Chapter 4: History: Second Phase of the Indian National Movement
On the morning of 7 August 1905, the Town Hall in Calcutta filled far beyond its seats. Men stood in the aisles, on the staircase and out in the street. They had come because a decision taken inside a government office was about to remake their province. On 20 July the Government of India had announced that the Presidency of Bengal would be divided into two. The order was to take effect in October. Petitions had already been sent to the government, and none of them had worked. So the meeting did something the Congress had not tried before on this scale. It resolved that the people of Bengal would refuse to buy British-made goods, cloth above all, until the order was withdrawn. That was a different kind of politics. A petition asks a government to act. This resolution asked nothing. It named something ordinary people could do themselves, in a shop, on any day of the week, without anyone’s permission. The resolution was carried. The delegates then left Calcutta to carry it into the districts, and within weeks the pledge was being taken at meetings across Bengal. How do we know what happened in that hall? Newspapers in Bengali and in English reported the speeches, and the government’s own officials filed reports on the same meeting. Both records survive. Neither of them is neutral, and reading them against each other is where the history of this movement begins.
Map
Map 4.1 Caption: Bengal before and after the division of 1905. Brief: Two panels side by side. Left panel: the Presidency of Bengal as it stood before 1905, showing Bengal proper, Bihar, Odisha and Chota Nagpur as one province, with Calcutta marked as its capital. Right panel: the same area after 16 October 1905, shaded to show the two new provinces — ‘Bengal’ (western districts with Bihar and Odisha), capital Calcutta, and ‘Eastern Bengal and Assam’, capital Dacca. Label the province names and the two capitals only. These are the boundaries of the past, not of today; the panels show a colonial province and are not a modern reference map of India.
4.1 The Partition Of Bengal, 1905
The second phase of the Indian national movement opened with a boundary line drawn on a map. In 1905 the British government divided the Presidency of Bengal into two provinces. The division lasted only six years. Yet it changed the methods of Indian politics, brought new people into the movement, and split the Indian National Congress itself. To see why one administrative order did so much, we first need to know what Bengal was before it was divided.
4.1.1 Bengal Before The Division
The Presidency of Bengal was the largest and most heavily populated province in British India. It covered Bengal proper, Bihar, Odisha and Chota Nagpur. Roughly eighty million people lived inside it. That was more than the population of Britain, France or Germany at the time. A single Lieutenant-Governor, an official appointed by the British government to head a large province, administered the whole of it from Calcutta.
Bengal also mattered for a second reason. Calcutta was then the capital of British India, and Bengal held the country’s oldest English-educated professional class. Lawyers, teachers, journalists and clerks in Bengal ran newspapers, associations and public meetings. Much of the early organised work of Indian nationalism — the belief that the people of India form one nation, entitled to govern themselves — was done from these offices. So Bengal was, at one and the same time, an administrative headache and the most politically active province in India. Both facts sat behind what happened next.
4.1.2 The Scheme Announced
On 20 July 1905 the Government of India announced the division of Bengal. Lord Curzon was Viceroy at the time, the Crown’s chief representative in India and the head of its government. The order was carried into effect on 16 October 1905. Map 4.1 in the chapter opening shows what the province looked like before and after that date.
The scheme created two provinces. (a) ‘Bengal’ held the western districts of Bengal proper together with Bihar and Odisha, and kept Calcutta as its capital. (b) ‘Eastern Bengal and Assam’ held the eastern districts of Bengal proper together with Assam, and was given a new capital at Dacca.
The line therefore cut through the Bengali-speaking population. Bengali-speakers were left as a minority in the western province, where Hindi-speakers and Odia-speakers were numerous, and were placed under two separate administrations. In the eastern province, Muslims formed the majority; in the western province, they did not. A single language community had been divided by a line that also divided two religious communities.
4.1.3 The Causes Of The Partition
The Reason Given In Public
The government’s stated reason was administrative necessity. Bengal, it argued, was simply too large and too populous for one provincial government to administer well. The eastern districts, it said, were remote from Calcutta and had long been neglected. A new province with its own capital would be governed more closely.
This argument was not absurd. A province of eighty million people, with poor roads and slow communications, was genuinely hard to administer from one city. The question a historian must ask is a different one. If size was the problem, why was the line drawn where it was drawn?
The Motives In The Files
Officials also wrote to one another privately while the scheme was being prepared. Some of those notes survive in the government’s own records, and they give reasons that were never stated in public. The best known was written by Sir Herbert Risley, then Home Secretary to the Government of India, in December 1904. He was arguing inside the administration for the scheme, and he set out plainly what he thought it would achieve.
Read the note carefully before deciding what it proves. It is written by one senior official, inside the government, to persuade other officials — not to inform the public. It tells us that weakening organised political opposition was one argument used for the scheme. It does not tell us that this was the only motive, that Curzon shared it in the same terms, or how much weight it carried in the final decision. A confidential file records an argument that was made. It does not record everything that was thought.
Taken together, the public reason and the private notes explain why the causes of the Partition are usually set out in two layers. (a) The declared cause was administrative convenience: a province too large to be governed from one capital. (b) The unstated causes, as the surviving records show, included weakening Bengal as the centre of nationalist activity, reducing Bengali-speakers to a minority in the western province, and separating a Muslim-majority east from a Hindu-majority west.
4.2 The Nationalist Perspective On The Partition
The government expected complaints and expected them to fade. What it met instead was the largest political agitation India had yet seen. To understand why, we have to look at the division as Indian nationalists looked at it — not as a map problem, but as an act of policy with a purpose behind it.
4.2.1 How The Nationalists Read The Scheme
Indian nationalists did not accept administrative convenience as the real reason. They read the scheme as a deliberate attempt to break up a politically active people. Their argument had two parts, and both were arguments about the line itself rather than about the idea of dividing a large province.
First, they said, the line separated Bengali-speakers from one another. If administrative efficiency was the aim, a different line was available. Hindi-speaking Bihar and Odia-speaking Odisha could have been detached from the Bengali-speaking districts. That would have reduced the province’s size while leaving the Bengali-speaking population whole. Instead the government drew a line straight through the Bengali-speaking districts. Nationalists took that choice as evidence of intention.
Second, they said, the line divided Bengal along religious lines as well. The eastern province had a Muslim majority, the western province did not. Setting the two communities into separate provinces, they argued, would teach them to see their interests as opposed. This was the charge they summed up as ‘divide and rule’.
There was a third grievance, about method rather than motive. The scheme was prepared inside the administration and announced as a decision, not proposed for discussion. Petitions, memorials and public meetings had already opposed earlier versions of the plan. That they had changed nothing was itself part of the anger.
Historians still weigh these motives differently. Some treat the political calculation as decisive; others hold that administrative pressure was real and that the political advantage was a welcome addition rather than the whole purpose. What is not in dispute is how the scheme was read at the time, and that reading is what produced the movement.
Not everyone in Bengal read the scheme the same way. In the eastern districts some leaders welcomed a province in which Muslims formed the majority, with its own capital, its own offices and its own share of government appointments. Eastern Bengal had long been the poorer half, and a government seated at Dacca promised attention it had not received from Calcutta. This position was argued openly, and it is part of the history of the Partition.
4.2.2 The Anti-Partition Movement
The campaign against the division came to be called the Anti-Partition Movement. It began before the order took effect and continued for years after it. Its chronology, from the announcement to the undoing, is set out in TL 4.1.
The movement drew in groups that had not acted together before. Landholders, merchants, lawyers, students, teachers and women all took part in meetings and processions. Leaders of both wings of the Congress worked side by side in it. Surendranath Banerjea, Krishna Kumar Mitra and Ananda Mohan Bose were among those who addressed meeting after meeting across the province. Newspapers carried the campaign further than any meeting could. Bengalee, Hitabadi and Sanjibani printed the speeches, the resolutions and the arguments week after week.
The Day The Order Took Effect
16 October 1905 was turned into a public demonstration. The leaders declared it a day of national mourning throughout Bengal. People fasted, and shops and offices closed in a hartal — a suspension of work and trade kept as a mark of protest. In Calcutta crowds walked barefoot to the river in the early morning and bathed in the Ganga.
Two acts of that day were meant to be read as symbols. Hindus and Muslims tied rakhis on one another’s wrists, using a festival of family bonds to say that Bengal’s people could not be separated by an order. In the afternoon Ananda Mohan Bose laid the foundation of a Federation Hall, a building meant to stand for the unity of a province the government had just divided.
Songs did the same work. ‘Bande Mataram’, written earlier by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, was sung through the streets and became the movement’s rallying cry. Rabindranath Tagore composed ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’ — ‘My Golden Bengal’ — for the occasion, and crowds carried it through the city. A song can be sung by people who cannot read a resolution, and that was the point.
At the meetings of that day the crowds took two pledges: to use swadeshi goods, meaning goods made in one’s own country, and to boycott British goods — to refuse, as an organised act of protest, to buy or use them. Manchester cloth and Liverpool salt were named because they were the imports found in every household. The pledge turned an everyday purchase into a political act.
4.2.3 The Impact Of The Anti-Partition Movement
The agitation did not stop at protest. It changed the shape of Indian politics in four ways.
- It carried the national movement beyond the meeting hall. Petitions had been the work of a small educated class; a pledge not to buy foreign cloth could be kept by anyone, and the movement reached shopkeepers, students, weavers and households.
- It gave the movement a positive programme. Swadeshi enterprises were founded — textile mills, soap and matchstick works, tanneries, banks and insurance concerns — and national schools and colleges were set up outside government control.
- It shifted the balance inside the Congress. The methods of the older leaders had produced nothing against Curzon, while direct action had produced a movement, and the younger leaders gained ground from this.
- It left a legacy of communal distrust. A province had been organised around a religious majority and then unmade, and the argument about which community gained by which arrangement outlasted the Partition itself.
The government answered the agitation with prosecutions, bans on public meetings and restrictions on newspapers. Curzon himself refused to reconsider, and his government maintained that the division was a settled question. That refusal had a consequence its authors did not intend. It confirmed the argument of those Indians who said that petitions to a government which would not listen were a waste of effort.
4.2.4 The Annulment Of 1911
In December 1911 the government announced that the Partition would be undone. The change was carried out in 1912, six years after the order it reversed.
The new arrangement followed roughly the line the nationalists had proposed in 1905. The Bengali-speaking districts were brought back together into one province. Bihar and Odisha were made a separate province, and Assam was again administered separately. At the same time it was announced that the capital of British India would move from Calcutta to Delhi.
The annulment is worth pausing over, because it can be read two ways and the chapter will not settle it for you. It was the first time a major British measure in India had been withdrawn under public pressure, and nationalists took it as proof that organised agitation worked. The government, on the other hand, presented it as an act of grace rather than a retreat, and moving the capital away from Calcutta reduced Bengal’s political weight at the same moment.
4.3 The Emergence Of The Assertive Nationalists
The Partition of Bengal did not create the disagreement inside the Congress. It brought a disagreement that had been growing for years into the open. By 1905 two groups within the same organisation held different views about what India should demand, and about how it should ask.
4.3.1 A New Group Within The Congress
The Early Nationalists had led the Congress since its foundation in 1885. They worked by resolution, petition, memorial and speech, and they aimed at reform within the British Empire. They believed that British rule could be argued into becoming just, and that Indians would win a larger share in government by proving their case in public.
A younger group inside the same Congress came to reject that belief. They are known as the Assertive Nationalists — the leaders who held that rights had to be claimed by direct action rather than requested by petition. They stood for complete swaraj, meaning self-rule, and they wanted a movement with a base among ordinary people rather than among lawyers and professionals alone.
The best known of them were Bal Gangadhar Tilak in Maharashtra, Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal and Lala Lajpat Rai in the Punjab. Together they were called the ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’ trio. Aurobindo Ghose in Bengal was another leading figure of the group, and its ideas were carried in newspapers and pamphlets across three provinces at once.
The names we use for the two groups deserve a moment’s attention. Contemporaries, including the British officials who wrote about them, generally called them Moderates and Extremists. Those labels were fixed by people watching from outside, and ‘extremist’ was not a neutral description. Historians now more often say Early Nationalists and Assertive Nationalists, which describes the difference without passing judgement on it.
4.3.2 Causes For The Rise Of Assertive Nationalism
What Had Changed In India
- The nature of British rule had become clearer. The writings and enquiries of the Early Nationalists themselves had built the case that British rule was draining India’s wealth and deepening its poverty, and a younger generation read that case and drew a harder conclusion from it.
- The Early Nationalists’ methods had produced very little. Two decades of petitions and resolutions had not stopped the reduction of elected Indian members in the Calcutta Corporation, or the tightening of controls on the press, or the Partition itself.
- Economic conditions had worsened sharply. Severe famines in the closing years of the nineteenth century killed millions and were followed by outbreaks of plague, while the government’s relief was widely judged to be inadequate.
- Education had grown faster than opportunity. The number of Indians with degrees rose steadily, but the higher posts stayed closed to them, and educated men in low-paid work or no work at all read the political argument with a personal grievance behind it.
- Curzon’s own measures supplied the immediate provocation. The sedition law was widened in 1898, the Calcutta Corporation Act of 1899 cut the strength of elected Indian members, and the Indian Universities Act of 1904 brought Indian universities under closer government control.
- Indians overseas were treated as inferior subjects. In South Africa in particular, Indian settlers faced legal discrimination in voting, residence and travel, and news of it reached India steadily.
What Had Changed Abroad
Events outside India mattered because they broke an assumption. Europeans had come to be thought of as militarily unbeatable, and between 1896 and 1905 that assumption failed in public three times over. In 1896 an Ethiopian army defeated an Italian invading force at Adwa. In South Africa the Boer republics held out against the British Empire from 1899 to 1902. In 1905 Japan, an Asian power, defeated Russia, a European one, in war. In Ireland a Home Rule agitation was pressing the same Parliament that governed India.
Alongside these events ran an older current of thought inside India. Writers and teachers had been arguing since the middle of the nineteenth century that Indians should take pride in their own past and rely on their own strength. The Assertive Nationalists drew on that current, and they used festivals, history and the memory of earlier rulers to reach people who never read a newspaper.
Finally, the Partition of Bengal itself gave the group its opportunity. It supplied a concrete grievance, a ready-made programme of swadeshi and boycott, and a demonstration that agitation could move a government when petitions could not.
4.3.3 The Two Wings Compared
The two wings differed first in what they asked for. The Early Nationalists wanted self-government within the Empire, on the footing that Canada and Australia already enjoyed, and they did not demand separation from it. The Assertive Nationalists wanted swaraj itself, and Tilak’s group meant by it complete control over India’s own affairs rather than a wider share of administration.
They differed second in method. The Early Nationalists worked through constitutional channels — petitions, resolutions, evidence before commissions, speeches in the councils — and stayed inside the law at every point. The Assertive Nationalists were willing to organise refusal: boycott of foreign goods, boycott of government schools and courts, and mass agitation outside the council chamber.
They differed third in whom they addressed. The Early Nationalists spoke to the British Parliament and to educated Indian opinion, and many of them held respected positions under the government. The Assertive Nationalists spoke to students, shopkeepers, workers and villagers, and treated the size of a crowd as a source of political strength.
The table is a summary, not the whole story, and its neat columns hide something important. Both wings condemned the Partition, both attended the same sessions, and Bengal’s protest meetings in 1905 were addressed by leaders of both. The quarrel was not between friends of British rule and enemies of it. It was between two judgements about what would work.
4.4 Objectives And Methods Of The Assertive Nationalists
A political group is defined by two things: what it wants, and what it is prepared to do to get it. On both counts the Assertive Nationalists broke with the leaders who came before them. This section sets out the objective first, and then the four methods through which they pursued it.
4.4.1 The Objective: Complete Swaraj
The declared objective of the Assertive Nationalists was the immediate attainment of swaraj. What they meant by the word is the point on which they parted from the Early Nationalists. For the older leaders, self-government meant the position of Canada or Australia: an Indian government running Indian affairs while India remained inside the British Empire.
The Assertive Nationalists wanted control that was not held on loan. Tilak argued that self-rule was a birthright rather than a favour to be granted, and that Indians should demand it rather than plead for it. That single shift — from asking to demanding — changed everything else about their politics. A request must be addressed to the ruler; a demand can be addressed to your own people.
They also rejected the timetable that went with the older view. The Early Nationalists expected self-government to arrive by stages, as Indians proved their fitness for it. The Assertive Nationalists denied that fitness was the question at all. Rights, they said, are exercised into existence, not awarded after an examination.
Since they could not win this by petition, they needed methods that did not depend on the government’s consent. Their programme is usually grouped under four heads: swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance. The four were meant to work together. Refusing foreign goods was useless without Indian goods to buy; leaving a government school was useless without a national school to enter.
4.4.2 Swadeshi
Swadeshi means ‘of one’s own country’. As a programme it meant producing in India the goods India needed, and using them in preference to imported ones. The economic argument behind it was straightforward. If Indians bought Indian-made cloth, the money stayed in India, Indian workshops grew, and Indian workers found employment.
The practice took several forms at once. Volunteers took and administered pledges at public meetings, and stores selling Indian-made goods opened in towns across Bengal and beyond. Foreign cloth was collected and burnt at public bonfires, which turned a private decision into a visible, collective one. New Indian-owned enterprises were founded, among them the chemical works started in Calcutta by the scientist Prafulla Chandra Ray.
The movement had real limits, and honest history records them. Indian mills could not supply cloth in the quantity or at the price the imports had reached, so swadeshi goods often cost more. It was therefore easier to keep the pledge if you had money. That fact shaped who could take part, and it is one reason the movement was strongest in towns.
4.4.3 Boycott
Boycott was the other half of the same coin, and Tilak insisted that neither worked without the other. Swadeshi said what to use; boycott said what to refuse. Its first target was British manufactured goods, cloth above all, and later imported salt, sugar and other articles of daily use.
It went further than shopping. The Assertive Nationalists called on Indians to withdraw from institutions that gave British rule its appearance of consent. That meant giving up government service, staying away from government schools and colleges, avoiding the government courts, and refusing honours and titles. Shops that continued to sell foreign goods were picketed — volunteers stood outside and persuaded, or pressed, customers not to enter.
Why was refusing to buy things a political weapon at all? Because British rule in India rested on a commercial relationship as much as on an army. Manchester’s mills depended on the Indian market, and Members of Parliament heard quickly from manufacturers who were losing it. An unarmed population that could not vote could still act on that dependence.
Boycott also did something inside India that its organisers valued as much. It gave people who had never attended a political meeting a way to take part, and it made participation something you did daily rather than annually.
4.4.4 National Education
The boycott of government schools raised an obvious problem. If students walked out, where were they to go? The answer was a system of national education: schools and colleges founded by Indians, funded by Indian donations, and free of government control over what was taught.
The case for it was not only practical. The Assertive Nationalists argued that an education designed to produce clerks for an administration would never produce citizens of a self-governing country. They wanted Indian history, Indian languages and technical training given a serious place, alongside the sciences already taught in the government colleges.
National education was expensive, and much of it did not survive the decline of the movement after 1908. But it established a claim that outlasted the schools themselves — that Indians could decide what Indian children should learn.
4.4.5 Passive Resistance
Passive resistance is the refusal to cooperate with a government, carried out without violence, in order to make its administration unworkable. The word ‘passive’ is misleading, and it is worth being careful with it. Nothing about withdrawing from courts, schools and government service is inactive; what is withheld is cooperation, not effort.
The reasoning was set out plainly by the Assertive Nationalist leaders. A government of a few hundred thousand officials could not run a country of three hundred million without the daily participation of Indians themselves. Indians served in its offices, pleaded in its courts, taught in its schools and paid for its establishment. Withdraw enough of that, and the administration would have to concede.
This was a demanding method, and its advocates said so. It asked people to accept arrest, loss of employment, forfeited careers and long imprisonment without striking back. The leaders who preached it were also the first to bear those costs, and that consistency was a large part of why crowds followed them.
Beyond The Four Methods
Two further features of the movement are worth naming, because they explain both its reach and its difficulties. The Assertive Nationalists appealed to India’s past, and they used popular festivals and remembered heroes to carry political ideas to people who read no newspapers. This gave the movement an emotional depth that resolutions could not. It also carried a cost. Symbols drawn mainly from one religious tradition did not speak to every Indian equally, and some of those who stood outside them read the movement as speaking for others rather than for them. Both the reach and the cost belong in the record.
4.5 The Surat Split Of 1907
In 1905 the two wings of the Congress had shared platforms across Bengal. Two years later the organisation broke in two at its own annual session. The break mattered because it decided who would speak for Indian nationalism, and with what programme, for the next nine years.
4.5.1 The Growing Differences
The disagreements came to a head over one practical question: how far should the Bengal programme travel? The Assertive Nationalists wanted swadeshi and boycott extended to the whole of India and turned into a permanent political weapon, aimed at swaraj rather than at the Partition alone. The Early Nationalists were willing to support both, but as a protest limited to Bengal and to the specific grievance that had produced them.
Behind that lay a difference of principle about boycott itself. The Early Nationalists worked by petition and persuasion, which assumes that the government can be reasoned with. An organised refusal to buy, to study or to serve says the opposite — that reasoning has been tried and abandoned. The two positions could not both be the policy of one organisation.
There were three further points of dispute, and each of them was really the same dispute in another form. (a) The goal: self-government within the Empire, or swaraj claimed as a right. (b) National education: a useful experiment, or a standing boycott of government institutions. (c) The leadership of the Congress itself, and therefore which of the two programmes the organisation would carry.
4.5.2 The Calcutta Session Of 1906
The Calcutta session of December 1906 was an attempt to hold the two wings together, and for a year it worked. Dadabhai Naoroji, a founding figure of the Congress who was respected by both groups, was chosen to preside precisely because neither wing could object to him.
The session declared swaraj — self-government of the kind the self-governing colonies enjoyed — to be the goal of the Congress. It also recorded the Congress’s support for swadeshi, for the boycott in Bengal and for national education. Each wing could read the outcome as a victory. The Assertive Nationalists had got the word swaraj into the Congress’s declared aim; the Early Nationalists had got it defined in colonial terms, and the boycott confined to Bengal.
4.5.3 The Split At Surat
The unresolved argument returned at the next annual session, held at Surat in December 1907. It surfaced, as such arguments often do, over a question of personnel rather than of policy. The Early Nationalists proposed Rashbehari Ghosh for the presidency of the session. The Assertive Nationalists proposed Lala Lajpat Rai instead. Whoever presided would shape the resolutions, so the contest over the chair was a contest over the programme.
The session broke down in disorder before any of it could be debated. Proceedings were disrupted, the meeting could not be conducted, and the Congress was unable to transact its business at all. The Assertive Nationalist leaders left the organisation, and the exclusion was made permanent at a convention held at Allahabad in April 1908. That convention adopted a constitution for the Congress which required members to accept its creed — self-government within the Empire, pursued by constitutional means. The Assertive Nationalists could not accept it, and they remained outside the Congress for nine years.
4.5.4 The Consequences Of The Split
The immediate effect was a weaker national movement. One wing held the organisation but had lost the energy of the mass agitation; the other had the energy but no organisation to work through.
The government was well placed to use the division, and it did. Its approach in these years is often summed up as concession and repression: constitutional concessions offered to those willing to work within the system, and prosecutions directed at those who were not. Assertive Nationalist leaders were tried, imprisoned or deported, their newspapers were prosecuted, and the swadeshi agitation in Bengal lost its momentum after 1908.
Yet the ideas of the excluded wing did not disappear with them. Swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance stayed in the vocabulary of Indian politics, and they were taken up again on a far larger scale in the movements that followed. The two wings came back together at the Lucknow session of 1916, nine years after Surat.
Historians still argue about how much the split cost. Some hold that it delayed a mass movement by a decade at the moment when one was possible. Others hold that the two programmes had become genuinely incompatible, and that the argument had to be settled before the Congress could act as one body. Both readings use the same evidence, and you may weigh it for yourself.
4.6 Leaders Of Assertive Nationalism
Three leaders gave the assertive wing its programme and its public voice, working in three different provinces at the same time. Bal Gangadhar Tilak worked in Maharashtra, Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal and Lala Lajpat Rai in the Punjab. That spread mattered as much as their individual work. It made assertive nationalism an all-India position rather than a Bengali reaction to a Bengali grievance.
The three are often shown together in a single photograph, and Fig. 4.6-1 is one such portrait.
Diagram
Fig. 4.6-1 Caption: The three leaders whose work carried assertive nationalism across northern and western India. Brief: A period photographic portrait of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal seated together in formal dress. Label each figure by name beneath the image. Reproduce as a historical photograph, not as an illustration.
A photograph like this is evidence of a kind, but of a narrow kind. It records that the three sat for a camera together, in clothes they chose, in a pose arranged for the occasion. It tells us how they wished to be seen — as equals, and as one group. It cannot tell us whether they agreed on tactics, how much they worked together in practice, or what any of them thought of the others.
4.6.1 Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Bal Gangadhar Tilak worked in Maharashtra as a teacher, editor and political leader, and was widely known by the title Lokmanya, meaning ‘respected by the people’.
Two contributions stand out. (a) He turned swaraj into an open demand. Tilak argued that self-rule was a birthright rather than a concession to be earned, and he pressed the Congress to say so, shifting nationalist politics from petition to claim. (b) He built a mass audience for nationalist ideas. Through the newspapers he ran — Kesari in Marathi and Mahratta in English — and through the public festivals he organised from the 1890s, he carried political argument to people who attended no Congress session and read no English.
4.6.2 Bipin Chandra Pal
Bipin Chandra Pal was a Bengali journalist, orator and reformer, and one of the leading voices of the assertive wing during the Anti-Partition Movement.
Two contributions stand out. (a) He carried the swadeshi and boycott programme beyond Bengal. Through his journalism and through extended speaking tours in other provinces, he argued that the Bengal programme was a national method and not a local protest, and he was imprisoned for refusing to give evidence against a fellow nationalist. (b) He made national education central to the movement’s case. Pal held that a system of education controlled by the government would never produce citizens of a self-governing country, and that Indians had to build and fund their own institutions.
4.6.3 Lala Lajpat Rai
Lala Lajpat Rai was a lawyer, writer and educationist from the Punjab, popularly called Punjab Kesari, meaning ‘the lion of the Punjab’.
Two contributions stand out. (a) He built institutions through mass education and social work. Associated with the Arya Samaj movement, he was instrumental in the expansion of the D.A.V. College at Lahore, and he founded schools, orphanages and relief institutions that gave the movement a base outside politics. (b) He put India’s case before readers abroad. His writings, including Young India, set out the nationalist argument for foreign audiences, and his account of the movement reached readers in Britain and the United States who had heard only the official version.
Their careers also show something about the cost of this politics. All three were prosecuted, imprisoned or sent out of the country for what they wrote and said, and their newspapers were repeatedly proceeded against. That record is part of the evidence for how seriously the government took the assertive wing, and it is one reason their standing among Indians rose rather than fell.
4.7 Summary
The Presidency of Bengal was the largest and most populous province in British India, covering Bengal proper, Bihar, Odisha and Chota Nagpur. It was also the most politically active province, and both facts lay behind the decision to divide it.
On 20 July 1905 the government announced the Partition of Bengal, which took effect on 16 October 1905. It created two provinces:
- ‘Bengal’, holding the western districts with Bihar and Odisha, with its capital at Calcutta.
- ‘Eastern Bengal and Assam’, holding the eastern districts with Assam, with a new capital at Dacca.
The causes of the Partition lie in two layers. The declared cause was administrative necessity — a province too large for one government. Confidential official notes, including one by the Home Secretary Sir Herbert Risley, show that weakening Bengal as a centre of organised opposition was also argued for inside the administration.
Nationalists read the scheme as political rather than administrative. Their argument rested on the line itself: a smaller province could have been made by detaching Hindi-speaking Bihar and Odia-speaking Odisha, whereas the line actually drawn cut through the Bengali-speaking districts and set a Muslim-majority province against a Hindu-majority one. Some leaders in eastern Bengal, however, welcomed a province of their own in a long-neglected region.
The Anti-Partition Movement drew in landholders, merchants, lawyers, students and women, and was carried by the Bengali press. On 16 October 1905 Bengal observed a day of mourning with fasting and hartal, Hindus and Muslims tied rakhis as a statement of unity, and the foundation of a Federation Hall was laid. Crowds sang ‘Bande Mataram’ and Tagore’s ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’.
The movement’s impact went beyond the grievance that produced it. It carried nationalism past the educated professional class, founded swadeshi enterprises and national schools, shifted the balance inside the Congress towards the younger leaders, and left behind a legacy of communal distrust.
The Partition was annulled in December 1911 and undone in 1912. Bengali-speaking districts were reunited, Bihar and Odisha and Assam became separate provinces, and the capital of British India moved from Calcutta to Delhi.
A younger group inside the Congress, the Assertive Nationalists, rejected the belief that British rule could be argued into justice. Their rise had several causes:
- The failure of two decades of petitions to prevent measures such as the Partition.
- Worsening economic conditions, including severe famines at the close of the nineteenth century.
- Curzon’s legislation, notably the Calcutta Corporation Act of 1899 and the Indian Universities Act of 1904.
- Education outrunning opportunity, and the treatment of Indians in British colonies overseas.
- Events abroad — Adwa in 1896, the Boer resistance of 1899 to 1902, and Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 — which broke the assumption that European power could not be beaten.
Their objective was the immediate attainment of swaraj, meaning control by Indians over India’s own affairs, and not self-government granted within the Empire. Their methods were swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance, and the four were designed to work together.
The Early Nationalists and the Assertive Nationalists differed in objective, method, view of British rule, social base and sources of inspiration — but both wings opposed the Partition and worked together throughout the Anti-Partition Movement.
The Surat Split of 1907 followed from a disagreement the Calcutta compromise of 1906 had postponed: whether boycott should be extended across India as a permanent weapon. The session collapsed over the contest for the presidency, and the creed adopted at Allahabad in April 1908 kept the assertive wing outside the Congress for nine years, until the reunion at Lucknow in 1916.
The split weakened the movement and allowed the government to combine concession with repression. The ideas of the excluded wing survived it, and were taken up on a far larger scale by the movements that followed.
Three leaders carried assertive nationalism in three provinces:
- Bal Gangadhar Tilak made swaraj an open demand and built a mass audience through Kesari, Mahratta and public festivals.
- Bipin Chandra Pal carried swadeshi and boycott beyond Bengal, and argued that national education was the basis of the movement.
- Lala Lajpat Rai built educational and social institutions in the Punjab, and put India’s case before readers abroad.
4.8 Key Terms
- Assertive Nationalists — the younger group within the Congress which held that rights had to be claimed by direct action rather than requested by petition.
- Boycott — an organised refusal to buy, use or take part in something, used as a means of protest.
- Early Nationalists — the leaders who led the Congress from 1885 and worked by petition, resolution and speech for reform within the British Empire.
- Hartal — a suspension of work and trade, with shops and offices closed, kept as a mark of protest.
- Nationalism — the belief that the people of a country form one nation and are entitled to govern themselves.
- Passive resistance — the refusal to cooperate with a government, carried out without violence, in order to make its administration unworkable.
- Swadeshi — ‘of one’s own country’; the programme of producing in India the goods India needed and using them in preference to imported ones.
- Swaraj — self-rule; control by Indians over India’s own affairs.
4.9 Points to Ponder
When a government’s public reason and its private notes give different motives, which should a historian treat as the real one — and what would you need to know before deciding?
Nationalists argued that a different boundary line was available in 1905. Can the choice of where a line is drawn tell you what was intended, or only what was convenient?
A boycott asks nothing of the government and a great deal of ordinary people. Does that make it a stronger method than a petition, or only a more demanding one?
Indian-made goods often cost more than imported ones during the swadeshi movement. What does it mean for a political method if keeping it is easier for those who have money?
The Congress split in 1907 over method rather than over aims. Is an organisation that holds two incompatible methods together stronger than two organisations that each pursue one?
The annulment of 1911 has been read both as a retreat forced by agitation and as an act of policy chosen by the government. What evidence would help you decide between the two readings?
4.10 Objective Questions
The Partition of Bengal came into effect on
- 20 July 1905
- 7 August 1905
- 16 October 1905
- 6 December 1904 [1 mark]
At the Surat session of 1907, the Assertive Nationalists proposed for the presidency the name of
- Rashbehari Ghosh
- Lala Lajpat Rai
- Dadabhai Naoroji
- Surendranath Banerjea [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The creed adopted at the ______________ convention of April 1908 kept the Assertive Nationalists outside the Congress. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: The Partition of Bengal was annulled in the same year in which it was announced. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): The Early Nationalists were unwilling to extend the boycott to the whole of India. Reason (R): An organised refusal to buy, study or serve was in conflict with their method of petition and persuasion.
- 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): Events outside India between 1896 and 1905 strengthened assertive nationalism in India. Reason (R): The Partition of Bengal divided the Bengali-speaking districts between two administrations.
- 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]
Match the items in Column I with those in Column II. [1 mark]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. Kesari | i. Home Secretary whose note argued that a divided Bengal would be weaker |
| b. Sir Herbert Risley | ii. Capital of the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam |
| c. National Council of Education | iii. Marathi newspaper run by Bal Gangadhar Tilak |
| d. Dacca | iv. Founded in 1906 to build a school and college system outside government control |
4.11 Check Your Concepts
Define swadeshi. State one form the swadeshi programme took in Bengal after 1905. [2 marks]
Name the two provinces created by the Partition of Bengal, and give the capital of each. [2 marks]
Give three reasons why Indian nationalists held that the Partition of Bengal was a political measure rather than an administrative one. [3 marks]
Differentiate between the Early Nationalists and the Assertive Nationalists with reference to their objectives and their methods of struggle. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, why the Assertive Nationalists held that swadeshi and boycott could not succeed without each other. [4 marks]
Trace the course of events from the Calcutta session of 1906 to the Surat Split of 1907, and state two consequences of the split for the national movement. [5 marks]
State any two contributions each of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai to the national movement. [6 marks]
State the main objective of the Assertive Nationalists, and describe the four methods by which they pursued it. [6 marks]
4.12 Show Your Skills
- A photograph taken in a Calcutta street in 1905 shows a crowd standing round a heap of burning cloth. Men at the front hold up unburnt lengths of imported cloth, and a hand-lettered banner in Bengali is visible behind them. A police constable stands at the edge of the crowd.
- To which movement does this scene belong, and what were the people in it trying to achieve? [2 marks]
- Explain why this act was performed in a public street rather than privately at home. [2 marks]
- State one thing the photograph cannot tell you about how widely the movement was supported. [2 marks]
- A note written inside the Government of India in December 1904 argued that a united Bengal was a source of strength to those who opposed British rule, and that dividing the province would weaken a solid body of opponents. In public, the government explained the same scheme as a matter of administrative necessity, since Bengal was too large to be governed well from one capital.
- Name the official who wrote the note and the post he held. [2 marks]
- Why do historians treat a confidential official note as valuable evidence about motive? [2 marks]
- State one thing that such a note, by itself, cannot establish. [1 mark]
- In 1906 a student at a government college in Bengal is urged by a volunteer to leave it and join a newly opened national school. The student’s father replies that the family cannot afford the risk, since a degree from the national school may not be recognised for government employment.
- Which method of the Assertive Nationalists is the volunteer urging the student to take up? [2 marks]
- Give two reasons the Assertive Nationalists offered for founding institutions outside government control. [2 marks]
- What does the father’s objection suggest about who found it easiest to take part in the movement? [2 marks]