Indian independence movement

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 13th of April 1919, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer blocked the only entrance to a walled courtyard called Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab. Inside, some 15,000 men, women, and children had gathered peacefully. His troops fired 1,651 rounds. An official British commission counted 379 dead and 1,137 wounded; Indian estimates of the dead ran as high as 1,499. Dyer was forced to retire, yet some in Britain hailed him as a hero. That contradiction taught Indian nationalists a bitter lesson. The Empire answered to public opinion in Britain, but not in India.

  The Indian independence movement ran from the mid-1880s to 1947, a series of political efforts across the Indian subcontinent aimed at ending British colonial rule. How did a body that began as a polite debating society end in the transfer of power and the partition of a subcontinent? Why did some leaders carry spinning wheels while others smuggled bomb manuals from Paris? And what made a man born in a Tamil Vellalar village, a barber's son turned ruler of Madurai, one of the earliest names in a struggle that would outlast him by two centuries?

• 2. The Company Tightens Its Grip

  ›

  Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, reached Calicut in 1498 in search of spice, the first European to arrive in India via the Atlantic Ocean. Just over a century later the English set up their first trading post at Surat in 1613. Over the next two centuries the British defeated the Portuguese and the Dutch, while remaining in conflict with the French.

  The decline of the Mughal Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century opened a door. At the Battle of Plassey, the East India Company's army defeated Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, and the company became a major player in Indian affairs. The Battle of Buxar of 1764 handed it administrative rights over Bengal, Bihar, and the Midnapur part of Odisha.

  After the defeat of Tipu Sultan, killed in the final war in 1799, most of southern India fell under company rule or indirect control through subsidiary alliance. The company then seized regions held by the Maratha Empire after a series of wars. Much of Punjab was annexed in 1849, following the defeat of Sikh armies in the First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars. The toughest resistance the company faced came from Mysore, where Hyder Ali and his successor Tipu Sultan fought on four fronts at once.

• 3. Forgotten Rebels And Queens

  ›

  Maruthanayagam Pillai was born in a Tamil Vellalar caste family in a village called Panaiyur. He converted to Islam, took the name Muhammad Yusuf Khan, and became ruler of Madurai, known popularly as Khan Sahib. The British and the Arcot Nawab first employed him to suppress the Polygar uprising, then turned on him. Three of his associates were bribed to capture him during his morning prayer, and he was hanged on the 15th of October 1764 near Madurai. Local legend says he survived two earlier hanging attempts, and that the fearful Nawab had his body dismembered and buried across Tamil Nadu.

  Rani Velu Nachiyar, queen of Sivaganga from 1760 to 1790, was trained in martial arts like Valari and Silambam and was proficient in French, English, and Urdu. After her husband was killed by British soldiers and the Nawab of Arcot's forces, she formed an army, allied with Hyder Ali, and challenged the British successfully in 1780. She is said to have arranged a suicide attack by a follower, Kuyili, who doused herself in oil and walked into a British storehouse. Nachiyar was one of the few rulers to regain her kingdom, ruling it for a decade more.

  Veerapandiya Kattabomman, a Polygar chieftain from Panchalankurichi, refused to accept the company's sovereignty and was hanged in 1799. Dheeran Chinnamalai, a Kongu Nadu chieftain, defeated the British at Cauvery in 1801, Odanilai in 1802, and Arachalur in 1804 through guerrilla warfare. In Odisha, after the King of Khordha lost his rights to the Jagannath Temple in 1804, armed Paiks attacked the British at Pipili, and Bakshi Jagabandhu launched the Paik Rebellion, remembered as the first uprising against the East India Company.

• 4. Uprisings Of The Land

  ›

  Binsu Manki led one of the earliest recorded Indigenous revolts around 1771, over the transfer of Jharkhand to the East India Company. His revolt was followed by a wave: the rebellion of Tilka Manjhi in 1784, the Bhumij Revolt of Manbhum from 1798 to 1799, the Chero Uprising of Palamu in 1800 under Bhukan Singh, and two Munda uprisings in the Tamar region. The Ho Rebellion of 1820 to 1821 near Chaibasa on the Roro River was crushed by colonial cavalry.

  Syed Mir Nisar Ali Titumir, an Islamic preacher, built a bamboo fort known in Bengali as Bansher Kella in Narkelberia Village. After British soldiers stormed it, he died of his wounds on the 19th of November 1831. The Santhal Hul of 1855 to 1857 mobilised over 60,000 Santhals, led by the Murmu siblings: brothers Sidhu, Kanhu, Chand, and Bhairav, and their sisters Phulo and Jhano.

  Birsa Munda led thousands from the Munda, Oraon, and Kharia communities in Ulgulaan, or revolt, against British expansion, forced conversions to Christianity, and the displacement of Indigenous people from their lands. Between the 7th and the 9th of January 1900, the British attacked the Dombari Hills, where Birsa had made his headquarters, killing at least 400 Munda warriors. The hills are called Topped Buru today, the mound of the dead. Birsa was captured in the Jamkopai forest in Singhbhum and died in jail in 1900, his cremation rushed to ensure the movement was subdued.

• 5. The Mutiny That Changed Everything

  ›

  The newly introduced Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle cartridges carried a rumour with terrible force. Soldiers had to bite the cartridges before loading, and word spread that they were greased with tallow from cows and lard from pigs, sacrilege to Hindus and Muslims alike. Beneath that spark lay deeper grievances: low salaries, racial discrimination in promotion, the perceived loss of caste from overseas deployment, and the annexation of Oudh under the doctrine of lapse.

  Mangal Pandey, a sepoy, defied his British superiors and was executed, contributing to the first outbreak at Meerut. On the 10th of May 1857, the sepoys there turned on their commanding officers. They reached Delhi on the 11th, marched into the Red Fort, and asked the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II to lead them. He was proclaimed Shahenshah-e-Hindustan. The rebels killed much of the European and Christian population, while sparing British men and women who had converted to Islam.

  The British, caught off-guard, eventually answered with force. They retook Delhi on the 20th of September 1857 after a siege. The last significant battle was fought at Gwalior on the 17th of June 1858, where Rani Lakshmibai was killed. Guerrilla warfare under Tatya Tope continued until spring 1859. Under the Government of India Act 1858, the company's territory passed to the British government, with a Secretary of State for India at the apex and the Viceroy answerable to him. Queen Victoria promised equal opportunity in public service and pledged to respect the rights of native princes. Bahadur Shah II was exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862, and in 1876 Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli proclaimed Victoria the Empress of India.

• 6. From Debating Society To Nation

  ›

  Seventy-two Indian delegates met in Bombay in 1885 and founded the Indian National Congress, inspired by a suggestion from A.O. Hume, a retired Scottish civil servant. They were mostly western-educated provincial elites working in law, teaching, and journalism. Dadabhai Naoroji had earlier formed the East India Association in 1866, and Surendranath Banerjee founded the Indian National Association in 1876. At its inception Congress had no defined ideology and functioned as a debating society that met annually to express loyalty to the British and pass resolutions on civil rights and government service.

  Religious and reform groups stirred the wider society, from the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj to the Namdhari sect of Sikhism, alongside figures like Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and the Scots-Irish Sister Nivedita. Dadabhai Naoroji became the first Indian nationalist to embrace Swaraj as the nation's destiny, and he won election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, its first Indian member.

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak, called the father of Indian Unrest by the British, declared that Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it. In 1907 Congress split into two factions. The radicals under Tilak advocated direct revolution and the abandonment of all British goods; the moderates under Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale wanted reform within British rule. Gokhale, who became Mahatma Gandhi's mentor, criticised Tilak for encouraging violence. Tilak and his supporters were forced to leave the party, and with his arrest the Congress lost credibility with the people.

• 7. Bombs, Boycotts And Conspiracies

  ›

  In July 1905 Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, ordered the partition of Bengal, stating the aim was better administration. Indians read it as divide and rule. Congress called for a boycott of British products under the banner of swadeshi, indigenous industries. Public burnings of foreign cloth were organised, shops selling foreign cloth were closed, and the period saw the founding of the National Council of Education and new Indian banks. Hindus tied Rakhi on each other's wrists and observed Arandhan. The partition was finally reversed on the 1st of April 1912.

  The Anushilan Samiti emerged in Bengal in 1902 from local youth groups and gyms, led by the brothers Aurobindo and Barindra Ghosh, drawing on Bankim and Vivekananda, Italian Nationalism, and the Pan-Asianism of Kakuzo Okakura. Its Jugantar arm, with 21 revolutionaries including Bagha Jatin, collected arms and made bombs; Hemchandra Kanungo trained in Paris. The attempted murder of District Judge Kingsford by Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki on the 30th of April 1908 triggered the Alipore bomb case. When Khudiram Bose was executed, a British newspaper, The Empire, reported that he mounted the scaffold with his body erect, cheerful and smiling.

  The networks reached far beyond India. India House in London, under Shyamji Krishna Verma and later V.D. Savarkar, distributed bomb manuals and seditious pamphlets like Bande Mataram and Oh Martyrs! The Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy of 1912 tried to assassinate Viceroy Lord Hardinge during the move of the capital to New Delhi; the bomb killed the Mahout but the Viceroy survived. During the First World War the Ghadar Party, formed overseas in 1913, joined the Hindu-German Conspiracy, plotting a Pan-Indian mutiny set for February 1915. British intelligence infiltrated the movement and the plot collapsed, leading later to the Rowlatt Acts.

• 8. Gandhi And The Road To 1947

  ›

  Gandhi returned to India on the 9th of January 1915, having already perfected satyagraha in South Africa, where General Jan Smuts had repealed anti-Indian legislation and freed political prisoners in January 1914. In his own words, civil disobedience is civil breach of immoral statutory enactments, to be carried out non-violently by withdrawing co-operation from a corrupt state. From 1920 to 1922 he led the Non-Cooperation Movement, urging khadi over British cloth and the boycott of British schools, courts, and titles. He called it off after the Chauri Chaura incident, where an angry mob killed twenty-two policemen. Sentenced in 1922 to six years, he was released after two and founded the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad and the newspaper Young India.

  At the Lahore session in December 1929 Congress adopted complete self-rule as its aim and declared the 26th of January 1930 as Purna Swaraj Day. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931 freed over 90,000 political prisoners, but the British refused Gandhi's appeal to spare the death sentences of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, and Shivaram Rajguru. In 1940 Muhammad Ali Jinnah, president of the All-India Muslim League, secured the Lahore Resolution demanding division into two sovereign states, the Two Nation Theory. In opposition, the All India Azad Muslim Conference gathered in Delhi in April 1940 for a united India, with about five times the attendance of the League meeting.

  The Quit India Movement began on the 8th of August 1942, demanding immediate self-rule. The British answered with over 100,000 arrests, heavy fines, public flogging, and the killing of hundreds of civilians. Other parties rejected the plan, and the Muslim League grew in membership and influence with the British. The struggle culminated in the Indian Independence Act 1947, which ended Crown suzerainty and partitioned British India into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. On the 26th of January 1950 the Constitution of India established the Republic of India; Pakistan adopted its first constitution in 1956; and in 1971 East Pakistan declared its own independence as Bangladesh.