Nationalism in India

How did different social groups conceive of the idea of Non-Cooperation?

The Movement in the Towns with middle-class participation

1.      The movement started with thousands of students left government-controlled schools andcolleges, headmasters and teachers resigned.

2.      Lawyers gave uptheir legal practices and boycotted courts.

3.      The council elections were boycotted in mostprovinces except Madras.

4.      Foreign goods were boycotted, liquor shops werepicketed,and foreign cloth burnt in huge bonfires.

5.      In many places merchants and tradersrefused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign trade.

Why did the movement in the cities gradually slowdown?Give reasons.

1.      Khadicloth wasoften more expensive than massproducedmill cloth and poor people could not afford to buy it. Common people began to wear foreign cloth.

2.      Similarly theboycott of British educational institutions posed a problem because there were no alternative Indian institutions. So students and teachers began tricklingback to government schools.

3.      Lawyers and officers could not survive without income so they joined back work ingovernment courts and offices.

Rebellion in the Countryside of Awadh

1.      In Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra – a sanyasiwhohad earlier been to Fiji as an indentured labourer. The movementhere was againsttalukdarsand landlords who demanded high rents, free labour and a variety of other taxes.

2.      The peasantmovement demanded reduction of revenue, abolition of begar, andsocial boycott of oppressive landlords. In many places barbers and washer menrefused to serve the landlords(nai– dhobibandh)

3.      By October, 1920 theOudh KisanSabha was set up headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, BabaRamchandra and a few others. Within a month, over 300 brancheshad been set up in the villages around the region.

4.      When the Non- Cooperation Movement began,the houses of talukdarsand merchants were attacked,bazaars were looted, and grain hoards were taken over.

5.       In manyplaces local leaders told peasants that Gandhiji had declared thatno taxes were to be paid and land was to be redistributed amongthe poor.

Rebellion in the forest of Andhra Pradesh

1.      In the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, the colonial governmenthad closed large forest areas, preventing people from enteringthe forests to graze their cattle, or to collect fuelwood and fruits.

2.      This enraged the hill people. Not only were their livelihoodsaffected but they felt that their traditional rights were being denied.When the government began forcing them to contribute beggar for road building, the hill people revolted.

3.      The person who cameto lead them was AlluriSitaramRajuwho claimedthat he had a variety of special powers: he could make correctastrological predictions and heal people, and he could surviveeven bullet shots.

4.      Raju was inspired by the Non-Cooperation Movement and Gandhiji. He persuaded people to wear khadiand give up drinking.But at the same time he asserted that India could be liberated onlyby the use of force, not non-violence.

5.      The Gudem rebels attackedpolice stations, attempted to kill British officials and carried onguerrilla warfare for achieving swaraj. Raju was captured andexecuted in 1924, and over time became a folk hero.

Plantation workers and Non Cooperation Movement

1.      Under the Inland EmigrationAct of 1859, plantation workers were not permitted to leave thetea gardens.

2.      When they heard of the Non-CooperationMovement, thousands of workers defied the authorities, left theplantations and headed home (Bihar, Bengal and Orissa).

3.      For plantation workers in Assam, freedommeant the right to move freely in and out of the confined space inwhich they were enclosed, and it meant retaining a link with thevillage from which they had come.

4.      They believed that Gandhi Raj has come and everyone would be given land in their own villages.

5.      On the way to steamer and railway stations they were caught by the police andbrutally beaten up.

How did different social groups participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement?

1.      Rich peasant communities:–They were very hard hit bythe trade depression and falling prices. As their cash incomedisappeared, they found it impossible to pay the government’s revenuedemand. These rich peasants becameenthusiastic supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement.

2.      The poor peasants: –As the Depression continued andcash incomes dwindled, the small tenants found it difficult to paytheir rent. They wanted the unpaid rent to the landlord to be remitted(removed).

3.      The business classes(Industrialists):They wanted protection against imports of foreign goods, and arupee-sterling foreign exchange ratio that would discourage imports.To organise business interests, they formed the Indian Industrialand Commercial Congress and the Federation of the IndianChamber of Commerce and Industries (FICCI) in 1927.

4.      The industrial workers:some workers did participate inthe Civil Disobedience Movement, selectively adopting the Gandhianprogramme, like boycott of foreigngoods, against low wages andpoor working conditions.

5.      Women:During Gandhiji’s saltmarch, thousands of women came out of their homes to participatein protest marches, manufacture salt, andpicket foreign cloth and liquor shops. Many went to jail. In urbanareas these women were from high-caste families; in rural areasthey came from rich peasant households.

The Limits of Civil Disobedience

Dalits

1.      Forlong the Congress had ignored the dalits. But Mahatma Gandhideclared that swaraj would not come for a hundred years ifuntouchability was not eliminated.

2.      He called the ‘untouchables’ harijan,or the children of God, organisedsatyagraha to secure them entryinto temples, and access to public wells, tanks, roads and schools.

3.      He himself cleaned toilets to dignify the work of the bhangi (thesweepers), and persuaded upper castes to change their heart andgive up ‘the sin of untouchability’.

4.      Dalit leaders began organising themselves into associations, demanding reserved seats ineducational institutions, and a separate electorate that would choosedalit members for legislative councils.

5.      Dalit participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement wastherefore limited, particularly in the Maharashtra and Nagpur regionwhere their organisation was quite strong.

Muslim Political Organisations:

1.      After the decline of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement, alarge section of Muslims felt alienated from the Congress.

2.      From themid-1920s the Congress came to be more visibly associated withopenly Hindu religious nationalist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha.

3.      As relations between Hindus and Muslims worsened, eachcommunity organised religious processions with militant fervour,provoking Hindu-Muslim communal clashes and riots in variouscities.

4.      The Congress and the Muslim League made efforts to renegotiatean alliance. Muhammad AliJinnah, was willing to giveup the demand for separate electorates, if Muslims were assuredreserved seats in the Central Assembly.

5.      Negotiations over the question of representationcontinued but all hope of resolving the issue at the All PartiesConference in 1928 disappeared when M.R. Jayakar of the HinduMahasabha strongly opposed efforts at compromise.When the Civil Disobedience Movement started there was large sections of Muslims could notrespond to the call for a united struggle.

How did people belonging to different communities,regions or language groups develop a sense of collective belonging?(Factors that gave rise to nationalistic sentiments among the Indians)

1.      In the 20^thcentury the identity of Indiacame to be visually associated with the image of Bharat Mata. Theimage was first created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image ofBharat Mata and portrayed it as an ascetic figure, calm, composed, divine and spiritual.

2.      In the1870s Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaywrote ‘VandeMataram’as a hymn to the motherland.Later it was included in his novel Anandamathand widely sung during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and other national movements.

3.      Ideas of nationalism also developed through a movement to reviveIndian folklore. Nationalists beganrecording folk tales sung by bards and they toured villages to gatherfolk songs and legends. In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagorehimself began collectingballads, nursery rhymes and myths, and led the movement for folkrevival. In Madras, NatesaSastri published a massive four-volumecollection of Tamil folk tales, The Folklore of Southern India.

4.      During the Swadeshimovement in Bengal, a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow)wasdesigned. By1921, Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag. It was again a tricolor (red, green and white) and had a spinning wheel in the centre,representing the Gandhian ideal of self-help. Carrying the flag,holding it aloft, during marches became a symbol of defiance.

5.      Another means of creating a feeling of nationalism was throughreinterpretation of history. The Britishsaw Indians as backward and primitive, incapable of governingthemselves. In response, Indians began looking into the past todiscover India’s great achievements in art and architecture, scienceand mathematics, religion and culture, law and philosophy, craftsand trade had flourished