Chapter 2: Nationalism in India

• In colonies, the spread of modern nationalism is directly related to the anti-colonial movement.
  • Unity found through freedom struggles.
  • Oppression: a common tie
• Each class and group felt the effects of colonialism differently, they had different experiences, and their notions of freedom were sometimes different.
• The Congress, under Mahatma Gandhi tried to merge these groups together within one movement. But the unity did not emerge without conflict.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE YEAR 1919

After 1919, the national movement for independence spread to new areas, incorporated new social groups, and developed new modes of struggle.

the first world war

• A new economic and political situation.
• Huge increase in defense expenditure
  • financed by war loans and increasing taxes-
    • customs duties raised
    • income tax introduced
• Prices increased (doubling between 1913 and 1918)– extreme hardship for the common people.
• Villages told to supply soldiers.
  • forced recruitment: widespread anger
• In 1918-19 and 1920-21:
  • crops failed in many parts of India, resulting in acute shortages of food.
  • influenza epidemic hit the country.
    • As per the census of 1921: 12 to 13 million people died due to famines and the epidemic.

Mahatma Gandhi comes back

• Returned from South Africa to India in January 1915.
• He successfully organised satyagraha movements in various places.

The Rowlatt Act, 1919

• Gandhiji decided to launch a nationwide satyagraha against the proposed Rowlatt Act (1919).
• Rowlatt Act:
  • Excessive powers to government to repress political activities.
  • Allowed detention of political prisoners without trial for two years.
• It was speedily passed by the Imperial Legislative Council despite united opposition by the Indian members.
• Gandhiji wanted non-violent civil disobedience against such unjust laws, starting with a hartal on 6 April.
• Rallies organised in various cities, workers went on strike in railway workshops, and shops closed down.
• Alarmed by the upsurge, and scared that communication methods like railways and telegraph would be disrupted, the colonial administration decided to get hold of the nationalists.
  • Local leaders were picked up from Amritsar.
  • Mahatma Gandhi was barred from entering Delhi.
• 10 April: police in Amritsar fired upon a peaceful procession.
  • This provoked widespread attacks on banks, post offices and railway stations.
    • Martial law was imposed;
    • General Dyer took command.

Jallianwalla Bagh massacre

• April 13: 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 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.
• News of Jallianwalla Bagh spread, crowds took to the streets in many north Indian towns.
  • Strikes & clashes with the police and attacks on government buildings.
  • The government responded with brutal repression, sought to humiliate and terrorise people:
    • satyagrahis 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.

Khilafat movement

• While the Rowlatt satyagraha had been a widespread movement, it was limited mostly to cities and towns.
• Mahatma Gandhi now felt the need to launch a more broad-based movement in India.
  • But bringing the Hindus and Muslims closer together was a necessity for that.
• One method: take up the Khilafat issue.
• World War I had ended with the defeat of Ottoman Turkey.
  • Rumours: a harsh peace treaty was going to be imposed on the Ottoman emperor – the spiritual head of the Islamic world (the Khalifa).
• March 1919, Bombay: Khilafat Committee formed to defend the Khalifa’s temporal powers.
  • 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 include Muslims in a unified national movement.
• September 1920, Calcutta session of the Congress in: he convinced other leaders of the need to start a non-cooperation movement in support of Khilafat as well as for swaraj.

SATYAGRAHA

• 1917: Mahatma Gandhi had come from South Africa, after successfully fighting the racist regime with a novel method of mass agitation, called satyagraha.
• Persuade people (including the oppressors) to see the truth without violence.
  • By this struggle, truth was bound to ultimately triumph.
  • He believed that this dharma of non-violence could unite all Indians.
• In 1917:
  • Champaran, Bihar: he inspired the peasants to struggle against the oppressive plantation system.
  • He organized 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,
    • they were demanding that revenue collection be relaxed.
• In Ahmedabad, 1918, Mahatma Gandhi organised a satyagraha movement amongst cotton mill workers.

Why Non-cooperation?

• 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.

Non-cooperation to become a movement: 

• Gandhiji proposed that the movement should unfold in stages:
  1. Surrender of titles that the government awarded.
  2. Boycott of civil services, army, police, courts and legislative councils, schools, and foreign goods.
  3. If the government used repression, a full civil disobedience campaign would be launched.
• Summer of 1920, Mahatma Gandhi & Shaukat Ali toured extensively to gain support for the movement.

 

DIFFERING STRANDS WITHIN THE MOVEMENT

• January 1921: The Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement begins.
  • Social groups participated in the movement with their own specific aspirations.

The Movement in the Towns

middle class in government institutuions

• Thousands of students left government-controlled schools and colleges, headmasters and teachers resigned, and lawyers gave up their legal practices.
• The council elections 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.

middle class and the economic front

• Foreign goods were boycotted, liquor shops picketed, and foreign cloth burnt in huge bonfires.
• 1921-1922: Import of foreign cloth halved;
  • value dropped from Rs 102 crore to Rs 57 crore.
• In many places, merchants and traders refused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign trade.
• Movement spreads:
  • people began discarding imported clothes
  • wearing only Indian manufactured items

• • production of Indian textile mills and handlooms went up.

slowdown in cities

• Khadi cloth often more expensive than mass-produced mill cloth; poor people could not afford to buy it.
• For the movement to be successful, alternative Indian institutions were needed in place of the British ones.
  • These were slow to come up.
  • Students and teachers resumed going to government schools
  • Lawyers joined back work in government courts.

Rebellion in the Countryside

Non-Cooperation drew into its fold the struggles of peasants and tribals which were developing in different parts in the years after the war.

• In Awadh, peasants led by Baba Ramchandra– a sanyasi who had been to Fiji as an indentured labourer.
• The movement: against talukdars & landlords demanding exorbitantly high rents and a variety of other cesses from peasants.
• Peasants had to do begar and work at landlords’ farms without any payment.
• Tenants: no security of tenure;
  • regularly evicted so they could acquire no right over the leased land.
• The peasant movement demanded:
  • reduction of revenue,
  • abolition of begar,
  • social boycott of oppressive landlords.
• Nai–dhobi bandhs organized by panchayats: deprived landlords of the services of barbers and washermen.
• June 1920: Jawaharlal Nehru went to villages in Awadh, talked to villagers to understand their grievances.
• October 1920: Oudh Kisan Sabha set up, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Baba Ramchandra and a few others.
  • Within a month, over 300 branches set up in the villages around the region.
  • When the Non-Cooperation Movement began the next year, the effort of the Congress was to integrate the Awadh peasant struggle into the wider struggle.

• • The peasant movement developed; yet Congress leadership discontented.
    • 1921: movement spreads; houses of talukdars & merchants attacked, bazaars looted, grain hoards 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.

The tribal story

• Early 1920s, Gudem Hills, Andhra Pradesh: militant guerrilla movement spread in the– not a form of struggle that the Congress could approve.
• Hill people enraged: colonial government closed large forest areas, preventing people from entering the forests to graze their cattle, or collect fuelwood and fruits.
  • Their livelihoods affected.
  • They felt their traditional rights were being denied.
• Government forced them to contribute begar for road building, then the hill people revolted.
• Their leader: Alluri Sitaram Raju
  •  claimed he had a variety of special powers, he could:
    • make correct astrological predictions.
    • heal people.
    • survive bullet shots.
  • Rebels proclaimed Raju was an incarnation of God.
• Raju talked of the greatness of Mahatma Gandhi, said he was inspired by the Non-Cooperation Movement.
  • persuaded people to wear khadi and give up drinking.
  • yet he asserted that India could be liberated only by the use of force.
• 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.

Swaraj in the Plantations

• Freedom for plantation workers in Assam: the right to move freely in and out of the confined space in which they were enclosed, and retaining a link with their native village.
• Inland Emigration Act of 1859: plantation workers not permitted to leave the tea gardens without permission; rarely granted such permission.
• Non-Cooperation Movement:
  • thousands of workers defied the authorities;
  • left the plantations and headed home.
• Belief: Gandhi Raj was coming and everyone would be given land in their own villages.
• They were stranded on the way by a railway and steamer strike;
  • caught by the police and brutally beaten up.
• The visions of these movements: not defined by the Congress.
  • People interpreted the term swaraj in their own ways;

• • imagined it to be a time when all suffering and all troubles would be over.
• When the tribals chanted Gandhiji’s name and raised slogans demanding ‘Swatantra Bharat’, they were 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.

• February 1922: Mahatma Gandhi decided to withdraw the Non-Cooperation Movement.
• Movement turning violent in many places, satyagrahis needed to be properly trained before they would be ready for mass struggles.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MOVEMENT

• Varied views within the Congress, some leaders tired of mass struggles.
  • C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party within the Congress to argue for a return to council politics.
    • wanted to participate in the provincial council elections, set up by the Government of India Act of 1919.
    • felt that it was important to oppose British policies within the councils, argue for reform and demonstrate that these councils were not truly democratic.
  • Younger leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose supported more radical mass agitation and for full independence.
• Late 1920s:
  • The effect of the worldwide economic depression.
  • Agricultural prices began to fall from 1926 and collapsed after 1930.
    • demand for agricultural goods fell & exports declined,
    • peasants unable to sell their harvests and pay their revenue.
  • By 1930, the countryside was in turmoil.
• At the same time, the new Tory government in Britain constituted a Statutory Commission under Sir John Simon, in response to the nationalist movement.
• The commission: to look into the functioning of the constitutional system in India and suggest changes.
  • The problem: did not have a single Indian member. They were all British.

Simon Commission

• 1928: Simon Commission arrived in India.
  • greeted with the slogan ‘Go back Simon’.
  • All parties, including the Congress and the Muslim League, participated in the demonstrations.
• October 1929: The viceroy Lord Irwin gave compensation.
  • announced a vague offer of ‘dominion status’ for India in an unspecified future;
  • a Round Table Conference to discuss a future constitution.
    • Congress leaders weren’t satisfied.

• December 1929: Presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru- the Lahore Congress formalised the demand of ‘Purna Swaraj’ or full independence for India.
  • 26 January 1930 would be celebrated as the Independence Day, people were to take a pledge to struggle for complete independence.
    • the celebrations attracted very little attention.

The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement

• 31 January 1930: he sent a letter to Viceroy Irwin stating eleven demands.
  • Some demands of general interest; others specific demands of different classes.
• The idea: make the demands wide-ranging-
  • all classes identify with them;
  • everyone could be brought together in a united campaign.
• The biggest demand: to abolish the salt tax.
• Salt: consumed by the rich and the poor alike, one of the most essential items of food. A powerful symbol.
• Gandhi’s declaration: The tax on salt and the government monopoly over its production, revealed the most oppressive face of British rule.
• Mahatma Gandhi’s letter: an ultimatum.
  • demands not fulfilled by 11 March: the Congress would launch a civil disobedience campaign.
• Irwin was unwilling to negotiate.
• Mahatma Gandhi started his famous salt march accompanied by 78 of his trusted volunteers.
  • The march over 240 miles, from Gandhiji’s ashram in Sabarmati to Dandi, a Gujarati coastal town.
  • The volunteers walked for 24 days, about 10 miles a day.
• Thousands came to hear Mahatma Gandhi wherever he stopped,
  • told them what he meant by swaraj;
  • urged them to peacefully defy the British.
• 6 April: he reached Dandi.
  • ceremonially violated the law by manufacturing salt by boiling sea water.
  • This marked the beginning of the Civil Disobedience Movement.

• People to break colonial laws, not only to refuse cooperation with the British, as they did in 1921-22.
• Thousands in different parts of the country broke the salt law, manufactured salt and demonstrated in front of government salt factories.
• The movement spread:
  • foreign cloth was boycotted,
  • liquor shops were picketed,
  • Peasants refused to pay revenue and chaukidari taxes,
  • village officials resigned,
  • in many places forest people violated forest laws
    • going into Reserved Forests to collect wood and graze cattle.
• The colonial government began arresting the Congress leaders one by one.
  • This led to violent clashes in many palaces.
• April 1930: Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devout disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, arrested.
  • Crowds demonstrated in Peshawar, facing armored cars & police firing. Many were killed.
• May 1930: Mahatma Gandhi himself arrested.
  • Industrial workers in Sholapur attacked police posts, municipal buildings, lawcourts and railway stations all structures that symbolized British rule.
• A frightened government responded with a policy of brutal repression.
  • Peaceful satyagrahis attacked,
  • Women & children were beaten,
  • about 100,000 people were arrested.

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

How Participants saw the Movement

Rich peasant communities of the Countryside

• Communities like the Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh.
• Active in the movement.
• commercial crop producers: they were hard hit by the trade depression and falling prices.
• They found it impossible to pay the government’s revenue demand.
  • refusal of government to reduce the demand led to widespread resentment.
• They became enthusiastic supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement:
  • organised their communities,
  • at times forced reluctant members to participate in the boycott programmes.
• For them, swaraj was a struggle against high revenues.
• 1931: disappointed when the movement was called off without the revenue rates being revised.
• When the movement was restarted in 1932, many of them refused to participate.

The poorer peasantry

• A major interest: the lowering of the revenue demand.
• Another interest: the unpaid rent to the landlord to be remitted.
  • Many of them were small tenants cultivating land they had rented from landlords.
  • As the Depression continued & cash incomes dwindled, they found it difficult to pay their rent.
• 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.
• The relationship between the poor peasants and the Congress remained uncertain.

 Merchants and Businessmen

• World War I: Indian merchants and industrialists made huge profits and become powerful.
  • For business expansion: against colonial policies that restricted business activities.
  • Wanted protection against:
    • imports of foreign goods,
    • a rupee-sterling foreign exchange ratio to discourage imports.
• To promote business interests, formed organisations:
  • 1920: Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress
  • 1927: Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FICCI)
• Leaders of movements: prominent industrialists like Purshottamdas Thakurdas and G.D. Birla
  • they attacked colonial control over the Indian economy,
  • supported the Civil Disobedience Movement when it was first launched.
• They gave financial assistance and refused to buy or sell imported goods.
• Swaraj to most businessmen: when colonial restrictions on business would no longer exist and trade and industry would flourish without constraints.
• After the failure of the Round Table Conference, business groups not uniformly interested.
  • apprehensive of the spread of militant activities,
  • worried about prolonged disruption of business,
  • concerned about 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.
• Some workers did participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement:
  • selectively adopted some of the ideas of the Gandhian programme;
  • boycott against low wages and poor working conditions.
• There were strikes by railway workers in 1930 and dockworkers in 1932.
• 1930:
  • workers in Chotanagpur tin mines wore Gandhi caps
  • participated in protest rallies and boycott campaigns.
• The Congress was reluctant to include workers’ demands as part of its program of struggle.
• This would alienate industrialists and divide the anti-imperial forces.

Women in civil disobedience movement

• Large-scale participation by women.
• During salt march, thousands of women came to listen to him.
  • They participated in protest marches
  • manufactured salt,
  • picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops.
  • Many went to jail.

Participamts:

• urban areas: women from high-caste families;
• rural areas: women from rich peasant households.
• Moved by Gandhiji’s call, they began to see service to the nation as a sacred duty of women.
• Increased public role did not imply any radical change in the position of women in society.
• Gandhiji’s belief: the duty of women to look after home and hearth, be good mothers and good wives.
• 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.

The sidelined groups and the Civil Disobedience

Untouchables

• Around the 1930s: begun to call themselves ‘dalit’ or oppressed.
• Ignorance of the Congress: fear of offending the sanatanis, the conservative high-caste Hindus.
• Gandhi’s declaration: swaraj would not come if untouchability was not eliminated.
  • He called the ‘untouchables’ harijan, or the children of God
  • organised satyagraha to secure them:
    • entry into temples;
    • access to public wells, tanks, roads and schools.
  • Himself cleaned toilets to dignify the work of the bhangi (the sweepers)
  • persuaded upper castes to change their heart and give up ‘the sin of untouchability’.
• Many dalit leaders keen on a different political solution to the problems.
  • They began organising themselves and demanded:
    • reserved seats in educational institutions,
    • a separate electorate that would choose dalit members for legislative councils.
  • Their belief: Political empowerment would resolve the problems of their social disabilities.
• Dalit participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement was limited, particularly in the Maharashtra and Nagpur region where their organisation was quite strong.

Depressed Classes Association, 1930

• Dr B.R. Ambedkar: organised the dalits into the Depressed Classes Association in 1930.
  • He clashed with Gandhi at the 2^nd Round Table Conference by demanding separate electorates for dalits.
• British government accepted Ambedkar’s demand.
  • Gandhiji began a fast unto death.
    • Belief: separate electorates for dalits would slow down their integration into society.
• Ambedkar ultimately accepted Gandhiji’s position.
  • Its result: 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.

Muslims and Muslim political organizations

• Decline of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement: Muslims largely felt alienated from the Congress.
• Mid-1920s: Congress more visibly associated with openly Hindu religious nationalist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha.
• Relations of Hindus and Muslims worsening: each community organised religious processions with militancy, 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;
  • 1927: seemed that such a unity could be forged.

• Important differences: over the question of representation in the future assemblies 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;
  • Representation in proportion to population in Muslim-dominated provinces (Bengal and Punjab).
• All Parties Conference, 1928: Hope of resolving the issue lost when M.R. Jayakar of the Hindu Mahasabha strongly opposed efforts at compromise.
• Civil Disobedience Movement started: an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust between communities.
• Alienated from the Congress, large sections of Muslims could not respond to united struggle.
• Many Muslim leaders & 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.

Limitations of the Movement

• Spread of nationalism:
  • when people begin to believe that they are all part of the same nation
  • when they discover some unity that binds them together.
• Sense of collective belonging:
  • partly through the experience of united struggles.
  • Nationalism captured people’s imagination: History and fiction, folklore and songs, popular prints and symbols, all played a part in the making of nationalism.

The nation symbolized

• Creation of an image that people can identify the nation with.
• 20^th century: with the growth of nationalism, identity of India visually related to the image of Bharat Mata.
  • The first image was created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
• 1870s: Chattopadhyay wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland.
  • Later, it was included in his novel Anandamath & widely sung during Swadeshi movement in Bengal.
• Moved by the Swadeshi movement, Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata.
  • 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.

• • Devotion to this mother figure came to be seen as evidence of one’s nationalism.
• Ideas of nationalism also developed via a movement to revive Indian folklore.
• Late-19^th-century:
  • nationalists recorded folk tales sung by bards;
  • they toured villages to gather folk songs & legends.
  • Their belief: the tales gave a true picture of traditional culture that had been damaged by external forces.
• Essential: preserve folk tradition to discover one’s national identity and restore a sense of pride in one’s past.
• Bengal: Rabindranath Tagore began collecting ballads, nursery rhymes and myths, and led the movement for folk revival.
• Madras: Natesa Sastri published a 4-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’.

• As the national movement developed, nationalist leaders became aware of symbols in unifying people.
• Swadeshi movement in Bengal: a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow) was designed. It had:
  • 8 lotuses for 8 provinces of British India,
  • a crescent moon, representing Hindus and Muslims.
• By 1921, Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag.
  • It was a tricolour (red, green and white)
  • 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 nationalism: reinterpretation of history.
• End of the 19^th century: many Indians 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.

These efforts to unify people were not without problems. When the past being glorified was Hindu, when the images celebrated were drawn from Hindu iconography, then people of other communities felt left out.

Conclusion

• A growing anger brought together various groups of Indians into a common struggle for freedom in the first half of the 20^th century.
• The Congress, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, tried to channel people’s grievances into organised movements for independence.
  • The nationalists tried to forge a national unity.
  • Diverse groups & classes participated in these movements with varied aspirations & expectations.
  • Wide-ranging grievances; freedom from colonial rule meant different things to different people.
• The Congress continuously attempted to resolve differences, and ensure that the demands of one group did not alienate another.
  • Led to unity within the movement often breaking down.
• The high points of Congress activity and nationalist unity were followed by phases of disunity and inner conflict between groups.
• In other words, what was emerging was a nation with many voices wanting freedom from colonial rule.