant’s existing, established position. The peasant often rebelled
only when he felt that it was not possible to carry on in the existing manner.
He was also moved by strong notions of legitimacy, of what was justifiable and
what was not. That is why he did not fight for land ownership or against
landlordism but against eviction and undue enhancement of rent. He did not
object to paying interest on the sums he had borrowed; he hit back against
fraud and chicanery by the moneylender and when the latter went against
tradition in depriving him of his land. He did not deny the state’s right to
collect a tax on land but objected when the level of taxation overstepped all
traditional bounds. He did not object to the foreign planter becoming his zamindar
but resisted the planter when he took away his freedom to decide what crops to
grow and refused to pay him a proper price for his crop. The peasant also
developed a strong awareness of his legal rights and asserted them in and
outside the courts. And if an effort was made to deprive him of his legal
rights by extra-legal means or by manipulation of the law and law courts, he
countered with extra-legal means of his own. Quite often, he believed that the
legally-constituted authority approved his actions or at least supported his
claims and cause. In all the three movements discussed here, he acted in the
name of this authority, the sarkar. In these movements, the Indian peasants
showed great courage and a spirit of sacrifice, remarkable organizational abilities,
and a solidarity that cut across religious and caste lines. They were also able
to wring considerable concessions from the colonial state. The latter, too, not
being directly challenged, was willing to compromise and mitigate the harshness
of the agrarian system though within the broad limits of the colonial economic
and political structure. In this respect, the colonial regime’s treatment of
the post-1857 peasant rebels was qualitatively different from its treatment of
the participants in the civil rebellions, the Revolt of 1857 and the tribal
uprisings which directly challenged colonial political power. A major weakness
of the 19th century peasant movements was the lack of an adequate understanding
of colonialism — of colonial economic structure and the colonial state — and of
the social framework of the movements themselves. Nor did the 19th century
peasants possess a new ideology and a new social, economic and political
programme based on an analysis of the newly constituted colonial society. Their
struggles, however militant, occurred within the framework of the old societal
order. They lacked a positive conception of an alternative society —a
conception which would unite the people in a common struggle on a wide regional
and all-India plane and help develop long-term political movements. An
all-India leadership capable of evolving a strategy of struggle that would
unify and mobilize peasants and other sections of society for nation-wide
political activity could be formed only on the basis of such a new conception,
such a fresh vision of society. In the absence of such a flew ideology,
programme, leadership and strategy of struggle, it was not to difficult for the
colonial state, on the one hand, to reach a Conciliation and calm down the
rebellious peasants by the grant of some concessions arid on the other hand, to
suppress them with the full use of its force. This weakness was, of course, not
a blemish on the character of the peasantry which was perhaps incapable of
grasping on its own the new and complex phenomenon of colonialism. That needed
the efforts of a modem intelligentsia which was itself just coming into
existence.Most of these weaknesses were overcome in the 20th century when
peasant discontent was merged with the general anti-imperialist discontent and
their political activity became a part of the wider anti-imperialist movement.
And, of course, the peasants’ participation in the larger national movement not
only strengthened the fight against the foreigner it also, simultaneously, enabled
them to organize powerful struggles around their class demands and to create
modem peasant organization.
CHAPTER 4. FOUNDATION OF THE CONGRESS: THE MYTH:
Indian National
Congress was founded in December 1885 by seventy-two political workers. It was
the first organized expression of Indian nationalism on an all-India scale.
A.O. Hume, a retired English ICS officer, played an important role in its
formation. But why was it founded by these seventy- two men and why at that
time? A powerful and long-lasting myth, the myth of ‘the safety valve,’ has
arisen around this question. Generations of students and political activists
have been fed on this myth. But despite widespread popular belief, this myth
has little basis in historical fact. The myth is that the Indian National
Congress was started by A.O. Hume and others under the official direction,
guidance and advice of no less a person than Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, to
provide a safe, mild, peaceful, and constitutional outlet or safety valve for
the rising discontent among the masses, which was inevitably leading towards a
popular and violent revolution. Consequently, the revolutionary potential was
nipped in the bud. The core of the myth, that a violent revolution was on the
cards at the time and was avoided only by the foundations of the Congress, is
accepted by most writers; the liberaIs welcome it, the radicals use it to prove
that the Congress has always been compromising if not loyalist vis-a-vis
imperialism, the extreme right use it to show that the Congress has been
anti-national from the beginning. All of them agree that the manner of its
birth affected the basic character and future work of the Congress in a crucial
manner. In his Young India published in 1916, the Extremist leader Lala Lajpat
Rai used the safety-valve theory to attack the Moderates in the Congress.
Having discussed the theory at length and suggested that the Congress ‘was a
product of Lord Dufferin’s brain,’ he argued that ‘the Congress was started
more with the object of saving the British Empire from danger than with that of
winning political liberty for India. The interests of the British Empire were
primary and those of India only secondary.’ And he added: ‘No one can say that
the Congress has not been true to that ideal.’ His conclusion was: ‘So this is
the genesis of the Congress, and this is sufficient to condemn it in the eyes
of the advanced Nationalists.” More than a quarter century later, R. Palme
Dutt’s authoritative work India Today made the myth of the safety-valve a staple
of left-wing opinion. Emphasizing the myth, Dutt wrote that the Congress was
brought into existence through direct Governmental initiative and guidance and
through ‘a plan secretly pre-arranged with the Viceroy’ so that it (the
Government) could use it ‘as an intended weapon for safeguarding British rule
against the rising forces of popular unrest and anti-British feeling.’ It was
‘an attempt to defeat, or rather forestall, an impending revolution.’ The
Congress did, of course, in time become a nationalist body; ‘the national
character began to overshadow the loyalist character.’ It also became the
vehicle of mass movements. But the ‘original sin’ of the manner of its birth
left a permanent mark on its politics. Its ‘two-fold character’ as an
institution which was created by the Government and yet became the organizer of
the anti-imperialist movement ‘ran right through its history.’ It both fought
and collaborated with imperialism. It led the mass movements and when the
masses moved towards the revolutionary path, it betrayed the movement to
imperialism. The Congress, thus, had two strands: ‘On the one hand, the strand
of cooperation with imperialism against the “menace” of the mass movement; on
the other hand, the strand of leadership of the masses in the national
struggle.’ This duality of the Congress leadership from Gokhale to Gandhi, said
Dutt, in fact reflected the two-fold and vacillating character of the Indian
bourgeoisie itself; ‘at once in conflict with the British bourgeoisie and
desiring to lead the Indian people, yet feeling that “too rapid” advance may
end in destroying its privileges along with those of the imperialists.’ The
Congress had, thus, become an organ of opposition to real revolution, that is,
a violent revolution. But this role did not date from Gandhiji; ‘this principle
was implanted in it by imperialism at the outset as its intended official
role.’ The culmination of this dual role was its ‘final capitulation with the
Mountbatten Settlement.’Earlier, in 1939, M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS chief, had
also found the safety-valve theory handy in attacking the Congress for its
secularism and, therefore, anti-nationalism. In his pamphlet We Golwalkar
complained that Hindu national consciousness had been destroyed by those
claiming to be ‘nationalists’ who had pushed the ‘notions of democracy’ and the
perverse notion that ‘our old invaders and foes’, the Muslims, had something in
common with Hindus. Consequently, ‘we have allowed our foes to be our friends
and with our hands are undermining true nationality.’ In fact, the tight in
India was not between Indians and the British only. It was ‘a triangular
fight.’ Hindus were at war with Muslims on the one hand and with the British on
the other. What had led Hindus to enter the path of ‘denationalization,’ said
Golwalkar, were the aims and policy laid down by flume, Cotton, and Wedderburn
in 1885; ‘the Congress they founded as a “safety valve” to “seething
nationalism,” as a toy which would lull the awakening giant into slumber, an
instrument to destroy National consciousness, has been, as far as they are
concerned, a success.’The liberal C.F. Andrews and Girija Mukherji fully
accepted the safety-valve theory in their work, The Rise and Growth of the
Congress in India published in 1938. They were happy with it because it had
helped avoid ‘useless bloodshed.’ Before as well as after 1947, tens of
scholars and hundreds of popular writers have repeated some version of these
points of view. *Historical proof of the safety-valve theory was provided by
the seven volumes of secret reports which flume claimed to have read at Simla
in the summer of 1878 and which convinced him of the existence of ‘seething
discontent’ and a vast conspiracy among the lower classes to violently
overthrow British rule.Before we unravel the mystery of the seven volumes, let
us briefly trace the history of its rise and growth. It was first mentioned in
William Wedderburn’s biography of A.O. flume published in 1913. Wedderburn
(ICS) found an undated memorandum in Hume’s papers which dealt with the
foundation of the Congress. He quoted at length from this document. To keep the
mystery alive so that the reader may go along with the writer step by step
towards its solution, I will withhold an account of Wedderburn’s writing,
initially giving only those paragraphs which were quoted by the subsequent
writers. According to Lajpat Rai, despite the fact that Hume was ‘a lover of
liberty and wanted political liberty for India under the aegis of the British
crown,’ he was above all ‘an English patriot.’ Once he saw that British rule
was threatened with ‘an impending calamity’ he decided to create a safety valve
for the discontent. As decisive proof of this Lajpat Rai provided a long
quotation from Hume’s memorandum that Wedderburn had mentioned along with his
own comments in his book. Since this passage is quoted or cited by all
subsequent authors, it is necessary to reproduce it here at length.“I was
shown,” wrote Hume, “several large volumes containing a vast number of entries;
English abstracts or translations longer or shorter — of vernacular reports or
communications of one kind or another, all arranged according to districts (not
identical with ours) The number of these entries was enormous; there were said,
at the time to be communications from over 30,000 different reporters.” He
(Hume) mentions that he had the volumes in his possession only for a week...
Many of the entries reported conversations between men of the lowest classes,
“all going to show that these poor men were pervaded with a sense of the
hopelessness of the existing state of affairs; that they were convinced that
they would starve and die, and that they wanted to do something, and stand by
each other, and that something meant violence. a certain small number of the
educated classes, at the time desperately, perhaps unreasonably, biller against
the Government, would join the movement assume here and there the lead, give
the outbreak cohesion, and direct it as a national revolt.”’ Very soon, the
seven volumes, whose character, origin, etc., were left undefined in Lajpat
Rai’s quotation, started undergoing a metamorphosis. In 1933, in Gurmukh Nihal
Singh’s hands, they became ‘government reports.’ Andrews and
Mukherjitransformed them into ‘several volumes of secret reports from the CID’
which came into Hume’s possession ‘in his official capacity.’ The classical and
most influential statement came from R. Palme Dutt. After quoting the passage
quoted by Lajpat Rai from Wedderburn, Dutt wrote: ‘Hume in his official
capacity had received possession of the voluminous secret police reports.”
Numerous other historians of the national movement including recent ones such
as R.C. Majumdar and Tara Chand, were to accept this product of the creative
imagination of these writers as historical fact. So deeply rooted had become
the belief in Hume’s volumes as official documents that in the 1950s a large
number of historians and would-be historians, including the present writer,
devoted a great deal of time and energy searching for them in the National Archives.
And when their search proved futile, they consoled themselves with the thought
that the British had destroyed them before their departure in 1947. Yet only if
the historians had applied a minimum of their historiographic sense to the
question and looked at the professed evidence a bit more carefully, they would
not have been taken for a ride. Three levels of historical evidence and logic
were available to them even before the private papers of Ripon and Dufferin
became available. The first level pertains to the system under which the
Government of India functioned in the 1870s. In 1878, Flume was Secretary to
the Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce. How could the Secretary of
these departments get access to Home Department files or CID reports? Also he
was then in Simla while Home Department files were kept in Delhi; they were not
sent to Simla. And from where would 30,000 reporters come? The intelligence
departments could not have employed more than a few hundred persons at the
time! And, as Lajpat Rai noted, if Congress was founded out of the fear of an
outbreak, why did Flume and British officialdom wait for seven long years? If
these volumes were not government documents, what were they? The clue was there
in Wedderburn’s book and it was easily available if a writer would go to the
book itself and not rely on extracts from it reproduced by previous authors as
nearly all the later writers seem to have done. This brings us to the second
level of historical evidence already available in Wedderburn. The passages
quoted by Lajpat Rai, R. Palme Dutt and others are on pages 80-81 of
Wedderburn’s book. Two pages earlier, pages 78-80, and one page later, 82-83,
Wedderburn tells the reader what these volumes were and who provided them to
Hume. The heading of the section where the quoted passages occur is ‘Indian
religious leaders.’ In the very beginning of the section, Wedderburn writes
that a warning of the threatened danger came to Flume ‘from a very special
source that is, from the leaders among those devoted, in all parts of India, to
a religious life.’ Hume referred in his memorandum to the legions of secret
quasi-religious orders, with literally their millions of members, which form so
important a factor in the Indian problem.” These religious sects and orders
were headed by Gurus, “men of the highest quality who . . have purged
themselves from earthly desires, and fixed their desires on the highest good.”
And “these religious leaders, through their Chelas or disciples, are hilly
informed of all that goes on under the surface, and their influence is great in
forming public opinion.” It was with these Gurus, writes Wedderburn, ‘that Mr.
Hume came in touch, towards the end of Lord Lytton’s Viceroyalty.’ These Gurus
approached Hume because Hume was a keen student of Eastern religions, but also
because they “feared that the ominous ‘unrest’ throughout the country… would
lead to terrible outbreak” and it was only men like Hume who had access to the
Government who could help ‘avert a catastrophe.’ “This,” wrote Hume, “is how
the case was put to me.” With this background the passages on pages 80-81
become clearer. In other words, the evidence of the seven volumes was shown to
Hume by the Gurus who had been sent reports by thousands of Chelas. But why should
Hume believe that these reports ‘must necessarily be true?’ Because Chelas were
persons of a special breed who did not belong to any particular sect or
religion or rather belonged to all religions. Moreover they were ‘bound by vows
and conditions, over and above those of ordinary initiates of low grade.’ They
were ‘all initiates in some of the many branches of the secret knowledge’ and
were ‘all bound by vows, they cannot practically break, to some farther
advanced seeker than themselves.’ The leaders were of ‘no sect and no religion,
but of all sects and all religions.’ But why did hardly anyone in India know of
the existence of these myriads of Gurus and Chelas? Because, explained Hume,
absolute secrecy was an essential feature in their lives. They had communicated
with Hume only because they were anxious to avert calamity. And, finally, we
come to the third level of historiography, the level of profound belief and
absolute fantasy. The full character of the Gurus and Chelas was still not
revealed by Wedderburn, for he was sheltering the reputation of his old friend,
as friendly biographers usually do. The impression given by him was that these
Gurus and Chelas were ordinary mortal men. This was, however, not the case.
Reconstructing the facts on the basis of some books of Theosophy and Madame
Blavatsky and the private papers of the Viceroys Ripon and Dufferin, we
discover that these Gurus were persons who, because of their practice of
‘peculiar Eastern religious thought,’ were supposed to possess supernatural
occult powers; they could communicate and direct from thousands of mites, enter
any place go anywhere, sit anywhere unseen, and direct men’s thoughts and
opinions without their being aware of it. *In 1881, Hume came under the spell
of Madame Blavatsky who claimed be in touch with these Gurus who were described
by her as mahatmas. These mahatmas lived as part of a secret brotherhood in
Tibet, but they could contact or ‘correspond’ with persons anywhere in the
world because of their occult powers. Blavatsky enabled Hume to get in touch
with one of these mahatmas named ‘Koot Hoomi Lal Singh.’ It is this invisible
brotherhood that gathered secret information on Indian affairs through their
Chelas. In a book published in 1880, A.P. Sinnet, editor of the Pioneer and
another follower of Blavatsky, had quoted a letter from Koot Hoomi that these
mahatmas had used their power in 1857 to control the Indian masses and saved
the British Empire and that they would do the same in future. Hume believed all
this. He was keen to acquire these occult powers by which the Chelas could know
all about the present and the future. He started a ‘correspondence’ with the
mahatmas in Tibet. By 1883 Hume had quarreled with Blavatsky, but his faith in
the Gurus or mahatmas continued unabated. He also began to use his connection
with the mahatmas to promote political objectives dear to his heart —
attempting to reform Indian administration and make it more responsive to
Indian opinion. In December 1883, he wrote to Ripon: ‘I am associated with men,
who though never seen by the masses . . . are yet reverenced by them as Gods .
. . and who feel every pulse of public feeling.’ He claimed a Superior
knowledge ‘of the native mind’ because ‘a body of men, mostly of Asiatic origin
. . . who possess facilities which no other man or body of men living do, for
gauging the feelings of the natives. . . have seen fit. . . to give me their
confidence to a certain limited extent.’ In January 1884, he informed Ripon
that even earlier, in 1848, he had been in contact with the brotherhood or
association of his mystical advisers and that it was their intervention which
had defeated the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and the ‘mutiny’ of 1857. From
distant Tibet they were now acting through him and others like him to help
Ripon introduce reforms and avoid ‘the possibility of such a cataclysm
recurring.’ This association of mahatmas was also helping him, he told Ripon,
to persuade the Queen to give a second term as Viceroy to Ripon and to
‘tranquilize the native press.Hume tried to play a similar role with Dufferin,
but more hesitatingly, not sharing with him the information that his advisers
were astral, occult figures so that even many historians have assumed that
these advisers were his fellow Congress leaders! Only once did he lift the veil
before Dufferin when the latter during 1887 angrily pressed him to reveal the
source through which he claimed to have gained access to the Viceroy’s secret
letter to the Secretary of State. Pressed to the wall, Hume told him copies of
the letter had been obtained by his friends through occult methods or ‘through
the medium of supernatural photography.’ And when Dufferin showed him the
original letter, proving that the copy was false, Hume had no answer.’Once
earlier, too, Hume had indirectly tried to tell Dufferin that his advisers were
not ordinary political leaders but ‘advanced initiates’ and mahatmas; but he
had done so in a guarded fashion. In a letter to Dufferin in November 1886, he
said that he had been trying to persuade those who had shown him the volumes in
Simla to also show them to Dufferin so that the Viceroy could get their
veracity checked by his own sources. But, at present they say that this is
impossible.’ Nor would they agree to communicate with the Viceroy directly.
‘Most of them, I believe, could not. You have not done, and would not do, what
is required to enable them to communicate with you directly after their
fashion.’ But there was hope. ‘My own special friend’ who cespent more than a
month with Hume in Simla (in 1878), and who was often in India might agree to
see the Viceroy. Hume suggested: ‘if ever a native gentleman comes to the
Private Secretary and says that Mr. Hume said the Viceroy would like to see
him, see him at once. You will not talk to him ten minutes without finding out
that he is no ordinary man. You may never get the chance — goodness knows —
they move in a mysterious way their wonders to But Hume was worried that he
could offer no visible or direct proof of his knowledge or connections. He told
the Viceroy that he was ‘getting gradually very angry and disgusted’ because he
was not able to get ‘this vouching for directly.’ None of the ‘advanced
initiates’ under whose advice and guidance’ he was working would ‘publicly
stand by me,’ so that most Europeans in India ‘look upon me either as a lunatic
or a liar.’ And hence, he informed the Viceroy, while he had decided to
continue the political work, he had decided to ‘drop all references to my
friends.” Thus, it turns out that the seven volumes which Hume saw were
prepared by mahatmas and Gurus, and his friends and advisers were these occult
figures and not Congressmen! *Further proof offered for the safety-valve theory
was based on W.C. Bannerjee’s statement in 1898 in Indian Politics that the
Congress, ‘as it was originally started and as it has since been carried on, is
in reality the work of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.’ He stated that Flume
had, in 1884, thought of bringing together leading political Indians once a
year “to discuss social matters” and did not “desire that politics should form
part of their discussion.” But Dufferin asked flume to do the opposite and
start a body to discuss politics so that the Government could keep itself
informed of Indian opinion. Such a body could also perform ‘the functions which
Her Majesty’s Opposition did in England.”Clearly, either W.C. Bannerjee’s
memory was failing or he was trying to protect the National Congress from the
wrath of the late 19th century imperialist reaction, for contemporary evidence
clearly indicated the opposite. All the discussions Hume had with Indian
leaders regarding the holding of an annual conference referred to a political
gathering. Almost the entire work of earlier associations like the Bombay
Presidency Association, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Madras Mahajan Sabha and Indian
Association was political. Since his retirement from the Indian Civil Service
in 1882, Hume had been publicly urging Indians to take to politics. He had also
been asking his Indian friends not to get divided on social questions. When, in
January 1885, his friend B.M. Malabari wrote some editorials in the Indian
Spectator urging educated Indians to inaugurate a movement for social reform,
Hume wrote a letter to the Indian Spectator criticizing Malabari’s proposals,
warning against the dangerous potential of such a move, and arguing
thatpolitical reforms should take precedence over social reform.’ Dufferin, on
his part, in his St. Andrews’ Day dinner speech in 1888, publicly criticized
the Congress for pursuing politics to serve narrow interests rather than take
to social reform which would benefit millions.’5 Earlier he had expressed the
same sentiment in a private letter to the Secretary of State. A perusal of
Dufferin’s private papers, thrown open to scholars in the late 1950s, should
have put an end to the myth of Dufferin’s sponsor of or support to the
Congress. It was only after Hume had sent him a Copy of the letter to the
Indian Spectator with a covering note deprecating Malabari’s views on social reform
that Dufferin expressed agreement with Hume and asked him to meet him. Definite
confirmation of the fact that Hume never proposed a social gathering but rather
a political one comes in Dufferin’s letter to Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay,
after his f meeting with Hume in May 1885: “At his last interview he told me
that he and his friends were going to assemble a political convention of
delegates, as far as I understood, on the lines adopted by O’Connell previous
to Catholic emancipation.”Neither Dufferin and his fellow-liberal Governors of
Bombay and Madras nor his conservative officials like Alfred and J.B. Lyall,
D.M Wallace, A. Colvin and S.C. Bayley were sympathetic to the Congress. It was
not only in 1888 that Dufferin attacked the Congress in a vicious manner by
writing that he would consider ‘in what way the happy despatch may be best
applied to the Congress,’ for ‘we cannot allow the Congress to continue to
exist.” In May 1885 itself, he had written to Reay asking him to be careful
about Hume’s Congress, telling him that it would be unwise to identify with
either the reformers or the reactionaries. Reay in turn, in a letter in June
1885, referred with apprehension to the new political activists as ‘the
National Party of India’ and warned against Indian delegates, like Irish
delegates, making their appearance on the British political scene. Earlier, in
May, Reay had cautioned Dufferin that Hume was ‘the head-centre of an
organization . . . (which) has for its object to bring native opinion into a focus.’
In fact, from the end of May 1885, Dufferin had grown cool to Hume and began to
keep him at an arm’s length. From 1886 onwards he also began to attack the
‘Bengali Baboos and Mahratta Brahmins’ for being ‘inspired by questionable
motives’ and for wanting to start Irish-type revolutionary agitations in
India.20 And, during May-June 1886. he was describing Hume as ‘cleverish, a
little cracked, excessively vain, and absolutely indifferent to truth,’ his
main fault being that he was ‘one of the chief stimulants of the Indian Home
Rule movement. Toconclude, it is high time that the safety-valve theory of the
genesis of the Congress was confined to the care of the mahatmas from whom
perhaps it originated!
CHAPTER 5. FOUNDATION OF THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS:THE
REALITY:
In the last chapter we began the story of the foundation of
the Indian National Congress. We could not, however, make much headway because
the cobwebs had to be cleared, the myth of the safety-valve had to be laid to
rest, the mystery of the ‘missing volumes’ had to be solved, and Hume’s
mahatmas had to be sent back to their resting place in Tibet. In this chapter
we resume the more serious part of the story of the emergence of the Indian
National Congress as the apex nationalist organization that was to guide the
destiny of the Indian national movement till the attainment of independence.
The foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was not a sudden event,
or a historical accident. It was the culmination of a process of political awakening
that had its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s and took a major leap forward in
the late 1870s and early 1880s. The year 1885 marked a turning point in this
process, for that was the year the political Indians, the modem intellectuals
interested in politics, who no longer saw themselves as spokesmen of narrow
group interests, but as representatives of national interest vis-a-vis foreign
rule, as a ‘national party,’ saw their efforts bear fruit. The all-India
nationalist body that they brought into being was to be the platform, the
organizer, the headquarters, the symbol of the new national spirit and
politics.British officialdom, too, was not slow in reading the new messages
that were being conveyed through the nationalist political activity leading to
the founding of the Congress, and watched them with suspicion, and a sense of
foreboding. As this political activity gathered force, the prospect of
disloyalty, sedition and Irish-type agitations began to haunt the Government.
The official suspicion was not merely the over-anxious response of an
administration that had not yet recovered from the mutiny complex, but was in
fact, well-founded. On the surface, the nationalist Indian demands of those
years — no reduction of import duties on textile import no expansion in
Afghanistan or Burma, the right to bear arms, freedom of the Press, reduction
of military expenditure, higher expenditure on famine relief, Indianization of
the civil services, the right of Indians to join the semi-military volunteer
corps, the right of Indian judges to try Europeans in criminal cases, the
appeal to British voters to vote for a party which would listen to Indians
—look rather mild, especially when considered separately. But these were
demands which a colonial regime could not easily concede, for that would
undermine its hegemony over the colonial people. It is true that any criticism
or demand no matter how innocuous its appearance but which cannot be
accommodated by a system is in the long-run subversive of the system. The new political
thrust in the years between 1875 and 1885 was the creation of the younger, more
radical nationalist intellectuals most of whom entered politics during this
period. They established new associations, having found that the older
associations were too narrowly conceived in terms of their programmes and
political activity as well as social bases. For example, the British Indian
Association of Bengal had increasingly identified itself with the interests of
the zamindars and, thus, gradually lost its anti-British edge. The Bombay
Association and Madras Native Association had become reactionary and moribund.
And so the younger nationalists of Bengal, led by Surendranath Banerjea and
Anand Mohan Bose, founded the Indian Association in 1876. Younger men of Madras
— M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramaniya Iyer, P. Ananda Charlu and others —
formed the Madras Mahajan Sabha in 1884. In Bombay, the more militant
intellectuals like K.T. Telang and Pherozeshah Mehta broke away from older
leaders like Dadabhai Framji and Dinshaw Petit on political grounds and formed
the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885. Among the older associations only
the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha carried on as before. But, then, it was already in
the hands of nationalist intellectuals. A sign of new political life in the
country was the coming into existence during these years of nearly all the
major nationalist newspapers which were to dominate the Indian scene till 1918
— The Hindu, Tribune, Bengalee, Mahraua and Kesari. The one exception was the
Amrita Bazar Patrika which was already edited by new and younger men. It became
an Englishlanguage newspaper only in 1878. By 1885, the formation of an
all-India political organization had become an objective necessity, and the
necessity was being recognized by nationalists all over the country. Many
recent scholars have furnished detailed information on the many moves that were
made in that direction from 1877. These moves acquired a greater sense of
urgency especially from 1883 and there was intense political activity. The
Indian Mirror of Calcutta was carrying on a continuous campaign on the
question. The Indian Association had already in December 1883 organized an
All-India National Conference and given a call for another one in December
1885. Surendranath Banerjea, who was involved in the All-India National
Conference, could not for that reason attend the founding session of the
National Congress in 1885). Meanwhile, the Indians had gained experience, as
well as confidence, from the large number of agitations they had organized in
the preceding ten years. Since 1875, there had been a continuous campaign
around cotton import duties which Indians wanted to stay in the interests of
the Indian textile industry. A massive campaign had been organized during 1877-88
around the demand for the lndianization of Government services. The Indians had
opposed the Afghan adventure of Lord Lytton and then compelled the British
Government to contribute towards the cost of the Second Afghan War. The Indian
Press had waged a major campaign against the efforts of the Government to
control it through the Vernacular Press Act. The Indians had also opposed the
effort to disarm them through the Arms Act. In 1881-82 they had organized a
protest against the Plantation Labour and the Inland Emigration Act which
condemned plantation labourers to serfdom. A major agitation was organized
during 1883 in favour of the Ilbert Bill which would enable Indian magistrates
to try Europeans. This Bill was successfully thwarted by the Europeans. The
Indians had been quick to draw the political lesson. Their efforts had failed
because they had not been coordinated on an all-India basis. On the other hand,
the Europeans had acted in a concerted manner. Again in July 1883 a massive
all-India effort was made to raise a National Fund which would be used to
promote political agitation in India as well as England. In 1885, Indians
fought for the right to join the volunteer corps restricted to Europeans, and
then organized an appeal to British voters to vote for those candidates who
were friendly towards India. Several Indians were sent to Britain to put the
Indian case before British voters through public speeches, and other means. *It
thus, becomes clear that the foundation of the Congress was the natural
culmination of the political work of the previous years: By 1885, a stage had
been reached in the political development of India when certain basic tasks or
objectives had to be laid down and struggled for. Moreover these objectives
were correlated and could only be fulfilled by the coming together of political
workers in a single organization formed on an all- India basis. The men who met
in Bombay on 28 December 1885 were inspired by these objectives and hoped to
initiate the process of achieving them. The success or failure and the future
character of the Congress would be determined not by who founded it but by the
extent to which these objectives were achieved in the initial years. *India had
just entered the process of becoming a nation or a people. The first major
objective of the founders of the Indian national movement was to promote this
process, to weld Indians into a nation, to create an Indian people. It was
common for colonial administrators and ideologues to assert that Indians could
not be united or freed because they were not a nation or a people but a
geographical expression, a mere congeries of hundreds of diverse races and
creeds. The Indians did not deny this but asserted that they were now becoming
a nation. India was as Tilak, Surendranath Banerjea and many others were fond
of saying — a nation-in-the-making. The Congress leaders recognized that
objective historical forces were bringing the Indian people together. But they
also realized that the people had to become subjectively aware of the objective
process and that for this it was necessarily to promote the feeling of national
unity and nationalism among them. Above all, India being a nation-in-the-making
its nationhood could not be taken for granted. It had to be constantly developed
and consolidated. The promotion of national unity was a major objective of the
Congress and later its major achievement For example, P. Ananda Charlu in his
presidential address to the Congress in 1891 described it ‘as a mighty
nationalizer’ and said that this was its most ‘glorious’ role.’ Among the three
basic aims and objectives of the Congress laid down by its first President,
W.C. Bannerji, was that of ‘the fuller development and Foundation of the Indian
National Congress: The Reality consolidation of those sentiments of national
unity.’ The Russian traveller, I.P. Minayeff wrote in his diary that, when
travelling with Bonnerji, he asked, ‘what practical results did the Congress
leaders expect from the Congress,’ Bonnerji replied: ‘Growth of national feeling
and unity of Indians.’ Similai.ly commenting on the first Congress session, the
Indu Prakash of Bombay wrote: ‘It was the beginning of a new life . . . it will
greatly help in creating a national feeling and binding together distant people
by common sympathy and common ends.’The making of India into a nation was to be
a prolonged historical process. Moreover, the Congress leaders realized that
the diversity of India was such that special efforts unknown to other parts of
the world would have to be made and national unity carefully nurtured. In an
effort to reach all regions, it was decided to rotate the Congress session
among different parts of the country. The President was to belong to a region
other than where the Congress session was being held. To reach out to the
followers of all religions and to remove the fears of the minorities a rule was
made at the 1888 session that no resolution was to be passed to which an
overwhelming majority of Hindu or Muslim delegates objected. In 1889, a
minority clause was adopted in the resolution demanding reformof legislative
councils. According to the clause, wherever Parsis, Christians, Muslims or
Hindus were a minority their number elected to the Councils would not be less
than their proportion in the Population. The reason given by the mover of the
resolution was that India was not yet a homogenous country and political
methods here had, therefore, to differ from those in Europe. The early national
leaders were also determined to build a secular nation, the Congress itself
being intensely secular. *The second major objective of the early Congress was
to create a common political platform or programme around which political
workers in different parts of the country could gather and Conduct their
political activities, educating and mobilizing people on an all-India basis.
This was to be accomplished by taking up those grievances and fighting for
those rights which Indians had in common in relation to the rulers. For the
same reason the Congress was not to take up questions of social reform. At its
second session, the President of the Congress, Dadabhai Naoroji, laid down this
rule and said that ‘A National Congress must confine itself to questions in
which the entire nation has a direct participation.’ Congress was, therefore,not
the right place to discuss social reforms. ‘We are met together,’ he said, ‘as
a political body to represent to our rulers our political aspirations.’Modern
politics — the politics of popular participation, agitation mobilization — was
new to India. The notion that politics was not the preserve of the few but the
domain of everyone was not yet familiar to the people. No modern political
movement was possible till people realized this. And, then, on the basis of
this realization, an informed and determined political opinion had to be
created. The arousal, training, organization and consolidation of public
opinion was seen as a major task by the Congress leaders. All initial activity
of the early nationalism was geared towards this end. The first step was seen
to be the politicization and unification of the opinion of the educated, and
then of other sections. The primary objective was to go beyond the redressal of
immediate grievances and organize sustained political activity along the lines
of the Anti-Corn Law League (formed in Britain by Cobden and Bright in 1838 to
secure reform of Corn Laws). The leaders as well as the people also had to gain
confidence in their own capacity to organize political opposition to the most
powerful state of the day. All this was no easy task. A prolonged period of
politicization would be needed. Many later writers and critics have
concentrated on the methods of political struggle of the early nationalist
leaders, on their petitions, prayers and memorials. It is, of course, true that
they did not organize mass movements and mass struggles. But the critics have
missed out the most important part of their activity — that all of it led to
politics, to the politicization of the people. Justice Ranade, who was known as
a political sage, had, in his usual perceptive manner, seen this as early as
1891 When the young and impatient twenty-six-year-old Gokhale expressed
disappointment when the Government sent a two line reply to a carefully and
laboriously prepared memorial by the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Ranade reassured
him: ‘You don’t realize our place in the history of our country. These
memorials are nominally addressed to Government, in reality they are addressed
to the people, so that they may learn how to think in these matters. This work
must be done for many years, without expecting any other result, because
politics of this kind is altogether new in this land.” *As part of the basic
objective of giving birth to a national movement, it was necessary to create a
common all-India national-political leadership, that is, to construct what
Antonio Gramsci, the famous Italian Marxist, calls the headquarters of a
movement. Nations and people become capable of meaningful and effective
political action only when they are organized. They become a people or
‘historical subjects’ only when they are organized as such. The first step in a
national movement is taken when the ‘carriers’ of national feeling or national
identity begin to organize the people. But to be able to do so successfully,
these ‘carriers’ or leaders must themselves be unified; they must share a
collective identification, that is, they must come to know each other and share
and evolve a common outlook, perspective, sense of purpose, as also common
feelings. According to the circular which, in March 1885, informed political
workers of the coming Congress session, the Congress was intended ‘to enable
all the most earnest labourers in the cause of national progress to become
personally known to each other.’9 W.C. Bonnerji, as the first Congress
President, reiterated that one of the Congress objectives was the ‘eradication,
by direct friendly personal intercourse, of all possible race, creed, or
provincial prejudices amongst all lovers of our country,’ and ‘the promotion of
personal intimacy and friendship amongst all the more earnest workers in our
country’s cause in (all) parts of the Empire.”In other words, the founders of
the Congress understood that the first requirement of a national movement was a
national leadership. The social- ideological complexion that this leadership
would acquire was a question that was different from the main objective of the
creation of a national movement. This complexion would depend on a host of
factors: the role of different social classes, ideological influences, outcomes
of ideological struggles, and so on. The early nationalist leaders saw the
internalization and indigenization of political democracy as one of their main
objectives. They based their politics on the doctrine of the sovereignty of the
people, or, as Dadabhai Naoroji put it, on ‘the new lesson that Kings are made
for the people, not peoples for their Kings.’ From the beginning, the Congress
was organized in the form of a Parliament. In fact, the word Congress was
borrowed fromNorth American history to connote an assembly of the’ people. The
proceedings of the Congress sessions were conducted democratically, issues
being decided through debate and discussion and occasionally through voting. It
was, in fact, the Congress, and not the bureaucratic and authoritarian colonial
state, as some writers wrongly argue, which indigenized, popularized and rooted
parliamentary democracy in India. Similarly, the early national leaders made
maintenance of civil liberties and their extension an integral part of the
national movement. They fought against every infringement of the freedom of the
Press and speech and opposed every attempt to curtail them. They struggled for
separation of the judicial and executive powers and fought against racial discrimination.
It was necessary to evolve an understanding of colonialism and then a
nationalist ideology based on this understanding. In this respect, the early
nationalist leaders were simultaneously learners and teachers. No ready- made
anti-colonial understanding or ideology was available to them in the 1870s and
1880s. They had to develop their own anti-colonial ideology on the basis of a
concrete study of the reality and of their own practice. There could have been
no national struggle without anideological struggle clarifying the concept of
we as a nation against colonialism as an enemy They had to find answers to many
questions. For example, is Britain ruling India for India’s benefit? Are the
interests of the rulers and the ruled in harmony, or does a basic contradiction
exist between the two? Is the contradiction of the Indian people with British
bureaucrats in India, or with the British Government, or with the system of
colonialism as such? Are the Indian people capable of fighting the mighty British
empire? And how is the fight to be waged? In finding answers to these and other
questions many mistakes were made. For example, the early nationalists failed
to understand, at least till the beginning of the 20th century, the character
of the colonial state. But, then, some mistakes are an inevitable part of any
serious effort to grapple with reality. In a way, despite mistakes and
setbacks, it was perhaps no misfortune that no ready-made, cut and dried,
symmetrical formulae were available to them. Such formulae are often lifeless
and, therefore, poor guides to action. True, the early national leaders did not
organize mass movements against the British. But they did carry out an
ideological struggle against them. It should not be forgotten that nationalist
or anti-imperialist struggle is a struggle about colonialism before it becomes
a struggle against colonialism. And the founding fathers of the Congress
carried out this ‘struggle about colonialism’ in a brilliant fashion. From the
beginning, the Congress was conceived not as a party but as a movement. Except
for agreement on the very broad objectives discussed earlier, it did not
require any particular political or ideological commitment from its activists.
It also did not try to limit its following to any social class or group. As a
movement, it incorporated different political trends, ideologies and social
classes and groups so long as the commitment to democratic and secular
nationalism was there. From the outset, the Congress included in the ranks of its
leadership persons with diverse political thinking, widely disparate levels of
political militancy and varying economic approaches. To sum up: The basic
objectives of the early nationalist leaders were to lay the foundations of a
secular and democratic national movement, to politicize and politically educate
the people, to form the headquarters of the movement, that is, to form an
all-India leadership group, and to develop and propagate an anti-colonial
nationalist ideology. History will judge the extent of the success or failure
of the early national movement not by an abstract, ahistorical standard but by
the extent to which it was able to attain the basic objectives it had laid down
for itself. By this standard, its achievements were quite substantial and that
is why it grew from humble beginnings in the 1880s into the most spectacular of
popular mass movements in the 20th century. Historians are not likely to
disagree with the assessment of its work in the early phase by two of its major
leaders. Referring to the preparatory nature of the Congress work from 1885 to
1905, Dadabhai Naoroji wrote to D.E. Wacha in January 1905: ‘The very
discontent and impatience it (the Congress) has evoked against itself as slow
and non-progressive among the rising generation are among its best results or
fruit. It is its own evolution and progress….(the task is) to evolve the
required revolution — whether it would be peaceful or violent. The character of
the revolution will depend upon the wisdom or unwisdom of the British
Government and action of the British people.’And this is how G.K. Gokhale
evaluated this period in 1907: ‘Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the
country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our
disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased
Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended
when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be
given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their
successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly
by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength
will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.”*As for the question of
the role of A.O. Hume, if the founders of the Congress were such capable and
patriotic men of high character, why did they need Hume to act as the chief
organizerof the Congress? It is undoubtedly true that Hume impressed —and,
quite rightly — all his liberal and democratic contemporaries, including Lajpat
Rai, as a man of high ideals with whom it was no dishonor to cooperate. But the
real answer lies in the conditions of the time. Considering the size of the
Indian subcontinent, there were very few political persons in the early 1 880s
and the tradition of open opposition to the rulers was not yet firmly
entrenched. Courageous and committed persons like Dadabhai Naoroji, Justice
Ranade, Pherozeshah Mehta, G. Subramaniya Iyer and Surendranath Banerjea (one
year later) cooperated with Hume because they did not want to arouse official
hostility at such an early stage of their work. They assumed that the rulers
would be less suspicious and less likely to attack a potentially subversive
organization if its chief organizer was a retired British civil servant.
Gokhale, with his characteristic modesty and political wisdom, gazed this
explicitly in 1913: ‘No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress.
.. if an Indian had. . . come forward to start such a movement embracing all
India, the officials in India would not have allowed the movement to come into
existence. If the founder of the congress had not been a great Englishman and a
distinguished ex-official, such was the distrust of political agitation in those
days that the authorities would have at once found some way or the other to
suppress the movement. In other words, if Hume and other English liberals hoped
to use the Congress as a safety-valve, the Congress leaders hoped to use Hume
as a lightning conductor. And as later developments show, it was the Congress
leaders whose hopes were fulfilled. CHAPTER 6. SOCIO-RELIGIOUS REFORMS AND
THENATIONAL AWAKENING:
‘I regret to say,’ wrote Raja Rammohan Roy in 1828, ‘that
the present system of religion adhered to by the Hindus is not well calculated
to promote their political interest. The distinctions of castes introducing
innumerable divisions and sub-divisions among them has entirely deprived them
of patriotic feeling, and the multitude of religious rites and ceremonies and
the laws of purification have totally disqualified them from undertaking any
difficult enterprise. It is, I think, necessary that some change should take
place in their religion at least for the sake of their political advantage and
social comfort.” Written at a time when Indians had just begun to experience
the ‘intellectual and cultural turmoil that characterized social life in
nineteenth century India this represented the immediate Indian response. The
British conquest and the consequent dissemination of colonial culture and
ideology had led to an inevitable introspection about the strengths and
weaknesses of indigenous culture and institutions. The response, indeed, was
varied but the need to reform social and religious life was a commonly shared
conviction. The social base of this quest which has generally, but not
altogether appropriately been called the renaissance, was the newly emerging
middle class and the traditional as well as western educated intellectuals. The
sociocultural regeneration in nineteenth century India was occasioned by the
colonial presence, but not created by it. The spirit of reform embraced almost
the whole of India beginning with the efforts of Raja Rammohan Roy in Bengal
leading to the formation of the Brahmo Samaj in 1828. Apart from the Brahmo
Samaj, which has branches in several parts of the country, the Paramahansa
Mandali and the Prarthana Samaj in Maharashtra and the Arya Samaj in Punjab and
North India were some of the prominent movements among the Hindus. There were
several other regional and caste movements like the Kayasth Sabha in Uttar
Pradesh and the Sarin Sabba in Punjab. The backward castes also started the
work of reformation with the Satya Sodhak Samaj in Maharashtra and the Sri
Narayana Dharma Paripalana Sabha in Kerala. The Ahmadiya and Aligarh movements,
the Singh Sabha and the Rehnumai Mazdeyasan Sabha represented the spirit of
reform among the Muslims, the Sikhs and the Parsees respectively. Despite being
regional in scope and content and confined to a particular religion, their
general perspectives were remarkably similar; they were regional and religious
manifestations of a common Consciousness. Although religious reformation ‘was a
major concern of these movements, none of them were exclusively religious in
character. Strongly humanist in inspiration, the idea of otherworldliness and
salvation were not a part of their agenda; instead their attention was focused
on worldly existence. Raja Rammohan Roy was prepared to concede the possible
existence of the other world mainly due to its utilitarian value. Akshay Kumar
Dutt and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar were agnostics who refused to be drawn into
any discussion on supernatural questions. Asked about the existence of God,
Vidyasagar quipped that he had no time to think about God, since there was much
to be done on earth. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Vivekananda emphasized the
secular use of religion and used spirituality to take cognizance of the
material conditions of human existence. Given the inter-connection between
religious beliefs and social practices, religious reformation was a necessary
prerequisite for social reform. ‘The Hindu meets his religion at every turn. In
eating, in drinking, moving, sitting, standing, he is to adhere to sacred
rules, to depart from which is sin and impiety.’ Similarly, the social life of
the Muslims was strongly influenced by religious tenets. Religion was the
dominant ideology of the times and it was not possible to undertake any social
action without coming to grips with it. *Indian society in the nineteenth
century was caught in a vicious web created by religious superstitions and
social obscurantism. Hinduism, asMax Weber observed, had ‘become a compound of
magic, animism and superstition’ and abominable rites like animal sacrifice and
physical torture had replaced the worship of God. The priests exercised an
overwhelming and, indeed, unhealthy influence on the minds of the people.
Idolatry and polytheism helped to reinforce their Position. As suggested by
Raja Rammohan Roy, their monopoly of scriptural knowledge and of ritual
interpretation imparted a deceptive character to all religious systems. The
faithful lived in submission, not only toGod, the powerful and unseen, but even
to the whims, fancies and wishes of the priests. There was nothing that
religious ideology could not persuade people to do — women even went to the
extent of offering themselves to priests to satisfy their carnal pleasures.
Social conditions were equally depressing. The most distressing was the
position of women. The birth of a girl was unwelcome, her marriage a burden and
her widowhood inauspicious. Attempts to kill girl infants at birth were not
unusual. Those who escaped this initial brutality were subjected to the
violence of marriage at a tender age. Often the marriage was a device to escape
social ignominy and, hence, marital life did not turn out to be a pleasant
experience. An eighty-year-old Brahmin in Bengal had as many as two hundred
wives, the youngest being just eight years old. Several women hardly had a
married life worth the name, since their husbands participated in nuptial
ceremonies for a consideration and rarely set eyes on their wives after that.
Yet when their husbands died they were expected to commit Sati which Rammohan described
as ‘murder according to every shasfra.’ If they succeeded in overcoming this
social coercion, they were condemned, as widows, to life-long misery, neglect
and humiliation. Another debilitating factor was caste; it sought to maintain a
system of segregation, hierarchically ordained on the basis of ritual status.
The rules and regulations of caste hampered social mobility, fostered social
divisions and sapped individual initiative. Above all was the humiliation of
untouchability which militated against human dignity. There were innumerable
other practices marked by constraint, credulity, status, authority, bigotry and
blind fatalism. Rejecting them as features of a decadent society, the reform
movements sought to create a social climate for modernization. In doing so,
they referred to a golden past when no such malaise existed. The nineteenth
century situation was the result of an accretionary process; a distortion of a
once ideal past. The reformers’ vision of the future, however, was not based on
this idealization. It was only an aid and an instrument —since practices based
on faith cannot be challenged without bringing faith itself into question.
Hence, Raja Rammohan Roy, demonstrated that sati had no religious sanction,
Vidyasagar did not ‘take up his pen in defence of widow marriage’ without being
convinced about Scriptural support and Dayanand based his anti-casteism on
Vedic authority. This, however, did not mean a subjection of the present to the
past nor a blind resurrection of tradition ‘The dead and the buried,’
maintained Mahadev Govind Ranade, the doyen of reformers in Maharashtra, ‘are
dead, buried, and burnt once for all and the dead past cannot, therefore, be
revived except by a reformation of the old materials into new organized forms.’
Neither a revival of the past nor a total break with tradition was
contemplated. *Two important intellectual criteria which informed the reform
movements were rationalism and religious universalism. Social relevance was
judged by a rationalist critique. It is difficult to match the uncompromising
rationalism of the early Raja Rammohan Roy or Akshay Kumar Dutt. Rejecting
supernatural explanations, Raja Rammohan Roy affirmed the principle of
causality linking the whole phenomenal universe. To him demonstrability was the
sole criterion of truth. In proclaiming that rationalism is our only
preceptor,’ Akshay Kumar went a step further. All natural and social phenomena,
he held, could be analyzed and understood by purely mechanical processes. This
perspective not only enabled them to adopt a rational approach to tradition but
also to evaluate the contemporary socio-religious practices from the standpoint
of social utility and to replace faith with rationality. In the Brahmo Samaj,
it led to the repudiation of the infallibility of the Vedas, and in the Aligarh
Movement, to the reconciliation of the teachings of Islam with the needs of the
modern age. Holding that religious tenets were not immutable, Syed Ahmed Khan
emphasized the role of religion in the progress of society: if religion did not
keep pace with and meet the demands of the time. It would get fossilized as in
the case of Islam in India. The perspectives on reform were not always
influenced by religious Considerations A rational and secular outlook was very much
evident in Posing an alternative to prevalent social practices. In advocating
widow marriage and opposing polygamy and child marriage, Akshay Kumar was not
concerned about religious sanction or whether they existed in the pa His
arguments were mainly based on their effects of Society. Instead of depending
on the scriptures, he cited medical Opinion against Child marriage. He held
very advanced ideas about marriage and family: courtship before marriage,
partnership and equality as the basis of married life and divorce by both law
and custom. In Maharashtra, as compared to other regions, there was less
dependence on religion as an aid to social reform. To Gopal Han Deshmukh,
popularly known as Lokahitavadi whether social reforms had the sanction of
religion was immaterial. If religion did not sanction these, he advocated that
religion itself should be changed as it was made by man and what was laid down,
in the scriptures need not necessarily be of contemporary relevance. Although
the ambit of reforms was particularistic, their religious perspective was
universalistic. Raja Rammohan Roy considered different religions as national
embodiments of universal theism. The Brahmo Samaj was initially conceived by
him as a universalist church. He was a defender of the basic and universal
principles of all religions — the monotheism of the Vedas and the Unitarianism
of Christianity — and at the same time attacked polytheism of Hinduism and the
trinitarianism of Christianity. Syed Ahmed Khan echoed the same idea: all prophets
had the same din (faith) and every country and nation had different prophets.
This perspective found clearer articulation in Keshub Chandra Sen’s ideas. He
said ‘our position is not that truths are to be found in all religions, but all
established religions of the world are true.’ He also gave expression to the
social implications of this universalist perspective: ‘Whoever worships the
True God daily must learn to recognize all his fellowcountrymen as brethren.
Caste would vanish in such a state of society. If I believe that my God is one,
and that he has created us all, I must at the same time instinctively, and with
all the warmth of natural feelings, look upon all around me — whether Parsees,
Hindus, Mohammadans or Europeans — as my brethern.’The universalist perspective
was not a purely philosophic concern; it strongly influenced the political and
social outlook of the time, till religious particularism gained ground in the
second half of the nineteenth century. For instance, Raja Rammohan Roy considered
Muslim lawyers to be more honest than their Hindu counterparts and Vidyasagar
did not discriminate against Muslims in his humanitarian activities. Even to
Bankim, who is credited with a Hindu outlook, dharma rather than religious
belonging was the criterion for determining superiority. Yet, ‘Muslim yoke’ and
‘Muslim tyranny’ were epithets often used to describe the pre-colonial rule.
This, however, was not a religious but a political attitude, influenced by the
arbitrary character of pre-colonial political institutions. The emphasis was
not on the word ‘Muslim’ but on the word ‘tyranny.’ This is amply clear from
Syed Ahmed Khan’s description of the pre-colonial system: ‘The rule of the
former emperors and rajas was neither in accordance with the Hindu nor the
Mohammadan religion. It was based upon nothing but tyranny and oppression; the
law of might was that of right; the voice of the people was not listened to’.
The yardstick obviously was not religious identity, but liberal and democratic
principles. This, however, does not imply that religious identity did not
influence the social outlook of the people; in fact, it did very strongly. The
reformers’ emphasis on universalism was an attempt to contend with it. However,
faced with the challenge of colonial culture and ideology, universalism,
instead of providing the basis for the development of a secular ethos,
retreated into religious particularism. *The nineteenth century witnessed a
cultural-ideological struggle against the backward elements of traditional
culture, on the one hand, and the fast hegemonizing colonial culture and
ideology on the other. The initial refonning efforts represented the former. In
the religious sphere they sought to remove idolatry, polytheism and priestly
monopoly of religious knowledge and to simplify religious rituals. They were
important not for purely religious reasons but equally for their social
implications. They contributed to the liberation of the individual from
conformity born out of fear and from uncritical submission to the exploitation
of the priests. The dissemination of religious knowledge through translation of
religious texts into vernacular languages and the right granted to the laity to
interpret scriptures represented an important initial breach in the stranglehold
of misinterpreted religious dogmas. The simplification of rituals made worship
a more intensely personal experience without the mediation of intermediaries.
Theindividual was, thus, encouraged to exercise his freedom. The socially
debilitating influence of the caste system which perpetuated social
distinctions was universally recognized as an area which called for urgent
reform. It was morally and ethically abhorrent, more importantly, it militated
against patriotic feelings and negated the growth of democratic ideas. Raja
Rammohan Roy initiated, in ideas but not in practice, the opposition which
became loud and clear as the century progressed. Ranade, Dayanand and
Vivekananda denounced the existing system of caste in no uncertain terms. While
the reform movements generally stood for its abolition, Dayanand gave a utopian
explanation for chaturvarna (four-fold varna division of Hindu society) and
sought to maintain it on the basis of virtue. ‘He deserves to be a Brahman who
has acquired the best knowledge and character, and an ignorant person is fit to
be classed as a shudra,’ he argued. Understandably the most virulent opposition
to caste came from lower caste movements. Jyotiba Phule and Narayana Guru were
two unrelenting critics of the caste system and its consequences. A
conversation between Gandhiji and Narayana Guru is significant. Gandhiji, in an
obvious reference to Chaturvarna and the inherent differences in quality
between man and man, observed that all leaves of the same tree are not identical
in shape and texture. To this Narayana Guru pointed out that the difference is
only superficial, but not in essence: the juice of all leaves of a particular
tree would be the same in content. It was he who gave the call — ‘one religion,
one caste and one God for mankind’ which one of his disciples, Sahadaran
Ayyapan, changed into ‘no religion, no caste and no God for mankind.’ The
campaign for the improvement of the condition and status of women was not a
purely humanitarian measure either. No reform could be really effective without
changes in the domestic conditions, the social space in which the initial
socialization of the individual took place. A crucial role in this process was
played by women. Therefore, there could be no reformed men and reformed homes
without reformed women. Viewed from the standpoint of women, it was, indeed, a
limited perspective. Nevertheless it was realized that no country could ever
make ‘significant progress in civilization whose females were sunk in
ignorance.’ If the reform movements had totally rejected tradition, Indian
society would have easily undergone a process of westernization. But the
reformers were aiming at modernizationrather than westernization. A blind
initiation of western cultural norms was never an integral part of reform. To
initiate and undertake these reforms which today appear to be modest, weak and
limited was not an easy proposition. It brought about unprecedented mental
agony and untold domestic and social tension. Breaking the bonds of tradition
created emotional and sentimental crises for men and women caught between two
worlds. The first widow marriage in Bengal attracted thousands of curious
spectators. To the first such couple in Maharashtra the police had to give
lathis to protect themselves! Rukmabhai, who refused to accept her uneducated
and unaccomplished husband, virtually unleashed a storm. Faced with the
prospect of marrying a young girl much against his conviction, Ranade spent
several sleepless nights. So did Lokahitavadi, Telang and a host of others who
were torn between traditional sentiments and modern commitments. Several
however succumbed to the former, but it was out of this struggle that the new
men and the new society evolved in India. *Faced with the challenge of the
intrusion of colonial culture and ideology, an attempt to reinvigorate
traditional institutions and to realize the potential of traditional culture
developed during the nineteenth century. The initial expression of the struggle
against colonial domination manifested itself in the realm of culture as a
result of the fact that the principles on which the colonial state functioned
were not more retrogressive than those of the pre-colonial state. All
intrusions into the cultural realm were more intensely felt. Therefore, a defence
of indigenous culture developed almost simultaneously with the colonial
conquest. This concern embraced the entire cultural existence, the way of life
and all signifying practices like language, religion, art and philosophy. Two
features characterized this concern; the creation of an alternate
cultural-ideological system and the regeneration of traditional institutions.
The cultivation of vernacular languages, the creation of an alternate system of
education, the efforts to regenerate Indian art and literature, the emphasis on
Indian dress and food, the defence of religion and the attempts to revitalize
the Indian system of medicine, the attempt to probe the potentialities of
pre-colonial technology and to reconstruct traditional knowledge were some of the
expressions of this concern. The early inklings of this can be discerned in
Raja Rammohan Roy’s debates with the Christian missionaries, in the formation
and activities of Tattvabodhini Sabha, in the memorial on education signed by
70,000 inhabitants of Madras and in the general resentment against the Lex Loci
Act (the Act proposed in 1845 and passed in 1850 provided the right to inherit
ancestral property to Hindu converts to Christianity). A more definite
articulation, however, was in the ideas and activities of later movements
generally characterized as conservative and revivalist. Strongly native in
tendency, they were clearly influenced by the need to defend indigenous culture
against colonial cultural hegemony. In this specific historical sense, they
were not necessarily retrogressive, for underlying these efforts was the
concern with the revival of the cultural personality, distorted, if not
destroyed, by colonial domination. More so because it formed an integral
element in the formation of national consciousness. Some of these tendencies
however, were not able to transcend the limits of historical necessity and led
to a sectarian and obscurantist outlook. This was possibly a consequence of the
lack of integration between the cultural and political struggles, resulting in
cultural backwardness, despite political advance. The cultural-ideological
struggle, represented by the socioreligious movements, was an integral part of
the evolving national consciousness. This was so because it was instrumental in
bringing about the initial intellectual and cultural break which made a new
vision of the future possible. Second, it was a part of the resistance against
colonial cultural and ideological hegemony. Out of this dual struggle evolved
the modern cultural situation: new men, new homes and a new society. CHAPTER 7. AN ECONOMIC CRITIQUE OF COLONIALISM:
Of all the national movements in colonial countries, the
Indian national movement was the most deeply and firmly rooted in an
understanding of the nature and character of colonial economic domination and
exploitation. Its early leaders, known as Moderates, were the first in the 19th
century to develop an economic critique of colonialism. This critique was,
also, perhaps their most important contribution to the development of the
national movement in India — and the themes built around it were later
popularized on a massive scale and formed the very pith and marrow of the
nationalist agitation through popular lectures, pamphlets, newspapers, dramas,
songs, and prabhat pheries. Indian intellectuals of the first half of the 19th
century had adopted a positive attitude towards British rule in the hope that
Britain, the most advanced nation of the time, would help modernize India. In
the economic realm, Britain, the emerging industrial giant of the world, was
expected to develop India’s productive forces through the introduction of
modern sciences and technology and capitalist economic organization. It is not
that the early Indian nationalists were unaware of the many political,
psychological and economic disabilities of foreign domination, but they still
supported colonial rule as they expected it to rebuild India as a spit image of
the Western metropolis. The process of disillusionment set in gradually after
1860 as the reality of social development in India failed to conform to their
hopes. They began to notice that while progress in new directions was slow and
halting; overall the country was regressing and underdeveloping. Gradually,
their image of British rule began to take on darker hues; and they began to
probe deeper into the reality of British rule and its impact on India. Three
names stand out among the large number of Indians who initiated and carried out
the economic analysis of Britishrule during the years 1870-1905. The tallest of
the three was Dadabhai Naoroji, known in the pre-Gandhian era as the Grand Old
Man of India. Born in 1825, he became a successful businessman but devoted his
entire life and wealth to the creation of a national movement in India. His
near contemporaryJustice Mahadev Govind Ranade, taught an entire generation of
Indians the value of modem industrial development. Romesh Chandra Dutt, a
retired ICS officer, published The Economic History of India at the beginning
of the 20th century in which he examined in minute detail the entire economic
record of colonial rule since 1757. These three leaders along with G.V. Joshi,
G. Subramaniya lyer, G.K. Gokhale, Prithwis Chandra Ray and hundreds of other
political workers and journalists analysed every aspect of the economy and
subjected the entire range of economic issues and colonial economic policies to
minute scrutiny. They raised basic questions regarding the nature and purpose
of British rule. Eventually, they were able to trace the process of the
colonialization of the Indian economy and conclude that colonialism was the
main obstacle to India’s economic development.They clearly understood the fact
that the essence of British imperialism lay in the subordination of the Indian
economy to the British economy. They delineated the colonial structure in all
its three aspects of domination through trade, industry and finance. They were
able to see that colonialism no longer functioned through the crude tools of
plunder and tribute and mercantilisin but operated through the more disguised
and complex mechanism of free trade and foreign capital investment. The essence
of 19th century colonialism, they said, lay in the transformation of India into
a supplier of food stuffs and raw materials to the metropolis, a market for the
metropolitan manufacturers, and a field for the investment of British capital.
The early Indian national leaders were simultaneously learners and teachers.
They organized powerful intellectual agitations against nearly all the important
official economic policies. They used these agitations to both understand and
to explain to others the basis of these policies in the colonial structure.
They advocated the severance of India’s economic subservience to Britain in
every sphere of life and agitated for an alternative path of development which
would lead to an independent economy. An important feature of this agitation
was the use of bold, hard- hitting and colourful language. *The nationalist
economic agitation started with the assertion that Indians were poor and were
growing poorer every day. Dadabhai Naoroji made poverty his special subject and
spent his entire life awakening the Indian and British public to the
‘continuous impoverishment and exhaustion of the country’ and ‘the wretched,
heart-rending, blood-boiling condition of India.’ Day after day he declaimed
from public platforms and in the Press that the Indian ‘is starving, he is
dying off at the slightest touch, living on insufficient food.” The early
nationalists did not see this all-encompassing poverty as inherent and
unavoidable, a visitation from God or nature. It was seen as man-made and,
therefore, capable of being explained and removed. As R.C. Dutt put it: ‘If
India is poor today, it is through the operation of economic causes.’ In the
course of their search for the causes of India’s poverty, the nationalists
underlined factors and forces which had been brought into play by the colonial
rulers and the colonial structure. The problem of poverty was, moreover, seen
as the problem of increasing of the ‘productive capacity and energy’ of the
people, in other words as the problem of national development. This approach
made poverty a broad national issue and helped to unite, instead of divide,
different regions and sections of Indian society.Economic development was seen
above all as the rapid development of modern industry. The early nationalists
accepted with remarkable unanimity that the complete economic transformation of
the country on the basis of modem technology and capitalist enterprise was the
primary goal of all their economic policies. Industrialism, it was further
believed, represented, to quote G.V. Joshi, ‘a superior type and a higher stage
of civilization;’ or, in the words of Ranade, factories could ‘far more effectively
than Schools and Colleges give a new birth to the activities of the Nation.’
Modem industry was also seen as a major force which could help unite the
diverse peoples of India into a single national entity having common interests.
Surendranath Banerjea’s newspaper the Bengalee made the point on 18 January
1902: ‘The agitation for political rights may bind the various nationalities of
India together for a time. The community of interests may cease when these
rights are achieved. But the commercial union of the various Indian
nationalities, once established, will never cease to exist. Commercial and
industrial activity is, therefore, a bond of very strong union and is,
therefore, a mighty factor in the formation of a great Indian union.’
Consequently, because of their whole-hearted devotion to the cause of
industrialization, the early nationalists looked upon all other issues such as
foreign trade, railways, tariffs, currency and exchange, finance, and labour
legislation in relation to this paramount aspect. *At the same time, nearly all
the early nationalists were clear on one question: However great the need of
India for industrialization, it had to be based on Indian capital and not
foreign capital. Ever since the1840s, British economists, statesman and officials
had seen the investment of foreign capital, along with law and order, as the
major instrument for the development of India. John Stuart Mill and Alfred
Marshall had put forward this view in their economic treatises. In 1899, Lord
Curzon, the Viceroy, said that foreign capital was ‘a sine qua non to the
national advancement’ of India.The early nationalists disagreed vehemently with
this view. They saw foreign capital as an unmitigated evil which did not
develop a country but exploited and impoverished it. Or, as Dadabhai Naoroji
popularly put it, foreign capital represented the ‘despoilation’ and
‘exploitation’ of Indian resources. Similarly, the editor of the Hindustan
Review and Kayastha Samachar described the use of foreign capital as ‘a system
of international depradation. ‘They further argued that instead of encouraging
and augmenting Indian capital foreign capital replaced and suppressed it, led
to the drain of capital from India and further strengthened the British hold
over the Indian economy. To try to develop a country through foreign capital,
they said, was to barter the entire future for the petty gains of today. Bipin
Chandra Pal summed up the nationalist point of view in 1901 as follows: ‘The
introduction of foreign, and mostly British, capital for working out the
natural resources of the Country, instead of being a help, is, in fact, the
greatest of hindrances to all real improvements in the economic condition of
the people. It is as much a political, as it is an economic danger. And the
future of New India absolutely depends upon as early and radical remedy of this
two-edged evil.’In essence, the early nationalists asserted that genuine
economic development was possible only if Indian capital itself initiated and
developed the process of industrialization. Foreign capital would neither
undertake nor could it fulfill this task. According to the early nationalists,
the political consequences of foreign capital investment were no less harmful
for the penetration of a country by foreign capital inevitably led to its
political subjugation. Foreign capital investment created vested interests
which demanded security for investors and, therefore, pert foreign rule. ‘Where
foreign capital has been sunk in a country,’ wrote the Hindu in its issue dated
23 September 1889, ‘the administration of that country becomes at once the
concern of the bondholders.’ It added: ‘(if) the influence of foreign
capitalists in the land is allowed to increase, then adieu to all chances of
success of the Indian National Congress whose voice will be drowned in the
tremendous uproar of “the empire in danger” that will surely be raised by the
foreign capitalists.’ *A major problem the early nationalists highlighted was
that of the progressive decline and ruin of India’s traditional handicrafts.
Nor was this industrial prostration accidental they said. It was the result of
the deliberate policy of stamping out Indian industries in the interests of
British manufacturers. The British administrators, on the other hand, pointed with
pride to the rapid growth of India’s foreign trade and the rapid construction
of railways as instruments of India’s development as well as proof of its
growing prosperity However, the nationalists said that because of their
negative impact on indigenous industries, foreign trade and railways
represented not economic development but colonialization and Underdevelopment
of the economy. What mattered in the case of foreign trade, they maintained,
was not its volume but its pattern or the nature of goods internationally
exchanged and their impact on national industry and agriculture. And this
pattern had undergone drastic changes during the 19th Century, the bias being
overwhelmingly towards the export of raw materials and the import of
manufactured goods. Similarly, the early nationalists pointed out that the
railways had not been coordinated with India’s industrial needs. They had
therefore, ushered in a commercial and not an industrial revolution which
enabled imported foreign goods to undersell domestic industrial products.
Moreover, they said that the benefits of railway construction in terms of
encouragement to the steel and machine industry and to capital investment —
what today we would call backward and forward linkages — had been reaped by
Britain and not India. In fact, remarked G.V. Joshi, expenditure on railways
should be seen as Indian subsidy to British industries.’ Or, as Tilak put it,
it was like ‘decorating another’s wife.” According to the early nationalists, a
major obstacle to rapid industrial development was the policy of free trade
which was, on the one hand, ruining India’s handicraft industries and, on the
other, forcing the infant and underdeveloped modem industries into a premature
and unequal and, hence, unfair and disastrous competition with the highly
organized and developed industries of the West. The tariff policy of the
Government convinced the nationalists that British economic policies in India
were basically guided by the interests of the British capitalist class. The
early nationalists strongly criticized the colonial pattern of finance. Taxes
were so raised, they averred, as to overburden the poor while letting the rich,
especially the foreign capitalists and bureaucrats, go scot-free. To vitiate
this, they demanded the reduction of land revenue and abolition of the salt tax
and supported the imposition of income tax and import duties on products which
the rich and the middle classes consumed. On the expenditure side, they pointed
out that the emphasis was on serving Britain’s imperial needs while the
developmental and welfare departments were starved. In particular, they
condemned the high expenditure on the army which was used by the British to
conquer and maintain imperialist control over large parts of Asia and Africa.
*The focal point of the nationalist critique of colonialism was the drain
theory.’ The nationalist leaders pointed out that a large part of India’s
capital and wealth was being transferred or ‘drained’ to Britain in the form of
salaries and pensions of British civil and military officials working in India,
interest on loans taken by the Indian Government, profits of British
capitalists in India, and the Home Charges or expenses of the Indian Government
in Britain. The drain took the form of an excess of exports over importsfor
which India got no economic or material return. According to the nationalist
calculations, this drain amount to one-half of government revenues, more than
the entire land revenue collection and over one-third of India’s total savings.
(In today’s terms this would amount to eight per cent of India’s national
income). The acknowledged high-priest of the drain theory was Dadabhai Naoroji.
It was in May 1867 that Dadabhai Naoroji put forward the idea that Britain was
draining and ‘bleeding’ India. From then on for nearly half a century he
launched a raging campaign against the drain, hammering at the theme through
every possible form of public communication.The drain, he declared, was the
basic cause of India’s poverty and the fundamental evil of British rule in
India. Thus, he argued in 1880: it is not the pitiless operations of
economiclaws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British
policy; it is the pitiless eating of India’s substance in India, and the
further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of
economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is
destroying India.’Other nationalist leaders, journalists and propagandists
followed in the foot-steps of Dadabhai Naoroji. R.C. Dutt, for example, made
the drain the major theme of his Economic History of India. He protested that
‘taxation raised by a king, says the Indian poet, is like the moisture sucked
up by the sun, to be returned to the earth as fertilizing rain; but the moisture
raised from the Indian soil now descends as fertilizing rain largely on other
lands, not on India. . . So great an Economic Drain out of the resources of a
land would impoverish the most prosperous countries on earth; it has reduced
India to a land of famines more frequent, more widespread, and more fatal, than
any known before in the history of India, or of the world.’The drain theory
incorporated all the threads of the nationalist critique of Colonialism, for
the drain denuded India of the productive capital its agriculture and
industries so desperately needed. Indeed, the drain theory was the high
watermark of the nationalist leaders’ comprehensive, interrelated and
integrated economic analysis of the colonial situation. Through the drain
theory, the exploitative character of British rule could be made Visible. By
attacking the drain, the nationalists were able to call into question in an
uncompromising manner, the economic essence of imperialism.Moreover, the drain
theory possessed the great political merit of being easily grasped by a nation
of peasants. Money being transferred from one country to another was the most
easily understood of the theories of economic exploitation, for the peasant
daily underwent this experience vis-a-vis the state, landlords, moneylenders,
lawyers and priests. No other idea could arouse people more than the thought
that they were being taxed so that others in far off lands might live in
comfort. ‘No drain’ was the type of slogan that all successful movements need —
it did not have to be proved by sophisticated and complex arguments. It had a
sort of immanent quality about it; it was practically self-evident. Nor could
the foreign rulers do anything to appease the people on this question. Modem
colonialism was inseparable from the drain. The contradiction between the
Indian people and British imperialism was seen by people to be insoluble except
by the overthrow of British rule. It was, therefore, inevitable that the drain
theory became the main staple of nationalist political agitation during the
Gandhian era. *This agitation on economic issues contributed to the undermining
of the ideological hegemony of the alien rulers over Indian minds, that is, of
the foundations of colonial rule in the minds of the people. Any regime is
politically secure only so long as the people have a basic faith in its moral
purpose, in its benevolent character — that is, they believe that the rulers
are basically motivated by the desire to work for their welfare. It is this
belief which leads them to support the regime or to at least acquiesce in its
continuation. It provides legitimacy to a regime in this belief lie its moral
foundations. The secret of British power in India lay not only in physical
force but also in moral force, that is; in the belief sedulously inculcated by
the rulers for over a century that the British were the Mai-Baap of the common
people of India — the first lesson in primary school language textbooks was
most often on ‘the benefits of British rule.’ The nationalist economic agitation
gradually undermined these moral foundations. It corroded popular confidence in
the benevolent character of British rule —in its good results as well as its
good intentions. The economic development of India was offered as the chief
justification for British rule by the imperialist rulers and spokesmen. The
Indian nationalists controverted it forcefully and asserted that India was
economically backward precisely because the British were ruling it in the
interests of British trade, industry and capital, and that poverty and
backwardness were the inevitable Consequences of colonial rule. Tilak’s
newspaper, the Kesari, for example, wrote on 28 January 1896: ‘Surely India is
treated as a vast pasture for the Europeans to feed upon.’ And P. Ananda Charlu,
an ex-President of the Congress, said in the Legislative Council: ‘While India
is safe-guarded against foreign inroads by the strong arm of the British power,
she is defenceless in matters where the English and Indian interests clash and
where (as a Tamil saying puts it) the very fence begins to feed on the
crop.’The young intellectual from Bihar, Sachidanand Sinha, summed up the
Indian critique in a pithy manner in Indian People on 27 February 1903: ‘Their
work of administration in Lord Curzon’s testimony is only the handmaid to the
task of exploitation. Trade cannot thrive without efficient administration,
while the latter is not worth attending to in the absence of profits of the
former. So always with the assent and often to the dictates of the Chamber of
Commerce, the Government of India is carried on, and this is the “White Man’s
Burden.”’ It was above all Dadabhai Naoroji who in his almost daily articles
and speeches hammered home this point. ‘The face of beneficence,’ he said, was
a mask behind which the exploitation of the country was carried on by the
British though ‘unaccompanied with any open compulsion or violence to person or
property which the world can see and be horrified with.’ And, again: ‘Under the
present evil and unrighteous administration of Indian expenditure, the romance
is the beneficence of the British Rule, the reality is the “bleeding” of the
British Rule.” Regarding the British claim of having provided security of life
and property, Dadabhai wrote: ‘The romance is that there is security of life
and property in India; the reality is that there is no such thing. There is
security of life and property in one sense or way, i.e., the people are secure
from any violence from each other or from Native despots. . . But from
England’s own grasp there is no security of property at all, and, as a
consequence, no security for life… What is secure, and well secure, is that
England is perfectly safe and secure… to carry away from India, and to eat up
in India, her property at the present rate of 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 £ a
year. . . To millions in India life is simply “halffeeding,” or starvation, or
famine and disease ‘.With regard to the benefits of law and order, Dadabhai
said: ‘There is an Indian saying: “Pray strike on the back, but don’t strike on
the belly.”’ Under the ‘native despot the people keep and enjoy what they
produce, though at times they suffer some violence on the back. Under the
British Indian despot the man is at peace, there is no violence; his substance
is drained away, unseen, peaceably and subtly — he starves in peace, and
peaceably perishes in peace, with law and order.*The corrosion of faith in
British rule inevitably spread to the political field. In the course of their
economic agitation, the nationalist leaders linked nearly every important
economic question with the politically subordinated status of the country. Step
by step, issue by issue, they began to draw the conclusion that since the
British Indian administration was ‘only the handmaid to the task of exploitation,’
pro-Indian and developmental policies would be followed only by a regime in
which Indians had control over political power. The result was that even though
most of the early nationalist leaders were moderate in politics and political
methods, and many of them still professed loyalty to British rule, they cut at
the political roots of the empire and sowed in the land the seeds of
disaffection and disloyalty and even sedition. This was one of the major
reasons why the period 1875 to 1905 became a period of intellectual unrest and
of spreading national consciousness — the seed-time of the modem Indian
national movement. While until the end of the 19th century, Indian nationalists
confined their political demands to a share in political power and control over
the purse, by 1905 most of the prominent nationalists were putting forward the
demand for some form of self-government. Here again, Dadabhai Naoroji was the
most advanced. Speaking on the drain at the International Socialist Congress in
1904, he put forward the demand for ‘selfgovernment’ and treatment of India
‘like other British Colonies.” A year later in 1905, in a message to the
Benares session of the Indian National Congress, Dadabhai categorically
asserted: ‘Selfgovernment is the only remedy for India’s woes and wrongs.’ And,
then, as the President of the 1906 session of the Congress at Calcutta, he laid
down the goal of the national movement as “selfgovernment or Swaraj,” like that
of the United Kingdom or the Colonies.’ While minds were being prepared and the
goal formed, the mass struggle for the political emancipation of the country
was still in the womb of time. But the early nationalists were laying Strong
and enduring foundations for the national movement to grow upon. They sowed the
seeds of nationalism well and deep. They did not base their nationalism
primarily on appeals to abstract or shallow Sentiments or on obscurantist
appeals to the past. They rooted their nationalism in a brilliant scientific
analysis of the complex economic mechanism of modern colonialism and of the
chief contradiction between the interests of the Indian people and British
rule. The nationalists of the 20th century were to rely heavily on the main
themes of their economic critique of colonialism. These themes were then to
reverberate in Indian cities, towns and villages, carried there by the youthful
agitators of the Gandhianera. Based on this firm foundation, the later
nationalists went onto stage powerful mass agitations and mass movements. At
the same time, because of this firm foundation, they would not, unlike in
China, Egypt and many other colonial and semi-colonial countries, waver in
their anti-imperialism.
CHAPTER 8. THE FIGHT TO SECURE PRESS FREEDOM:
Almost from the beginning of the 19th century, politically conscious
Indians had been attracted to modem civil rights, especially the freedom of the
Press. As early as 1824, Raja Rammohan Roy had protested against a regulation
restricting the freedom of the Press. In a memorandum to the Supreme Court, he
had said that every good ruler ‘will be anxious to afford every individual the
readiest means of bringing to his notice whatever may require his interference.
To secure this important object, the unrestricted liberty of publication is the
only effectual means that can be employed.’ In the period from 1870 to 1918,
the national movement had not yet resorted to mass agitation through thousands
of small and large maidan meetings, nor did political work consist of the
active mobilization of people in mass struggles. The main political task still
was that of politicization, political propaganda and education and formation
and propagation of nationalist ideology. The Press was the chief instrument for
carrying out this task, that is, for arousing, training, mobilizing and consolidating
nationalist public opinion.Even the work of the National Congress was
accomplished during these years largely through the Press. The Congress had no
organization of its own for carrying on political work. Its resolutions and
proceedings had to be propagated through newspapers. Interestingly, nearly
one-third of the founding fathers of the Congress in 1885 were journalists.
Powerful newspapers emerged during these years under distinguished and fearless
journalists. These were the Hindu and Swadesamitran under the editorship of G.
Subramaniya Iyer, Kesari and Mahratta under B.G. Tilak, Bengalee under
Surendranath Banerjea, Amrita Bazar Patrika under Sisir Kumar Ghosh and Motilal
Ghosh, Sudharak under G.K. Gokhale, Indian Mirror under N.N. Sen, Voice of
India under Dadabhai Naoroji, Hindustani and Advocate under G.P. Varma and
Tribune and Akhbar-i-Am in Punjab, Indu Prakash, Dnyan Prakash, Kal and
Gujarati in Bombay, and Som Prakash, Banganivasi, and Sadharani in Bengal. In
fact, there hardly existed a major political leader in India who did not
possess a newspaper or was not writing for one in some capacity or the other.
The influence of the Press extended far beyond its literate subscribers. Nor
was it confined to cities and large towns. A newspaper would reach remote
villages and would then be read by a reader to tens of others. Gradually
library movements sprung up all over the country. A local ‘library’ would e
organized around a single newspaper. A table, a bench or two or a charpoy would
constitute the capital equipment. Every piece of news or editorial comment
would be read or heard and thoroughly discussed. The newspaper not only became
the political educator; reading or discussing it became a form of political
participation. Newspapers were not in those days business enterprises, nor were
the editors and journalists professionals. Newspapers were published as a
national or public service. They were often financed as objects of
philanthropy. To be a journalist was often to be a political worker and an
agitator at considerable selfsacrifice. It was, of course, not very expensive
to start a newspaper, though the editor had usually to live at a semi
starvation level or earn his livelihood through a supplementary source. The
Amrita Bazar Patrika was started in 1868 with printing equipment purchased for
Rs. 32. Similarly, Surendranath Banerjea purchased the goodwill of the Bengalee
in 1879 for Rs. 10 and the press for another Rs. 1600. Nearly all the major
political controversies of the day were conducted through the Press. It also
played the institutional role of opposition to the Government. Almost every act
and every policy of the Government was subjected to sharp criticism, in many
cases with great care and vast learning backing it up. ‘Oppose, oppose, oppose’
was the motto of the Indian Press. Regarding the role of the nationalist Press,
Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, wrote as early as March 1886: ‘Day after day,
hundreds of Sharp-witted babus pour forth their indignation against their
English Oppressors in very pungent and effective diatribe.’ And again in May:
‘In this way there can be no doubt there is generated in the minds of those who
read these papers. . . a sincere conviction that we are all enemies of mankind
in general and of India in particular.‘ To arouse political consciousness, to
inculcate nationalism, to expose colonial rule, to ‘preach disloyalty’ was no
easy task, for there had existed since 1870 Section 124A of the Indian Penal
Code according to Which ‘whoever attempts to excite feelings of disaffection to
the Government established by law in British India’ was to be punished with
transportation for life or for any term or with imprisonment upto three years.
This clause was, moreover, later supplemented with even more strident measures.Indian
journalists adopted several clever strategems and evolved a distinctive style
of writing to remain outside the reach of the law. Since Section 124A excluded
writings of persons whose loyalty to the Government was undoubted, they
invariably prefaced their vitriolic writing with effusive sentiments of loyalty
to the Government and the Queen. Another strategem was to publish
anti-imperialist extracts from London-based socialist and Irish newspapers or
letters from radical British citizens knowing that the Indian Government could
not discriminate against Indians by taking action against them without touching
the offending Britishers. Sometimes the extract from the British newspaper
would be taken without quotation marks and acknowledgement of the source, thus
teasing the British-Indian bureaucracy into contemplating or taking action
which would have to be given up once the real source of the comment became
known. For example, a sympathetic treatment of the Russian terrorist activities
against Tsarism would be published in such a way that the reader would
immediately draw a parallel between the Indian Government and the Revolutionary
Terrorists of Bengal and Maharashtra. The officials would later discover that
it was an extract from the Times, London, or some such other British newspaper.
Often the radical expose would take the form of advice and warning to the
Government as if from a well-wisher, as if the writer’s main purpose was to
save the authorities from their own follies! B.G. Tilak and Motilal Ghosh were
experts at this form ofwriting. Some of the more daring writers took recourse
to irony, sarcasm, banter, mock-seriousness and burlesque. In all cases,
nationalist journalists, especially of Indian language newspapers, had a
difficult task to perform, for they had to combine simplicity with subtlety —
simplicity was needed to educate a semi-literate public, subtlety to convey the
true meaning without falling foul of the law. They performed the task
brilliantly, often creatively developing the languages in which they were
willing, including, surprisingly enough, the English language. The national
movement from the beginning zealously defended the freedom of the Press
whenever the Government attacked it or tried to curtail it. In fact, the
struggle for the freedom of the Press became an integral part of the struggle
for freedom. *Indian newspapers began to find their feet in the 1870s. They
became highly critical of Lord Lytton’s administration, especially regarding
its inhuman approach towards the victims of the famine of 1876-77. As a result
the Government decided to make a sudden strike at the Indian language
newspapers, since they reached beyond the middle class readership. The
Vernacular Press Act of 1878, directed only against Indian language newspapers,
was conceived in great secrecy and passed at a single sitting of the Imperial
Legislative Council. The Act provided for the confiscation of the printing
press, paper and other materials of a newspaper if the Government believed that
it was publishing seditious materials and had flouted an official warning.
Indian nationalist opinion firmly opposed the Act. The first great
demonstration on an issue of public importance was organized in Calcutta on
this question when a large meeting was held in the Town Hall. Various public
bodies and the Press also campaigned against the Act. Consequently, it was
repealed in 1881 by Lord Ripon. The manner in which the Indian newspapers
cleverly fought such measures was brought out by a very amusing and dramatic
incident. The Act was in particular aimed at the Amrita Bazar Patrika which
came out at the time in both Bengali aa1d English. The objective was to take
summary action against it. But when the officials woke up the morning after the
Act was passed, they discovered to their dismay that the Patrika had foxed
them; overnight, the editors had converted it into an English newspaper!
*Another remarkable journalistic coup occurred in 1905. Delivering the
Convocation Address at Calcutta University, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy said that
‘the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception.
Undoubtedly, truth took a high place in the moral codes of the West before it
had been similarly honored in the East.’ The insinuation was that the British
had taught this high Conception of truth to Indians.Next day, the Amrita Bazar
Patrika came out with this speech on the front page along with a box
reproducing an extract from Curzon’s book the Problems of the East in which he
had taken credit for lying while a visit to Korea. He had written that he had
told the President of the Korean Foreign Office that he was forty when he was
actually thirtyj.ije because he had been told that in the East respect went
with age. He has ascribed his youthful appearance to the salubrious climate of
Korea! Curzon had also recorded his reply to the President’s question whether
he was a near relation of Queen Victoria as follows: ‘“No,” I replied, “I am
not.” But observing the look of disgust that passed over his countenance, I was
fain to add, “I am, however, as yet an unmarried man,” with which unscrupulous
suggestion I completely regained the old gentleman’s favour.’The whole of
Bengal had a hearty laugh at the discomfiture of the strait-laced Viceroy, who
had not hesitated to insult an entire people and who was fond of delivering
homilies to Indians. The Weekly Times of London also enjoyed the episode. Lord
Curzon’s ‘admiration for truth,’ it wrote, ‘was perhaps acquired later on in
life, under his wife’s management. It is pre-eminently a Yankee quality.’
(Curzon’s wife was an American heiress). Surendranath Banerjea, one of the
founding fathers of the Indian national movement, was the first Indian to go to
jail in performance of his duty as a journalist. A dispute concerning a family
idol, a saligram, had come up before Justice Norris of the Calcutta High Court.
To decide the age of the idol, Norris ordered it to be brought to the Court and
pronounced that it could not be a hundred years old. This action deeply hurt
the sentiments of the Bengali Hindus. Banerjea wrote an angry editorial in the
Bengalee of 2 April 1883. Comparing Norris with the notorious Jeffreys and
Seroggs (British judges in the 17th century, notorious for infamous conduct as
judges), he said that Norris had done enough ‘to show how unworthy he is of his
high office.’ Banerjea suggested that ‘some public steps should be en to put a
quietus to the wild eccentricities of this young and raw Dispenser of
Justice’.Immediately, the High Court hauled him up for contempt of court before
a bench of five judges, four of them Europeans. With the Indian judge, Romesh
Chandra Mitra, dissenting, the bench convicted and sentenced him to two months
imprisonment. Popular reaction was immediate and angry. There was a spontaneous
hartal in the Indian part of Calcutta. Students demonstrated outside the courts
smashing windows and pelting the police with stones. One of the rowdy young men
was Asutosh Mukherjea who later gained fame as a distinguished Vice Chancellor
of Calcutta University. Demonstrations were held all over Calcutta and in many
other towns of Bengal as also in Lahore, Amritsar, Agra, Faizabad , Poona and
other cities. Calcutta witnessed for the first time several largely attended
open-air meetings. *But the man who is most frequently associated with the
struggle for the freedom of the Press during the nationalist movement is Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, the outstanding leader of militant nationalism. Born in 1856,
Tilak devoted his entire life to the service of his country. In 1881, along
with G.G. Agarkar, he founded the newspaper Kesari (in Marathi) and Mahratta
(in English). In 1888, he took over the two papers and used their columns to
spread discontent against British rule and to preach national resistance to it.
Tilak was a fiery and courageous journalist whose style was simple and direct
and yet highly readable. In 1893, he started the practice of using the
traditional religious Ganapati festival to propagate nationalist ideas through
patriotic songs and speeches. In 1896, he started the Shivaji festival to
stimulate nationalism among young Maharashtrians. In the same year, he
organized an all-Maharashtra campaign for the boycott of foreign cloth in
protest against the imposition of the excise duty on cotton. He was, perhaps
the first among the national leaders to grasp the important role that the lower
middle classes, peasants, artisans and workers could play in the national
movement and, therefore, he saw the necessity of bringing them into the
Congress fold. Criticizing the Congress for ignoring the peasant, he wrote in
the Kesari in early 1897: ‘The country’s emancipation can only be achieved by
removing the clouds of lethargy and indifference which have been hanging over
the peasant, who is the soul of India. We must remove these clouds, and for
that we must completely identify ourselves with the peasant --- we must feel
that he is ours and we are his.’ Only when this is done would ‘the Government
realize that to despise the Congress is to despise the Indian Nation. Then only
will the efforts of the Congress leaders be crowned with success.’In pursuance
of this objective, he initiated a no-tax Campaign in Maharashtra during 1896-97
with the help of the young workers of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Referring to
the official famine code whose copies he got printed in Marathi and distributed
by the thousand, he asked the famine-stricken peasants of Maharashtra to
withhold payment of land revenue if their crops had failed. In 1897, plague
broke out in Poona and the Government had to undertake severe measures of
segregation and housesearches. Unlike many other leaders, Tilak stayed in
Poona, supported the Government and organized his own measures against the
plague. But he also criticized the harsh and heartless manner in which the
officials dealt with the plague- stricken people. Popular resentment against
the official plague measures resulted in the assassination of Rand, the
Chairman of the Plague Committee in Poona, and Lt. Ayerst by the Chaphekar
brothers on 27 June 1898.The anti-plague measures weren’t the only practices
that made the people irate. Since 1894, anger had been rising against the
Government because of its tariff, currency and famine policy. A militant trend
was rapidly growing among the nationalists and there were hostile comments in
the Press. The Government was determined to check this trend and teach a lesson
to the Press. Tilak was by now well-known in Maharashtra, both as a militant
nationalist and as a hostile arid effective journalist. The Government was
looking for an opportunity to make an example of him. The Rand murder gave them
the opportunity. The Britishowned Press and the bureaucracy were quick to
portray the Rand murder as a conspiracy by the Poona Brahmins led by Tilak. The
Government investigated the possibility of directly involving Tilak in Rand’s
assassination. But no proof could be found. Moreover, Tilak had condemned the
assassination describing it as the horrible work of a fanatic, though he would
not stop criticizing the Government, asserting that it was a basic function of
the Press to bring to light the unjust state of affairs and to teach people how
to defend their rights. And so, the Government decided to arrest him under
Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code on the charge of sedition, that is,
spreading disaffection and hatred against the Government. Tilak was arrested on
27 July 1879 arid tried before Justice Strachey and a jury of six Europeans and
three Indians. The charge was based on the publication in the Kesari of 15 June
of a poem titled ‘Shivaji’s Utterances’ ‘read out by a young man at the Shivaji
Festival and on a speech Tilak had delivered at the Festival in defence of
Shivaji’s killings of Afzal Khan. In ‘Shivaji’s Utterances,’ the poet had shown
Shivaji awakening in the present and telling his countrymen: ‘Alas! Alas! I now
see with my own eyes the ruin of my country . . . Foreigners are dragging out
Lakshmi violently by the hand (kar in Marathi which also means taxes) and by
persecution. . . The wicked Akabaya (misfortune personified) stalks with famine
through the whole country. . . How have all these kings (leaders) become quite
effeminate like helpless figures on the chessboard?’ Tilak’s defence of
Shivaji’s killing of Afzal Khan was portrayed by the prosecution as an
incitement to kill British officials. The overall accusation was that Tilak
propagated the views in his newspaper, that the British had no right to stay in
India and any and all means could be used to get rid of them.Looking back, it
is clear that the accusation was not wrong.But the days when, under Gandhiji’s
guidance, freedom fighters would refuse to defend themselves and openly
proclaim their sedition were still far off. The politics of sacrifice and open
defiance of authority were still at an early stage. It was still necessary to
claim that anti-colonial activities were being conducted within the limits of
the law. And so Tilak denied the official charges and declared that he had no
intention of preaching disaffection against alien rule. Within this ‘old’ style
of facing the rulers, Tilak set a high example of boldness and sacrifice. He
was aware that he was initiating a new kind of politics which must gain the
confidence and faith of the people by the example of a new type of leader,
while carefully avoiding premature radicalism which would invite repression by
the Government and lead to the cowing down of the people and, consequently, the
isolation of the leaders from the people. Pressure was brought upon Tilak by
some friends to withdraw his remarks and apologise. Tilak’s reply was: My
position (as a leader) amongst the people entirely depends upon my character .
. . Their (Government’s) object is to humiliate the Poona leaders, and I think
in me they will not find a “kutcha” (weak) reed... Then you must remember
beyond a certain stage we are all servants of the people. You will be betraying
and disappointing them if you show a lamentable Want of courage at a critical
time.’Judge Strachey’s partisan summing up to the jury was to gain notoriety in
legal circles, for he defined disaffection as ‘simply the absence of affection’
which amounted to the presence of hatred, enmity, disloyalty and every other
form of ill-will towards the Government! The jury gave a 6 to 3 verdict holding
Tilak guilty, the three dissenters being its Indian members. The Judge passed a
barbarous sentence of rigorous imprisonment for eighteen months, and this when
Tilak was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council! Simultaneously several
other editors of Bombay Presidency were tried and given similar harsh
sentences.Tilak’s imprisonment led to widespread protests all over the county
Nationalist newspapers and political associations, including those run by
Tilak’s critics like the Moderates, organized a countrywide movement against
this attack on civil liberties and the fiefdom of the Press. Many newspapers
came out with black borders on the front page. Many published special
supplements hailing Tilak as a martyr in the battle for the freedom of the
Press. Addressing Indian residents in London, Dadabhai Naoroji accused the
Government of initiating Russian (Tsarist) methods of administration and said
that gagging the Press was simply suicidal. Overnight Tilak became a popular
all-India leader and the title of Lokamanya (respected and honored by the
people) was given to him. He became a hero, a living symbol of the new spirit
of self-sacrifice a new leader who preached with his deeds. When at the Indian
National Congress session at Amraoti in December 1897, Surendranath Banerjea
made a touching reference to Tilak and said that ‘a whole nation is in tears,’
the entire audience stood up and enthusiastically cheered. In 1898, the
Government amended Section 124A and added a new Section 153A to the penal code,
making it a criminal offence for anyone to attempt ‘to bring into contempt’ the
Government of India or to create hatred among different classes, that is
vis-a-vis Englishmen in India. This once again led to nation-wide protest. *The
Swadeshi and Boycott Movement, which we shall look at in more detail later on in
Chapter 10, led to a new wave of repression in the country. The people once
again felt angry and frustrated. This frustration led the youth of Bengal to
take to the path of individual terrorism. Several cases of bomb attacks on
officials Occurred in the beginning of 1908. The Government felt unnerved. Once
again newspapers became a major target Fresh laws for Controlling the Press
were enacted, prosecutions against a large number of newspapers and their
editors were launched 89 | The Fight to Secure Press Freedomand the Press was
almost completely Suppressed In this atmosphere it was inevitable that the
Government’s attention would turn towards Lokamanya Tilak, the mainstay of the
Boycott movement and militant politics outside Bengal. Tilak wrote a series of
articles on the arrival of the ‘Bomb’ on the Indian scene. He condemned the use
of violence and individual killings he described Nihilism as ‘this Poisonous
tree’ — but, simultaneously, he held the Government responsible for suppressing
criticism and dissent and the urge of the people for greater freedom. In such
an atmosphere, he said ‘violence, however deplorable, became inevitable.’ As he
wrote in one of his articles: ‘When the official class begins to overawe the
people without any reason and when an endeavour is made to produce despondency
among the people b unduly frightening them, then the sound of the bomb is
spontaneously produced to impart to the authorities the true knowledge that the
people have reached a higher stage than the vapid one in which they pay
implicit regard to such an illiberal policy of repression.’Once again, on 24
June 1908, Tilak was arrested and tried on the charge of sedition for having
published these articles. Once again Tilak pleaded not guilty and behaved with
exemplary courage. A few days before his arrest, a friendly police officer
warned him of the coming event and asked Tilak to take precautionary steps.
Tilak laughed and said: The Government has converted the entire nation into a
prison and we are all prisoners. Going to prison only means that from a big
cell one is confined to a smaller one.”In the court, Tilak posed the basic
question: ‘Tilak or no Tilak is not the question. The question is, do you
really intend as guardians of the liberty of the Press to allow as much liberty
here in India as is enjoyed by the people of England?” Once again the jury
returned a verdict of guilty with only the two Indian members opposing the
verdict. Tilak’s reply was: ‘There are higher powers that rule the destiny of
men and nations; and it may be the will of Providence that the cause which I
represent may prosper more by my sufferings than by my remaining free.’ Justice
Davar awarded him the sentence of six years’ transportation and after some time
the Lokamanya was sent to a prison in Mandalay in Burma.The public reaction was
massive. Newspapers proclaimed that they would defend the freedom of the Press
by following Tilak’s example. All markets in Bombay city were closed on 22
July, the day his was announced, and remained closed for a week. The Workers of
all the textile mills and railway workshops went on strike for six days.
Efforts to force them to go back to work led to a battle between them and the
Police. The army was called out and at the end of the battle sixteen workers
lay dead in the streets with nearly fifty others seriously injured. Lenin
hailed this as the entrance of the Indian working class on the political
stage.’Echoes of Tilak’s trial were to be heard in another not-sodistant court
when Gandhiji, his political successor, was tried in 1922 for the same offence
of sedition under the same Section 124A for his articles in Young India. When
the Judge told him that his offence was similar to Tilak’s and that he was
giving him the same sentence of six years’ imprisonment Gandhiji replied:
‘Since you have done me the honor of recalling the trial of the late Lokamanya
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, I just want to say that I consider it to be proudest
privilege and honor to be associated with his name.”The only difference between
the two trials was that Gandhiji had pleaded guilty to the charges. This was
also a measure of the distance the national movement had travelled since 1908.
Tilak’s contribution to this change in politics and journalism had been
momentous.
CHAPTER 9. PROPAGANDA
IN THE LEGISLATURES:
Legislative Councils in India had no real official power
till 1920. Yet, work done in them by the nationalists helped the growth of the
national movement. *The Indian Councils Act of 1861 enlarged the
GovernorGeneral’s Executive Council for the purpose of making laws. The
Governor-General could now add from six to twelve members to the Executive
Council. At least half of these nominations had to be non-officials, Indian or
British. This council came to be known as the Imperial Legislative Council. It
possessed no powers at all. It could not discuss the budget or a financial
measure or any other important bill without the previous approval of the
Government. It could not discuss the actions of the administration. It could
not, therefore, be seen as some kind of parliament, even of the most elementary
kind. As if to underline this fact, the Council met, on an average, for only
twenty-five days in a year till 1892. The Government of India remained, as
before 1858, an alien despot. Nor was this accidental. While moving the Indian
Councils Bill of 1861, the Secretary of State for India, Charles Wood, said:
All experience reaches us that where a dominant race rules another, the mildest
form of Government is despotism.’ A year later he wrote to Elgin, the Viceroy,
that the only government suitable for such a state of things as exists in India
a despotism controlled from home.” This ‘despotism controlled from home’ was to
remain the fundamental feature of the Government of India till 15 August 1947. What
was the role of Indian members in this Legislative Council? The Government had
decided to add them in order to represent Indian views, for many British
officials and statesmen had come to believe that one reason for the Revolt of
1857 was that Indian views were not known to the rulers. But, in practice, the
Council did not serve even this purpose. Indian members were few in number — in
thirty years, from 1862 to 1892, only forty-five Indians were nominated to it.
Moreover, the Government invariably chose rulers of princely states or their
employees, big zamindars, big merchants or retired high government officials as
Indian members. Only a handful of political figures and independent
intellectuals such as Syed Ahmed Khan (1878-82), Kristodas Pal (1883), V.N.
Mandlik (1884-87), K.L. Nulkar (1890-91) and Rash Behari Ghosh (1892) were
nominated. The overwhelming majority of Indian nominees did not represent the
Indian people or emerging nationalist opinion. It was, therefore, not
surprising that they completely toed the official line. There is the
interesting story of Raja Dig Vijay Singh of Balarampur — nominated twice to
the Council —who did not know a word of English. When asked by a relative how
he voted one way or the other, he replied that he kept looking at the Viceroy
and when the Viceroy raised his hand he did so too and when he lowered it he
did the same! The voting record of Indian nominees on the Council was poor.
When the Vernacular Press Bill came up before the Council, only one Indian
member, Maharaja Jotendra Mohan Tagore, the leader of the zamindari-dominated
British Indian Association was present. He voted for it. In 1885, the two
spokesmen of the zamindars in the Council helped emasculate the pro-tenant
character of the Bengal Tenancy Bill at a time when nationalist leaders like
Surendranath Banerjea were agitating to make it more pro-tenant. In 1882,
Jotendra Mohan Tagore and Durga Charan Laha, the representative of Calcutta’s
big merchants, opposed the reduction of the salt tax and recommended the
reduction of the licence tax on merchants and professionals instead. The
nationalists were demanding the opposite. In 1888, Peary Mohan Mukherjea and
Dinshaw Petit, representatives of the big zamindars and big merchants
respectively, supported the enhancement of the salt tax along with the
non-official British members representing British business in India.By this
time nationalists were quite active in opposing the salt tax and reacted
strongly to this support. In the newspapers and from the Congress platform they
described Mukherjea and Petit as ‘gilded shams’ and magnificient non-entities.’
They cited their voting behavior as proof of the nationalist contention that
the existing Legislative Councils were unrepresentative of Indian opinion.
Madan Mohan Malaviya said at the National Congress session of 1890: ‘We would
much rather that there were no nonofficial members at all on the Councils than
that there should be members who are not in the least in touch with people and
who...betray a cruel want of sympathy with them’ Describing Mukherjea and petit
as ‘these big honourable gentlemen, enjoying private incomes and drawing huge
salaries,’ he asked rhetorically: ‘Do you think, gentlemen, such members would
be appointed to the Council if the people were allowed any voice in their
selection?’ The audience shouted ‘No, no, never.’However, despite the early
nationalists believing that India should eventually become self-governing, they
moved very cautiously in putting forward political demands regarding the
structure of the state, for they were afraid of the Government declaring their
activities seditious and disloyal and suppressing them. Till 1892, their demand
was limited to the expansion and reform of the Legislative Councils. They
demanded wider participation in them by a larger number of elected Indian
members as also wider powers for the Councils and an increase in the powers of
the members to ‘discuss and deal with’ the budget and to question and criticize
the day-to-day administration. *The nationalist agitation forced the Government
to make some changes in legislative functioning by the Indian Councils Act of
1892. The number of additional members of the Imperial and Provincial
Legislative Councils was increased from the previous six to ten to ten to
sixteen. A few of these members could be elected indirectly through municipal
committees, district boards, etc., but the official majority remained. The
members were given the right to discuss the annual budget but they could
neither vote on it nor move a motion to amend it. They could also ask questions
but were not allowed to put supplementary questions or to discuss the answers.
The ‘reformed’ Imperial Legislative Council met, during its tenure till 1909,
on an average for only thirteen days in a year, and the number of unofficial
Indian members present was only five out of twenty- four! The nationalists were
totally dissatisfied with the Act of 1892. They saw in it a mockery of their
demands. The Councils were still impotent; despotism still ruled. They now
demanded a majority for non-official elected members with the right to vote on
the budget and, thus, to the public purse. They raised the slogan ‘no taxation
without representation.’ Gradually, they raised their demands. Many leaders —
for example Dadabhai Naoroji in 1904, G.K. Gokhale in 1905 and Lokamanya Tilak
in 1906 began to put forward the demand for self government the model of the
selfgoverning colonies of Canada and Australia.*Lord Dufferin, who had prepared
the outline of the Act of 1892, and other British statesmen and administrators,
had seen in the Legislative Council a device to incorporate the more vocal
Indian political leaders into the colonial political structure where they
could, in a manner of Speaking let off their political steam. They knew that
the members of the Councils enjoyed no real powers; they could only make wordy
speeches and indulge in empty rhetorics, and the bureaucracy could afford to
pay no attention to them. But the British policy makers had reckoned without
the political capacities of the Indian leaders who soon transformed the
powerless and impotent councils, designed as mere machines for the endorsement
of government policies, and measures and as toys to appease the emerging
political leadership, into forums for ventilating popular grievances,
mercilessly exposing the defects and shortcomings of the bureaucratic
administration, criticizing and opposing almost every government policy and
proposal, and raising basic economic issues, especially relating to public
finance. They submitted the acts and policies of the Government to a ruthless
examination regarding both their intention and their method and consequence.
Far from being absorbed by the Councils, the nationalist members used them to
enhance their own political stature in the county and to build a national
movement. The safety valve was transformed into a major channel for nationalist
propaganda. By sheer courage, debating skill, fearless criticism, deep
knowledge and careful marshalling of data they kept up a constant campaign
against the Government in the Councils undermining its political and moral
influence and generating a powerful anti-imperialist sentiment. Their speeches
began to be reported at length in the newspapers and widespread public interest
developed in the legislative proceedings. The new Councils attracted some of
the most prominent nationalist leaders. Surendranath Banerjea, Kalicharan
Banerjee, Ananda Mohan Bose, Lal Mohan Ghosh, W.C. Bonnerji and Rash Beha Ghosh
from Bengal, Ananda Charlu, C. Sankan Nair and Vijayaraghavachariar from
Madras, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Ayodhyanath and Bishambar Nath from U.P., B.G.
Tilak, Pherozeshah Mehta, R.M. Sayani, Chimanlal Setalvad, N.G. Chandravarkar
and G.K. Gokhale from Bombay, and G.M. Chitnavis from Central Provinces were
some of served as members of the Provincial or Central Legislative Councils
from 1893 to 1909.The two men who were most responsible for putting the Council
to good use and introducing a new spirit in them were Pherozeshah Mehta and
Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Both men were political Moderates. Both became famous
for being fearlessly independent and the bete noir of British officialdom in
India. *Born in 1845 in Bombay, Pherozeshah Mehta came under Dadabhai Naoroji’s
influence while studying law in London during the 1860s. He was one of the
founders of the Bombay Presidency Association as also the Indian National
Congress. From about the middle of the 1890s till his death in 1915 he was a
dominant figure in the Indian National Congress and was often accused of
exercising autocratic authority over it. He was a powerful debater and his
speeches were marked by boldness, lucidity, incisiveness, a ready wit and quick
repartee, and a certain literary quality. Mehta’s first major intervention in
the Imperial Legislative Council came in January 1895 on a Bill for the
amendment of the Police Act of 1861 which enhanced the power of the local
authorities to quarter a punitive police force in an area and to recover its
cost from selected sections of the inhabitants of the area. Mehta pointed out
that the measure was an attempt to convict and punish individuals without a
judicial trial under the garb of preserving law and order. He argued: ‘I cannot
conceive of legislation more empirical, more retrograde, more open to abuse, or
more demoralizing. It is impossible not to see that it is a piece of that
empirical legislation so dear to the heart of executive officers, which will
not and cannot recognize the scientific fact that the punishment and suppression
of crime without injuring or oppressing innocence must be controlled by
judicial procedure.’ Casting doubts on the capacity and impartiality of the
executive officers entrusted with the task of enforcing the Act, Mehta said:
‘It would be idle to believe that they can be free from the biases, prejudices,
and defects of their class and position.’ Nobody would today consider this
language and these remarks very strong or censorious. But they were like a bomb
thrown into the ranks of a civil service which considered itself above such
criticism. How dare a mere ‘native’ lay his sacrilegious hands on its fair name
and reputation and that too in the portals of the Legislative Council? James
Westland, the Finance Member, rose in the house and protested against ‘the new
spirit’ which Mehta ‘had introduced into the Council.’ He had moreover uttered
‘calumnies’ against and ‘arraigned’ as a class as biased, prejudiced, utterly
incapable of doing the commonest justice . . . a most distinguished service,’
which had ‘contributed to the framing and consolidation of the Empire.’ His
remarks had gravely detracted ‘from the reputation which this Council has
justly acquired for the dignity, the calmness and the consideration which
characterize its deliberations.’ In other words, Mehta was accused of changing
the role and character of the colonial legislatures. The Indian reaction was
the very opposite. Pherozeshah Mehta won the instant approval of political
Indians, even of his political opponents like Tilak, who readily accepted
Westland’s description that ‘a new spirit’ had entered the legislatures. People
were accustomed to such criticism coming from the platform or the Press but
that the ‘dignified’ Council halls could reverberate with such sharp and
fearless criticism was a novel experience. The Tribune of Lahore commented:
‘The voice that has been so long shut out from the Council Chamber — the voice
of the people has been admitted through the open door of election . . . Mr.
Mehta speaks as the representative of the people... Sir James Westland’s
protest is the outcry of the bureaucrat rapped over the knuckles in his own
stronghold.’The bureaucracy was to smart under the whiplash of Mehta’s rapier-
like wit almost every time he spoke in the Council. We may give a few more examples
of the forensic skill with which he regaled the Indians and helped destroy the
moral influence and prestige of the British Indian Government and its
holier-than-thou bureaucracy. The educated Indians and higher education were
major bugbears of the imperialist administrators then as they are of the
imperialist schools of historians today. Looking for ways and means of Cutting
down higher education because it was producing ‘discontended and seditious
babus,’ the Government hit upon the expedient of counterposing to expenditure
on primary education of the masses that on the college education of the
elites.Pointing to the real motives behind this move to check the spread of
higher education, Mehta remarked: It is very well to talk of “raising the subject
to the pedestal of the rule?’ but when the subject begins to press close at
your heels, human nature is after all weak, and the personal experience is so
intensely disagreeable that the temptation to kick back is almost
irresistible.’ And so, most of the bureaucrats looked upon ‘every Indian
college (as) a nursery for hatching broods of vipers; the less, therefore, the
better.’In another speech, commenting on the official desire to transfer public
funds from higher to primary education, he said he was reminded of ‘the amiable
and well-meaning father of a somewhat numerous family, addicted unfortunately
to slipping off a little too often of an evening to the house over the way,
who, when the mother appealed to him to do something for the education of the grown-up
boys, begged of her with tears in his eyes to consider if her request was not
unreasonable, when there was not even enough food and clothes for the younger
children. The poor woman could not gainsay the fact, with the hungry eyes
staring before her; but she could not help bitterly reflecting that the
children could have food and clothes, and education to boot, if the kindly
father could be induced to be good enough to spend a little less on drink and
cards. Similarly, gentlemen, when weare reminded of the crying wants Of the
poor masses for sanitation and pure water and medical relief and primary
education, might we not respectfully venture to submit that there would be
funds, and to spare, for all these things, and higher education too, if the
enormous and growing resources of the country were not ruthlessly squandered on
a variety of whims and luxuries, on costly residences and Sumptuous furniture,
on summer trips to the hills, on little holiday excursions to the frontiers,
but above and beyond all, on the lavish and insatiable humours of an
irresponsible military policy, enforced by the very men whose view and opinions
of its necessity cannot but accommodate themselves to their own interests and
ambitions.” The officials were fond of blaming the Indian peasant’s poverty and
indebtedness on his propensity to spend recklessly on marriages and festivals.
In 1901, a Bill was brought in the Bombay Legislative to take away the
peasant’s right of ownership of land to prevent him from bartering it away
because of his thriftlessness. Denying this charge and opposing the bill, Mehta
defended the right of the peasant to have some joy, colour, and moments of
brightness in his life. In the case of average Indian peasant, he said, ‘a few
new earthenware a few wild flowers, the village tom-tom, a stomach-full meal,
bad arecanut and betel leaves and a few stalks of cheap tobacco, and in some
cases a few cheap tawdry trinkets, exhaust the joys of a festive occasion in
the life of a household which has known only an unbroken period of unshrinking
labour from morn to sunset.”° And when the Government insisted on using its
official majority to push through the Bill, Mehta along. With Gokhale, G.K.
Parekh, Balachandra Krishna and D.A. Khare took the unprecedented step of organizing
the first walk-out in India’s legislative history. Once again officialdom was
furious with Mehta. The Times of India, then British-owned even suggested that
these members should be made to resign their seats! Criticizing the
Government’s excise policy for encouraging drinking in the name of curbing it,
he remarked in 1898 that the excise department ‘seems to follow the example of
the preacher who said that though he was bound to teach good principles, he was
by no ‘means bound to practice them.” Pherozeshah Mehta retired from the
Imperial Legislative Council in 1901 due to bad health. He got elected in his
place thirty-five-year-old Gokhale, who had already made his mark as the
Secretary of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the editor of the Sudharak. In
1897, as a witness in London before the Royal Commission on Expenditure in
India, Gokhale had outshone veterans like Surendranath Banerjea, D.E. Wacha, G.
Subramaniya Iyer and Dadabhai Naoroji. Gokhale was to prove a more than worthy
successor to Mehta. *Gopal Krishna Gokhale was an outstanding intellectual who
had been carefully trained in Indian economics by Justice Ranade and G.V.
Josh’. He was no orator. He did not use strong and forceful language as Tilak,
Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dun did. Nor did he take recourse, as Mehta did, to
humour, irony and courteous, sarcasm. As a speaker he was gentle, reasonable,
courteous, non-flamboyant and lucid. He relied primarily upon detailed
knowledge and the careful data. Consequently, while hisspeeches did not entertain
or hurt, they gradually took hold of the listeners’ or readers’ attention by
their sheer intellectual power. Gokhale was to gain great fame for his budget
speeches which used to be reported extensively by the newspapers and whose
readers would wait eagerly for their morning copy. He was to transform the
Legislative Council into an open university for imparting political education
to the people.His very first budget speech on 26 March 1902 established him as
the greatest parliamentarian that India has produced. The Finance Member,
Edward Law, had just presented a budget with a seven-crore-rupees surplus for
which he had received with great pride the congratulations, of the house. At
this point Gokhale rose to speak. He could not, he said, ‘conscientiously join
in the congratulations’ because of the huge surplus. On the contrary, the
surplus budget ‘illustrated the utter absence of a due correspondence between
the Condition of the country and the condition of the finances of the country.’
In fact, this surplus coming in times of serious depression and suffering,
constituted ‘a wrong to the community.’ The keynote of his speech was the poverty
of the people. He examined the problem in all its aspects and came to the
conclusion that the material condition of the mass of the people was ‘steadily
deteriorating’ and that the phenomenon was ‘the saddest in the whole range of
the economic history of the world.’ He then set out to analyze the budget in
detail. He showed how land revenue and the salt tax had been going up even in
times of drought and famine. He asked for the reduction of these two taxes and
for raising the minimum level of income liable to income tax to Rs. 1,000 so
that the lower middle classes would not be harassed. He condemned the large
expenditure on the army and territorial expansion beyond Indian frontiers and
demanded greater expenditure on education and industry instead. The management
of Indian finances, he said, revealed that Indian interests were invariably
subordinated to foreign interests. He linked the poor state of Indian finances
and the poverty of the people with the colonial status of the Indian economy
and polity. And he did all this by citing at length from the Government’s own
blue books.’Gokhale’s first budget speech had ‘an electrifying effect’ upon the
people. As his biographer, B.R. Nanda, has put it: ‘Like Byron, he could have
said that he woke up one fine morning and found himself famous”. He won instant
praise even from his severest critics and was applauded by the entire nationalist
Press. It was felt that he had raised Indian pride many notches higher. The
Amrita Bazar Patrika, which had missed no opportunity in the past to berate and
belittle him, gave unstinted expression to this pride: ‘We had ever entertained
the ambition of seeing some Indian member openly and fearlessly criticizing the
Financial Statement of the Government. But this ambition was never satisfied.
When members had ability, they had not the requisite courage. When they had the
requisite courage, they had not the ability. . . For the first time in the
annals of British rule in India, a native of India has not only succeeded in
exposing the fallacies which underlie these Government statements, but has
ventured to do it in an uncompromising manner.” All this welldeserved acclaim
did not go to Gokhale’s head. He remained unassuming and modest as before. To
G.V. Joshi (leading economist and one of his gurus), he wrote: ‘Of course it is
your speech more than mine and I almost feel I am practicing a fraud on the
public in that I let all the credit for it come to me.” sIn the next ten years,
Gokhale was to bring this ‘mixture of courage, tenacity and ability’ to bear
upon every annual budget and all legislation, highlighting in the process the
misery and poverty of the peasants, the drain of wealth from India, the
Government neglect of industrial development, the taxation of the poor, the
lack of welfare measures such as primary education and health and medical
facilities, the official efforts to suppress the freedom of the Press and other
civil liberties, the enslavement of Indian labourers in British colonies, the
moral dwarfing of Indians, the underdevelopment of the Indian economy and the
complete neglect and subordination of Indian interests by the rulers. Officials
from the Viceroy downwards squirmed with impotent fury under his sharp and
incisive indictments of their policies. In 1904, Edward Law, the Finance
Member, cried out in exasperation: ‘When he takes his seat at this Council
table he unconsciously perhaps adopts the role and demeanour of the habitual
mourner, and his sad wails and lamentations at the delinquencies of Government
are as piteous as long practice and training can make them.” Such was the fear
Gokhale’s budget speeches aroused among officials that in 1910, Lord Minto, the
Viceroy, asked the Secretary of State to appoint R.W. Carlyle as Revenue Member
because he had come to know privately of ‘an intended attack in which Gokhale
is interested on the whole of our revenue system and it is important that we
should be well prepared to meet it.Gokhale was to be repaid in plenty by the
love and recognition of his own people. Proud of his legislative achievement
they were to confer him the title of ‘the leader of the opposition’. Gandhiji
was to declare him his political guru. And Tilak, his lifelong political
opponent, said at his funeral: ‘This diamond of India, this jewel of
Maharashtra, this prince of workers, is taking eternal rest on the funeral
ground. Look at him and try to emulate him.”
CHAPTER 10. THE SWADESHI MOVEMENT— 1903-08:
With the start of the Swadeshi Movement at the turn of the
century, the Indian national movement took a major leap forward. Women,
students and a large section of the urban and rural population of Bengal and
other parts of India became actively involved in politics for the first time.
The next half a decade saw the emergence of almost all the major political
trends of the Indian national movement. From conservative moderation to
political extremism, from terrorism to incipient socialism, from petitioning
and public speeches to passive resistance and boycott, all had their origins in
the movement. The richness of the movement was not confined to politics alone.
The period saw a breakthrough in Indian ã1 literature, music, science and
industry. Indian society, as a ‘hole, was experimenting and the creativity of
the people expanded in every direction. *The Swadeshi Movement had its genesis
in the antipartition movement which was started to oppose the British decision
to partition Bengal There was no questioning the fact that Bengal with a
population of78 million (about a quarter of the population of British India)
had indeed become administratively unwieldy. Equally there was no escaping the
fact that the real motive or partitioning Bengal was political. Indian
nationalism was gaining in strength and partition expected to weaken what was
perceived as the nerve centre of Indian nationalism at that time. The attempt,
at that time in the words of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy (1899-1905) was to
‘dethrone Calcutta’ from its position as the ‘centre from which the Congress
Party is manipulatedthroughout Bengal, and indeed which the Congress Party
centre of successful intrigue’ and ‘divide ,the Bengali speaking population.’
Risley, the Home Secretary to the Government of India, was more blunt. He said
on 6 December 1904: ‘Bengal united, is power, Bengal divided, will pull several
different ways. That is what the Congress leaders feel: their apprehensions are
perfectly correct and they form one of the great merits of the scheme...in this
scheme... one of our main objects is to split upand thereby weaken a solid body
of opponents to our rule.’Curzon reacted sharply to the almost instant furore
that was raised in Bengal over the partition proposals and wrote to the
Secretary of State. ‘If we are weak enough to yield to their clamour now, we
shall not be able to dismember or reduce Bengal again: and you will be
cementing and solidifying a force already formidable and certain to be a source
of increasing trouble in the future’. The partition of the state intended to
curb Bengali influence by not only placing Bengalis under two admininistrations
but by reducing them to a minority in Bengalitself as in the new proposal
Bengal proper was to have seventeen million Bengali and thirty-seven million
Oriya and Hindi speaking people! Also, the partition was meant to foster
another kind of division— this time on the basis of religion. The policy
ofpropping up Muslim communalists as a counter to the Congress and the national
movement, which was getting increasingly crystallized in the last quarter of
the 19th century. was to be implemented once again. Curzon’s speech at Dacca,
betrayed his attempt to ‘woo the Muslims’ to support partition. With partition,
he argued, Dacca could become the capital of the new Muslim majority province
(with eighteen million Muslims and twelve million Hindus) ‘which would Invest
the Mohammedans in Eastern Bengal with a unity which they have not enjoyed
since the days of the old Mussulman Viceroys and Kings.’ The Muslims would thus
get a ‘better deal’ and the eastern districts would be freed of the ‘pernicious
influence of Calcutta.’ And even Lord Minto, Curzon’s successor was critical of
the way in which partition was imposed disregarding public opinion saw that it
was good political strategy; Minto argued that ‘from a political point of View
alone, putting aside the administrative difficulties of the old province, I
believe partition to have been very necessary . .‘The Indian nationalists
clearly saw the design behind the partition and condemned it unanimously. The
anti-partition and Swadeshi Movement had begun. In December 1903, the partition
proposals became publicly known, immediate and spontaneous protest followed.
The strength of this protest can be gauged from the fact that in the first two
months following the announcement 500 protest meetings were held in East Bengal
alone, especially m Dacca, Mymensingh and Chittagong. Nearly fifty thousand
copies of pamphlets giving a detailed critique of the partition proposals were
distributed all over Bengal. Surendranath Banerjea, Krishna Kumar Mitra,
Prithwishchandra Ray and other leaders launched a powerful press campaign
against the partition proposals through journals and newspapers like the
Bengalee, Hitabadi and Sanjibani. Vast protest meetings were held in the town
hail of Calcutta in March 1904 and January 1905, and numerous petitions
(sixty-nine memoranda from the Dacca division alone), some of them signed by as
many as 70,000 people — a very large number keeping n view the level of
politicization in those days —were sent to the Government of India and the
Secretary of State. Even, the big zamindars who had hitherto been loyal to the
Raj, joined forces with the Congress leaders who were mostly intellectuals and
political workers drawn from journalism, law and other liberal professions.
This was the phase, 1903 to mid-1905 when moderate techniques of petitions,
memoranda, speeches, public meetings and press campaigns held full sway. The
objective was to turn to public opinion in India and England against the
partition proposals by preparing a foolproof case against them. The hope was
that this would yield sufficient pressure to prevent this injustice from
occurring. *The Government of India however remained unmoved. Despite the
widespread protest, voiced against the partition proposals, the decision to
partition Bengal was announced on 19 July 1905. It was obvious to the
nationalists that their moderate methods were not working and that a different
kind of strategy as needed. Within days of the government announcement numerous
spontaneous protest meetings were held in mofussil towns such as Dinajpur,
Pabna, Faridpur, Tangail, Jessore, Dacca, Birbhum, and Barisal. It was in these
meetings that the pledge to boycott foreign goods was first taken In Calcutta;
students organized a number of meetings against partition and for Swadeshi. The
formal proclamation of the Swadeshi Movement was, made on the 7 August 1905, in
meeting held at the Calcutta to hall. The movement; hitherto sporadic and
spontaneous, now had a focus and a leadership that was coming together. At the
7 August meeting, the famous Boycott Resolution was passed. Even Moderate
leaders like Surendranath Banerjea toured the country urging the boycott of
Manchester cloth and Liverpool salt. On September 1, the Government announced
that partition was to be effected on.[6 October’ 1905. The following weeks saw
protest meetings being held almost everyday all over Bengal; some of these meetings,
like the one in Barisal, drew crowds of ten to twelve thousand. That the
message of boycott went home is evident from the fact that the value of British
cloth sold in some of the mofussil districts fell by five to fifteen times
between September 1904 and September 1905. The day partition took effect — 16
October 1905 — was declared a day of mourning throughout Bengal. People fasted
and no fires were lit at the cooking hearth. In Calcutta a hartal was declared.
People took out processions and band after band walked barefoot, bathed in the
Ganges in morning and then paraded the streets singing Bande Mataram which,
almost spontaneously, became the theme song of the movement. People tied rakhis
on each other’s hands as a symbol of the unity of the two halves of Bengal.
Later in the day Anandamohan Bose and Surendranath Banerjea addressed two huge
mass meetings which drew crowds of 50,000 to 75,000 people. These were,
perhaps, the largest mass meetings ever to be held under the nationalist banner
this far. Within a few hours of the meetings, a sum of Rs. 50,000 was raised
for the movement. It was apparent that the character of the movement in terms
both its goals and social base had begun to expand rapidly. As Abdul Rasul,
President of Barisal Conference, April 1906, put it: ‘What we could not have
accomplished in 50 or 100 years, the great disaster, the partition of Bengal,
has done for us in six months. Its fruits have been the great national movement
known as the Swadeshi movement.’ The message of Swadeshi and the boycott of
foreign goods soon spread to the rest of the country: Lokamanya Tilak took the
movement to different parts of India, especially Poona and Bombay; Ajit Singh
and Lala Lajpat Rai spread the Swadeshi message in Punjab and other parts of northern
India. Syed Haidar Raza led the movement in Delhi; Rawalpindi, Kangra, Jammu,
Multan and Haridwar witnessed active participation in the Swadeshi Movement;
Chidambaram Pillai took the movement to the Madras presidency, which was also
galvanized by Bipin Chandra Pal’s extensive lecture tour. The Indian National
Congress took up the Swadeshi call and the Banaras Session, 1905, presided over
by G.K. Gokhale, supporter the Swadeshi and Boycott Movement for Bengal. The
militant nationalists led by Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo
Ghosh were, however, in favour of extending the movement to the rest of India
and carrying it beyond the programme of just Swadeshi and boycott to a full
fledged political mass struggle The aim was now Swaraj and the abrogation of
partition had become the ‘pettiest and narrowest of all political objects” The
Moderates, by and large, were not as yet willing to go that far. In 1906,
however, the Indian National Congress at its Calcutta Session, presided over by
Dadabhai Naoroji, took a major step forward. Naoroji in his presidential
address declared that the goal of the Indian National Congress was
‘selfgovernment or Swaraj like that of the United Kingdom or the Colonies.’ The
differences between the Moderates and the Extremists, especially regarding the
pace of the movement and the techniques of struggle to be adopted, came to a
head in the 1907 Surat session of the Congress where the party split with
serious consequences for the Swadeshi Movement. *In Bengal, however, after
1905, the Extremists acquired a dominant influence over the Swadeshi Movement.
Several new forms of mobilization and techniques of struggle now began to
emerge at the popular level. The trend of ‘mendicancy,’ petitioning and
memorials was on the retreat. The militant nationalists put forward several
fresh ideas at the theoretical, propagandistic and programmatic plane.
Political independence was to be achieved by converting the movement into a
mass movement through the extension of boycott into a full-scale movement of
non-cooperation and passive resistance. The technique of extended boycott’ was
to include, apart from boycott of foreign goods, boycott of government schools
and colleges courts, titles and government services and even the organization
of strikes. The aim was to ‘make the administration under present conditions
impossible by an organized refusal to do anything which shall help either the
British Commerce in the exploitation of the country or British officialdom in
the administration of it.’ While some, with remarkable foresight, saw the
tremendous potential of large scale peaceful resistance--- . . . the Chowkidar,
the constable; the deputy and the munsif and the clerk, not to speak of the
sepoy all resign their respective functions, feringhee rule in the country may
come to an end in a moment No powder and shot will be needed, no sepoys will
have to be trained... Others like Aurobindo Ghosh (with his growing links with
revolutionary terrorists) kept open the option of violent resistance if British
repression was stepped up. Among the several forms of struggle thrown up by the
movement, it was the boycott of foreign goods which met with the greatest
visible success at the practical and popular level. Boycott and public burning
of foreign cloth, picketing of shops selling foreign goods, all became common
in remote corners of Bengal as well as in many important towns and cities
throughout the country. Women refused to wear foreign bangles and use foreign
utensils, washermen refused to wash foreign clothes and even priests declined
offerings which contained foreign sugar. The movement also innovated with
considerable success different forms of mass mobilization. Public meetings and
processions emerged as major methods of mass mobilization and simultaneously as
forms of popular expression. Numerous meetings and processions organized at the
district, taluqa and village levels, in cities and towns, both testified to the
depth of Swadeshi sentiment and acted as vehicles for its further spread. These
forms were to retain their pre-eminence in later phases of the national
movement. Corps of volunteers (or samitis as they were called) were another
major form of mass mobilization widely used by the Swadeshi Movement. The
Swadesh Bandhab Samiti set up by Ashwini Kumar Dutt, a school teacher, in
Barisal was the most well known volunteer organization of them all. Through the
activities of this Samiti, whose 159 branches reached out to the remotest
corners of the district, Dutt was able to generate an unparalleled mass
following among the predominantly Muslim Peasantry of the region. The samitis
took the Swadeshi message to the villages through magic lantern lectures and
Swadeshi songs, gave physical and moral training to the members, did social
work during famines and epidemics, organized schools, training in Swadeshi
craft and arbitrtj011 courts. By August 1906 the Barisal Samiti reportedly
settled 523 disputes througheighty-nine arbitration committees. Though the
samitis stucktheir deepest roots in Barisal, they had expanded to other parts
of Bengal as well. British officialdom was genuinely alarmed by their
activities, their growing popularity with the rural masses.The Swadeshi period
also saw the creative use of traditional popular festivals and melas as a means
of reaching out to the masses. The Ganapati arid Shivaji festivals, popularized
by Tilak, became a medium for Swadeshi propaganda not only in Western India but
also in Bengal. Traditional folk theatre forms such as jatras i.e. extensively
used in disseminating the Swadeshi message in an intelligible form to vast
sections of the people, many of whom were being introduced to modern political
ideas for the first time. Another important aspect of the Swadeshi Movement was
the great emphasis given to self-reliance or ‘Atmasakti’ as a necessary part of
the struggle against the Government. Self reliance in various fields meant the
re-asserting of national dignity, honor and confidence. Further, self-help and
constructive work at the village level was envisaged as a means of bringing
about the social and economic regeneration of the villages and of reaching the
rural masses. In actual terms this meant social reform and campaigns against
evils such as caste oppression, early marriage, the dowry system, consumption
of alcohol, etc. One of the major planks of the programme of selfreliance was
Swadeshi or national education. Taking a cue from Tagore’s Shantiniketan, the
Bengal National College was founded, with Aurobindo as the principal. Scores of
national schools sprang up all over the country within a short period. In
August 1906, the National Council of Education was established. The Council,
consisting of virtually all the distinguished persons of the country at the
time, defined its objectives in this way. . . ‘to organize a system of
Education Literary; Scientific and Technical — on National lines and under
National control from the primary to the university level. The chief medium of
instruction was to be the vernacular to enable the widest possible reach. For
technical education, the Bengal Technical institute was set and funds were
raise to send students to Japan for advanced learning. Self-reliance also meant
an effort to set up Swadeshi or indigenous enterprises. The period saw a
mushrooming of Swadeshi textile mills, soap and match factories; - tanneries,
banks, insurance companies, shops, etc. While many of these enterprises, whose
promoters were more endowed with patriotic zeal than with business acumen were
unable to survive for long, some others such as Acharya P.C. Ray’s Bengal
Chemicals Factory, became successful and famous.It was, perhaps, in the
cultural sphere that the impact of the Swadeshi Movement was most marked. The
songs composed at that time by Rabindranath Tagore, Rajani Kanta Sen, Dwijendralal
Ray, Mukunda Das, Syed Abu Mohammed, and others later became the moving spirit
for nationalists of all hues, ‘terrorists, Gandhian or Communists’ and are
still popular. Rabindranath’s Amar Sonar Bangla, written at that time, was to
later inspire the liberation struggle of Bangladesh and was adopted as the
national anthem of the country in 1971. The Swadeshi influence could be seen in
Bengali folk music popular among Hindu and Muslim villagers (Palligeet and Jan
Gàn) and it evoked collections of India fairy tales such as, Thakurmar
Jhuli(Grandmother’s tales) written by Daksinaranjan Mitra Majumdar which
delights Bengai children to this day. In art, this was the period when
Abanindranath Tagore broke the domination of Victorian naturalism over Indian
art and sought inspiration from the rich indigenous traditions of Mughal,
Rajput and Ajanta paintings. Nandalal Bose, who left a major imprint on Indian
art, was the first recipient of a scholarship offered by the Indian Society of
Oriental Art founded in 1907. In science, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Prafulla
Chandra Ray, and others pioneered original research that was praised the world
over. *In sum, the Swadeshi Movement with its multi-faceted programme and
activity was able to draw for the first time large sections of society into
active participation in modern nationalist into the ambit of modern political
ideas.The social base of the national movements now extended to include a
certain zamindari section, the lower middle class in the cities and small towns
and school and college students on a massive scale. Women came out of their
homes for the first time and joined processions and picketing. This period saw,
again for the first time, an attempt being made to give a political direction
to the economic grievances of the working class. Efforts were Swadeshi leaders,
some of whom were influenced by International socialist currents such as those
in Germany and Russia, to organize strikes in foreign managed concerns such as
Eastern India Railway and Clive Jute Mills, etc.While it is argued that the
movement was unable to make much headway in mobilizing the peasantry especially
its lower rungs except in certain areas, such as the district of Barisal, there
can be no gainsaying the fact that even if the movement was able to mobilize
the peasantry only in a limited area that alone would count for a lot. This is
so peasant participation in the Swadeshi Movement marked the very beginnings of
modem mass politics in India. After all, even in the later, post-Swadeshi
movements, intense political mobilization and activity among the peasantry
largely remained concentrated in specific pockets. Also, while it is true that
during the Swadeshi phase the peasantry was not organized .around peasant
demands, and that the peasants in most parts did not actively join in certain
forms of struggle such as, boycott or passive resistance, large sections of the
peasants, through meetings, jatras, constructive work, and so on were exposed
for the first time to modem nationalist ideas and politics. The main drawback
of the Swadeshi Movement was that it was not able to gamer the support of the
mass of Muslims and especially of the Muslim peasantry. The British policy of
consciously attempting to use communalism to turn the Muslims against the
Swadeshi Movement was to a large extent responsible for this. The Government
was helped in its designs by the peculiar situation obtaining in large pasts of
Bengal where Hindus and Muslims were divided along class lines with the former
being the landlords and the latter constituting the peasantry. This was the
period when the All India Muslim League was set up with the active guidance and
support of the Government. More specifically, in Bengal, people like Nawab
Salimullah of Dacca were propped up so centres of opposition to the Swadeshi
Movement. Mullahs and maulvis were pressed into service and, unsurprisingly, at
the height of the Swadeshi Movement communal riots broke out in Bengal.Given
this background, some of the forms of mobilization adopted by the Swadeshi Movement
had certain unintended negative consequences. The use of traditional popular
customs, festivals and institutions for mobilizing the masses—a technique used
widely in most parts of world to generate mass movements, especially in the
initial stages —was misinterpreted and distorted by communalists backed by the
state. The communal forces saw narrow religious identities in the traditional
forms utilized by the Swadeshi movements whereas in fact these forms generally
reflected common popular cultural traditions which had evolved as a synthesis
of different religious ‘prevalent among the people.*By mid-1908, the open
movement with its popular masscharacter had all but spent itself. This was due
to several reasons. First, the government, seeing the revolutionary potential
of the movement, came down with a heavy hand. Repression took the form of
controls and bans on public meetings, processions and the press. Student
participants were expelled from Government schools and colleges, debarred from
Government service, fined and at times beaten up by the police. The case of the
1906 Barisal Conference, where the police forcibly dispersed the conference and
brutally beat up a large number of the participants, is a telling example of
the government’s attitude and policy. Second, the internal squabbles, and
especially, the split, in 1907 in the Congress, the apex all-India
organization, weakened the movement. Also, though the Swadeshi Movement had
spread outside Bengal, the rest of the country was not as yet fully prepared to
adopt the new style and stage of politics. Both these factors strengthened the
hands of the government. Between 1907 and 1908, nine major leaders in Bengal
including Ashwini Kumar Dutt and Krishna Kumar Mitra were deported, Tilak was
given a sentence of six years imprisonment, Ajit Singh and Lajpat Rai of Punjab
were deported and Chidambaram Pillai and Harisarvottam Rao from Madras and
Andhra were arrested. Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh retired from active
politics, a decision not unconnected with the repressive measures of the
Government Almost with one stroke the entire movement was rendered leaderless.
Third, the Swadeshi Movement lacked an effective organization and party
structure. The movement had thrown up programmatically the entire gamut of
Gandhian techniques such as passive resistance, non-violent non-cooperation,
the call to fill the British jails, social reform, constructive work, etc. It
was, however, unable to give these techniques a centralized, disciplined focus,
carry- the bulk of political - India, and convert these techniques into actual,
practical political practice, as Gandhiji was able to do later.Lastly, the
movement declined partially because of the very logic of mass movements
itself—they cannot be sustained endlessly at the same pitch of militancy and
self-sacrifice, especially when faced with severe repression, but need to
pause, to consolidate its forces for yet another struggle. *However, the
decline of the open movement by mid-1908 engendered yet another trend in the
Swadeshi phase i.e., the rise of revolutionary terrorism. The youth of the
county, who had been part of the mass movement, now found themselves unable to
disappear tamely into the background once the movement itself grew moribund and
Government repression was stepped up. Frustrated, some among them opted for
‘individual heroism’ as distinct from the earlier attempts at mass action. With
the subsiding of the mass movement, one era in the Indian freedom struggle was
over. It would be wrong, however, to see the Swadeshi Movement as a failure.
The movement made a major contribution in taking the idea of nationalism, in a
truly creative fashion, to many sections of the people, hitherto untouched by
it. By doing so, it further eroded the hegemony of colonial ideas and
institutions. Swadeshi influence in the realm of culture and ideas was crucial
in this regard and has remained unparalleled in Indian history, except,
perhaps, for the cultural upsurge of the I93Os this time under the influence of
the Left. Further, the movement evolved several new methods and techniques of
mass mobilization and mass action though it was not able to put them all into
practice successfully. Just as the Moderates’ achievement in the realm of
developing an economic critique of colonialism is not minimized by the fact
that they could not themselves carry this critique to large masses of people,
similarly the achievement of the Extremists and the Swadeshi Movement in
evolving new methods of mass mobilization and action is not diminished by the
fact that they could not themselves fully utilize these methods. The legacy
they bequeathed was one on which the later national movement was to draw
heavily. Swadeshi Movement was only the first round in the national popular
struggle against colonialism. It was to borrow this imagery used by Antonio
Gramsci an important battle’ in the long drawn out and complex ‘war of
position’ for Indian independence.
CHAPTER 11. THE SPLIT IN THE CONGRESS AND THE RISE OF
REVOLUTIONARY TERRORISM:
The Indian National Congress split in December 1907. Almost
at the name time revolutionary terrorism made its appearance in Bengal. The two
events were not unconnected.*By 1907, the Moderate nationalists had exhausted
their historical role. Their achievements, as we have seen in the previous
chapter, we immense, considering the low level of political consciousness and
the immense difficulties they had to face when they began. Their failures too
were numerous. They lacked faith in the common people, did no work among them and
consequently failed to acquire any roots among them. Even their propaganda did
not reach them. Nor did they organize any allIndia campaigns and when, during
1905-07, such an all-India campaign did come up in the form of the Swadeshi and
Boycott Movement, they were not its leader& (though the Bengal Moderates
did play an active role in their own province). Their politics were based on
the belief that they would be able to persuade the rulers to introduce economic
and political reforms but their practical achievements in this respect were
meagre. Instead of respecting them for their moderation, the British treated
them with contempt, sneered at their politics and met popular agitations with
repression. Their basic failure, however, was that of not keeping pace with
events. They could not see that their own achievements had made their Politics
obsolete. They failed to meet the demands of the new stage of the national
movement) Visible proof f this was their failure to attract the younger
generation. *The British had been suspicious of the National Congress from its
inception. But they had not been overtly hostile, in the first few years of its
existence because they believed its activities would remain academic and
confined to a handful of intellectuals. However, as soon as it became apparent
that the Congress would not remain so narrowly confined, and that it was
becoming a focus of Indian nationalism, the officials turned openly critical of
the Congress, the nationalist leaders and the Press. They now began to brand
the nationalists as ‘disloyal babus’ ‘seditious Brahmins,’ and ‘violent
villains.’ The Congress was described as ‘a factory of sedition’ and
Congressmen as ‘disappointed candidates for office and discontented lawyers who
represent no one but themselves.’ In 1888, Dufferin, the Viceroy, attacked the
National Congress in a public speech and ridiculed it as representing only the
elite ‘a microscopic minority.” George Hamilton, Secretary of State for India,
accused the Congress leaders of possessing ‘seditious and double sided
character.’This hostility did not abate when the Moderates, who then controlled
the Congress, began to distance themselves from the rising militant nationalist
tendencies of certain sections of the Congress which became apparent when the
government unleashed a repressive policy against the Indian Press in 1897.
Instead the British appeared even more eager to attack and finish the Congress.
Why was this so? First, because however moderate and loyal in their political
perception the Moderates were, they were still nationalists and propagators of
anti-colonialist politics and ideas. As Curzon, the Viceroy, put it in 1905:
‘Gokhale either does not see where he is going, or if he does see it, then he
is dishonest or his pretensions. You Cannot awaken and appeal to the spirit of
nationality in India and at the same time, profess loyal acceptance of British
rule.’ Or, as George Hamilton, the Secretary of State, had complained to
Dadabhai Naoroji an 1900: ‘You announce yourself as a sincere supporter of
British rule; you vehemently denounce the condition, and consequences which are
it inseparable from the maintenance of that rule.” Second, the British
policy-makers felt that the Moderate-led Congress could be easily finished
because it was weak and without a popular base. Curzon, in particular,
supported by George Hamilton, pursued this policy. He declared in 1900: ‘The
Congress is tottering to its fall, and one of my greatest ambitions while in
India is to assist it to a peaceful demise’. In 1903, he wrote to the Madras
Governor: ‘My policy, ever since I came to India, has been to reduce the
Congress to impotence.’ In 1904, he had insulted the Congress by refusing to
meet its delegation headed by its President. This policy was changed once the powerful
Swadeshi, and Boycott Movement began and the militant nationalist trend became
strong. An alternative policy of weakening the nationalist movement was now to
be followed. Instead of sneering at the Moderates, the policy was to be that of
‘rallying’ them as John Morley, the new Secretary of State for India, put it in
1907. The new policy, known as the policy of the carrot and the stick, was to
be a three pronged one. It may be described as a policy of
repression-conciliation-suppression. The Extremists, as we shall refer to the
militant nationalists from now on, were to be repressed, though mildly in the
first stage, the purpose being to frighten the Moderates. The Moderates were
then to be placated through some concessions and promises and hints were to be
given that further concessions would be forthcoming if they disassociated
themselves from the Extremists. The entire objective of the new policy was to
isolate the Extremists. Once the Moderates fell into the trap, the Extremists
could be suppressed through the use of the full might of the state. The
Moderates, in turn, could then be ignored. Unfortunately for the national
movement, neither the Moderates nor the Extremists were able to understand the
official strategy and consequently suffered a number of reverses. *The
Government of India, headed by Lord Minto as Viceroy and John Morley as the
Secretary of State, offered a bait of fresh reforms in the Legislative Councils
and in the beginning of 1906 began discussing them with the Moderate leadership
of the Congress. The Moderates agreed to cooperate with the Government and
discuss reforms even while a vigorous popular movement, which the Government
was trying to suppress, was going on in the country. The result was a total
split in the nationalist ranks. Before we take up this split at some length, it
is of some interest to note that the British were to follow this tactic of
dividing the Moderates from the militants in later years also — for example in
1924, vis-a-vis Swarajists, in 1936, vis-a-vis Nehru and the leftists, and so
on. The difference was that in the later years the national leadership had
learnt a lesson from the events of 1907-1909, and refused to rise to the bait,
remaining united despite deep differences. *There was a great deal of public
debate and disagreement among Moderates and Extremists in the years 1905-1907,
even when they were working together against the partitioning of Bengal. The
Extremists wanted to extend the Swadeshi and the Boycott Movement from Bengal
to the rest of the country. They also wanted to gradually extend the boycott
from foreign goods to every form of association or cooperation with the
colonial Government. The Moderates wanted to confine the boycott part of the
movement to Bengal and were totally opposed to its extension to the Government.
Matters nearly came to a head at the Calcutta Congress in 1906 over the
question of its Presidentship. A split was avoided by choosing Dadabhai
Naoroji, who was respected by all the nationalists as a great patriot. Four compromise
resolutions on the Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education, and Self-Government
demands were passed. Throughout 1907 the two sides fought over differing
interpretations of the four resolutions. By the end of 1907, they were looking
upon each other as the min political enemy. The Extremists were convinced that
the battle for freedom had begun as the people had been roused. They felt it
was time for the big push and in their view the Moderates were a big drag on
the movement. Most of them, led by Aurobindo Ghose, felt that the time had come
to part company with the Moderates, push
them out of the leadership of the Congress, and split the organization if the
Moderates could not be deposed. Most of the Moderates, led by Pherozeshah
Mehta, were no less determined on a split. To remain with the Extremists was,
they felt, to enter dangerous waters. They were afraid that the Congress
organization built carefully over the last twenty years, would be shattered.
The Government was bound to suppress any large-scale antiimPerIat1st movement;
why invite premature repression? As Gokhale put it in 1907, ‘You (the
Extremists) do not realize the enormous reserve of power behind the Government,
if the Congress were to do anything such as you suggest, the Government would have
no difficulty in throttling it in five minutes.’ Minto and Morley were holding
up hopes of brighter prospects. Many Moderates thought that their dream of
Indians sharing political and administrative power was going to come true. Any
hasty action by the Congress under Extremist pressure could annoy the Liberals
in power in Britain. Why not get rid of the Extremists while there was still
time? As H.A. Wadya, representing Pherozeshah Mehta’s thinking, wrote in an
article in which, after referring to ‘he Extremists as ‘the worst enemies of
our cause,’ said: ‘The union of these men with the Congress is the union of a
diseased limb to a healthy body, and the only remedy is surgical severance, if
the Congress is to be saved from death by blood poisoning.’Both sides had it
wrong — from the nationalist point of view as well as their own factional point
of view. The Moderates did not see that the colonial state was negotiating with
them not because of their inherent political strength but because of the fear
of the Extremists. The Extremists did not see that the Moderates were their
natural outer defence line (in terms of civil liberties and so on) and that
they did not possess the required strength to face the colonial state’s
juggernaut. Neither saw that in a vast country like India ruled by a powerful
imperialist nation only a broad- based united movement had any chance of
success. It wasn’t as though the whole leadership was blind to the danger. The
main public leaders of the two wings, Tilak (of the Extremists) and Gokhale (of
the Moderates) were mature politicians who had a clear grasp of the dangers of
disunity in the nationalist ranks. Tilak did not want the united national front
to break. He saw clearly that a powerful movement could not be built up at that
stage nor political demands successfully pressed on the rulers without the
unity of different political trends. His tactics were to organize massive
support for his political line and, thus, force a favourable compromise on the
Moderates. But having roused his followers in Maharashtra arid pushed on by the
more extreme elements of Bengal. Tilak found that he could not afford to
dismount from the tiger he found himself riding. When it came to the crunch, he
had to go with the more extreme leaders like Aurobindo Ghose. Gokhale, too, saw
the dangers of a split in the nationalist ranks and tried to avoid it. Already,
in October 1907, he had written to a friend: ‘If a split does come it means a
disaster, for the Bureaucracy will then put down both sections without much
difficulty.’ But he did not have the personality to stand upto a wilful
autocrat like Pherozeshah Mehta. He, too, knuckled under pressure of his own
extremists. The Congress session was held on 26 December, 1907 at Surat, on the
banks of the river Tapti. The Extremists were excited by the rumours that the
Moderates wanted to scuttle the four Calcutta resolutions. The Moderates were
deeply hurt by the ridicule and venom poured on them in mass meetings held at
Surat on the previous three days. The delegates, thus, met in an atmosphere
surcharged with excitement and anger. The Extremists wanted a guarantee that
the four resolutions would be passed. To force the Moderates to do so they
decided to object to the duly elected President for the year, Rash Behari
Ghose. Both sides came to the session prepared for a confrontation. In no time,
the 1600 delegates were shouting, coming to blows and hurling chairs at each
other. En the meantime, some unknown person hurled a shoe at the dais which hit
Pherozeshah Mehta and Surendranath Banerjea. The police came and cleared the
hall. The Congress session was over. The only victorious party was the rulers.
Minto immediately wrote to Morley that the ‘Congress collapse’ at Surat was ‘a
great triumph for us.”Tilak had seen the coming danger and made last minute
efforts to avoid it. But he was helpless before his followers. Lajpat Rai, a
participant in the events from the Extremist side, wrote later: ‘Instead of
leading his party, he (Tilak) allowed himself to be led by some of its wild
spirits. Twice on my request, at Surat, he agreed to waive his opposition to
the election of Dr. Rash Behari Ghose and leave the matter of the four Calcutta
resolutions to the Subjects Committee, but the moment I left him he found
himself helpless before the volume of opinion that surrounded him.” The
suddenness of the Surat fiasco took Tilak by surprise. He had not bargained for
it because, as Aurobindo Ghose wrote later, Tilak viewed the split as a
‘catastrophe.’ He valued the Congress ‘as a great national fact and for its
unrealized possibilities.”He now tried to undo the damage. He sent a virtual
letter of regret to his opponents, accepted Rash Behari Ghose as the President
of the Congress and offered his cooperation in working fm Congress unity. But
Pherozeshah Mehta and his colleagues would not relent. They thought they were
on a sure wicket. The Government immediately launched a massive attack on the
Extremists. Extremist newspapers were suppressed. Tilak, their main leader, was
sent to Mandalay jail for six years. Aurobindo Ghose, their ideologue, was
involved in a revolutionary Conspiracy case and immediately after being judged
innocent gave up politics and escaped to Pondicherry to take up religion. B.C.
Pal temporarily retired from politics and Lajpat Rai, who had been a helpless
onlooker at Surat, left for Britain in 1908 to come back in 1909 and then to go
off to the United States for an extended stay. The Extremists were not able to
organize an effective alternative party or to sustain the movement. The
Government had won, at least for the moment.’ The Moderates were indulging
their own foolish beliefs. They gave up all the radical measures adopted at the
Benaras and Calcutta sessions of the Congress, spurned all overtures for unity
from the Extremists and excluded them from the party. They thought they were
going to rebuild, to quote Pherozeshah Mehta, a ‘resuscitated, renovated,
reincarnated Congress.’ But the spirit had gone out of the Congress and all
efforts to restore it failed. They had lost the respect and support of the
political Indians, especially the youth, and were reduced to a small coterie.
Most of the Moderate leaders withdrew into their shells; only Gokhale plodded
on, with the aid of a small band of co-workers from the Servants of India
Society. And the vast majority of politically conscious Indians extended their
support, however passive, to Lokamanya Tilak and the militant nationalists.
After 1908 the national movement as a whole declined. In 1909, Aurobindo Ghose
noted the change: ‘When I went to jail the whole country was alive with the cry
of Bande Mataram, alive with the hope of a nation, the hope of millions of men
who had newly risen out of degradation. When I came out of jail I listened for
that cry, but there was instead a silence. A hush had fallen on the country.”
But while the upsurge was gone, the arouse nationalist sentiments did not
disappear. The people waited for the next phase. In 1914, Tilak was released
and he picked up the threads of the movement. *The Moderates and the country as
a whole were disappointed by the ‘constitutional’ reforms of 1909. The Indian
Councils Act of 1909 increased the number of elected members in the imperial
Legislative Council and the provincial legislative councils. Most of the
elected members were still elected indirectly. An Indian was to be appointed a
member of the Governor-General’s Executive Council. Of the sixty-eight members
of the Imperial Legislative Council, thirty-six were officials and five were
nominated non-officials. Out of twentyseven elected members, six were elected
by big landlords and two by British capitalists. The Act permitted members to
introduce resoluti9r s; it also increased their power to ask questions. Voting
on separate budget items was allowed. But the reformed councils still enjoyed
no real power and remained mere advisory bodies. They also did not introduce an
element of democracy or selfgovernment. The undemocratic, foreign and
exploitative character of British rule remained unchanged. Morley openly
declared in Parliament: ‘If it could be said that this chapter of reforms led
directly or necessarily up to the establishment of a Parliamentary system in
India, I, for one, would have nothing at all to do with it.’The real purpose of
the Morley-Minto Reforms was to divide the nationalist ranks and to check the
growing unity among Indians by encouraging the growth of Muslim communalism. To
achieve the latter objective, the Reforms introduced the system of separate
electorates under which Muslims could only vote for Muslim candidates in
constituencies specially reserved for them. This was done to encourage the
notion that the political, economic and cultural interests of Hindus and
Muslims were separate and not common. The institution of separate electorates
was one of the poisonous trees which was to yield a bitter harvest in later
years. *The end of 1907 brought another political trend to the fore. The
impatient young men of Bengal took to the path of individual heroism arid
revolutionary terrorism (a term we use without any pejorative meaning and for
want of a different term). This was primarily because they could find no other
way of expressing their patriotism It is necessary at this point to reiterate
the fact that, while the youth of Bengal might have been incensed at the
official arrogance and repression and the ‘mendicancy’ of the Congress
Moderates, they were also led to ‘the politics of the bomb’ by the Extremists’
failure to give a positive lead to the people. The Extremists had made a sharp
and on the whole correct and effective critique of the Moderates. They had
rightly emphasized the role of the masses and the need to go beyond propaganda
and agitation. They had advocated persistent opposition to the Government and
put forward a militant programme of passive resistance and boycott of foreign
cloth, foreigners’ courts, education and so on. They had demanded selfsacrifice
from the youth. They had talked and written about direct action. But they had
failed to find forms through which all these ideas could find practical
expression. They could neither create a viable organization to lead the
movement nor could they really define the movement in a way that differed from
that of the Moderates. They were more mi1itant their critique of British rule was
couched in stronger language, they were willing to make greater sacrifices and
undergo greater suffering, but they did not know how to go beyond more vigorous
agitation. They were not able to put before people new forms of political
struggle or mass movements. Consequently, they too had come to a political dead
end by the end of 1907. Perhaps that is
one reason why they expended so much of their energy in criticizing the
Moderates and capturing the Congress. Unsurprisingly, the Extremists’ waffling
failed to impress the youth who decided to take recourse to physical force. The
Yugantar, a newspaper echoing this feeling of disaffection, wrote in April
1906, after the police assault on the peaceful Barisal Conference: ‘The thirty
crores of people inhabiting India must raise their sixty crores of hands to
stop this curse of oppression. Force must be stopped by force.’ But the
question was what form would this movement based on force take. Organizing a
popular mass uprising would necessarily be an uphill and prolonged task. Many
thought of trying to subvert the loyalty of the army, but they knew it would
not be easy. However, these two objectives were kept as long-term goals and,
for the present, revolutionary youth decided to copy the methods of the fish
nationalists and Russian nihilists and populists. That is to say, they decided
to organize the assassination of unpopular British officials. Such
assassinations would strike terror into the hearts of the rulers, amuse the
patriotic instincts of the people, inspire them and remove the fear of
authority from their minds. Each assassination, and if the assassins were
caught, the consequent trial of the revolutionaries involved, would act as
‘propaganda by deed’’ All that this form of struggle needed was numbers of young
people ready to sacrifice their lives. Inevitably, it appealed to the idealism
of the youth; it aroused their latent sense of heroism. A steadily increasing
number of young men turned to this form of political struggle. Here again the
Extremist leadership let the young people down, While it praised their sense of
self-sacrifice and courage, it failed to provide a positive outlet for their
revolutionary energies and to educate them on the political difference between
a evolution based on the activity of the masses and a revolutionary feeling
based on individual action, however heroic. It also failed to oppose the notion
that to be a revolutionary meant to be a believer in violent action. In fact,
Aurobindo Ghose encouraged this notion. Perhaps the actions of the Extremist
leadership were constrained by the feeling that it was not proper to
politically criticize the heroic youth who were being condemned and hunted by
the authorities. But this failure to politically and ideologically oppose the
young revolutionaries proved a grievous error, for it enabled the
individualistic and terrorist conception of revolution to take root in Bengal.
In 1904, V.D. Sarvarkar organized Abhinav Bharat as a secret society of
revolutionaries. After 1905 several newspapers openly (and a few leaders
secretly) began to advocate revolutionary terrorism. In 1907, an unsuccessful
attempt was made on the life of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. In April
1908, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose threw a bomb at a carriage which they believed
was occupied by Kingsford, the unpopular judge at Muzzafarpur. Unfortunately,
they killed two English ladies instead. Prafulla Chaki shot himself dead while
Khudiram Bose was tried and hanged. Thousands wept at his death and he and
Chaki entered the ranks of popular nationalist heroes about whom folk songs
were composed and sung all over the countryThe era of revolutionary terrorism
had begun. Very soon secret societies of revolutionaries came up all over the
country, the most famous and long lasting being Anushilan Samity and Jugantar.
Their activities took two forms---the assassination of oppressive officials and
informers and traitors from their own ranks and dacoities to raise funds for
purchase of arms etc. The latter came to be popularly known as Swadeshi
dacoities! Two of the most spectacular revolutionary terrorist actions of the
period were the unsuccessful attempt under the leadership of Rash Behari Bose
and Sachin Sanyal to kill the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge who was wounded by the
bomb thrown at him while he was riding an elephant in a state procession — and
the assassination of Curzon-Wylie in London by Madan Lal Dhingra. In all 186
revolutionaries were killed or convicted between the years 1908-1918. The
revolutionary terrorists also established centres abroad. The more famous of
them were Shyamji Krishnavarma, V.D. Savarkar and Har Dayal in London and
Madame Cama and Ajit Singh in Europe. Revolutionary terrorism gradually petered
out. Lacking a mass base, despite remarkable heroism, the individual
revolutionaries, organized in small secret groups, could not withstand
suppression by the still strong colonial state. But despite their ‘small
numbers and eventual failure, they made a valuable contribution to the growth
of nationalism in India. As a historian has put it, ‘they gave us back the
pride of our manhood.’CHAPTER 12. WORLD WAR I AND INDIANNATIONALISM:
THEGHADARThe outbreak of the First World War in 1914 gave a new lease of life
to the nationalist movement which had been dormant since the heady days of the
Swadeshi Movement. Britain’s difficulty was India’s ‘opportunity.’ This
opportunity was seized, in different ways arid with varying success, by the
Ghadar revolutionaries based in North America and by Lokamanya Tilak, Annie
Besant and their Home Rule Leagues in India. The Ghadarites attempted a violent
overthrow of British rule, while the Home Rule Leaguers launched a nation-wide
agitation for securing Home Rule or Swaraj.*The West Coast of North America
had, since 1904, become home to a steadily increasing number of Punjabi
immigrants. Many of these were land-hungry peasants from the crowded areas of
Punjab, especially the Jullundur and Hoshiarpur districts, in search of some
means of survival. Some of them came straight from their villages in Punjab
while others had emigrated earlier to seek employment in various places in the
Far East, in the Malay States, and in Fiji. Many among them were exsoldiers
whose service in the British Indian Army had taken them to distant lands and
made them aware of the opportunities to be had there. Pushed out from their
homes by economic hardship and lured by the prospect of building a new and
prosperous life for themselves and their kin, they pawned the belonging,
mortgaged or sold their land, and set out for the promised lands.The welcome
awaited the travel-weary immigrants in Canada and the USA was, however not what
they had expected. Many were refused entry, especially those who came straight from
their villages and did not know Western Ways and manners those who were allowed
to stay not only had to face racial Contempt but also the brunt of the
hostility of the White labour force and unions who resented the competition
they offered. Agitations against the entry of the Indians were launched by
native American labourers and these were supported by politicians looking for
the popular vote. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for India had his own
reasons for urging restrictions on immigration. For one, he believed that the
terms of close familiarity of Indians with Whites which would inevitably take
place in America was not good for British prestige; it was by prestige alone
that India was held and not by force. Further, he was worried that the
immigrants would get contaminated by socialist ideas, and that the racial
discrimination to which they were bound to be subjected would become the source
of nationalist agitation in India.’ The combined pressure resulted in an
effective restriction on Indian immigration into Canada in 1908. Tarak Nath
Das, an Indian student, and one of the first leaders of the Indian community in
North America to start a paper (called Free Hindustan) realized that while the
British government was keen on Indians going to Fiji to work as labourers for
British planters, it did not want them to go to North America where they might
be infected by ideas of liberty. *The discriminatory policies of the host
countries soon resulted in a flurry of political activity among Indian
nationalists. As early as 1907, Ramnath Purl, a political exile on the West Coast,
issued a Circular-e-Azadi (Circular of Liberty) in which he also pledged
support to the Swadeshi Movement; Tarak Nath Das in Vancouver started the Free
Hindustan and adopted a very militant nationalist tone; G.D. Kumar set up a
Swadesh Sevak Home in Vancouver on the lines of the India House in London and
also began to bring out a Gurmukhi paper called Swadesh Sevak which advocated
social reform and also asked Indian troops to rise in revolt against the
British. In 1910, Tarak Nath Das and G.D. Kumar, by now forced out of
Vancouver, set up the United India House in Seattle in the US, where every
Saturday they lectured to a group of twenty-five Indian labourers. Close links
also developed between the United India House group, consisting mainly of
radical nationalist students, and the Khalsa Diwan Society, and in 1913 they
decided to send a deputation to meet the Colonial Secretary in London and the
Viceroy and other officials in India The Colonial Secretary in London could not
find the time to see them even though they waited for a whole month, but in
India they succeed in meeting the Viceroy and the Lieutenant Governor of the
Punjab But, more important, their visit became the occasion for a series of
public meetings in Lahore, Ludhiana, Ambala, Ferozepore, Jullundur, Amritsar
Lyallpur, Gujranwala, Sialkot and Simla and they received enthusiastic support
from the Press and the general public.The result of this sustained agitation,
both in Canada and the United States, was the creation of a nationalist consciousness
and feeling of solidarity among immigrant Indians. Their inability to get the
Government of India or the British Government to intercede on their behalf
regarding immigration restrictions and other disabilities, such as those
imposed by the Alien Land law which practically prohibited Indians from owning
land in the US, led to an impatience and a mood of discontent which blossomed
into a revolutionary movement. *The first fillip to the revolutionary movement
was provided by the visit to Vancouver, in early 1913, of Bhagwan Singh, a Sikh
priest who had worked in Hong Kong and the Malay States. He openly preached the
gospel of violent overthrow of British rule and urged the people to adopt Bande
Mataram as a revolutionary salute. Bhagwan Singh was externed from Canada after
a stay of three months. The centre of revolutionary activity soon shifted to
the US, which provided a relatively free political atmosphere. The crucial role
was OW played by Lala Har Dayal, a political exile fromIndia. Har Dayal arrived
in California in April 1911, taught briefly at Stanford University, and soon
immersed himself in political activity. During the summer of 1912, he
concentrated mainly on delivering lectures on the anarchist and syndicalist
movements to various American groups of intellectuals, radicals and workers, and
did not show much interest in the problems that were agitating the
immigrant4ndian community. But the bomb attack on Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of
India, in Delhi on 23 December, 1912, excited his imagination and roused the
dormant Indian revolutionary in him. His faith in the possibility of a
revolutionary overthrow of the British regime m India was renewed, and he
issued a Yugantar Circular praising the attack on the Viceroy. Meanwhile, the
Indians on the West Coast of the US had been in search of a leader and had even
thought of inviting Ajit Singh, who had become famous in the agitation in
Punjab in 1907. But Har Dayal was already there and, after December 1912,
showed himself willing to play an active political role. Soon the Hindi
Association was set up in Portland in May 1913. At he very first meeting of the
Association, held in the house of Kanshi Rain, and attended among others by
Bhai Parmanand, Sohan Singh Bhakna, and Harnam Singh ‘Tundilat,’ Har Dayal set
forth his plan of action: ‘Do not fight the Americans, but use the free&wn
that is available in the US to fight the British; you will never be treated as
equals by the Americans until you are free in your own land, the root cause of
Indian poverty and degradation is British rule and it must be overthrown, not
by petitions but by aimed revolt; carry this message to the masses and to the
soldiers in the Indian Anny; go to India in large numbers and enlist their
support.’ Har Dayal’s ideas found immediate acceptance. A Working Committee was
set up and the decision was taken to start a weekly paper, The Ghadar, for free
circulation, and to set up a headquarters called Yugantar Ashram in San
Francisco. A series of meetings held in different towns and centres and finally
a representatives’ meeting in Astoria confirmed and approved the decisions of
the first meeting at Portland. The Ghadar Movement had begun. *The Ghadar
militants immediately began an extensive propaganda Campaign; they toured
extensively, visiting mills and farms where most of the Punjabi immigrant
labour worked. The Yugantar Ashram became the home and headquarters and refuge
of these political workers.
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