Nationalism in India Notes Class 10 Social Science

Introduction

The modern nationalism in India is connected with the successful anti-colonial movements that took place in various parts of the world.
Inthisprocess ofmodernnationalism,people inIndiadiscoveredtheirunityandbelongingness through the sense of being oppressed.
The effects of colonialism were experienced differently by different classes and groups and therefore, their notions of freedom were different. Mahatma Gandhi tried a lot to put them together under one umbrella that is being Indians.

The First World War, Khilafat and Non-Cooperation

The national movement in India took a new shape after the end of the First World War. Here onwards, the national movement incorporated different new social groups and also developed newer modes of struggle.
Due to the First World War, the economic and political situation of India was altered. The defence expenditure was financed by the war loans, the increased taxes, raising the custom duties and introducing the income tax and increased prices of the commodities which caused economic hardship for the common people.
For the continuous supply of the soldiers, the villages were called upon and recruitment was done forcefully.
There was a period of crop failure in many parts of the country which caused acute food shortages and millions of people perished due to the famine and the epidemics.

The Idea of Satyagraha

In January 1915, Mahatma Gandhi came back to India from South Africa. In South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi fought against the racial discrimination with a novel method of mass agitation called Satyagraha which emphasizes the power of truth and the need to search for the truth.
Mahatma Gandhi said that if you are fighting for the truth and against injustice then there is no need of physical force to defeat the oppressor. This can be possible without being aggressive. The oppressors can be persuaded to see the truth with the use of non-violence. Mahatma Gandhi had a hard belief that the dharma of non-violence would help in uniting the people of the country.
In the initial periods, Gandhiji organized three successful Satyagraha movements in different parts of the country. In the year 1916, Champaran Satyagraha (in Bihar) was organized to inspire the peasants to fight against the oppressive domination of the plantation system. In the year 1917, Kheda Satyagraha was organized in Gujarat. Due to the crop failure and a plague epidemic the peasants were not able to pay the revenue so they were demanding for the revenue collection to be relaxed. In the year 1918, a Satyagraha was organized for the cotton mill workers in Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

The Rowlatt Act

In the year 1919, Gandhiji organized a satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act which was passed hurriedly by the Imperial Legislative Council despite the opposition by the Indian members. He planned a non-violent civil disobedience against this Act which would start with a hartal on 6th April 1919.
The Rowlatt Act gave enormous power to the government for repressing the political activities. According to this Act, the government can detain the political prisoners without trial for a period of two years.
Againstthe Rowlatt Act, rallies were organized,the railway workshop workers went on strike and the shops were closed down. The British administration got the alarm and were scared about the disruption of the communication lines such as the railways and the telegraph.
To suppress the nationalists, the British administration picked up the local leaders and barred Gandhiji from entering Delhi.
On 10th April 1919, the police opened fire in Amritsar on a peaceful procession and Martial law was imposed.
On 13th April 1919, huge crowd had gathered in the Jallianwalla Bagh. The crowd had two different objectives. Some of them gathered to protest the new repressive measures of the government whereas others gathered to attend the annual Baisakhi fair. Those who came from outside city were not aware of the martial law. General Dyer entered in the ground, closed the exit points and opened fire in which hundreds of innocent people were killed. This was basically done to create a feeling of terror in the minds of Satyagrahis.
This infamous incident resulted in strikes, clashes with the police and the government buildings were attacked. This reaction of Indians was brutally suppressed by the government as the Satyagrahis were forced to rub their nose on the ground, crawl on streets and do salute to all the Sahibs, people were beaten up and villages were bombed.
Mahatma Gandhi called off the non-violent civil disobedient movement against the Rowlatt Act because the violence was spreading all over. Now he wanted to launch a much wider movement in India by joining the Hindus and the Muslims of the country. That’s why he took up the Khilafat issue.
A harsh peace treaty was going to be imposed on the Khalifa of the Ottoman empire after the defeat in the First World War. In March 1919, a Khilafat committee was set up in Bombay to defend the temporal powers of the Khalifa. Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali were the two brothers among the youth generation of the Muslim leaders who discussed the issue with Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, in September 1920 session of Congress in Calcutta it was decided to start a non-cooperation in support of Khilafat and also for the Swaraj.
In the year 1909, Mahatma Gandhi wrote a book named ‘Hind Swaraj’ in which he wrote that the British survived in India only because of the cooperation of the Indians, otherwise they would have collapsed within a year.
Gandhiji planned to unfold the movement in stages. In the first stage, the people surrendered the titles, boycotted civil services, army, police, schools, foreign goods, courts and legislative councils. The full civil disobedience campaign was planned for the second phase if the government tried to repress the first phase.
Many within the Congress were reluctant to boycott the council election which was scheduled for November 1920. Finally, in December 1920, a compromise was done to adopt the noncooperation.

Differing Strands Within the Movement

In January 1921, the Non-Cooperation Khilafat Movement was started in which different social groups participated with different aspirations for the Swaraj. This movement was started with the middle class people of the towns and cities. The students left the schools and colleges, the teachers and headmasters resigned and the lawyers gave up their practices.
The council elections were also boycotted except in Madras. The Justice Party which was a party of the non-Brahmins in Madras felt that power could be acquired only through the council elections.
The economic effects of the non-cooperation movement – foreign goods boycotted, liquor shops picketed, foreign clothes were burnt, import of the foreign clothes became half, the value of imports dropped, merchants and traders refused the trade of foreign goods, production of Indian mills and handloom rose.
The non-cooperation movement gradually slowed down in towns and cities because the khadi clothes were expensive which the poor people could not afford, there was need for Indian institutions for the teachers, students and the lawyers but these were very slow to come up. Thus once again people started using the mill-made British clothes and the students, teachers and the lawyers rejoined their respective institutions.
Now the non-cooperation movement spread to the countryside where the peasants and the tribals were taking part in this. Baba Ramchandra was a sanyasi who worked as an indentured labourer in Fiji. A movement was led by him leading the peasants against the talukdars and landlords because they demanded very high rents and other cesses from the peasants. The peasants were bound to work at landlord’s farm without any payment. Peasants had to do begar, no security of tenure and also they were evicted regularly so that they could not acquire right over the leased land.
The various demands of the peasants in Awadh were – reduction of revenue, abolition of Begar and social boycott of oppressive landlords which was strengthened by the nai-dhobi bandhs organized by the Awadh panchayats to deprive the landlords from the services of the barbers and washermen.
In October 1920, Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up by Jawahar Lal Nehru, Baba Ramchandra and a few others. This is how the Awadh peasants were integrated in the process of upcoming wider non-cooperation movement by the Congress. Butthe Awadh peasants invoked the name of Mahatma Gandhi to sanction all action and aspirations because during the movement they attacked the houses of the talukdars and merchants, looted the bazaars and took over the grain hoards. Some of the local leaders told the peasants that Gandhiji had declared not to pay taxes and also the land will be redistributed among the poor.
In the early 1920s, a militant guerrilla movement was spread in the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh. The Congress never approved such type of movements. This war took because the colonial government closed large forest areas and prevented the people from entering the forest for the purposes like grazing the cattle, collection of fuelwood and fruits.
The livelihood and the traditional rights of the local people were denied. The revolt began when the government forced the hill people to contribute begar for the road building.
Alluri Sitaram Raju was the leader of this revolt claimed that he had special powers like making correct astrological predictions, healing the people and could survive even bullet shots. Therefore the rebels proclaimed him the incarnation of God.
Though Raju favoured the Gandhian styles and greatness and urged people to wear khadi and give up drinking but at the same time he asserted the use of force and violence to get India liberated. The police stations were attacked, British officials were killed and guerrilla warfare continued for Swaraj. As a result in the year 1924, Raju was arrested and executed and hence became a folk hero.
According to the Inland Emigration Act 1859 the plantation workers in Assam were not allowed to leave the tea garden. Therefore they also joined the Swaraj movement. For the plantation workers in Assam, the notion of Swaraj was to get the right of free movement in and out of the confined space, retaining a link with the village from which they belong to and also they believed that in the Gandhi Raj they would be given land.

Towards Civil Disobedience

As the Non-Cooperation Movement was turning violent in many places it was called off by Mahatma Gandhi in February 1922 to train the Satyagrahis for mass struggle. Some of the Congress leaders were not willing to continue the non-cooperation because they were tired of the mass struggle, wanted to participate in the council elections and they wanted to criticize the British policies within the council.
The Swaraj Party was formed within the Congress by C.R.Das and Motilal Nehru. It was formed with purpose to argue for return to council politics.
Due to the worldwide economic depression, the agricultural prices began to fall, demands for agricultural goods fell and the export declined. This resulted in a countryside turmoil because now it was difficult for the peasants to sell their harvest and pay the high revenue.
Against this situation of countryside turmoil, the Tory government in Britain set up a commission named Simon Commission under Sir John Simon to look into the constitutional system in India and suggest the changes needed. There were no Indian members in this commission.
In the year 1928, Simon commission arrived India and was greeted with the slogan ‘Simon, go back’.
In October 1929, the viceroy, Lord Irwin, announced a vague offer of ‘dominion status’ for India because the period was unspecified and also suggested a Round table conference to discuss the future constitution.
In December 1929, the Congress under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru demanded Purna Swaraj and declared that 26th January 1930 would be celebrated as the Independence Day. On this day, the people of India will take pledge to struggle for Purna Swaraj. But this step of Congress proved just an abstract idea as this celebration got very little attention.
On 31st March 1930, Mahatma Gandhi sent a letter to Viceroy Irwin stating eleven demands in this letter out of which some were of general interest and some were specific demands of different classes. The most important demand was to abolish the salt tax as it was the most important item in food that is consumed by both rich and poor.
Mahatma Gandhi started the famous salt march for over 240 miles with his 78 trusted volunteers from Sabarmati to Dandi. They walked for 10 miles a day for 24 days. He violated the salt law by manufacturing salt by boiling the sea water on 6th April 1930.
Now Gandhiji wanted Indians to refuse all sort of cooperation with the British and also to break the colonial laws. There after, people broke salt law, manufactured salt, showed demonstrations, boycotted the foreign clothes, picketed up the liquor shops, peasants refused to pay the taxes and revenues and the forest people violated the forest laws.
To suppress this movement, the colonial government started arresting the Congress leaders. The arrest of Abdul Ghaffar Khan made the Indians angry and the crowd demonstrated in the streets of Peshawar. The arrest of Mahatma Gandhi made this demonstration more widespread and violent as the industrial workers in Sholapur (Maharashtra) attacked the police posts, railway stations and other government buildings.
A brutal repression policy was adopted by the colonial government to suppress this and the police attacked the peaceful Satyagrahis, beat up the women and the children and arrested about 1 lakh people.
This resulted in the call off the movement by Gandhiji and Gandhi-Irwin Pact was signed on 5th March 1931. He agreed for the Round Table Conference and thus the political prisoners were released.
When Mahatma Gandhi went for the Round Table Conference in December 1931, he returned disappointed as the negotiations broke down. He discovered this new cycle of repression by the British. The important Congress leaders were in jail and meetings, demonstrations and boycotts were prevented. As a result, Gandhiji relaunched the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1932 which again lost its momentum by 1934.
The rich peasant communities of Gujarat (Patidars) and Uttar Pradesh (Jats) participated actively in the relaunched Civil Disobedience Movement but they were highly disappointed when Gandhiji called off the movement without revising the revenue rates.
These rich peasants were the main producers of the commercial crops. Due to the trade depression, falling prices and disappeared cash income they were not able to pay the revenue and also the government refused to reduce the revenue. Their notion for Swaraj struggle was basically a struggle against high revenue.
For the poor peasantry groups, the meaning of Swaraj was lowering the revenue demand and also they wanted the unpaid rent to be remitted. But the Congress was reluctant the demand for support the demand for no rent and thus the relationship between the poor peasantry groups and Congress remained uncertain.
The Indian merchants and the industrialists became rich and powerful due to huge profits they made during the First World War. Thus they started opposing the colonial policies which restricted their business to expand. They had two demands – protection against the import of foreign goods and a favorable exchange ratio of rupee and sterling.
In the year 1920 and 1927, Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress and the Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries were formed respectively by the Indian merchants and industrialist to organize their business interest.
Purshottamdas Thakurdas and G.D. Birla were the prominent industrialists who supported the Civil Disobedience Movement, gave financial assistance, refused to buy and sellthe foreign goods and attacked the colonial control. According the merchants and the industrialists. The meaning of Swaraj was expansion of trade and business without restrictions by the colonial government. But they were disheartened due to the failure of the Round Table Conference.
Most of the industrial workers did not participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement as the industrialists were close to the Congress. Some of the industrial workers who participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement were the Nagpur industrial workers who selectively adopted some of the Gandhian ideas such as boycott of the foreign goods. They participated in the movement as part of their own movement against the low wages and the poor working conditions in the industries.
In the year 1930 and 1932, the railway workers and the dock workers went on strike. The Chhotanagpur tin mines workers also protested in rallies wearing Gandhian caps and boycotted the campaigns. But the Congress was not willing to include their demands.
Women also participated in large scale in the Civil Disobedience Movement during the salt march by Gandhiji. They belonged to the high caste families from the urban areas and rich peasant households from the rural areas. For them, it was a sacred duty to serve the nation. But the Congress was not willing to give them any position of authority in the organisation and that’s why Gandhiji said that women should look after the domestic chores and be good mothers and wives.
The untouchables who called themselves Dalits or oppressed were not taking part in any such movements due to the ignorance of the Congress and the fear of offending the Sanatanis. But Gandhiji was of the view that Swaraj would not come for hundred years if the problem of untouchability was not removed from the country. Gandhiji called them ‘harijan’ which means the children of God.
Gandhiji fought for their temple entry rights and others rights such as access to public wells, schools and other public places. Gandhiji himself cleaned the toilets in order to dignify the work of the sweepers and also urged the upper caste people to change their heart and thinking about these untouchables.
The Dalit leaders demanded reserved seats in the educational institutions and separate electorates so that they would be getting seats in the legislative councils and thus politically empowered. The Dalits believed that these are the only ways through which they will be treated equally in the society.
The Dalits organisations were quite strong in Maharashtra and Nagpur and therefore, in these regions only they participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement.
In the Second Round Table Conference, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar demanded separate electorates for the Dalits. Against this, Gandhiji began a fast unto death because he believed that separate electorates for the Dalits would slow down the process of national integration.
Later on, Ambedkar accepted Gandhian view and in the Poona Pact, the depressed class people were given the reserved seats in the provincial and the central legislative council election but to be voted in by the general electorate.
The Muslims and their political organisations were also not taking much interest in the Civil Disobedience Movement due to the decline of the Non-Cooperation Khilafat Movement. They felt alienated from Congress. They felt that Congress is linked with a Hindu Mahasabha and their propagandas are Hindu oriented. This thinking resulted to Hindu-Muslim communal clashes and riots in different parts of the country. Thus the distance between these two communities widened. Their main issue was over the representation in the future assemblies.
In the All Parties Conference in 1928, the demands of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, for reserved seats in the Central Assembly and representation in proportion to population in the Muslim dominated provinces like Bengal and Punjab, was strongly opposed by M.R. Jayakar of Hindu Mahasabha. The Muslims were very much concerned about their status, culture and identity as a minority in India.

The Sense of Collective Belonging

• It is a belief that all are a part of the same nation which binds the people together and make different communities, regions and language groups united. This came through the united struggles like the different non-cooperation movements, civil disobedience movements, the wars like 1857, history, fiction, folklores, folk songs, prints, icons and symbols etc. All these helped in unifying the Indians and inspired a feeling of nationalism in them.

• The image of India was first visualized as Bharat Mata by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and also a hymn ‘Vande Matram’ was written by him in 1870s. This hymn was later included in his novel Anandmath and sung during the swadeshi movement in Bengal.

• The image of Bharat Mata was portrayed as calm, composed, divine and spiritual which acquired different forms in different years by different artists. This image of India developed the ideas of nationalism in India.

• The Indian folklores were revived and the folk tales were recorded and sung by bards which gave a true picture of the traditional Indian culture and tells how it was ruined by the Britishers.

• Rabindranath Tagore led the movement for the revival of the folks and thus collected ballads, nursery rhymes and myths .Tamil folk tales were published by Natesa Sashtri in his book The Folklore of Southern India which was a massive four volume collection.

• A tricolor swadeshi flag, using red, green and yellow was designed during the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal which had 8 lotuses for the representation of the 8 provinces and a crescent moon for symbolizing the Hindus and the Muslims.

• A tricolor Swaraj flag was designed by Gandhiji in the year 1921 using the colours red, green and white. A spinning wheel was in the Centre of the flag which represented the Gandhian ideal of self- help.

• The history was reinterpreted to create the feeling of nationalism and instill a sense of pride among the Indians. Through this the perspective of British towards India as backward, primitive and incapable of governing themselves was criticized.

• The reinterpretation of the Indian history revealed that India had glorious achievements and developments in the past. India had contributed in the field of art, architecture, science, religion, culture, law, philosophy, crafts and trade.