Nationalism In India Flashcards
Define Forced recruitment
A process by which the colonial state forced people to join the army
World War I (1914-1918) effect on India
The war created a new economic and political situation.
a) It led to a huge increase in defence expenditure which was financed by war loans and increasing taxes: customs duties were raised and income tax introduced.
b) Through the war years prices increased –
doubling between 1913 and 1918 – leading to extreme hardship for the common people.
c) Villages were called upon to supply soldiers, and the forced recruitment in rural areas caused widespread anger.
d) Crops failed in many parts of India,
resulting in acute shortages of food
e) This was accompanied by an influenza epidemic
f) According to the census of 1921, 12 to 13 million people perished as a result of famines and the epidemic.
Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in which year after fighting South Africa’s racist regime?
9 January 1915, he had come from South Africa where he had successfully fought the racist regime with a novel method of mass agitation, which he called satyagraha.
The idea of satyagraha
a) The idea of satyagraha emphasised the power of truth and the need to search for truth.
b) It suggested that if the cause was true, if the struggle was against injustice, then physical force was not necessary to fight the oppressor.
c) Without seeking vengeance or
being aggressive, a satyagrahi could win the battle through nonviolence.
d) This could be done by appealing to the conscience of the
oppressor.
e) People – including the oppressors – had to be persuaded to see the truth, instead of being forced to accept truth through the
use of violence.
f) By this struggle, truth was bound to ultimately triumph.
g) Mahatma Gandhi believed that this dharma of non-violence could unite all Indians.
Satyagraha movements in various places by Mahatma Gandhi
Satyagraha movements in sequence:
1) In 1917 he travelled to Champaran in Bihar to inspire the peasants to struggle against the
oppressive Indigo plantation system.
(Indigo was a blue dye used in textile industries. Indigo has deep roots)
2) In 1918, Mahatma Gandhi went to Ahmedabad to organise a satyagraha movement amongst cotton mill workers.
3) Then in 1918, he organised a satyagraha
to support the peasants of the Kheda district of Gujarat. Affected by crop failure and a plague epidemic, the peasants of Kheda could
not pay the revenue, and were demanding that revenue collection be relaxed.
Rowlatt Act (1919)
a) This Act had been hurriedly passed through the Imperial Legislative Council despite the united opposition of the Indian members.
b) It gave the government enormous powers to repress political activities, and allowed detention of political prisoners without trial for two years.
When did Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement began?
The Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement began in January 1921.
Hind Swaraj (1909) book written by whom?
Mahatma Gandhi
1) In his famous book Hind Swaraj (1909) Mahatma Gandhi declared that British rule was established in India with the cooperation of Indians, and had survived only because of this cooperation.
2) If Indians refused to cooperate, British rule in India would collapse within a
year, and swaraj would come.
The Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement in the Towns
1) The movement started with middle-class participation in the cities.
2) Thousands of students left government-controlled schools and colleges
3) headmasters and teachers resigned, and lawyers gave up their legal practices.
4) The council elections were boycotted in most provinces except Madras, where the Justice Party, the party of the non-Brahmans, felt that entering the council was one way of gaining some power – something that usually only Brahmans had access to.
5) Foreign goods were boycotted
6) Liquor shops picketed
7) Foreign cloth burnt in huge bonfires. The import of foreign cloth halved between 1921 and 1922, its value dropped.
8) In many places merchants and traders
refused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign trade.
9) people began discarding imported
clothes and wearing only Indian ones
10) production of Indian textile mills and handlooms went up.
Why did the non-cooperation khilafat movement in towns gradually slowed down?
This movement in the cities gradually slowed down for a variety of reasons:
1) Khadi cloth was often more expensive than mass produced mill cloth and poor people could not afford to buy it.
2) the boycott of British institutions posed a problem. For the movement to be successful, alternative Indian institutions had to be set up
so that they could be used in place of the British ones..
Rebellion in the Countryside due to non-cooperation khilafat movement in towns
It drew into its fold the struggles of peasants and tribals which were developing in different parts of India in the years after the war.
In Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra – a sanyasi who
had earlier been to Fiji as an indentured labourer.
The movement here was against talukdars and landlords who demanded from
peasants exorbitantly high rents and a variety of other cesses.
Peasants had to do begar and work at landlords’ farms without any payment.
As tenants they had no security of tenure, being regularly evicted so that they could acquire no right over the leased land.
The peasant movement demanded reduction of revenue, abolition of begar, and social boycott of oppressive landlords.
In many places nai – dhobi bandhs were organised by panchayats to deprive landlords of the services of even barbers and washermen.
In June 1920, Jawaharlal Nehru began going around the villages in Awadh, talking to the
villagers, and trying to understand their grievances.
By October, the Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Baba
Ramchandra and a few others.
Within a month, over 300 branches
had been set up in the villages around the region.
So when the Non Cooperation Movement began the following year, the effort of the
Congress was to integrate the Awadh peasant struggle into the wider struggle.
The peasant movement, however, developed in forms that the Congress leadership was unhappy with. As the movement spread in 1921, the houses of talukdars and merchants were attacked,
bazaars were looted, and grain hoards were taken over.
In many places local leaders told peasants that Gandhiji had declared that
no taxes were to be paid and land was to be redistributed among
the poor.
The name of the Mahatma was being invoked to sanction all action and aspirations.
…..
Tribal peasants interpreted the message of Mahatma Gandhi and the idea of swaraj in yet another way.
In the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, a militant guerrilla movement spread in the early 1920s – not a form of struggle that the Congress could
approve.
Here, as in other forest regions, the colonial government had closed large forest areas, preventing people from entering
the forests to graze their cattle, or to collect fuelwood and fruits.
This enraged the hill people. Not only were their livelihoods affected but they felt that their traditional rights were being denied.
When the government began forcing them to contribute begar for road building, the hill people revolted.
The person who came to lead them was an interesting figure. Alluri Sitaram Raju claimed that he had a variety of special powers: he could make correct
astrological predictions and heal people, and he could survive even bullet shots.
Captivated by Raju, the rebels proclaimed that he was an incarnation of God.
Raju talked of the greatness of Mahatma Gandhi, said he was inspired by the Non-Cooperation Movement, and persuaded people to wear khadi and give up drinking.
But at the same time he asserted that India could be liberated only by the use of force, not non-violence.
The Gudem rebels attacked police stations, attempted to kill British officials and carried on guerrilla warfare for achieving swaraj.
Raju was captured and executed in 1924, and over time became a folk hero.
Define Picket
A form of demonstration or protest by which people block the entrance to a shop, factory or office.
Swaraj in the Plantations
Workers too had their own understanding of Mahatma Gandhi and the notion of swaraj.
For plantation workers in Assam, freedom
meant the right to move freely in and out of the confined space in which they were enclosed, and it meant retaining a link with the village from which they had come.
Under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859, plantation workers were not permitted to leave the tea gardens without permission, and in fact they were rarely given such permission.
When they heard of the Non-Cooperation
Movement, thousands of workers defied the authorities, left the plantations and headed home.
They believed that Gandhi Raj was coming and everyone would be given land in their own villages.
They, however, never reached their destination. Stranded on the way
by a railway and steamer strike, they were caught by the police and
brutally beaten up.
The visions of these movements were not defined by the Congress
programme.
They interpreted the term swaraj in their own ways, imagining it to be a time when all suffering and all troubles would
be over.
Yet, when the tribals chanted Gandhiji’s name and raised slogans demanding ‘Swatantra Bharat’, they were also emotionally relating to an all-India agitation.
When they acted in the name of
Mahatma Gandhi, or linked their movement to that of the Congress, they were identifying with a movement which went beyond the limits of their immediate locality
The Sense of Collective Belonging In India
sense of collective belonging came partly through the experience
of united struggles. But there were also a variety of cultural processes
through which nationalism captured people’s imagination. History
and fiction, folklore and songs, popular prints and symbols, all played
a part in the making of nationalism
the identity of India came to be visually associated with the image of Bharat Mata.
The image was first created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the
1870s he wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland.
Later it was included in his novel Anandamath and widely sung during
the Swadeshi movement in Bengal.
Moved by the Swadeshi movement, Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata.
In this painting Bharat Mata is portrayed
as an ascetic figure; she is calm, composed, divine and spiritual.
In subsequent years, the image of Bharat Mata acquired many different forms, as it circulated in popular prints, and was painted by different artists.
Devotion to this mother figure came
to be seen as evidence of one’s nationalism.
Ideas of nationalism also developed through a movement to revive
Indian folklore.
In late-nineteenth-century India, nationalists began recording folk tales sung by bards and they toured villages to gather
folk songs and legends.
These tales, they believed, gave a true picture of traditional culture that had been corrupted and damaged by
outside forces.
It was essential to preserve this folk tradition in order to discover one’s national identity and restore a sense of pride
in one’s past.
In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore himself began collecting ballads, nursery rhymes and myths, and led the movement for folk revival.
In Madras, Natesa Sastri published a massive four-volume collection of Tamil folk tales, The Folklore of Southern India. He believed that folklore was national literature; it was ‘the most trustworthy
manifestation of people’s real thoughts and characteristics’.
As the national movement developed, nationalist leaders became
more and more aware of such icons and symbols in unifying people
and inspiring in them a feeling of nationalism.
During the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow) was
designed. It had eight lotuses representing eight provinces of British India, and a crescent moon, representing Hindus and Muslims.
By 1921, Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag. It was again a tricolour (red, green and white) and had a spinning wheel in the centre, representing the Gandhian ideal of self-help.
Carrying the flag, holding it aloft, during marches became a symbol of defiance.
Another means of creating a feeling of nationalism was through reinterpretation of history.
By the end of the nineteenth century
many Indians began feeling that to instill a sense of pride in the nation, Indian history had to be thought about differently.
The British saw Indians as backward and primitive, incapable of governing
themselves. In response, Indians began looking into the past to discover India’s great achievements. They wrote about the glorious developments in ancient times when art and architecture, science
and mathematics, religion and culture, law and philosophy, crafts and trade had flourished. This glorious time, in their view, was followed by a history of decline, when India was colonised.
These nationalist histories urged the readers to take pride in India’s great
achievements in the past and struggle to change the miserable conditions of life under British rule.
These efforts to unify people were not without problems. When the
past being glorified was Hindu, when the images celebrated were
drawn from Hindu iconography, then people of other communities
felt left out.