Chapter 2: History: Growth of Nationalism
In March 1878 the Government of India passed a law that changed what an Indian newspaper was allowed to print. The Vernacular Press Act let officials demand a bond from any paper printed in an Indian language, and seize its press if it published matter that might stir feeling against the government. Papers printed in English were left alone. At the office of the Amrit Bazar Patrika in Bengal, the editors did the arithmetic. Their paper was printed in Bengali, so a district officer could silence it. Within days the Patrika appeared as an English newspaper. The type was reset and the columns rewritten. The paper had not changed its opinions. It had changed the language it printed them in, and had stepped outside the reach of the Act. That was one decision by one small paper. But it tells us something larger about the second half of the nineteenth century in India. Educated Indians were noticing that the rules were not the same for everyone — one law for the Indian-language press, another for the English. The noticing did not stay with newspapermen. It reached peasants losing their produce to revenue demands, weavers losing their trade, clerks blocked from promotion, and reformers arguing about caste and the treatment of widows. Out of all that grew a question which had not been asked in quite this form before: whose country is this, and who is it run for?
Diagram
Fig. 2.0-1 Caption: A compositor sets type by hand in an Indian newspaper office in the 1870s. Brief: Line drawing of a small nineteenth-century press room — a compositor at a type case, a hand-operated flatbed press behind him, folded sheets stacked on a table. Label the type case and the press. Emphasise how small and easily seized such an establishment was.
2.1 What Nationalism Meant In Nineteenth Century India
Nationalism is the feeling of oneness that grows among people who live in a common territory, share the same historical, political and cultural background, and think of themselves as one nation. It is a feeling about belonging together. It is also a political claim: that a people who belong together should govern themselves.
Both halves of that idea matter for this chapter. The second half of the nineteenth century saw Indians begin to speak of India as one country with one set of interests. That way of speaking was not old. It had to be built.
2.1.1 A Land Of Many Kingdoms
India has a long history, but for most of it the subcontinent was not one state. It was made up of many kingdoms, some large and some very small. At certain times a single empire did control vast stretches of it, and at other times power was scattered among dozens of rulers.
Under those older arrangements, loyalty ran to a particular king or a particular kingdom. A cultivator in the Deccan owed dues to his own ruler, not to an idea called India. People across the subcontinent shared pilgrimage routes, trading networks, texts and festivals, but they did not share a government or a common political identity.
British rule changed the political map. By the later nineteenth century the British governed large provinces directly, while several hundred princely states kept their own rulers under British control. Map 2.1 shows how this looked.
Map
Map 2.1 Caption: British India and the princely states in the later nineteenth century. Brief: Political map of the subcontinent as it stood in the later nineteenth century. Shade the directly administered provinces in one tone and the princely states in a clearly different tone, with a key. Label Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Punjab, Hyderabad, Mysore, Kashmir and Rajputana. Print on the map that these are the boundaries of the past and are not the boundaries of India today. Show no modern international boundary.
The map is worth reading slowly, because it shows two kinds of territory rather than one. The shaded provinces were administered by British officials, with British courts, British revenue rules and British-appointed collectors. The princely states kept their own rulers, but their foreign relations and defence were controlled from outside.
A political map like this one also has clear limits. It can show who administered what. It cannot show what the people living in either kind of territory thought of themselves, whether they felt any tie to a person a thousand kilometres away, or how heavily colonial trade and revenue policy pressed on a princely state that looks independent on paper. Boundaries are the easiest thing to draw and the least revealing thing to know.
2.1.2 Why The Feeling Was New
If loyalty had always been local, why did a wider feeling appear when it did? Part of the answer is that the British created, for the first time, one administration stretching across the subcontinent. The same laws, the same courts, the same revenue demands and the same officials reached Bengal, Bombay and Madras alike.
That had an effect nobody had planned. A grievance in one province now looked exactly like a grievance in another, because it came from the same source. Railways, the postal service and the telegraph carried people and news between provinces faster than ever before. English gave educated Indians from different language regions a way to argue with one another.
A second part of the answer came from outside India. The French Revolution had put into circulation the idea of self-determination — the claim that a people has the right to decide its own government rather than have one imposed on it. Indians who read European history in the new colleges met that claim and applied it to their own situation.
A third part was the character of foreign rule itself. Indians had resisted the British from the beginning, but that earlier resistance was scattered and local. It was led by deposed chiefs and their families, by zamindars, by ex-soldiers and by officials of the Indian states, and it culminated in the First War of Independence of 1857, which you studied in the previous chapter. It did not achieve its objectives, but it left behind the knowledge that the foreign power could be opposed.
How We Know What People Felt
Feelings leave thinner evidence than laws do. Historians reconstruct this change mainly from newspapers, petitions, the minute books of associations, private letters and speeches at public meetings.
Almost all of that material was produced by a literate minority — lawyers, teachers, journalists, government clerks. What a weaver in a small town or a woman in a cultivating household thought about British rule is much harder to recover, because such people rarely left written records. When you read that ‘Indians began to feel’, keep asking which Indians the evidence actually lets us hear.
2.2 Economic Exploitation
Of all the causes of discontent with British rule, the economic ones went deepest, because they reached the largest number of people. Indians came to believe that the general aim of British policy in India was to serve British interests, whatever it cost Indians.
The discontent was not the same for everyone. A cultivator, a weaver, a mill hand and a college graduate each met colonial economic policy at a different point, and each had a different complaint. What matters for this chapter is that the complaints pointed at the same government.
2.2.1 The Peasants
Peasants were the largest group in India and the main victims of colonial economic policy. Land revenue — the government’s share of the produce of the land, taken from the cultivator — was the state’s biggest source of income, and the demand was heavy.
The demand was also rigid. It was fixed in advance and collected in cash, whether the harvest was good or ruined. A cultivator who could not pay had to borrow, and once he borrowed he was in the hands of the moneylender.
Debt of this kind was hard to escape. Land passed from cultivators to landlords and moneylenders, and families who had farmed a plot for generations became tenants on it. Rural distress was therefore not an occasional accident but a standing condition.
2.2.2 The Artisans And Craftsmen
Indian handicrafts, above all cotton textiles, had been famous and widely traded for centuries. British economic policy worked against that trade. Once the English East India Company held political power, it used that power to shape Indian trade and industry in Britain’s favour.
The pattern that resulted is easy to state. India was turned into a supplier of raw materials for British industry and a market for British finished goods. Machine-made cloth from Britain came in cheaply, while Indian manufactures faced duties in Britain.
Artisans and craftsmen lost the market they had lived by. Fig. 2.2-1 shows the kind of workshop this policy emptied.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-1 Caption: Weavers at a pit loom, of the kind worked in Indian towns and villages in the nineteenth century. Brief: Line drawing after a nineteenth-century engraving of Indian handloom weavers at a pit loom — two or three men at the loom frame, warp threads stretched away from them, finished cloth rolled at one side. Label the loom frame and the warp. Keep the setting plain and domestic, not picturesque.
Look at what the picture actually contains. It shows the tools, the scale of the workshop and the fact that weaving was done at home rather than in a factory. That is real evidence about technique and organisation.
It cannot tell you what the weaver earned, whether he owned the loom or worked it for a merchant, or whether this particular workshop survived the next twenty years. Pictures of work record how something was made, not who profited from it. For that, historians have to go to trade figures, revenue records and the petitions weavers themselves sent to officials.
De-industrialisation is the name historians give to what followed — the shrinking of a country’s manufacturing and the pushing of its workers back into agriculture. Weavers and other craftsmen who lost their trade had nowhere to go except the land, which was already under revenue pressure.
2.2.3 The Working Class
Modern industry did grow in India in the later nineteenth century — cotton mills in Bombay, jute mills near Calcutta, coal mines, railway workshops. These created something India had not had before: a working class employed for wages in large units.
Conditions in the new mills were harsh. Hours were long, wages were low, and there was no legal protection worth the name. Many of the mill and mine owners were British, so a dispute between worker and employer could easily look like a dispute between Indian and foreigner.
2.2.4 The Educated Indians
The new colleges produced a class of Indians trained in English, in law, in medicine and in administration. They had gained from British schooling, and many began by admiring British institutions. Their discontent came from what happened next.
Employment was the first problem. Government service was almost the only career open to them, competition for it was fierce, and the higher posts were kept out of reach. A qualified Indian could watch a less qualified Englishman rise past him.
The second problem was larger. Educated Indians had expected that British capital and British methods would develop India’s productive powers as they had developed Britain’s. Instead they concluded that British policy was keeping India poor and industrially backward. Dadabhai Naoroji gave this argument its most famous name, the drain of wealth — the steady transfer of India’s resources to Britain without a return.
One Grievance, Many Classes
These four sets of complaints were not identical, and the people who held them did not all meet. But they had one feature in common: each pointed at the same government and the same set of policies.
That is what made economic exploitation a nationalist argument rather than a series of separate protests. If the cause of distress was one, then the remedy had to be one as well, and Indians would have to come together on a national platform to seek it.
2.3 Repressive Colonial Policies
Economic policy created hardship. Political policy created humiliation, and it did so in public. A series of measures taken in the late 1870s and early 1880s showed educated Indians that the government did not treat them as equals, and each measure gave them something specific to organise against.
Several of these came from Lord Lytton, who was Viceroy — the Crown’s chief representative in India — from 1876 to 1880. In 1877 he held a Grand Delhi Durbar, a vast ceremonial assembly, to proclaim Queen Victoria as Empress of India. It was held while famine gripped large parts of southern India, and Indians noted the contrast between what was spent on the ceremony and what was done for the starving.
Lytton also removed the import duty on cotton textiles entering India. The duty had given Indian mills a little protection; removing it helped British cloth manufacturers at the cost of an Indian industry that was only beginning. TL 2.1 sets out this run of measures in order.
2.3.1 The Vernacular Press Act, 1878
A vernacular language is the everyday language of a place — Bengali in Bengal, Marathi in the Bombay Presidency, Urdu in much of the north. Newspapers in these languages reached readers far beyond the small English-reading class, and they had grown critical of the government.
The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 was aimed at exactly those papers. A publisher could be required to give a written undertaking not to print matter likely to excite disaffection — that is, ill feeling — towards the government, and a paper that broke the undertaking could have its press and its printed sheets seized.
The most striking feature of the Act was what it left out. It did not apply to newspapers printed in English, which were largely owned and read by Europeans. The same opinion was punishable in one language and permitted in another. You have already seen, at the opening of this chapter, how one Bengali paper answered that.
Lord Ripon, who was Viceroy from 1880 to 1884, repealed the Act in 1882. The repeal was welcomed, but it did not undo the lesson. Indians had learnt that a right they had been allowed to exercise could be withdrawn by executive order, and that it could be withdrawn from them alone.
2.3.2 The Indian Arms Act, 1878
Passed in the same year, the Indian Arms Act made it a criminal offence for an Indian to keep or carry arms without a licence. Licences were granted by officials, and could be refused.
Europeans in India were not brought under the same requirement. The Act therefore did two things at once: it disarmed the Indian population, and it wrote a distinction between ruler and ruled into the criminal law.
2.3.3 The Civil Service Age Limit
The Indian Civil Service was the senior administrative service that ran British India, and entry to it was by open examination. In principle Indians could compete. In practice the obstacles were formidable, because the examination was held only in London.
In 1878 the maximum age for sitting the examination was lowered from twenty-one to nineteen. An Indian candidate now had to finish his education and reach London before nineteen, which very few families could arrange.
The rule was not stated in racial terms. Its effect was racial, and educated Indians said so. A door that was formally open had been narrowed until almost nobody could pass through it, and campaigning against that narrowing became one of the first organised political demands in India.
2.3.4 The Ilbert Bill, 1883
In 1883 Sir Courtenay Ilbert, the Law Member of the Viceroy’s Council, prepared a bill during Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty. Until then, a European British subject accused of a crime in the districts could not be tried by an Indian magistrate or judge. The Bill proposed to remove that bar.
The proposal was modest in scope and large in meaning. It said that an Indian judge, qualified under the same law and appointed by the same government, was fit to try any accused person.
The European community in India opposed it fiercely. Planters and businessmen organised meetings, raised funds and formed a Defence Association to protect what they described as their special privileges. Under this pressure the government did not carry the Bill in its original form; in 1884 it was amended so that a European facing trial could claim a jury of which half were Europeans.
The episode taught educated Indians two things. The first was that justice and fair play could not be expected where European interests were involved. The second was more useful to them: the Europeans had won by organising, agitating and putting pressure on the government. Indians could do the same.
Taken together, these measures did not weaken Indian political feeling. They quickened it, by giving that feeling clear and specific targets.
2.4 Socio-Religious Reform Movements
The nineteenth century saw a wave of movements that set out to change Indian religious practice and Indian social custom together. Those who led them had usually studied both Indian learning and Western learning, and they argued that Indian society had to put its own house in order.
These movements worked in two spheres at once. In the social sphere they attacked practices such as sati — the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre — along with child marriage, the purdah system of secluding women, dowry and untouchability, the exclusion of certain castes from ordinary social and religious life. In the religious sphere they questioned superstition, image worship and the authority of a hereditary priesthood.
Reform was never a settled matter. Many Indians opposed it and defended established custom, and the reformers themselves disagreed sharply about how far to draw on Western ideas and how far to return to older Indian texts. What follows takes four reformers whom the movements are usually organised around, and sets out two contributions of each.
2.4.1 Raja Rammohan Roy
Raja Rammohan Roy worked in Bengal in the early nineteenth century, when the reform argument was just beginning. He read Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy, Persian and Arabic literature, and Western thought, and he used all of them in his case for change.
He campaigned persistently against sati. His writing, petitioning and public argument helped bring about the law of 1829, under Governor-General William Bentinck, which declared the practice illegal and punishable.
He founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, later known as the Brahmo Samaj. It stood for monotheism, the worship of one God, and rejected image worship, laying its emphasis instead on prayer, charity and moral conduct across differences of religion and caste.
2.4.2 Jyotiba Phule
Jyotiba Phule worked in Maharashtra, and he came to reform from a different position — from within a caste that upper-caste society treated as low. His own experience of exclusion shaped what he chose to attack.
He opened schooling to those who had been kept out of it. In 1848 he and his wife Savitribai Phule started one of the first schools for girls in Pune, and in the years that followed they opened further schools, including for children of the untouchable castes.
He founded the Satya Shodhak Samaj, the Society of Truth Seekers, in 1873, to win social justice and dignity for the weaker sections of society. In his book Gulamgiri he set out his case that the caste order amounted to a form of slavery.
2.4.3 Swami Dayananda Saraswathi
Swami Dayananda Saraswathi took his stand on the Vedas. He held that India’s decline had come from departing from Vedic religion, and that recovery lay in going back to it.
He founded the Arya Samaj in 1875 in Bombay. It regarded the Vedas as the true source of authority, opposed image worship and the fixing of status by birth, and condemned child marriage while supporting widow remarriage and education for women.
He made education central to reform. The Arya Samaj carried this on after his death through the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic schools and colleges, which combined Sanskrit and Vedic learning with modern subjects and spread widely across northern India.
Rammohan Roy and Dayananda Saraswathi are often set beside each other, because they took opposite views of where authority should come from. Roy welcomed Western learning and read widely outside his own tradition. Dayananda held the Vedas to be beyond error and wanted Indians to return to them.
2.4.4 Swami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda was a monk and preacher who became the best known Indian voice abroad in the 1890s. He spoke about religion, but the effect of what he said was as much social and political as religious.
He represented Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, where he opened with the words ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’. He argued there for the essential oneness of religions and against narrowness in religious matters, and he told his listeners that India’s philosophical tradition had something of value to offer the world.
He founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897, organising the disciples of his teacher Ramakrishna Paramhansa into a body devoted to service. The Mission opened schools, hospitals, dispensaries, libraries and orphanages, holding that service to human beings was itself a form of worship.
2.4.5 How The Reform Movements Fed Nationalism
None of these four set out to build a national movement. Their effect on it was indirect, and it worked in five ways.
They gave Indians confidence in their own civilisation at a time when colonial writing described it as backward, so that self-respect no longer depended on European approval.
They attacked untouchability and caste rigidity, and their language of brotherhood and equality drew in people whom the older social order had shut out.
They insisted that women mattered to the future of the country, and their schools began producing women who could take part in public life.
They criticised British domination openly. The demand for swaraj, meaning self-rule, and the call of ‘India for the Indians’ were being voiced in reform circles before they became the language of political organisations.
They spread the idea of a society whose privileges did not rest on caste, creed or birth — which is close to the idea of a nation of equal members.
2.5 The Role Of The Press
A movement needs more than grievances. It needs a way for people who will never meet to learn what the others are thinking. In nineteenth century India that work was done by the printing press.
Newspapers multiplied in the second half of the century, in English and in every major Indian language. They were cheap, they appeared regularly, and they carried the same argument to Lahore, Madras and Calcutta in the same week. Nothing before had been able to do that.
2.5.1 The Newspapers Of The Later Nineteenth Century
Among the papers printed in English, several were owned and edited by Indians and became platforms for Indian opinion. The Amrit Bazar Patrika in Bengal, The Bengalee, which Surendranath Banerjee edited, The Hindu in Madras and The Tribune in Lahore all belong to this group.
Other English papers of the period were owned and read mainly by Europeans in India. The Pioneer, The Statesman and The Times of India were of this kind. They carried news and argument too, but they generally spoke for the European community and for the government, and they were often the loudest opponents of Indian demands.
That distinction matters when you use newspapers as evidence. A student who reads only the Anglo-Indian papers will conclude that Indians were troublesome and ungrateful; one who reads only the nationalist papers will conclude that nobody defended British rule. Both impressions come from taking one set of interested writers at their word.
Alongside these were a very large number of newspapers and magazines in the Indian languages, which reached far more readers than the English press did. They also carried the greater risk, as you saw in section 2.3.
Circulation is a poor measure of how far a paper reached. Copies were expensive relative to income and literacy was low, so a single copy was commonly read aloud in a shop, a courtyard or a village square to people who could not read it themselves. Fig. 2.5-1 shows how this worked.
Diagram
Fig. 2.5-1 Caption: A newspaper is read aloud to listeners, the usual way news travelled in a town where few could read. Brief: Line drawing of a nineteenth-century Indian street or shop front — one seated man holding an open newspaper and reading aloud, eight or ten men and boys of varied dress listening, some standing, some squatting. Label the newspaper. Keep the setting ordinary and specific, not romanticised.
2.5.2 What The Press Did For The National Sentiment
The press shaped public opinion — the settled view that a body of people comes to hold on a public question — and it did so in four distinct ways.
It spread political ideas. Liberty, equality, freedom, self-government and eventually independence reached readers who had never seen a college, because a newspaper cost a fraction of a book.
It criticised the government daily. Where an official report explained a policy, a newspaper set out what the policy had cost, and it did this steadily rather than once.
It let different regions and social groups hear one another. A protest in Bombay was known in Bengal within days, so campaigns could be coordinated instead of remaining local.
It carried news of the wider world. Indians read about political change in Europe and elsewhere, and used those examples in arguing about their own future.
The press did something else that is easy to miss. It trained a generation in the skill of public argument — drafting a case, answering an objection, and addressing strangers as though they shared an interest. The men who founded India’s political associations had learnt that trade in newspaper offices.
2.6 The Foundation Of The Indian National Congress
By the second half of the nineteenth century a conclusion had formed among educated Indians: the British controlled the resources of India and the lives of its people, and while that control lasted India could not be a sovereign nation — one that governs itself and answers to no outside power.
A conclusion of that size needs an organisation behind it. Complaints made separately by separate men could be ignored one at a time. The problem the following decades set out to solve was how to speak for the whole country at once.
2.6.1 The Political Associations Before 1885
The first political association in India was the Landholders’ Society, started in Calcutta in 1838. Others followed in different provinces: the Bengal British India Society, the British Indian Association, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the London Indian Society and the Indian Association.
Most of these bodies were led by English-educated professionals — lawyers, teachers, journalists. Though each was formed in a particular region, they set goals for all Indians and did not work for any one religion, community or class. Three of them mattered most to what came next.
The East India Association was founded in London in 1866 by Dadabhai Naoroji. It put information about Indian conditions before British citizens and Members of Parliament, voiced Indian grievances and suggested remedies, and later opened branches in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Its method rested on a belief widely held at the time: that the British public, once properly informed, would put matters right.
The Indian Association, formed in Calcutta in 1876 and headed by Surendranath Banerjee, aimed higher. Its objectives were the creation of a strong body of public opinion, the integration of Indians on the basis of common political interests, friendly relations between Hindus and Muslims, and mass participation in public movements. It agitated against the Vernacular Press Act, the Indian Arms Act and the lowering of the Civil Service age limit, and it took up the cause of workers on British-owned plantations. It had branches in Bengal and in towns outside it, but it never became an all-India body.
The Indian National Conference, convened by Surendranath Banerjee at Calcutta in 1883, came closer still. It was provincial in reach but national in ambition, and it offered a working model to the organisation formed two years later. Since both bodies served the same purpose, the Conference merged with the Indian National Congress in December 1886.
2.6.2 The Year Of Formation And The Founder
Indian leaders including Surendranath Banerjee, Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji and Justice Ranade were already moving towards an all-India political body. Help came from an unexpected quarter.
Allan Octavian Hume was a retired British officer of the Indian Civil Service. He wanted an organisation that would draw the government’s attention to administrative failings and suggest how to correct them. In 1883 he wrote an open letter to the graduates of Calcutta University, calling on them to give themselves to the service of their country through an organised body.
In 1884, in consultation with Indian leaders, Hume laid the foundation of the Indian National Union. He is therefore named as the founder of the Indian National Congress. Gopal Krishna Gokhale later observed that no Indian could have started such a body — that if its founder had not been an Englishman and a retired civil servant, the government would have crushed it at birth.
The Union’s first conference was called at Poona for December 1885, but an outbreak of cholera there forced a change of place. It met instead in Bombay from 28 to 31 December 1885. On Dadabhai Naoroji’s suggestion the Union’s name was changed, and the Indian National Congress was founded on 28 December 1885.
Why A Viceroy Welcomed It
Lord Dufferin, who was Viceroy at the time, did not oppose the new body. He is said to have favoured it as a ‘safety-valve’ — a channel through which popular discontent could escape harmlessly, leaving British interests in India secure.
Historians disagree about how much weight to give this. Some treat the safety-valve intention as the real origin of the Congress. Others point out that the evidence for it is thin, and that Indian leaders had been building towards an all-India body for years without any British prompting. What is not in dispute is what the Congress became: it led the freedom movement, and India won independence in 1947.
2.6.3 The Immediate Objectives Of The Congress
In his presidential address at the first session, W.C. Bonnerjee set out what the new body was for. Its immediate objectives were these.
To promote friendly relations between nationalist political workers from different parts of the country.
To develop and consolidate the feeling of national unity, irrespective of caste, religion or province.
To formulate popular demands and present them before the government.
To train and organise public opinion in the country.
Read that list carefully and notice what is missing. There is no demand for independence, and no demand for self-government. The first objectives are about building a body of people who can act together and be heard — which tells you that in 1885 the founders judged the country’s political organisation, not its subjection, to be the immediate problem. The aims were changed in later years as circumstances changed.
2.6.4 The First Two Sessions And Their Presidents
The first session met at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay in December 1885, under the presidentship of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, and was attended by 72 delegates from all parts of India.
The second session was held at Calcutta in December 1886, under the presidentship of Dadabhai Naoroji. From then on the Congress met each December in a different part of the country, and the number of its delegates rose quickly into the hundreds and then the thousands.
2.7 Summary
Nationalism is the feeling of oneness among people who share a territory, a history and a culture, together with the claim that such a people should govern itself. In India this feeling was new, because older loyalty had run to a king or a kingdom rather than to a country.
Three conditions made the wider feeling possible: one administration reaching every province with the same laws and taxes, faster movement of people and news by rail, post and telegraph, and the idea of self-determination, which Indians met in the study of European history.
Economic exploitation produced the deepest and most widely shared discontent, and it reached different classes at different points.
- Peasants faced a heavy land revenue demand fixed in advance and collected in cash, which drove them to moneylenders and cost many of them their land.
- Artisans and craftsmen lost their market as India was made a supplier of raw materials and a market for British manufactures, and many fell back on agriculture.
- Mill and mine workers, a class India had not had before, worked long hours for low wages, often under British employers.
- Educated Indians were kept out of the higher posts and concluded that British policy was keeping India poor, an argument Dadabhai Naoroji named the drain of wealth.
Repressive colonial policies gave that discontent specific targets. The Grand Delhi Durbar of 1877 was held during famine; the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 bonded Indian-language papers while leaving English ones free; the Indian Arms Act of the same year required a licence of Indians alone; and the Civil Service age limit was cut from twenty-one to nineteen for an examination held only in London.
The Ilbert Bill of 1883 proposed that Indian judges could try European British subjects. European opposition forced an amendment in 1884. Indians drew two lessons: that fair play was not to be had where European interests were involved, and that organised agitation worked.
The socio-religious reform movements worked in the social sphere against sati, child marriage, the purdah system and untouchability, and in the religious sphere against superstition, image worship and hereditary priesthood.
- Raja Rammohan Roy campaigned against sati, helping bring about the law of 1829, and founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, later the Brahmo Samaj, which preached the worship of one God.
- Jyotiba Phule opened schooling to girls and to untouchable castes from 1848, and founded the Satya Shodhak Samaj in 1873 to win social justice for the weaker sections.
- Swami Dayananda Saraswathi founded the Arya Samaj in 1875 on the authority of the Vedas, and made education central to reform, carried on later through the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic institutions.
- Swami Vivekananda represented Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, and founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897 to carry out social service.
These movements fed nationalism indirectly: they restored confidence in Indian civilisation, attacked caste exclusion, insisted that women mattered to the country’s future, criticised British domination, and put the language of swaraj into circulation.
The press connected people who would never meet. Indian-owned papers such as the Amrit Bazar Patrika, The Bengalee, The Hindu and The Tribune spread political ideas, criticised government policy daily, carried news between regions and reported the wider world. Anglo-Indian papers of the period generally argued the other way, which is why newspapers must be read as interested evidence.
Political associations prepared the ground for an all-India body. The Landholders’ Society of 1838 was the first; the East India Association was founded in London in 1866 by Dadabhai Naoroji; the Indian Association of 1876 was headed by Surendranath Banerjee; and the Indian National Conference of 1883 offered a working model before merging with the Congress in 1886.
A.O. Hume, a retired British civil servant, founded the Indian National Union in 1884 and is named as the founder of the Indian National Congress, which was established at Bombay on 28 December 1885.
The immediate objectives declared at the first session were to promote friendly relations between nationalist workers from different parts of the country, to consolidate national unity irrespective of caste, religion or province, to formulate popular demands and present them to the government, and to train and organise public opinion. Independence was not among them.
The first session met at Bombay in December 1885 with 72 delegates under the presidentship of W.C. Bonnerjee. The second met at Calcutta in December 1886 under Dadabhai Naoroji. Lord Dufferin welcomed the new body, and historians still disagree about how far a ‘safety-valve’ intention explains its origin.
2.8 Key Terms
- De-industrialisation — the shrinking of a country’s manufacturing, which pushes its workers back into agriculture.
- Drain of wealth — the argument, named by Dadabhai Naoroji, that India’s resources were steadily transferred to Britain without a return.
- Land revenue — the government’s share of the produce of the land, taken from the cultivator, and under British rule fixed in advance and collected in cash.
- Monotheism — the belief in and worship of one God.
- Nationalism — the feeling of oneness among people who share a territory, a history and a culture, together with the claim that such a people should govern itself.
- Public opinion — the settled view that a body of people comes to hold on a public question.
- Self-determination — the claim that a people has the right to decide its own government rather than have one imposed on it.
- Sovereign — describing a state that governs itself and answers to no outside power.
- Untouchability — the exclusion of certain castes from ordinary social and religious life.
- Vernacular — the everyday language of a place, as against an official or foreign language.
2.9 Points to Ponder
Almost everything we know about what Indians felt in this period was written by lawyers, editors, teachers and clerks. How confident can we be that we know what the country as a whole thought?
The Vernacular Press Act punished an opinion printed in Bengali and permitted the same opinion printed in English. What does that difference tell you about what the government was actually afraid of?
The Congress declared four objectives in 1885, and independence was not among them. Should an organisation be judged by the purpose it states at its founding, or by what it goes on to do?
The reformers attacked practices within their own society at a time when a foreign government ruled that society. Does criticising your own people weaken a national movement, or strengthen it?
A small European community defeated the Ilbert Bill in its original form by organising, meeting and raising funds. What does that episode suggest about how political power really worked in British India?
A newspaper’s circulation counted copies sold, not the listeners who heard it read aloud. What other historical numbers might be measuring less than they appear to?
2.10 Objective Questions
Which measure required the publisher of an Indian-language newspaper to give a written undertaking about what he printed?
- The Indian Arms Act, 1878
- The Vernacular Press Act, 1878
- The Ilbert Bill, 1883
- The Licence Act [1 mark]
The Indian National Congress was founded at
- Calcutta in December 1885
- Bombay in December 1885
- Poona in December 1884
- Bombay in December 1886 [1 mark]
In 1878 the maximum age for sitting the Indian Civil Service examination was lowered from twenty-one years to ______ years. [1 mark]
Match the reformer in Column A with the body he founded in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Raja Rammohan Roy | i. Arya Samaj |
| b. Jyotiba Phule | ii. Ramakrishna Mission |
| c. Swami Dayananda Saraswathi | iii. Brahmo Sabha |
| d. Swami Vivekananda | iv. Satya Shodhak Samaj |
State whether the following is true or false: the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 applied equally to newspapers printed in English. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): Educated Indians grew discontented with British rule although they had gained from English education. Reason (R): The higher posts of the administration were kept beyond their reach.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): The Indian National Conference merged with the Indian National Congress in December 1886. Reason (R): Both bodies had been formed to work for the welfare of Indians.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
2.11 Check Your Concepts
Define nationalism. [2 marks]
Name the founder of the Indian National Congress and state the year in which the Congress was formed. [2 marks]
State any two contributions of Jyotiba Phule. [3 marks]
Differentiate between Raja Rammohan Roy and Swami Dayananda Saraswathi in their attitude towards Western learning and the source of religious authority. [3 marks]
Explain, with reference to the Indian Arms Act and to the lowering of the Civil Service age limit, why Indians said that the law treated them as unequals. [4 marks]
Trace the chain by which British trade and industrial policy led to the decline of Indian handicrafts and increased pressure on the land. [4 marks]
Describe the immediate objectives declared by the Indian National Congress at its first session, and state what those objectives did not include. [5 marks]
Explain how the socio-religious reform movements of the nineteenth century prepared the ground for the growth of nationalism in India. [6 marks]
2.12 Show Your Skills
- Study the description of the picture given below and answer the questions that follow. The picture shows two men working a pit loom inside a house. The warp threads are stretched away from them, a roll of finished cloth lies at one side, and there is no machinery of any kind in the room.
- Which section of Indian society is shown here, and what happened to its livelihood under British economic policy? [2 marks]
- Explain why this section could not compete with cloth imported from Britain. [2 marks]
- State one thing this picture cannot tell you about the men shown in it. [1 mark]
- Read the situation given below and answer the questions that follow. A student working in a city library finds two newspapers from 1883. One is an English paper owned by Europeans in India, which attacks a proposed law in strong language and calls on readers to subscribe to a defence fund. The other is an Indian-owned paper, which supports the same proposal and says its opponents are defending a privilege.
- Name the Bill the two papers are arguing about, and state what it proposed. [2 marks]
- Explain why the two newspapers took opposite positions on it. [2 marks]
- These two papers tell the student what two groups of editors wrote. What else would she need before she could say how Indians in general viewed the Bill? [2 marks]
- Study the description of the map given below and answer the questions that follow. The map shows the Indian subcontinent in the later nineteenth century. Some areas are shaded in one tone and marked as provinces administered directly by British officials. Other areas, scattered among them, are shaded differently and marked as states with their own rulers.
- Identify the two kinds of territory shown, and state who controlled the defence and foreign relations of the second kind. [2 marks]
- Explain how the spread of one administration across such a large area helped the growth of nationalism. [3 marks]
- State one thing about the people of these territories that a political map of this kind cannot show. [1 mark]