Class 10 History Nationalism In India.pdf

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CLASS –X HISTORY
Chapter-1
(Chapter-2)
NATIONALISM IN INDIA
By
INDRAJIT SIR
Feelings About Nation

As you have seen, modern nationalism in Europe came to be associated
with the formation of nation-states. It also meant a change in people’s
understanding of who they were, and what defined their identity and
sense of belonging. New symbols and icons, new songs and ideas forged
new links and redefined the boundaries of communities. In most
countries the making of this new national identity was a long process.
How did this consciousness emerge in India?

In India and as in many other colonies, the growth of modern
nationalism is intimately connected to the anti-colonial
movement.
* People began discovering their unity in the process of their struggle with
colonialism.
• The sense of being oppressed under colonialism provided a shared bond that
tied many different groups together. But each class and group felt the effects of
colonialism differently, their experiences were varied, and their notions of
freedom were not always the same.
• The Congress under Mahatma Gandhi tried to forge these groups together
within one movement. But the unity did not emerge without conflict.

1. The First World War, Khilafat and Non-Cooperation
In the years after 1919, we see the national movement spreading to new areas,
incorporating new social groups, and developing new modes of struggle.
Q.How do we understand these developments?
Q.What implications did they have?

Effects of First World War:-
1.The war created a new economic and political situation. It led to a huge increase in defence
expenditure which was financed by war loans and increasing taxes: customs duties were raised
and income tax introduced.
2.Through the war years prices increased – doubling between 1913 and 1918 – leading to
extreme hardship for the common people.
3. Villages were called upon to supply soldiers, and the forced recruitment in rural areas caused
widespread anger. Then in 1918-19 and 1920-21, crops failed in many parts of India, resulting in
acute shortages of food.
4. This was accompanied by an influenza epidemic.
5. According to the census of 1921, 12 to 13 million people perished as a result of famines and
the epidemic.

1.1 THE IDEA OF SATYAGRAHA:-
Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in January 1915. As you know, he had come from South Africa
where he had successfully fought the racist regime with a novel method of mass agitation, which
he called satyagraha. The idea of satyagraha emphasised the power of truth and the need to
search for truth. It suggested that if the cause was true, if the struggle was against injustice, then
physical force was not necessary to fight the oppressor. Without seeking vengeance or being
aggressive, a satyagrahi could win the battle through nonviolence. This could be done by
appealing to the conscience of the oppressor. People – including the oppressors – had to be
persuaded to see the truth, instead of being forced to accept truth through the use of violence.
By this struggle, truth was bound to ultimately triumph. Mahatma Gandhi believed that this
dharma of non-violence could unite all Indians.

After arriving in India, Mahatma Gandhi successfully organised
satyagraha movements in various places. In 1917 he travelled to
Champaran in Bihar to inspire the peasants to struggle against the
oppressive plantation system. Then in 1917, he organised a satyagraha
to support the peasants of the Kheda district of Gujarat. Affected by
crop failure and a plague epidemic, the peasants of Kheda could not pay
the revenue, and were demanding that revenue collection be relaxed. In
1918, Mahatma Gandhi went to Ahmedabad to organise a satyagraha
movement amongst cotton mill workers

1.2 The Rowlatt Act:-
Emboldened with this success, Gandhiji in 1919 decided to launch a
nationwide satyagraha against the proposed Rowlatt Act (1919). This Act
had been hurriedly passed through the Imperial Legislative Council
despite the united opposition of the Indian members. It gave the
government enormous powers to repress political activities, and allowed
detention of political prisoners without trial for two years. Mahatma
Gandhi wanted non-violent civil disobedience against such unjust laws,
which would start with a hartal on 6 April.

Rallies were organised in various cities, workers went on strike in railway
workshops, and shops closed down. Alarmed by the popular upsurge,
and scared that lines of communication such as the railways and
telegraph would be disrupted, the British administration decided to
clamp down on nationalists. Local leaders were picked up from Amritsar,
and Mahatma Gandhi was barred from entering Delhi. On 10 April, the
police in Amritsar fired upon a peaceful procession, provoking
widespread attacks on banks, post offices and railway stations. Martial
law was imposed and General Dyer took command.

Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre:-
On 13 April the infamous Jallianwalla Bagh incident took place. On that day a large
crowd gathered in the enclosed ground of Jallianwalla Bagh. Some came to protest
against the government’s new repressive measures. Others had come to attend the
annual Baisakhi fair. Being from outside the city, many villagers were unaware of
the martial law that had been imposed. Dyer entered the area, blocked the exit
points, and opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. His object, as he declared
later, was to ‘produce a moral effect’, to create in the minds of satyagrahis a feeling
of terror and awe.

As the news of Jallianwalla Bagh spread, crowds took to the streets in
many north Indian towns. There were strikes, clashes with the police
and attacks on government buildings. The government responded with
brutal repression, seeking to humiliate and terrorise people: satyagrahis
were forced to rub their noses on the ground, crawl on the streets, and
do salaam (salute) to all sahibs; people were flogged and villages
(around Gujranwala in Punjab, now in Pakistan) were bombed. Seeing
violence spread, Mahatma Gandhi called off the movement.

While the Rowlatt satyagraha had been a widespread movement, it was
still limited mostly to cities and towns. Mahatma Gandhi now felt the
need to launch a more broad-based movement in India. But he was
certain that no such movement could be organised without bringing the
Hindus and Muslims closer together. One way of doing this, he felt, was
to take up the Khilafat issue. The First World War had ended with the
defeat of Ottoman Turkey. And there were rumours that a harsh peace
treaty was going to be imposed on the Ottoman emperor – the spiritual
head of the Islamic world (the Khalifa).

To defend the Khalifa’s temporal powers, a Khilafat Committee was
formed in Bombay in March 1919. A young generation of Muslim leaders
like the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, began discussing with
Mahatma Gandhi about the possibility of a united mass action on the
issue. Gandhiji saw this as an opportunity to bring Muslims under the
umbrella of a unified national movement. At the Calcutta session of the
Congress in September 1920, he convinced other leaders of the need to
start a non-cooperation movement in support of Khilafat as well as for
swaraj.

1.3 Why Non-cooperation?
In his famous book Hind Swaraj (1909) Mahatma Gandhi declared
that British rule was established in India with the cooperation of
Indians, and had survived only because of this cooperation. If Indians
refused to cooperate, British rule in India would collapse within a
year, and swaraj would come.
How could non-cooperation become a movement? Gandhiji
proposed that the movement should unfold in stages. It should begin
with the surrender of titles that the government awarded, and a
boycott of civil services, army, police, courts and legislative councils,
schools, and foreign goods. Then, in case the government used
repression, a full civil disobedience campaign would be launched.
Through the summer of 1920 Mahatma Gandhi and Shaukat Ali
toured extensively, mobilising popular support for the movement.

Many within the Congress were, however, concerned about the
proposals. They were reluctant to boycott the council elections
scheduled for November 1920, and they feared that the movement
might lead to popular violence. In the months between September
and December there was an intense tussle within the Congress. For a
while there seemed no meeting point between the supporters and
the opponents of the movement. Finally, at the Congress session at
Nagpur in December 1920, a compromise was worked out and
the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted.

*Big Questions
1.How did the movement unfold? Who participated in it?
2.How did different social groups conceive of the idea of Non-
Cooperation?

Differing Strands within the Movement
The Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement began in January 1921.
Various social groups participated in this movement, each with its
own specific aspiration. All of them responded to the call of Swaraj,
but the term meant different things to different people.
2.1 The Movement in the Towns
The movement started with middle-class participation in the cities.
Thousands of students left government-controlled schools and
colleges, headmasters and teachers resigned, and lawyers gave up
their legal practices. The council elections were boycotted in most
provinces except Madras, where the Justice Party, the party of the
non-Brahmans, felt that entering the council was one way of gaining
some power – something that usually only Brahmans had access to.

The effects of non-cooperation on the economic front were more
dramatic. Foreign goods were boycotted, liquor shops picketed,
and foreign cloth burnt in huge bonfires. The import of foreign
cloth halved between 1921 and 1922, its value dropping from
Rs 102 crore to Rs 57 crore. In many places merchants and traders
refused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign trade. As the
boycott movement spread, and people began discarding imported
clothes and wearing only Indian ones, production of Indian textile
mills and handlooms went up

But this movement in the cities gradually slowed down for a variety
of reasons. Khadi cloth was often more expensive than massproduced
mill cloth and poor people could not afford to buy it.
How then could they boycott mill cloth for too long? Similarly the
boycott of British institutions posed a problem. For the movement
to be successful, alternative Indian institutions had to be set up
so that they could be used in place of the British ones. These were
slow to come up. So students and teachers began trickling
back to government schools and lawyers joined back work in
government courts.

2.2 Rebellion in the Countryside
From the cities, the Non-Cooperation Movement spread to the
countryside. It drew into its fold the struggles of peasants and tribals
which were developing in different parts of India in the years
after the war.

In Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra – a sanyasi who
had earlier been to Fiji as an indentured labourer. The movement
here was against talukdars and landlords who demanded from
peasants exorbitantly high rents and a variety of other cesses. Peasants
had to do begar and work at landlords’ farms without any payment.
As tenants they had no security of tenure, being regularly evicted so
that they could acquire no right over the leased land. The peasant
movement demanded reduction of revenue, abolition of begar, and
social boycott of oppressive landlords. In many places nai – dhobi
bandhs were organised by panchayats to deprive landlords of the
services of even barbers and washermen.
Begar – Labour that villagers were forced to
contribute without any payment

In June 1920, Jawaharlal
Nehru began going around the villages in Awadh, talking to the
villagers, and trying to understand their grievances. By October, the
Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Baba
Ramchandra and a few others. Within a month, over 300 branches
had been set up in the villages around the region. So when the Non-
Cooperation Movement began the following year, the effort of the
Congress was to integrate the Awadh peasant struggle into the wider
struggle. The peasant movement, however, developed in forms that
the Congress leadership was unhappy with. As the movement spread
in 1921, the houses of talukdars and merchants were attacked,
bazaars were looted, and grain hoards were taken over. In many
places local leaders told peasants that Gandhiji had declared that
no taxes were to be paid and land was to be redistributed among
the poor. The name of the Mahatma was being invoked to sanction
all action and aspirations.
In 1928, Vallabhbhai Patel led the peasant
movement in Bardoli, a taluka in Gujarat,
against
enhancement of land revenue. Known as the
Bardoli Satyagraha, this movement was a
success
under the able leadership of Vallabhbhai
Patel.
The struggle was widely publicised and
generated immense sympathy in many parts
of India.

Tribal peasants interpreted the message of Mahatma Gandhi and
the idea of swaraj in yet another way. In the Gudem Hills of Andhra
Pradesh, for instance, a militant guerrilla movement spread in
the early 1920s – not a form of struggle that the Congress could
approve. Here, as in other forest regions, the colonial government
had closed large forest areas, preventing people from entering
the forests to graze their cattle, or to collect fuelwood and fruits.
This enraged the hill people. Not only were their livelihoods
affected but they felt that their traditional rights were being denied.
When the government began forcing them to contribute begar
for road building, the hill people revolted. The person who came
to lead them was an interesting figure.

Alluri Sitaram Raju claimed that he had a variety of special powers: he could make
correct astrological predictions and heal people, and he could survive
even bullet shots. Captivated by Raju, the rebels proclaimed that
he was an incarnation of God. Raju talked of the greatness of
Mahatma Gandhi, said he was inspired by the Non-Cooperation
Movement, and persuaded people to wear khadi and give up drinking.
But at the same time he asserted that India could be liberated only
by the use of force, not non-violence. The Gudem rebels attacked
police stations, attempted to kill British officials and carried on
guerrilla warfare for achieving swaraj. Raju was captured and
executed in 1924, and over time became a folk hero.

2.3 Swaraj in the Plantations
Workers too had their own understanding of Mahatma Gandhi
and the notion of swaraj. For plantation workers in Assam, freedom
meant the right to move freely in and out of the confined space in
which they were enclosed, and it meant retaining a link with the
village from which they had come. Under the Inland Emigration
Act of 1859, plantation workers were not permitted to leave the
tea gardens without permission, and in fact they were rarely given
such permission. When they heard of the Non-Cooperation
Movement, thousands of workers defied the authorities, left the
plantations and headed home. They believed that Gandhi Raj was
coming and everyone would be given land in their own villages.
They, however, never reached their destination. Stranded on the way
by a railway and steamer strike, they were caught by the police and
brutally beaten up.

The visions of these movements were not defined by the Congress
programme. They interpreted the term swaraj in their own ways,
imagining it to be a time when all suffering and all troubles would
be over. Yet, when the tribals chanted Gandhiji’s name and raised
slogans demanding ‘Swatantra Bharat’, they were also emotionally
relating to an all-India agitation. When they acted in the name of
Mahatma Gandhi, or linked their movement to that of the Congress,
they were identifying with a movement which went beyond the limits
of their immediate locality

3 .Towards Civil Disobedience
In February 1922, Mahatma Gandhi decided to withdraw the
Non-Cooperation Movement. He felt the movement was turning
violent in many places and satyagrahis needed to be properly trained
before they would be ready for mass struggles. Within the Congress,
some leaders were by now tired of mass struggles and wanted to
participate in elections to the provincial councils that had been set
up by the Government of India Act of 1919. They felt that it was
important to oppose British policies within the councils, argue for
reform and also demonstrate that these councils were not truly
democratic. C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party
within the Congress to argue for a return to council politics. But
younger leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose
pressed for more radical mass agitation and for full independence.

In such a situation of internal debate and dissension two factors
again shaped Indian politics towards the late 1920s. The first was
the effect of the worldwide economic depression. Agricultural prices
began to fall from 1926 and collapsed after 1930. As the demand
for agricultural goods fell and exports declined, peasants found it
difficult to sell their harvests and pay their revenue. By 1930, the
countryside was in turmoil.

Against this background the new Tory government in Britain constituted
a Statutory Commission under Sir John Simon. Set up in response to the
nationalist movement, the commission was to look into the functioning
of the constitutional system in India and suggest changes. The problem
was that the commission did not have a single Indian member. They
were all British.

When the Simon Commission arrived in India in
1928, it was greeted with the slogan ‘Go back
Simon’. All parties, including the Congress and the
Muslim League, participated in the demonstrations.
In an effort to win them over, the viceroy, Lord
Irwin, announced in October 1929, a vague offer
of ‘dominion status’ for India in an unspecified
future, and a Round Table Conference to discuss a
future constitution. This did not satisfy the Congress
leaders.

The radicals within the Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra
Bose, became more assertive. The liberals and moderates, who were proposing a
constitutional system within the framework of British dominion, gradually lost their
influence. In December 1929, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, the
Lahore Congress formalised the demand of ‘Purna Swaraj’ or full independence for
India. It was declared that 26 January 1930, would be celebrated as the
Independence Day when people were to take a pledge to struggle for complete
independence. But the celebrations attracted very little attention. So Mahatma
Gandhi had to find a way to relate this abstract idea of freedom to more concrete
issues of everyday life.

3.1 The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement
Mahatma Gandhi found in salt a powerful symbol that could unite
the nation. On 31 January 1930, he sent a letter to Viceroy Irwin
stating eleven demands. Some of these were of general interest;
others were specific demands of different classes, from industrialists
to peasants. The idea was to make the demands wide-ranging, so
that all classes within Indian society could identify with them and
everyone could be brought together in a united campaign. The most
stirring of all was the demand to abolish the salt tax. Salt was
something consumed by the rich and the poor alike, and it was one
of the most essential items of food. The tax on salt and the
government monopoly over its production, Mahatma Gandhi
declared, revealed the most oppressive face of British rule.

Mahatma Gandhi’s letter was, in a way, an ultimatum. If the
demands were not fulfilled by 11 March, the letter stated, the
Congress would launch a civil disobedience campaign. Irwin was
unwilling to negotiate. So Mahatma Gandhi started his famous
salt march accompanied by 78 of his trusted volunteers. The march
was over 240 miles, from Gandhiji’s ashram in Sabarmati to the
Gujarati coastal town of Dandi. The volunteers walked for 24 days,
about 10 miles a day. Thousands came to hear Mahatma Gandhi
wherever he stopped, and he told them what he meant by swaraj
and urged them to peacefully defy the British. On 6 April he reached
Dandi, and ceremonially violated the law, manufacturing salt by
boiling sea water.

This marked the beginning of the Civil Disobedience Movement.
How was this movement different from the Non-Cooperation
Movement? People were now asked not only to refuse cooperation
with the British, as they had done in 1921-22, but also to break
colonial laws. Thousands in different parts of the country broke
the salt law, manufactured salt and demonstrated in front of
government salt factories. As the movement spread, foreign cloth
was boycotted, and liquor shops were picketed. Peasants refused to
pay revenue and chaukidari taxes, village officials resigned, and in
many places forest people violated forest laws – going into Reserved
Forests to collect wood and graze cattle.

Worried by the developments, the colonial government began
arresting the Congress leaders one by one. This led to violent clashes
in many palaces. When Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devout disciple of
Mahatma Gandhi, was arrested in April 1930, angry crowds
demonstrated in the streets of Peshawar, facing armoured cars and
police firing. Many were killed. A month later, when Mahatma
Gandhi himself was arrested, industrial workers in Sholapur attacked
police posts, municipal buildings, lawcourts and railway stations –
all structures that symbolised British rule. A frightened government
responded with a policy of brutal repression. Peaceful satyagrahis
were attacked, women and children were beaten, and about 100,000
people were arrested.

In such a situation, Mahatma Gandhi once again decided to call off
the movement and entered into a pact with Irwin on 5 March 1931.
By this Gandhi-Irwin Pact, Gandhiji consented to participate in a
Round Table Conference (the Congress had boycotted the first
Round Table Conference) in London and the government agreed to
release the political prisoners. In December 1931, Gandhiji went to
London for the conference, but the negotiations broke down and
he returned disappointed. Back in India, he discovered that the
government had begun a new cycle of repression. Ghaffar Khan
and Jawaharlal Nehru were both in jail, the Congress had been
declared illegal, and a series of measures had been imposed to prevent
meetings, demonstrations and boycotts. With great apprehension,
Mahatma Gandhi relaunched the Civil Disobedience Movement.
For over a year, the movement continued, but by 1934 it lost
its momentum.

3.2 How Participants saw the Movement?
Let us now look at the different social groups that participated in the
Civil Disobedience Movement. Why did they join the movement?
What were their ideals? What did swaraj mean to them?

In the countryside, rich peasant communities – like the Patidars of Gujarat and the
Jats of Uttar Pradesh – were active in the movement. Being producers of
commercial crops, they were very hard hit by the trade depression and falling
prices. As their cash income disappeared, they found it impossible to pay the
government’s revenue demand. And the refusal of the government to reduce the
revenue demand led to widespread resentment. These rich peasants became
enthusiastic supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement, organising their
communities, and at times forcing reluctant members, to participate in the boycott
programmes. For them the fight for swaraj was a struggle against high revenues.
But they were deeply disappointed when the movement was called off in 1931
without the revenue rates being revised. So when the movement was restarted in
1932, many of them refused to participate.

The poorer peasantry were not just interested in the lowering of the revenue
demand. Many of them were small tenants cultivating land they had rented from
landlords. As the Depression continued and cash incomes dwindled, the small
tenants found it difficult to pay their rent. They wanted the unpaid rent to the
landlord to be remitted. They joined a variety of radical movements, often led by
Socialists and Communists. Apprehensive of raising issues that might upset the rich
peasants and landlords, the Congress was unwilling to support no rent’ campaigns
in most places. So the relationship between the poor peasants and the Congress
remained uncertain.

What about the business classes? How did they relate to the Civil Disobedience
Movement? During the First World War, Indian merchants and industrialists had
made huge profits and become powerful (see Chapter 5). Keen on expanding their
business, they now reacted against colonial policies that restricted business
activities. They wanted protection against imports of foreign goods, and a rupee-
sterling foreign exchange ratio that would discourage imports. To organise business
interests, they formed the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress in 1920 and
the Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FICCI) in 1927.

Led by prominent industrialists like Purshottamdas Thakurdas and G. D. Birla, the industrialists
attacked colonial control over the Indian economy, and supported the Civil Disobedience
Movement when it was first launched. They gave financial assistance and refused to buy or sell
imported goods. Most businessmen came to see Swaraj as a time when colonial restrictions on
business would no longer exist and trade and industry would flourish without constraints. But
after the failure of the Round Table Conference, business groups were no longer uniformly
enthusiastic. They were apprehensive of the spread of militant activities, and worried about
prolonged disruption of business, as well as of the growing influence of socialism amongst the
younger members of the Congress.

The industrial working classes did not participate in the Civil
Disobedience Movement in large numbers, except in the Nagpur
region. As the industrialists came closer to the Congress, workers
stayed aloof. But in spite of that, some workers did participate in
the Civil Disobedience Movement, selectively adopting some of
the ideas of the Gandhian programme, like boycott of foreign
goods, as part of their own movements against low wages and
poor working conditions. There were strikes by railway workers in
1930 and dockworkers in 1932. In 1930 thousands of workers in
Chotanagpur tin mines wore Gandhi caps and participated in protest
rallies and boycott campaigns. But the Congress was reluctant to
include workers’ demands as part of its programme of struggle.
It felt that this would alienate industrialists and divide the antiimperial
forces.

Another important feature of the Civil Disobedience Movement
was the large-scale participation of women. During Gandhiji’s salt
march, thousands of women came out of their homes to listen to
him. They participated in protest marches, manufactured salt, and
picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops. Many went to jail. In urban
areas these women were from high-caste families; in rural areas
they came from rich peasant households. Moved by Gandhiji’s call,
they began to see service to the nation as a sacred duty of women.
Yet, this increased public role did not necessarily mean any radical
change in the way the position of women was visualised. Gandhiji
was convinced that it was the duty of women to look after home
and hearth, be good mothers and good wives. And for a long time
the Congress was reluctant to allow women to hold any position
of authority within the organisation. It was keen only on their
symbolic presence.

3.3 The Limits of Civil Disobedience
Not all social groups were moved by the abstract concept of swaraj. One such
group was the nation’s ‘untouchables’, who from around the 1930s had begun to
call themselves dalit or oppressed. For long the Congress had ignored the dalits, for
fear of offending the sanatanis, the conservative high-caste Hindus. But Mahatma
Gandhi declared that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability
was not eliminated. He called the ‘untouchables’ harijan, or the children of God,
organised satyagraha to secure them entry into temples, and access to public wells,
tanks, roads and schools.

He himself cleaned toilets to dignify the work of the bhangi (the sweepers), and
persuaded upper castes to change their heart and give up ‘the sin of
untouchability’. But many dalit leaders were keen on a different political solution to
the problems of the community. They began organising themselves, demanding
reserved seats in educational institutions, and separate electorate that would
choose dalit members for legislative councils. Political empowerment, they
believed, would resolve the problems of their social disabilities. Dalit participation
in the Civil Disobedience Movement was therefore limited, particularly in the
Maharashtra and Nagpur region where their organisation was quite strong.

Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who organised the dalits into the Depressed Classes Association
in 1930, clashed with Mahatma Gandhi at the second Round Table Conference by
demanding separate electorates for dalits. When the British government conceded
Ambedkar’s demand, Gandhiji began a fast unto death. He believed that separate
electorates for dalits would slow down the process of their integration into
society.Ambedkar ultimately accepted Gandhiji’s position and the result was the
Poona Pact of September 1932. It gave the Depressed Classes (later to be known as
the Schedule Castes) reserved seats in provincial and central legislative councils,
but they were to be voted in by the general electorate. The dalit movement,
however, continued to be apprehensive of the Congress-led national movement.

Some of the Muslim political organisations in India were also lukewarm in their
response to the Civil Disobedience Movement. After the decline of the Non-
Cooperation-Khilafat Movement, a large section of Muslims felt alienated from the
Congress. From the mid-1920s the Congress came to be more visibly associated
with openly Hindu religious nationalist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha. As
relations between Hindus and Muslims worsened, each community organised
religious processions with militant fervour, provoking Hindu-Muslim communal
clashes and riots in various cities. Every riot deepened the distance between the
two communities.

The Congress and the Muslim League made efforts to renegotiate an alliance,
and in 1927 it appeared that such a unity could be forged. The important
differences were over the question of representation in the future
assemblies that were to be elected. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, one of the
leaders of the Muslim League, was willing to give up the demand for separate
electorates, if Muslims were assured reserved seats in the Central Assembly
and representation in proportion to population in the Muslim-dominated
provinces (Bengal and Punjab). Negotiations over the question of
representation continued but all hope of resolving the issue at the All Parties
Conference in 1928 disappeared when M.R. Jayakar of the Hindu Mahasabha
strongly opposed efforts at compromise.

When the Civil Disobedience Movement started there was thus an atmosphere of
suspicion and distrust between communities.Alienated from the Congress, large
sections of Muslims could not respond to the call for a united struggle. Many
Muslim leaders and intellectuals expressed their concern about the status of
Muslims as a minority within India. They feared that the culture and identity of
minorities would be submerged under the domination of a Hindu majority.

4. The Sense of Collective Belonging:-
Nationalism spreads when people begin to believe that they are all part of the
same nation, when they discover some unity that binds them together. But how
did the nation become a reality in the minds of people? How did people belonging
to different communities, regions or language groups develop a sense of collective
belonging? This sense of collective belonging came partly through the experience
of united struggles. But there were also a variety of cultural processes through
which nationalism captured people’s imagination. History and fiction, folklore and
songs, popular prints and symbols, all played a part in the making of nationalism.

Bharat Mata, Abanindranath Tagore,
1905.
Notice that the mother figure here is shown as
dispensing learning, food and clothing. The mala
in one hand emphasises her ascetic quality.
Abanindranath Tagore, like Ravi Varma before
him, tried to develop a style of painting that
could be seen as truly Indian.

The identity of the nation, as you know (see Chapter 1), is most
often symbolised in a figure or image. This helps create an image
with which people can identify the nation. It was in the twentieth
century, with the growth of nationalism, that the identity of India
came to be visually associated with the image of Bharat Mata. The
image was first created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the
1870s he wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland.

Later it was included in his novel Anandamath and widely sung during
the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. Moved by the Swadeshi movement,
Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata. In this
painting Bharat Mata is portrayed as an ascetic figure; she is calm,
composed, divine and spiritual. In subsequent years, the image of Bharat
Mata acquired many different forms, as it circulated in popular prints,
and was painted by different artists. Devotion to this mother figure
came to be seen as evidence of one’s nationalism.

Ideas of nationalism also developed through a movement to revive
Indian folklore. In late-nineteenth-century India, nationalists began
recording folk tales sung by bards and they toured villages to gather folk
songs and legends. These tales, they believed, gave a true picture of
traditional culture that had been corrupted and damaged by outside
forces. It was essential to preserve this folk tradition in order to discover
one’s national identity and restore a sense of pride in one’s past.

In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore himself began collecting ballads, nursery
rhymes and myths, and led the movement for folk revival. In Madras,
Natesa Sastri published a massive four-volume collection of Tamil folk
tales, The Folklore of Southern India. He believed that folklore was
national literature; it was ‘the most trustworthy manifestation of
people’s real thoughts and characteristics’.

Bharat Mata.
This figure of Bharat Mata is a contrast to the
one painted by Abanindranath Tagore. Here she
is shown with a trishul, standing beside a lion
and an elephant – both symbols of power and
authority.

As the national movement developed, nationalist leaders became more
and more aware of such icons and symbols in unifying people and
inspiring in them a feeling of nationalism. During the Swadeshi
movement in Bengal, a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow) was
designed. It had eight lotuses representing eight provinces of British
India, and a crescent moon, representing Hindus and Muslims. By 1921,
Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag. It was again a tricolour (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.

Another means of creating a feeling of nationalism was through reinterpretation of
history. By the end of the nineteenth century many Indians began feeling that to
instill a sense of pride in the nation, Indian history had to be thought about
differently. The British saw Indians as backward and primitive, incapable of
governing themselves. In response, Indians began looking into the past to discover
India’s great achievements. They wrote about the glorious developments in ancient
times when art and architecture, science and mathematics, religion and culture,
law and philosophy, crafts and trade had flourished. This glorious time, in their
view, was followed by a history of decline, when India was colonised. These
nationalist histories urged the readers to take pride in India’s great achievements in
the past and struggle to change the miserable conditions of life under British rule.

Class 10 History Nationalism In India.pdf

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