Chapter 3: History: First Phase Of The Indian National Movement
In 1888 the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, told an audience in Edinburgh that he doubted any British constituency would elect an Indian to Parliament. He used a phrase about colour that was reported across India within weeks. It caused anger — and it made one elderly Indian in London a great deal better known than he had been. Dadabhai Naoroji was then in his sixties. He had taught mathematics at Elphinstone College in Bombay, had gone to England as a partner in a trading firm, and had spent years doing something unusual for a political man. He sat in libraries and government offices adding up what India paid Britain each year in salaries, pensions, interest and profits, and what India received in return. In July 1892 the voters of Central Finsbury, a crowded constituency in north London, elected him to the House of Commons by five votes. He was the first Indian to sit in that House. He used the seat to press Indian questions in the chamber where Indian policy was actually settled. The choice Naoroji made — to argue India’s case inside British institutions, in English, with figures and printed evidence — was the choice of a whole generation. Between 1885 and 1907 the Indian National Congress was led by men who drafted petitions rather than called strikes, and who believed that the surest way to move a government was to prove it wrong.
Diagram
Fig. 3.0-1 Caption: Dadabhai Naoroji, elected to the British House of Commons from Central Finsbury in 1892. Brief: Reproduce an archival photograph of Dadabhai Naoroji from the 1890s, head and shoulders. Label with his name and the years 1825–1917. Keep the treatment plain and documentary, with no added symbols or flags.
3.1 The Early Nationalist Phase, 1885–1907
The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. For its first twenty-two years it was led by one broad group of men, working in one broad way.
Historians call this stretch the first phase of the Indian National Movement, and it runs from 1885 to 1907. The leaders of these years are known as the Early Nationalists — the men who led the Congress in its opening phase and who sought reform within British rule rather than an end to it. They are also called the Moderates, because their demands were moderate in scale and their methods were peaceful.
The phase closed in 1907, when a second and more impatient group of leaders came to the front. That later phase is the subject of the next chapter. What matters here is that the first phase set the questions, and the second phase disagreed mainly about how to press them.
3.1.1 Who The Early Nationalists Were
The Early Nationalists came from a narrow social layer: the educated urban middle class. They were lawyers and barristers — advocates trained for the higher courts, usually in England — along with teachers, professors, journalists, doctors and government officials.
Almost all of them had passed through English-medium schools and colleges. Many had studied in Britain, and had seen at close quarters how a parliament, a press and a court of law worked there. That experience shaped both their confidence and their blind spots.
They were not confined to one region. Bengal produced W.C. Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Romesh Chunder Dutt and Rashbehari Ghosh. The Bombay Presidency — the western province that then included today’s Maharashtra and Gujarat — produced Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta and Justice M.G. Ranade.
From the Madras Presidency in the south came G. Subramania Iyer and Ananda Charlu. From the United Provinces in the north came Madan Mohan Malviya. A few Englishmen who disagreed with their own government’s Indian policy worked alongside them, among them A.O. Hume and William Wedderburn.
Why This Layer, And Not Another
The men who led the Congress were produced by a system the British had built for their own purposes. Colonial administration needed clerks, lawyers, engineers and teachers who could work in English, so English education spread through the cities from the middle of the nineteenth century.
The graduates of that system found the higher posts of the services closed to them, and the profits of trade and industry largely in British hands. Educated, articulate and blocked, they turned to associations, newspapers and petitions.
Photographs of these leaders survive in large numbers, and the group portrait in Fig. 3.1-1 is typical of them.
Diagram
Fig. 3.1-1 Caption: Four leaders of the first phase: M.G. Ranade, Surendranath Banerjee, Pherozeshah Mehta and Madan Mohan Malviya. Brief: Four archival head-and-shoulders photographs in a single row, each labelled with the leader’s name only. Documentary treatment, no decorative frames.
Read the picture carefully, because it tells you less than it seems to. It shows four men in formal dress, photographed in studios, at a time when a portrait cost money and took planning.
It therefore records who led, and who could afford to be recorded. It cannot tell you how many people the Congress spoke for, what a peasant in a village thought of it, or whether anyone outside the cities had heard of these men at all.
3.1.2 Their View Of British Rule
The Early Nationalists did not begin as opponents of British rule. They began as critics of how it was being run, and they said so openly.
Four beliefs held their politics together. They may be set out plainly:
- They had faith in the British sense of justice and fair play, and expected honest dealing once the facts were known.
- They believed the British connection was, on balance, of benefit to India, and that Britain would in time help Indians to govern themselves.
- They held that the chief obstacle to India’s progress was India’s own social and economic backwardness, not colonial rule as such.
- They relied on constitutional and peaceful methods, and preferred patience and reconciliation to confrontation.
They were also loyal to the Crown, and said so in public. B.C. Pal, then an early nationalist himself, declared in 1887 that his loyalty to the British government was one and the same as loyalty to his own people.
Two things follow from these beliefs, and they run through the rest of the chapter. Because they trusted the government’s good faith, they asked for reform rather than transfer of power. Because they feared that a bolder movement would be suppressed, they aimed at a gradual advance.
That reading of British rule did not survive the phase intact. The same men who began by trusting the connection ended by proving, with figures, that it was draining India — a change traced in section 3.5.
How The Government Saw Them
The government’s response moved in the opposite direction. A few officials attended the first Congress session, and the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, invited its members to a garden party in Calcutta in 1886.
Within two years the tone had changed. In a speech at Calcutta in 1888, Dufferin dismissed the Congress as representing only ‘a microscopic minority of the people’ — a phrase that was quoted for decades afterwards, by officials as a defence and by nationalists as a challenge.
3.2 The Objectives Of The Early Nationalists
The Early Nationalists wanted a larger Indian share in the government of India, a fairer economic settlement, an administration Indians could enter, and the ordinary liberties of speech and assembly.
Their demands were framed to be granted. Each one was pitched at something the government could concede without surrendering control, because the Congress of these years was asking to be admitted to the system rather than to replace it.
The demands are best studied under four heads, and that is how the Congress itself presented them in its annual sessions.
3.2.1 Constitutional Objectives
Their central political demand was a larger share for Indians in the governance of their own country, leading in time to self-government — the right of a people to make their own laws through their own elected representatives.
They therefore pressed for the expansion of the Legislative Council at the Centre and of the legislative councils in the provinces. These were the small advisory bodies that helped the Viceroy and the Governors make laws, and at first they contained no elected members at all.
The Congress asked that some members be elected by bodies such as municipalities, universities and chambers of commerce, and that the councils be given real powers. In particular it demanded Indian control over the public purse, raising the slogan ‘No taxation without representation’.
Two further constitutional demands went with these. The Congress sought the abolition of the India Council — a body of retired officials in London that advised the Secretary of State for India and could overrule Indian opinion — and adequate Indian representation in the Executive Councils of the Viceroy and the Governors.
The Demand For Swarajya
By the opening years of the twentieth century the demand had grown sharper. The Congress asked for swarajya, or self-government for India within the British empire, on the model of the self-governing colonies of Canada and Australia.
Those colonies had elected legislatures and ministries answerable to them, and ran their internal affairs themselves, while the Crown remained the head of state. Asking for the same status was, in the language of the time, a large demand and a loyal one at once.
3.2.2 Economic Objectives
The economic demands of the Early Nationalists were the most closely argued part of their programme, because this was where they had done the research.
For the countryside they asked for a reduction in land revenue — the tax the state took from agricultural land, which was the government’s largest single source of income. They also asked for protection for tenants against unjust demands by zamindars, and for cheap credit through agricultural banks.
For the country’s finances they asked for a cut in military expenditure, with the money saved spent instead on health, education, irrigation and medical services. They pressed repeatedly for an official enquiry into India’s growing poverty and into the famines of these decades.
For industry they asked for tariff protection — a heavy duty on imported goods, so that Indian producers could compete at home — and for government loans to develop iron, coal, paper and sugar manufacture. They also demanded the abolition of the salt tax, which fell on a necessity that every household had to buy.
The thread running through these demands is one idea: that Indian revenue should be spent on Indian needs. It is the idea that Dadabhai Naoroji would put into figures, and section 3.5 returns to it.
3.2.3 Administrative Objectives
The administration of India was run by a very small senior service, the Indian Civil Service, whose members governed districts and headed departments. Its examination was held only in London, and its upper age limit was low, so almost all successful candidates were British.
The Congress therefore demanded Indianisation of the services — the filling of higher posts by Indians — beginning with a simultaneous Indian Civil Service examination held in India and in England on the same day.
Alongside this came four more administrative demands:
- Complete separation of the executive from the judiciary, so that the officer who ordered an arrest was not the officer who tried the case.
- Wider employment of Indians in the higher grades of all administrative services.
- Greater powers for municipal and other local bodies, with less control over them by officials.
- The spread of primary education among the masses, and a police service made honest and efficient.
The demand for separation of powers was not a technical one. Where the same official investigated, prosecuted and judged, an Indian defendant had no protection against the arbitrary act of a district officer or a policeman.
3.2.4 The Defence Of Civil Rights
Civil rights are the freedoms a person holds against the state — to speak, to publish, to gather and to be tried before being punished. The Early Nationalists defended these whenever the government moved against them.
They pressed for the removal of restrictions on freedom of speech and of the press, and for the restoration of the right to assemble and to form associations. They also opposed detention without trial, and asked that individual liberty be restored where the law had taken it away.
These were not abstract claims. Indian newspapers had been muzzled by press laws, the Arms Act of 1878 restricted who might keep a weapon, and public meetings could be broken up on an official’s order.
This part of the programme had a consequence its authors did not fully foresee. In defending the right to speak and to organise, the Early Nationalists planted the ideas of representation, liberty and public criticism among educated Indians — ideas that a later generation would use for purposes far bolder than a petition.
3.3 The Methods Of Struggle
The Early Nationalists were practical men who expected to win by degrees. They chose their methods to match that expectation.
They did not pitch their demands high, and they worked along what they themselves called the lines of least resistance. Two calculations lay behind this. A cautious movement was unlikely to be suppressed, and a movement that avoided open conflict was more likely to be listened to.
3.3.1 The Constitutional Agitation Method
Their approach is known as constitutional agitation — pressing political demands by lawful means alone, through meetings, resolutions, newspapers, memoranda and petitions, and never outside the law.
The word ‘agitation’ is worth pausing on. It did not mean disorder. It meant stirring up opinion deliberately and publicly, so that a grievance could no longer be treated as the complaint of a few individuals.
The method served two distinct objectives, and almost every activity of these years belongs to one of them:
- To educate Indians in modern politics, awaken national political consciousness, and build a united public opinion.
- To influence the British government and the British public, in whose hands the decisions actually lay.
The two objectives fed each other. A memorandum drafted for Whitehall was printed and read in Bombay; a resolution passed in Calcutta was quoted in the House of Commons. Fig. FC 3.1 sets out the route a single grievance travelled.
Flowchart
FC 3.1 — How A Grievance Travelled Caption: The path an Early Nationalist demand followed, from a public meeting in India to a decision taken in London. Nodes: Grievance identified → public meeting held and speeches made → resolution passed at the Congress session → memorandum drafted with facts and figures → sent to Indian officials and to the British Parliament → text printed in newspapers and read in India → if pressed in Britain: raised by the British Committee and by sympathetic Members of Parliament → outcome: concession granted, or demand refused → if refused: the resolution is renewed at the next annual session.
Notice what the chart shows and what it cannot. It shows a lawful, repeatable procedure that produced a permanent record of Indian demands. It cannot show how long each stage took, or how often the last branch — refusal, and renewal a year later — was the one actually followed.
3.3.2 Building Opinion Within India
Inside India the work was public and repetitive. The Congress met once a year, in a different city each time, passed resolutions on popular demands, and had the speeches reported at length.
Between sessions the newspapers carried the argument. Papers in English and in the Indian languages criticised government policies, printed official figures, and taught readers to expect explanations from those who governed them.
The third instrument was the memorandum, or petition — a written statement of a grievance, carefully drafted with facts and arguments, and addressed to officials or to the British Parliament.
That is the point most easily missed. Though these petitions were addressed to the government, their real aim was to educate the Indian people, and their authors knew it.
3.3.3 Carrying The Case To Britain
The second objective required work in Britain itself, and the reason is a constitutional one. Final authority over Indian policy rested with the Secretary of State for India and with Parliament in London. The Viceroy was appointed, not elected, and he answered to London rather than to Indians.
So the Congress set out to reach the British voter and the British Member of Parliament. Its methods in Britain are remembered as the three P’s — Petitions, Prayers and Protests: formal petitions, respectful requests, and letters of protest asking the British government to look into Indian problems.
Two more instruments supported this effort. A British Committee of the Indian National Congress was set up in London in 1889, and published a journal, India, to place the Indian case before the British public. Deputations of Indian leaders were also sent to Britain to explain to British politicians and audiences what the state of affairs in India actually was.
Several leaders spent long years in Britain doing this work, living far from home in order to argue for it. It was slow, expensive and, for most of the phase, unrewarded.
3.4 The Results And Limits Of The Method
Twenty-two years is long enough to judge a method. By 1907 the Early Nationalists had a record that could be examined, and Indians examined it closely — some with respect, some with impatience.
This section weighs both sides of that record. It asks what the constitutional method actually produced, and where it stopped producing.
3.4.1 What The Method Achieved
The largest achievement was not a reform at all. It was an idea: that the people of a subcontinent of many languages and faiths belonged to one country, with common political and economic interests.
The Congress also trained a generation in the practice of politics. Its sessions, elections, resolutions and debates spread the working habits of representative government, and popularised the ideas of democracy, civil liberties, secularism and nationalism among educated Indians.
Its third achievement was analytical. By studying budgets, trade figures and famine reports, the Early Nationalists exposed the economic character of British rule, and established the claim that India must be governed in the interest of Indians. That argument, once made with evidence, could not be unmade.
The Concessions They Won
Concrete gains were real but modest, and they came in a short cluster of years.
The 1893 resolution repays a closer look, because it shows the method at its most successful and at its most frustrating in the same episode.
3.4.2 Where The Method Fell Short
Criticism of the Early Nationalists began among Indians, and it began early. Three charges were made, and each has weight.
The first concerned the method itself. Passing resolutions and sending petitions was called inadequate, because it rested on the generosity of the British rather than on the strength of Indians. A government that could refuse a request was under no obligation to grant it.
The second concerned their reading of British rule. They had assumed that British and Indian interests could be reconciled, and were slow to accept that the two clashed — that Britain was using India’s resources to increase its own wealth.
The third concerned their reach. Their influence was limited to the urban educated, and their leadership stayed within a narrow band of professions — lawyers, doctors, journalists and teachers. The peasantry and the working population, who bore the heaviest share of land revenue and famine, were spoken about rather than spoken with.
The government’s own conduct sharpened the criticism. Officials who had once attended Congress sessions grew hostile; from 1890 government employees were forbidden to take part in its proceedings, and minor concessions were used to slow the movement rather than satisfy it.
By 1907 a younger group within the Congress had concluded that a method depending on the goodwill of the rulers could not deliver self-government. Their disagreement was about means, not ends, but it was sharp enough to split the organisation.
3.5 Three Leaders Of The First Phase
The first phase had many leaders, and three of them show the method at work in three different ways.
One built the economic case with figures. One built organisations that could hold opinion together. One worked inside the government’s own council chamber. Each is studied here through two of his contributions.
3.5.1 Dadabhai Naoroji
Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) was called the ‘Grand Old Man of India’. He spent much of his working life in Britain and much of it on arithmetic.
He Explained The Drain Of Wealth
His first contribution was intellectual. Naoroji argued that the root cause of India’s poverty was not Indian backwardness but the steady transfer of India’s wealth to Britain, and he set the argument out in his work Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.
This argument is known as the Drain Theory — the claim that a large part of India’s annual income left the country every year as payments to Britain, and returned nothing to India. The payments he counted included salaries and pensions of British officials, interest on debt raised in London, military costs and the profits of British firms.
Fig. 3.5-1 shows the shape of the argument.
Diagram
Fig. 3.5-1 Caption: The drain of wealth as Naoroji described it. Brief: A simple two-arrow flow diagram. A thick arrow leaves ‘India’ for ‘Britain’, labelled with the four heads Naoroji counted: officials’ salaries and pensions, interest on debt raised in London, military expenditure, profits of British firms. A thin return arrow is labelled ‘goods, and administration’. No currency figures.
Read the diagram as a claim, not as a photograph of the economy. It shows what Naoroji argued was leaving India and under what heads, and it makes visible why he called the government’s finances the central political question.
It cannot show how large the drain was, and that is where the dispute lay. Estimates of the amount varied widely, and British officials disputed both the totals and the idea that these payments were a loss at all. Economic historians still differ over how the sums should be calculated.
He Led The Congress
His second contribution was organisational. Naoroji took an active part in the foundation of the Indian National Congress and was elected its President three times — in 1886, 1893 and 1906.
Under his presidency the Congress passed resolutions on self-government, boycott, swadeshi — the use of goods made in one’s own country — and national education. At the Calcutta session of 1906 he became the first leader to demand swarajya from the Congress platform, giving the phase’s cautious politics a word that would outlast it.
3.5.2 Surendranath Banerjee
Surendranath Banerjee (1848–1925) was a teacher, journalist and organiser, dismissed early from the Indian Civil Service and thereafter a critic of the government from outside it. He was later called the ‘Father of Indian Nationalism’.
He Founded The Indian Association
His first contribution was the founding of the Indian Association in 1876, at a time when political bodies in India were small and local.
Its declared aims were to educate the people, to create a strong body of public opinion in the country, and to arouse political consciousness and unity. It was among the earliest Indian organisations to treat public opinion itself as something that had to be built.
He Convened The Indian National Conference
His second contribution followed from the first. Wanting a political organisation for the whole country, Banerjee convened the Indian National Conference at Calcutta in 1883, drawing delegates from several provinces.
The Conference and the Indian National Congress had similar objectives, and in 1886 the two merged, with the Congress carrying the work forward. Banerjee himself later presided over two Congress sessions.
3.5.3 Gopal Krishna Gokhale
Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) was a teacher of history and economics who became one of the most influential Congress leaders of the phase, and who presided over its Benares session in 1905.
He Founded The Servants Of India Society
His first contribution was the founding of the Servants of India Society in 1905. Its purpose was to train national workers who would take a vow of poverty and give their lives to public service — to famine relief, education, and work among the poorest.
The Society was an answer to a weakness of the phase. Congress politics was the part-time activity of busy professional men; Gokhale wanted full-time workers who could carry it into daily life.
He Worked Within The Imperial Legislative Council
His second contribution was made inside the government’s own institutions. Gokhale became a member of the Imperial Legislative Council in 1902, and used the annual budget debates to argue India’s case in detail.
There he pleaded for a reduction in the salt duty and for the abolition of the excise duty on cotton goods, criticised heavy military expenditure, and opposed discrimination against Indians in appointments to high posts. He also pressed for the separation of the judiciary from the executive and for the reform of the councils themselves.
The council could not vote a government out, and Gokhale knew it. What a skilled member could do was force officials to explain themselves in public, on the record, in figures — which is exactly what the constitutional method was designed to achieve.
3.6 Summary
- The first phase of the Indian National Movement runs from 1885 to 1907. It was led by the Early Nationalists, or Moderates, who sought reform within British rule rather than an end to it.
- They came from the educated urban middle class — lawyers, teachers, journalists, doctors and officials — drawn from every province, and shaped by English education and by study in Britain.
- Their politics rested on four beliefs:
- That the British had a sense of justice and would act once the facts were proved.
- That the British connection benefited India, and that self-government would be granted in time.
- That India’s own social and economic backwardness, rather than colonial rule, was the chief obstacle to progress.
- That constitutional and peaceful methods, pursued patiently, would succeed.
- Their constitutional objectives were a larger Indian share in government: expansion of the legislative councils with some elected members, Indian control over the public purse, abolition of the India Council, and Indian representation in the Executive Councils. By the early twentieth century they demanded swarajya on the model of Canada and Australia.
- Their economic objectives were lower land revenue, protection for tenants, cheap agricultural credit, reduced military expenditure, an enquiry into poverty and famine, tariff protection and loans for industry, and abolition of the salt tax.
- Their administrative objectives were the Indianisation of the services through a simultaneous Indian Civil Service examination, separation of the executive from the judiciary, stronger local bodies, wider primary education and an improved police.
- They defended civil rights throughout — freedom of speech and the press, the right to assemble and to form associations, and an end to detention without trial.
- Their method was constitutional agitation: lawful pressure through meetings, resolutions, newspapers, memoranda and petitions. It had two objectives — to educate Indian opinion, and to influence the British government and public.
- In Britain they worked through the three P’s — Petitions, Prayers and Protests — through the British Committee of the Congress set up in London in 1889 and its journal India, and through deputations. They did so because Indian policy was finally decided by Parliament and the Secretary of State.
- Their achievements were an awakened sense of one nation, a generation trained in politics, and an evidence-based case against colonial economic policy. Their concessions were fewer: the Public Service Commission of 1886, the Indian Councils Act of 1892, the Commons resolution of 1893 that was never carried out, and the Welby Commission of 1895.
- They were criticised for relying on British generosity, for being slow to see that British and Indian interests clashed, and for leaving the peasantry and the working population outside the movement. In 1907 the Congress split over methods, and the phase ended.
- Dadabhai Naoroji’s two contributions were the Drain Theory, argued in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, and his leadership of the Congress, which he served as President in 1886, 1893 and 1906, demanding swarajya from its platform in 1906.
- Surendranath Banerjee’s two contributions were the founding of the Indian Association in 1876 and the convening of the Indian National Conference at Calcutta in 1883, which merged with the Congress in 1886.
- Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s two contributions were the founding of the Servants of India Society in 1905 to train full-time national workers, and his work in the Imperial Legislative Council from 1902, where he pressed for a lower salt duty, the abolition of the cotton excise and reform of the councils.
3.7 Key Terms
- Civil rights: The freedoms a person holds against the state — to speak, to publish, to gather, and to be tried before being punished.
- Constitutional agitation: Pressing political demands by lawful means alone — meetings, resolutions, newspapers, memoranda and petitions — and never outside the law.
- Drain Theory: Dadabhai Naoroji’s argument that a large part of India’s annual income left the country every year as payments to Britain and returned nothing to India.
- Early Nationalists: The leaders of the Congress in its first phase, from 1885 to 1907, who sought reform within British rule rather than an end to it; also called the Moderates.
- Indianisation: The filling of higher posts in the administration and the services by Indians instead of by British officials.
- Land revenue: The tax the state took from agricultural land, which was the government’s largest single source of income.
- Self-government: The right of a people to make their own laws through their own elected representatives.
- Swarajya: Self-government for India within the British empire, on the model of the self-governing colonies of Canada and Australia.
3.8 Points to Ponder
- The Early Nationalists believed India’s poverty came from India’s own backwardness, and later argued it came from how India was governed. What kind of evidence could make a person change their mind so completely?
- A petition asks; it does not compel. If a government is free to refuse, what exactly is a petition doing, and for whom is it really written?
- The House of Commons passed a resolution in 1893 that was never carried out. What does that tell you about where power actually sat in the government of India?
- The leaders of this phase spoke of the whole country, but their movement lived in the cities and worked in English. Can a movement represent people it has never organised?
- Naoroji’s Drain Theory was disputed at the time, and the sums are still argued over. Does an argument have to be exactly right to be politically important?
- Gokhale worked inside a council that could not vote the government out. When is it worth taking a seat you cannot use to win?
3.9 Objective Questions
The first phase of the Indian National Movement is dated —
- 1857 to 1885
- 1885 to 1907
- 1905 to 1916
- 1915 to 1947 [1 mark]
Which of the following was a constitutional demand of the Early Nationalists?
- Abolition of the excise duty on cotton goods
- Cheap credit for peasants through agricultural banks
- Indian control over the public purse
- Improvement of the police service [1 mark]
The three P’s used by the Early Nationalists in Britain were —
- Protests, Processions and Petitions
- Petitions, Prayers and Protests
- Petitions, Persuasion and Publicity
- Prayers, Publicity and Processions [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The British Committee of the Indian National Congress was set up in London in the year ______. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The Indian National Conference convened by Surendranath Banerjee merged with the Indian National Congress in 1886. [1 mark]
Select the option that shows the correct relationship between Statements (I) and (II).
- The Early Nationalists demanded that the Indian Civil Service examination be held in India and England on the same day.
- The examination was held only in London, which few Indian families could afford to send a candidate to. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (II) is the reason for (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- Select the option that shows the correct relationship between Statements (I) and (II).
- The Early Nationalists addressed carefully drafted petitions to the government.
- The text of these petitions was printed in newspapers and read by educated Indians. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (I) is the reason for (II) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- Match the items in Column A with those in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. 1876 | i. The Servants of India Society is founded |
| b. 1892 | ii. The Indian Association is founded |
| c. 1905 | iii. Swarajya is demanded from the Congress platform |
| d. 1906 | iv. The Indian Councils Act is passed |
3.10 Check Your Concepts
Define constitutional agitation. [2 marks]
Name the two objectives that the methods of the Early Nationalists were meant to serve. [2 marks]
State any three economic demands made by the Early Nationalists for the countryside. [3 marks]
Give reasons why the Early Nationalists took India’s case to the British Parliament and the British public. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, why the Early Nationalists demanded the Indianisation of the services. [4 marks]
Trace the chain of reasoning by which Dadabhai Naoroji connected the drain of wealth to India’s poverty. [4 marks]
State any two contributions each of Surendranath Banerjee and Gopal Krishna Gokhale to the national movement. [4 marks]
Describe the objectives and the methods of struggle of the Early Nationalists, and evaluate the claim that their methods failed. [6 marks]
3.11 Show Your Skills
- Study the diagram described below and answer the questions that follow. A thick arrow runs from a box marked ‘India’ to a box marked ‘Britain’. It is labelled with four heads: salaries and pensions of officials, interest on debt raised in London, military expenditure, and profits of British firms. A thin arrow returns from ‘Britain’ to ‘India’, labelled ‘goods, and administration’.
- Which economic argument of the first phase does this diagram represent, and who made it?
- Explain how this argument changed the Early Nationalists’ earlier explanation of India’s poverty.
- State one thing the diagram cannot tell you about the drain. [5 marks]
- Read the situation below and answer the questions that follow. A district town in 1896 holds a public meeting about a rise in land revenue. Speeches are made, and a resolution is passed. A memorandum setting out the local revenue figures is drafted, signed by lawyers, teachers and traders, and sent to the Collector and to the Secretary of State in London. The full text is then printed in two local newspapers, one in English and one in an Indian language.
- Name the method of struggle being followed here, and state its two objectives.
- Why was the memorandum printed in newspapers as well as sent to the officials?
- State one weakness of this method that critics of the Early Nationalists pointed out. [5 marks]
- Look at the photographs described below and answer the questions that follow. Four studio portraits are printed in a row. Each shows an Indian public figure of the late nineteenth century in formal dress, seated or standing before a plain backdrop. Each is captioned only with a name.
- From what social background were the leaders of the first phase drawn, and how had that background been created?
- What does a set of studio portraits tell you about who led the movement?
- State two things such photographs cannot tell you about the movement’s support. [4 marks]