HISTORY OF INDIAN INDEPENDENCE (1857-1950)

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INDIAN NATIONALISM

Academic Script

During the period of more than half a century after India’s independence in 1947, both optimism and
at times disenchantment about the Indian state have come to influence historical judgments about
nationalism. The nationalist historians celebrating the emancipatory outcome of the national
movement inherited from their early twentieth century predecessors the historical critique of
imperialism. The critique of imperialism of the kind that Dadabhai Naoroji offered in his Poverty and
Un-British Rule in India or R.C.Dutt in his Economic History of India indicted British rule for
keeping India economically backward, and for denying Indians the right of self-rule. It is well-known
how such historical understanding of the essential malevolence (evil) of imperial rule laid out the
ideological foundations of nationalism, just in the same way as nationalist archaeologists and art
historians celebrated the cultural achievements of India to contain the imperial practice of attaching
labels of inferiority to Indian culture. Recent works by scholars like Vasudha Dalmiya or Tapati Guha
Thakurta have drawn attention to a certain nationalist engagement with India’s cultural heritage in
what has been labelled as the nationalist public sphere, constituted as it was by print and visual
culture.

As far as the history of the Indian nationalist movement is concerned, researches by professional
historians during the last few decades have raised questions about the sanctity of the ideological
commitments of the nationalist protagonists by concentrating on the interplay of interest and power in
shaping the politics of nationalism. It has been often argued that the dilution of the emancipatory
promises of the national movement after the Indian National Congress achieved power, was built into
the game of politics for power that the nationalist politicians had played out even during the phase of
anti-colonial movements. This was one reason, as Marxist critics of the Congress and the
practitioners of subaltern history have argued, why the Congress had time and again tried to restrain
the militant spirit of popular movements from below, often by calling off a movement, as Gandhi did
during the height of the non-cooperation agitation, when it reached a level of militancy. The subaltern
historians however go beyond this by suggesting that the ordinary people, predominantly peasants
in a country like India periodically mobilized themselves without depending on the initiatives of the
elite politicians. The thesis of self-mobilization indicated among other things an unbridgeable divide
between elite politics represented by the Congress and popular politics which always displayed
greater militancy. Earlier during the 1960’s several scholars found a cultural divide between what was
perceived as an abstract nation in a multi-cultural society and regions which had their distinct regional
cultural traditions. Regional movements in post-colonial India created a more acute awareness about
regionalism, that apparently ran counter to nationalism once the nation came into being and tried to
create a homogenous national culture. The fragments of the nation came to look upon such
homogenizing trends with disfavour, as pointed at by Partha Chatterjee succinctly in his Fragments
of the Nation.

The Nationalist Thesis

The nationalist historiography has always emphasized the Unitarian vision of nationalism.
During the last few decades this Unitarian vision has given way to studies of sub-nationalism, local
factions and autonomous peasant movements. These are competing historiographical trends that
refused to believe that the idea of the Indian nation could ever exist without implying discordant
meanings. In other words the nation meant different things to different people, depending on their
location, interest and imagination. The nationalist historiography recognized such discordant trends.
Yet, it emphasized how over time certain common bonds and interests were created. The educated
middle class or the Indian business classes shared common interests regardless of the region they
represented. Of course there were differences among nationalists. Some preferred moderation; a few
others opted for militant nationalism of the kind that surfaced around the close of the nineteenth
century. Such differences suggest different political methods that nationalists of different persuasions
were willing to adopt. But there was no disagreement about the essential malevolence of British rule.
If such realization in the early stages of nationalism remained limited to the urban intellectual world, a
time came in the early twentieth century when the urban leaders forged links with the peasants to
create the phenomenon of mass nationalism.

The combination of the intellectuals with the people, represented by Gandhi according to nationalist
historiography, brought about more intense pressures on the British Empire. Large scale agitations
which however were never uniform and came in cycles and touched different regions unevenly none
the less put so much of pressure on the British that the Imperial rulers eventually realized that ruling
India had become an impossible proposition. On the other side of the fence the chain of commands
that the Congress had created by establishing local organizations resembled an alternative stage.

A new generation of leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel or Rajendra Prasad came to constitute
the new general staff of Gandhi’s army. Such accounts suggest that as a consequence of the
initiatives of the Congress organizations and nationalist volunteers, the peasants who had remained
hitherto outside the purview of nationalist mobilizations, began to feature as important actors in the
Congress. Disagreements however centred on the precise motivations behind such mobilizations.
Some saw in this the impact of nationalist idealism; the more sceptical among historians emphasized
elitist manipulations of peasant grievances. The theory of manipulation ultimately converges with the
standard Marxist argument about imperfections in such mobilizations. If the peasants looked
anxiously towards the Congress for leadership in their struggle for genuine freedom, the latter was
intent on diffusing the tension generated by the anti-landlord evocation of peasant mobilization. The
history of the Congress mobilization of the peasants according to Vinita Damodaran’s Broken
Promises, was a story of betrayal as their leaders went back on their promises of a just world.
However imperfect, this was still mobilization on a grand scale. In a well-known research on the
Congress mobilization of the peasants in Uttar Pradesh, Mazid Siddiqi argued that apart from
creating nationalists out of peasants the Congress taught them the basic lessons of organization. In
the process the Congress generated a certain kind of peasant militancy which they also wished to
restrain, yet peasant nationalism in Siddiqi’s opinion suggested the emergence of an alternative
nationalism. Mass nationalism therefore was a linear sequel to the emergence of nationalist
consciousness in the late nineteenth century. If nationalism in the nineteenth century had infected the
mind of the leaders it entered the heart of the people in the age of mass nationalism.

The Region versus Nation

Questions about this Unitarian vision of nationalist historiography began to be raised from the 1960’s
when the euphoria for independence dissipated and the Congress began to be indicted by its
opponents for adopting anti-people measures. This was also the time when regional moments,
nurtured by local and ethnic sentiments started threatening the legitimacy of the nation state. It was
against this backdrop that school of American historians started emphasizing the existence of strong
regional identities that ran counter to the Unitarian aspiration of nationalism. The idea of a nationalist
leadership gave way to the concept of regional elites who drew on distinct regional cultural traditions
as political resources. This understanding revealed that the nation tended to imply completely
different things in different cultural regions. Cultural nationalism in India had the ability to foreground
differences among Indians along regional, linguistic and communal lines. In a very influential work on
South India, Eugene Irschik showed how the traditional social conflict between the Brahmins and
non-Brahmins had brought about Tamil separatism by the non-Bramins’ identification of the former as
the agents of an alien north-Indian culture. In the Madras Presidency, Congress dominated as it was
by the Brahmins represented precisely that for a Tamil nationalist. In effect such studies put emphasis
on an endemic conflict of ‘two nationalisms’ within Indian nationalism. Rabindranath also recognized
this when he talked about the great Indian nation (Bharatbarshiya Mahajati) which permitted the
peasants of a smaller nation as well.

This new understanding came to influence the writing of the history of Indian nationalism as historians
sought to reconcile the existence of numerous ‘little nations’, shaped by regional cultural identities
within the broader framework of a Unitarian nationalism. Some historians like D.A. Low in his
persuasive introduction in Soundings in modern South Asian Histories (1968) went to the extent of
suggesting that it is only at a rather ‘rarefied level that modern Indian history may be said to comprise
a single all-India story’. The distinct regions in India contained independent dynamics of politics. In
explaining the lack of national uniformities in Indian society some of its inherent cultural divisions
were given greater prominence.

The Cambridge School and the Pursuit of Power

In the early 1970’s a group of historians in the University of Cambridge started emphasizing the local
dynamics of Indian politics. At one level they under-emphasized the impact of cultural factors like
caste or language, and at another level ideological factors like nationalism. The main story line in their
accounts was formed by the dominant individuals operating in the locality who pursued their interest
in power to reinforce their local dominance by forming factions. Since pursuit of power was the be-all
and end-all of Indian politics, nationalism had a marginal impact. At best, nationalist mobilization
provided new opportunities to the local faction leaders to fulfill their aspirations for power by achieving
prominence in Indian politics. A collection of essays entitled ‘Locality, Province and Nation’, edited by
Cambridge historians like John Gallagher, Anil Seal and Gordon Johnson in 1973 provided the frame-
work of the new approach. The contributors to this volume refused to take the cultural underpinnings
of either nationalism or regional sub-nationalism for granted. They attempted to look into individual
motivations behind political involvement and argued how individuals who were dominant in the
localities started asserting their own rights, pointed at in Christopher Bailey’s ‘Rais’ of Allahabad, or
David Washbrook’s ‘Reddys of Andhra country side’. They were organizing in response to
opportunities for power that the imperial government offered through constitutional reforms, local
factions. The magnetic quality of power was drawing them to politics, for such powers could be
effectively used to pursue self-interest and buttress their local dominance. For such narrow purposes
the local notables, who belonged to either powerful trading or land holding groups, forged
connections with lawyers, journalists and the educated classes. Such connections were effectively
used in electoral politics and nationalist mobilizations. In the process local factionalism was grafted
into the larger frame work of national politics represented by the Congress. The factional alignments
in the Congress, according to this view had their roots in local rivalries. According to this view the only
general factors in Indian politics was the ‘Government Impulse’, implying that in response to the
government initiative towards devolution of power from 1882 onwards, factions were transformed into
broad base party organizations to strengthen their claims to power. Consequently the shifting
alliances of the local factions determined the fortunes of the political parties.
Critique of the Cambridge School
The observations of the ‘Cambridge Cluster’ of historians are not baseless; they are simply following
the logic of power, something which one of the more distinguished scholars like Tapan
Roychowdhury had labelled as ‘Animal Politics’. This particular version of Indian nationalism has
always left behind a more acute sense of dissatisfaction for its excessive preoccupation with power
and factionalism and its utter neglect of ideology which was capable of generating nationalist
idealism. There were certainly important moments in Indian history when ideological motivations
persuaded men to sacrifice their lives and career for achieving freedom from foreign rule. The
Congress also had outlined its own programme of national reconstruction and an element of idealism
was manifest among Congress men as well when they participated in large scale agitations against
foreign rule. The mass nationalism which arose from painstaking attempts by the local organization of
the Congress to mobilize people in anti-colonial movements of course provided an alternative to the
extremely conceited view that it was concern for power alone that inspires people into political action.
The standard nationalist interpretations suggest that during the Gandhian era, the mainly urban
intellectual nationalism of the late nineteenth century came to be fused with scattered and sporadic
popular protest movements emanating from below. Professor Bipan Chandra for example talks about
the pressures that such large scale mobilizations came to bear upon imperial rule. There were
occasions however when the Congress leadership struck compromises with the imperial rule by
agreeing to participate in the constitutional process created by the British Raj. Yet it was only a short
term arrangement. The Congress frequently returned to the agitational mould in order to exert greater
pressures on imperial governments creating a situation in the 1940s when the British decided to leave
India.

The story of the emergence of the Congress’s popular mobilizations has come out from a large
number of regional studies on the national movement. The focus has often been on the political
career of leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad or Subhash Chandra
Bose, whose roles as popular leaders have figured prominently in studies of Indian nationalism. It is
not as if the Congress hegemony in Indian politics remained unchallenged. Muslim separatism for
example, emerged in the early twentieth century as one such challenge, that ultimately accounted for
the partition of the country preceded by gruesome communal riots. Yet the recognition of such
discordant tendencies does not take away from the history of nationalism its ideological commitment
to freedom from British rule.
The Subaltern Historiography: The Thesis of Self-mobilization of the Peasantry
During the decade of the 1980’s a new interpretation on Indian nationalism was represented by
historians who contributed to the series of volumes of subaltern studies, and began to raise questions
about the intentions and impact of the strategy of mass-mobilization by the Congress. The new
historiographical position represented by the subaltern studies put greater emphasis on the
independent self-mobilization by the peasants, under stressing in the process what had earlier been
studied as a successful strategy of popular mobilization. Gyanendra Pandey for example, in an
influential essay in the first volume of the subaltern studies, joined issues with Mazid Siddiqi’s version
of peasant politics in Uttar Pradesh. Pandey criticized Siddiqi for ignoring the autonomy of peasant
politics and their capacity of self-mobilization under independent peasant leadership. According to
this interpretation it seemed no longer sufficient to analyze the imperfections in the nationalist
mobilizations, for whatever be the imperfections; they arose from some fundamental divergences of a
long-term nature rooted in conflicting consciousness and aspirations. If the Congress and the
peasants came together, their togetherness survived only for a short duration. The class alignments
in the Congress made the separation between the two levels of politics inevitable.

It is generally accepted that since pre-colonial times the peasants had been participating in various
types of protest activity. Such kinds of protests continued during colonial rule as well. The subaltern
studies group came to attach greater importance to the continuity of such independent movements,
often directed against local oppressor who might have been politically aligned with the Congress,
despite the emergence of a pan–Indian multi-class framework of protests against foreign rule. While
in the standard nationalist accounts the people, peasants or the urban poor, belonged to a hierarchy
within the nationalist formation, the subaltern studies identified the divergence between the elite and
the people as the source of a major divide in Indian politics. Apparently the peasants were the
peasants first and the peasants last. Occasional convergences of their autonomous movements with
the town based nationalist movements did not conceal the more prominent and profound divergences
manifest in the peasants’ sense of distance from the outsider leadership.

The subaltern story of accommodating independent peasant mobilization of course gave a distinct
space to the politics of the ordinary people in the grand narrative of nationalism. Their insights
enabled historians to recognize that people while participating in the nationalist movements spoke in
many voices, had distinct aspirations and looked upon the leaders of the movements as deliverers
from oppression. For many such rural followers of the Congress Gandhi Maharaj represented a
promise of a just and equitable world, ‘Ramrajya’ to use Gandhi’s own language. Yet in their
appreciation of nationalism such historians had betrayed a one-track concern with peasants’
independent consciousness. The result had been a tendency to assess nationalism in terms of
preoccupations which are more consistent with the ideals of egalitarian reconstruction of the nation
rather than the story of its creation under British rule. To look at the national movement from the
position of an ideal type peasant rebellion has the danger of missing out on the impact of a process of
mobilization through which the peasants came to identify with the nationalist ideal. The mobilization
on a grand scale indeed widened the geographical orbit of the nation. There were leaders who carried
the message of nationalism from the town to the country, even though many of them eventually failed
to achieve prominence in the politics of post-independent India. With the rise of mass-nationalism the
intermediary levels of leadership became important in the Congress. New aspirants for Congress
leadership at the national level had to depend on their support, while many of these intermediary
leaders like, Rajendra Prasad moved up in the Congress hierarchy. It is very difficult to visualize a
situation where men like Rajendra Prasad who had intimate rural connections were looked upon as
outsiders.

The subaltern historiography in a sense has been a continuation of an already existing left-wing critic
of the Congress, proceeding from the assumption that the main objective of the Congress movement
was to create a free world, using freedom in a much larger sense than what was implied in the limited
objective of freedom from British rule, they tended to ignore somewhat the multi-class imperatives of
nationalism. Nationalism wished to create an independent nation state. Its ideals were certainly
nurtured by a feeling of cultural greatness but in practice the national movement required constant
negotiations with forces that stood in the way of achieving the ideals of a free and independent
nation. These are problems which cannot be understood adequately by studying local politics or
independent peasant movements. The study of nationalism requires therefore a Unitarian framework
and a certain empathy for those who tried to translate the nationalist dream into a political reality.
 GLOSSARY

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

Political and ideological leader of the Indian national movement; pioneer of non-violent protest
movements; famous for his ideal of satyagraha; called the ‘Father of the Nation’ in recognition of the
role he played in Indian politics.

Gandhian Era
The period between 1920 and 1947 when Gandhi was the foremost leader of the Congress who
negotiated with the British government. This era covered the Dandi March, Non-Cooperation, and
Civil Disobedience movements and the Round Table Conferences.

Nationalism
Devotion to one’s national identity among the people of a particular country; aspirations for national
independence from foreign domination.

Indian National Congress

The most prominent political party in India in pre-independence days; founded in December 1885 on
the suggestion of the British civil servant A.O.Hume to provide a platform for Indians to voice their
grievances.

Gyanendra Pandey
A historian and founding member of the Subaltern studies project.

Ramrajya
The ideal of a just and equitable country envisaged by Gandhi to encourage the masses of India to
participate in anti-British movements.

Unitarian
The concept that Indians had unilaterally joined the national movement due to the unifying force of
the spread of nationalistic ideas, and underplays the existence of other factors.

Subaltern history
An approach to history that is focused more on what happens among the masses, their conditions
and the role played by them in history.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956)

Also known as Babasaheb, he was a scholar, jurist, political leader, and philosopher; was the
designer and formulator of the Indian Constitution; campaigned against social evils like untouchability
and caste system and demanded reservations for Dalits.
Dalits
Literal meaning is ‘downtrodden’; a designation for those sections of Indian society who was regarded
as untouchables as they were associated with impure occupations; segregated from mainstream
society.

FAQs
1. What was the main contention of nationalist scholars regarding nationalism?
Nationalist scholars like Dadabhai Naoroji in his Poverty and Un-British Rule in India or
R.C.Dutt in his Economic History of India indicted British rule for keeping India economically
backward, and for denying Indians the right of self-rule. They felt that it was the oppression
and humiliation suffered under British rule that laid out the ideological foundations of
nationalism.

2. How have nationalist opinions been critiqued by recent historians?

Research by professional historians during the last few decades have raised questions about
the sanctity of the ideological commitments of the nationalist protagonists by concentrating on
the interplay of interest and power in shaping the politics of nationalism. It has been argued
that the once the Indian National Congress achieved power, nationalist politics turned into a
game of politics for power. Marxist critics of the Congress and practitioners of subaltern history
have argued, that it was these selfish interests that made the Congress time and again to
restrain the militant spirit of popular movements from below.

3. What are the theories regarding peasant participation in the nationalist movement?
There is a difference of opinion among historians regarding the nature of peasant motivations
in the nationalist movement. Some argued that it was the consequence of the impact of
nationalist idealism, while the more sceptical among historians emphasized elitist
manipulations of peasant grievances. The theory of manipulation converges with the standard
Marxist argument about imperfections in such mobilizations. It has also been asserted that if
 the peasants looked anxiously towards the Congress for leadership in their struggle for
genuine freedom, the latter was intent on diffusing the tension generated by the anti-landlord
evocation of peasant mobilization. According to Mazid Siddiqi peasant nationalism suggested
the emergence of an alternative nationalism.

4. What was the main contention of the American school of historians about the nature of
nationalism?
The American school of historians asserted that there existed strong regional identities that ran
counter to the aspirations of nationalism. The idea of a nationalist leadership gave way to the
concept of regional elites who drew on distinct regional cultural traditions as political resources.
Their study revealed that the nation tended to imply completely different things in different
cultural regions. Some historians like D.A.Low went to the extent of suggesting that it was only
at a rather ‘rarefied level that modern Indian history may be said to comprise a single all-India
story’.

5. State the main difference in outlook between nationalist and subaltern scholars?
While the standard nationalist accounts opined that the peasants or the urban poor, belonged
to a hierarchy within the nationalist formation, the subaltern studies identified the divergence
between the elite and the common people as the source of a major divide in Indian politics.
The peasants were always regarded as a class apart, and the occasional convergences of
their autonomous movements with the town based nationalist movements, did not conceal the
more prominent and profound divergences manifest in the peasants’ sense of distance from
the outsider leadership.

6. What do you know about Dr. Rajendra Prasad?

Dr. Rajendra Prasad (1884-1963) was one of the architects of the Indian Republic, and was its
first President (1950-1962). He played a prominent part in the Indian national movement and
joined the Indian National Congress in 1911. He was greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi,
whom he first met in 1916.

7. What sort of ‘individual motivation’ does Christopher Bailey point to when discussing
nationalist leadership?
Christopher Bailey has put forth the opinion that local factions were organizing protests against
the British in response to opportunities for power that the imperial government offered through
 constitutional reforms. It was the lure of power that was drawing them to politics, for such
powers could be effectively used to pursue self-interest and buttress their local dominance.
These local notables, who belonged to either powerful trading or land holding groups, forged
connections with lawyers, journalists and the educated classes, in order to use such
connections effectively in electoral politics and nationalist mobilizations, to further their own
interests.

8. Indicate the approach of subaltern scholars towards Indian nationalism.

Subaltern scholars raised questions about the intentions and impact of the strategy of mass-
mobilization by the Congress. The new historiographical position represented by the subaltern
studies put greater emphasis on independent self-mobilization by the peasants, while under
stressing the successful strategy of popular mobilization.

9. Explain what Gandhi implied by ‘Ramrajya’?

By using the ‘Ramrajya slogan, Gandhiji implied an ideal state where values of justice,
equality, idealism, renunciation, sacrifice and honesty would prevail, just as the myth of
Rama’s rule conveys. Gandhiji projected this concept to encourage the common masses to
participate in movements for throwing off the yoke of oppressive British rule and to establish an
ideal state.
10. How did scholars like Bipan Chandra seek to analyse the growth of the Indian national
movement?
Bipan Chandra argued that the Indian national movement was a popular movement of various
classes, not exclusively controlled by the bourgeoisie, and that colonial India demonstrated two
types of contradictions. There was a primary contradiction between the interests of the Indian
people and those of British rule at one level, while there were several contradictions within
Indian society, between classes, castes and religious communities. He goes on to say that as
the anti-colonial struggle made progress, the latter contradictions were compromised in the
interest of the former.
 Reference

Chaudhury, Sashibhusan, ‘Civil Disturbances during British Rule in India 1765-1857’, Calcutta, World
Press, 1955.

Majumdar, R. C., ‘The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857’, Calcutta, Firma KLM, 1957.

Stokes, Eric., ‘The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in
Colonial India’, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Mukherjee, Rudrangsu., ‘Awadh in Revolt, 1857-1858: A Study of Popular Resistance’, Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1984.

Metcalf, T. R.; ‘The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857-1870’; Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1964

Hardiman, David, ‘Peasant Resistance in India, 1858-1914’, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar (ed.); ‘Nationalist Movement in India: A Reader’, Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 2009.

Weblinks

http://archive.org/details/nationalism00tago [Nationalism, Rabindranath Tagore, 1918]

http://archive.org/details/indiannationalis00paniiala [