The Indian Independence Movement: A Comprehensive Account

The Indian independence movement was the largest and most consequential anti-colonial movement of the twentieth century. It brought together hundreds of millions of people across the Indian subcontinent, transformed the political culture of British India, and produced, in 1947, the partition of British India into the two new states of India and Pakistan. The movement is often told as a story of a single, unified national struggle led by a single, charismatic leader, Mahatma Gandhi. The reality was more complicated, more violent, and more contested. The Indian independence movement combined Gandhian non-violence with revolutionary terrorism, constitutional politics with mass mobilisation, and Hindu-Muslim unity with a deepening religious division. The end of the movement, in 1947, was not the triumph of Indian unity but the violent partition of British India.

The Origins of the Movement

The Indian independence movement emerged from a number of overlapping traditions. The Indian National Congress, founded in December 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant, was the principal political organisation of the Indian educated class. The early Congress was a moderate body, led by figures like Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Pherozeshah Mehta, who sought a greater Indian role in the British administration of India. The 1905 partition of Bengal, and the resulting Swadeshi movement, produced a more radical tradition, represented by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Lala Lajpat Rai, who were known as the “extremists” or the “Lal Bal Pal” trio.

The second tradition was that of revolutionary politics. The Indian revolutionary tradition, going back to the 1857 rebellion and the assassination of British officials in the 1890s, was given new life by the Gadar Party of 1913–1918, by the revolutionary terrorists of Bengal in the 1900s and 1910s, and by the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose in the 1940s. The revolutionary tradition was always a minority, but it was a significant minority, and it shaped the politics of the Indian independence movement in ways that are often overlooked.

The third tradition was that of religious and cultural reform. The Arya Samaj, founded by Dayananda Saraswati in 1875; the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 and transferred to Madras in 1882; the Aligarh Movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan in 1875; the Ramakrishna Mission, founded by Swami Vivekananda in 1897 — all of these were responses to the encounter with British rule, and all of them shaped the political culture of the Indian independence movement. The Hindu-Muslim question, in particular, was a question of religious reform as well as a question of political representation.

Gandhi and the Gandhian Era

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) returned to India from South Africa in January 1915, and the Gandhian era of the Indian independence movement began in 1919, with the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Gandhi’s contribution to the movement was, in the first instance, the introduction of nonviolent civil disobedience, or satyagraha, as the principal instrument of political action. The Gandhian programme of nonviolent resistance — non-cooperation with British institutions, the boycott of British goods, the spinning of Indian cotton in the charkha — was, in its combination of political and cultural demands, a remarkable innovation.

The Gandhian movement had three main phases. The first, the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–1922, was suspended after the Chauri Chaura incident of February 1922, in which a mob attacked a police station and killed 22 policemen. The second, the Salt March of 1930 and the Civil Disobedience Movement that followed, was the most dramatic period of Gandhian politics. The third, the Quit India Movement of 1942, was the last and most violent of the Gandhian campaigns, and it was the campaign that produced, in the end, the British decision to leave India.

The Hindu-Muslim Question

The Hindu-Muslim question was, in many respects, the most important political question of the Indian independence movement. The Indian National Congress, the All-India Muslim League, and the various regional political organisations had to find a constitutional framework that would accommodate the religious diversity of British India. The early Congress, dominated by figures like Gokhale and Naoroji, had attempted to develop a common Indian nationalism that would transcend religious difference. The Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, which introduced separate electorates for Muslims, marked the beginning of the British policy of communal representation, and the Lucknow Pact of 1916, by which the Congress and the Muslim League agreed on a common constitutional programme, was the high-water mark of Hindu-Muslim political cooperation.

The 1930s saw a decisive shift in the politics of the Hindu-Muslim question. The All-India Muslim League, under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, became increasingly assertive, and the demand for Pakistan — a separate Muslim state — emerged in the late 1930s. The Lahore Resolution of March 1940, which called for “independent states” for the Muslim-majority areas of British India, was the founding document of the Pakistan movement. The Congress, for its part, was increasingly dominated by Hindu leaders, and the political culture of the Congress became, in some respects, less accommodating to Muslim concerns.

The Round Table Conferences and the Government of India Act

The Round Table Conferences of 1930–1932, and the Government of India Act of 1935, were the principal British attempts to find a constitutional framework for an independent India. The First Round Table Conference, in November 1930, was boycotted by the Congress; the Second, in September–December 1931, was attended by Gandhi as the sole representative of the Congress; the Third, in November–December 1932, was attended by a wider range of Indian political leaders.

The Government of India Act of 1935, which established provincial self-government and a federal structure for the whole of British India, was the principal product of the Round Table process. The Act was a substantial document, and it established the framework of Indian self-government for the next twelve years. The provincial governments established under the Act of 1935, with Congress ministries in seven of the eleven provinces from 1937, were the principal training ground for the Indian politicians who would lead independent India. The Act of 1935 also established the All-India Federation, which was never implemented because the Indian princes refused to join it.

The Second World War and the Road to Independence

The Second World War was the decisive event in the Indian independence movement. The British declaration of war on Germany in September 1939, on behalf of British India without consulting Indian political leaders, produced a serious political crisis. The Congress ministries in the provinces resigned in October 1939, in protest against the British action, and the British Indian government was, in effect, governing without Indian political consent. The Muslim League, taking advantage of the Congress absence, celebrated the “Day of Deliverance” from the Congress ministries and consolidated its position in the Muslim-majority provinces.

The Japanese invasion of South-East Asia in December 1941 transformed the strategic situation. The fall of Singapore in February 1942, the fall of Rangoon in March 1942, and the Japanese advance to the borders of India produced a serious crisis of confidence in the British position. The Cripps Mission of March–April 1942, which offered India dominion status after the war in exchange for cooperation during the war, was rejected by the Congress. The Quit India Resolution, passed by the All-India Congress Committee on 8 August 1942, called for the immediate withdrawal of British rule and authorised a mass civil disobedience campaign. The British response was the immediate arrest of the principal Congress leaders, including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

The Quit India Movement was the most serious crisis of British rule in India since 1857. The movement was suppressed with considerable violence — the British used the army, the air force, and a series of emergency powers to put down the disturbances. The death toll is not certain, but it was probably in the low thousands. The movement was effectively over by 1944, and Gandhi was released from prison in May 1944. The failure of the Quit India Movement did not, however, resolve the question of Indian independence. The British, by 1944, were exhausted by the war, the economy was in crisis, and the international climate was no longer favourable to the British Empire.

The Cabinet Mission and the Final Settlement

The end of the Second World War in August 1945 produced a new political crisis. The Labour government of Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945, was determined to resolve the Indian question. The Cabinet Mission of March–June 1946, led by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps, and A. V. Alexander, attempted to find a constitutional framework for an independent India. The Cabinet Mission Plan, which proposed a three-tier federation of India, was rejected by the Muslim League. The Direct Action Day of 16 August 1946, called by the Muslim League, produced a massacre of Hindus in Calcutta in which perhaps 5,000 people were killed. The cycle of communal violence that followed was to last until 1947.

The decision to partition British India was taken by the British government in February 1947, in response to the breakdown of the Cabinet Mission process. The announcement was made by Prime Minister Attlee on 20 February 1947, and the date for the transfer of power was set for August 1947. The last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, arrived in India in March 1947 and, in a series of intensive negotiations, attempted to find a final settlement. The Indian Independence Act of July 1947, passed by the British Parliament, established the two new dominions of India and Pakistan, and the transfer of power took place on 14 August 1947 (Pakistan) and 15 August 1947 (India).

The Partition and Its Consequences

The partition of British India in 1947 was one of the largest migrations in human history, in which perhaps 10–15 million people crossed the new boundaries, and one of the most violent episodes of mass killing in the twentieth century, in which perhaps a million people died. The Punjab, in particular, was the scene of large-scale communal violence, with massacres in Amritsar, Lahore, and the surrounding districts. The accession of the princely states, and the war over Kashmir that followed, was a further consequence of the partition. The British withdrawal from India, in this respect, was not a clean break but a series of crises that have continued to shape the politics of the subcontinent to the present.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Indian independence movement has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older nationalist tradition, of which the work of R. C. Majumdar and the History of the Freedom Movement in India is representative, treated the movement as a unified national struggle that culminated in 1947. The post-independence Indian historiography, of which the work of Sumit Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, and Ranajit Guha at the Subaltern Studies group has been the most influential representative, has tried to recover the experience of the Indian peasant, the Indian worker, and the Indian woman from the colonial archive. The current generation of historians, of whom C. A. Bayly, David Arnold, Ayesha Jalal, Yasmin Khan, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a much more nuanced picture in which the Indian independence movement is treated as a complex and contested set of political, social, and cultural processes. The “Cambridge school” of Indian history, of which C. A. Bayly and the contributors to the Cambridge History of India are representative, has been particularly influential in producing a more integrated account of the movement. The most recent work, of which the contributions of William Dalrymple, Kim Wagner, and the participants in the “Nonviolence and the State” project (in the relevant volumes) are representative, has focused on the violence that accompanied the movement, and on the way in which the British withdrawal was, in the end, a process of negotiation in conditions of near-civil war.

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