Perspectives on the Indian National Movement

1. Indian Nationalism —

A. Political Strategies of India’s Freedom Struggle : Constitutionalism to mass Satyagraha, Non- cooperation, Civil Disobedience; Militant and Revolutionary Movements, Peasant and Workers Movements
B. Perspectives on Indian National Movement; Liberal, Socialist and Marxist; Radical Humanist and Dalit

Section B: Indian Government and Politics

Historiography is not a preliminary to this topic; it is the topic. What the Indian national movement was depends entirely on who is taken to have made it — an educated leadership expressing an emerging nation, a bourgeoisie managing mass energy, a set of elites competing for colonial patronage, or a subaltern population acting for reasons of its own. Each perspective answers that question differently, and every other disagreement follows from it.

The prior question: was India a nation at all?

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Before any perspective on the movement can be stated, the disagreement about nationalism itself has to be laid out, because the imperialist position turns on it.

• Modernist theories treat the nation as a recent construct rather than a natural or ancient unit.
  • Eric Hobsbawm describes nations as sustained by invented traditions — rituals and continuities with the past that are themselves recent fabrications, used to legitimise present projects.
  • Benedict Anderson calls the nation an imagined community: imagined because most members will never meet, community because it is conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. He locates its modular form in post-revolutionary France, spread by print capitalism and by elites promoting — and sometimes inventing — national languages.
  • Stalin’s definition supplied the working checklist for a generation of Marxist writing: a historically constituted stable community with common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up, expressed in a common culture.
• Cultural theories run the other way. Johann Herder held that the cultural nation is the true basis of community and identity, constituted by language, tradition and inclination rather than by contract, and that nationality overrides all sectional interest — “there is only one class in the state, the volk“.
• The three families of nationalism theory are worth naming, because each Indian perspective implicitly adopts one.
  • Primordialism treats the nation as an ancient, given community of blood, language or faith — the position of Indian cultural nationalism.
  • Modernism treats it as a product of industrial society, print and the modern state — Ernest Gellner’s claim that nationalism creates nations rather than the reverse, and Anderson’s and Hobsbawm’s variants.
  • Ethno-symbolism, associated with Anthony D. Smith, is the middle position: modern nations are constructed, but they are constructed out of pre-existing ethnic cores, myths, memories and symbols that constrain what can plausibly be built.
  • Applied to India, ethno-symbolism is the most defensible frame — it accounts for both the novelty of the Indian nation as a political form and the depth of the cultural material the movement drew on.
• Tom Nairn adds that nationalism is not always endogenous: it can be produced by external pressure, which is exactly the colonial case.
• The application to India is contested in a specific way, and this is where the debate becomes interesting.
  • Partha Chatterjee argues that colonial nationalism is a “different yet derivative discourse” — it accepts the West’s thematic framework even while opposing Western rule.
    • He traces three stages: a moment of departure in Bankim Chandra, where national consciousness is constructed through post-Enlightenment rationalist thought; a moment of manoeuvre in Gandhi, where the masses are mobilised; and a moment of arrival in Nehru, where the state embraces the Western model.
    • In The Nation and Its Fragments he distinguishes an outer material domain, conceded to Western superiority, from an inner spiritual domain where sovereignty was claimed first — which is why cultural nationalism preceded political nationalism in India.
  • C. A. Bayly takes the opposite view: Indian nationalism was built on a pre-existing sense of territoriality and an indigenous tradition of public morality and ethical government, not simply imported.
  • Ashish Nandy reads Indian nationalism as a response to Western nationalism — shaped by it, and partly deformed by having to answer it on its terms.

The imperialist and Cambridge perspective

• The classical colonial position denied that India was a nation.
  • John Strachey: there “is not and never was an India… no Indian nation, no people of India”.
  • John Seeley: India is “not a political name, but only a geographical expression like Europe or Africa”.
  • Valentine Chirol in Indian Unrest called India a “variegated jumble of races and peoples, castes and creeds” whose ancient divisions only British rule prevented from breaking into open strife.
  • The lineage runs back through James Mill’s History of British India and the classificatory work of W. W. Hunter and Herbert Risley, whose enumeration of castes and tribes gave the claim an administrative appearance of proof.
  • Curzon and Dufferin applied the same argument politically, denying that the Congress represented anyone, and dismissing the movement as the agitation of a “microscopic minority” of Bengali babus.
• The Cambridge School restated the position in academic form, and this is the version that has to be answered.
  • Its precursors are John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson; its method is Namierite — the study of politics as the pursuit of interest by small groups rather than as the expression of ideas.
  • Anil Seal’sThe Emergence of Indian Nationalism supplies the core argument.
    • English education created a new middle class that clamoured for posts and seats; the posts were few and the claimants many.
    • The resulting competition among elites, at provincial and local level and along caste and community lines rather than class lines, is what nationalism actually was.
  • The central contention is that there was no real contradiction between imperialism and the Indian people; the contradiction lay among Indians themselves.
  • Mobilisation was “horizontal”, built on prescriptive identities of caste and religion, so Indian nationalism did not resemble the genuine nationalisms of nineteenth-century Europe.
  • The colonial state is treated as the motor of change, with the movement growing entirely inside the constitutional and administrative matrix the state created — from which it follows that communal politics, and Pakistan, were its logical outcome.
• The weaknesses are severe and worth naming precisely.
  • It cannot explain mass participation: patronage rivalry among a few thousand educated men does not produce Dandi or 1942.
  • It reads motive from outcome — because leaders sometimes competed for office, all their politics is reduced to office-seeking.
  • It ignores the economic critique the movement produced, which was addressed to the fact of colonial extraction and not to the distribution of appointments.
  • It takes the colonial classification of Indian society as a description of it, when that classification was itself a colonial product.

The nationalist and liberal perspective

• The response to the “no nation” charge was unusually sophisticated, and its sophistication is often missed.
  • The nineteenth-century intellectuals did not reply with an “always a nation” assertion. They accepted that India was not yet a formed nation, that nationalism had not existed in the Indian past, and that a nation is a historical creation rather than a natural fact.
  • What they denied was that India could not become one. Surendranath Banerjea’s formulation — India as a “nation in the making” — supplied the phase’s self-description and the title of his autobiography.
  • The characteristic move was to distinguish civilisation from nation: India was an old civilisation but a new nation, which allowed pride in the past without a false claim about political continuity.
• The historians of this school argued from the movement’s outcomes.
  • R. C. Majumdar held that at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were “Bengalis, Hindustanis, Marathas, Sikhs, but no Indian”, and credited the Congress-led movements with giving reality to the ideal of Indian unity.
  • Tara Chand treated the Indian nation as a recent creation produced by combined economic and political change.
  • Against the imperialist charge, they insisted that the Congress was a national party with a nationalist leadership, that its agenda was not exclusive, and that a grand idea was in fact animating it.
• Cultural nationalism forms a distinct wing of the nationalist family, and it does make the “always a nation” claim.
  • Radha Kumud Mookerji’s Fundamental Unity of India, K. P. Jayaswal’s Hindu Polity — which found republics, elective institutions and the supremacy of law in ancient India — Har Bilas Sarda, and Lajpat Rai’s assertion that India had been a nation for two thousand years.
  • Aurobindo Ghosh gave it its strongest form: India was not a nation in the making but a nation from the beginning, because the nation has a spirit and the spirit does not die.
• Bipan Chandra’s mature position is the most developed version of the liberal-nationalist account, and it borrows its central tool from Gramsci.
  • The movement conducted a war of position against colonial hegemony — a prolonged struggle on the moral, political and ideological plane, building reserves of counter-hegemony in stages, rather than a single revolutionary seizure of power.
  • The struggle-truce-struggle rhythm means that withdrawal is consolidation, not betrayal, which is a direct answer to the Marxist charge of demobilisation.
  • Non-violence in this reading is not a personal dogma nor a device of the propertied classes but a necessary feature of a hegemonic strategy requiring the widest possible mobilisation.
  • The Congress, he insists, is best treated not as a party but as a movement — an all-class formation within which any class could contend for hegemony.
• Its limitation, pressed from every other position, is that it treats unity as an unqualified good. That makes the postponement of caste and class questions look like statesmanship rather than a choice with identifiable victims.

The Gandhian perspective as a distinct reading

Gandhi’s own account of what the movement was does not fit neatly into any of the five categories, and treating it as a version of the liberal-nationalist position loses what is distinctive in it.

• The movement was a moral struggle before it was a political one. Its object was not the transfer of power but the transformation of both parties — the coloniser as much as the colonised.
• Swaraj is self-rule in the strict sense. Political independence without self-discipline, village self-sufficiency and the removal of untouchability would be “English rule without the Englishman” — the retention of the structure with a change of personnel.
• The nation is a moral community, held together not by shared descent or shared interest but by mutual obligation, which is why the constructive programme is not preparation for the struggle but part of it.
• The masses are agents, not instruments. The whole point of satyagraha is that it can be practised by anyone, and Gandhi’s disputes with the socialists turn on his insistence that a movement that treats the peasantry as raw material has already failed.
• The critique from every side converges on one point: this reading treats conflict as a misunderstanding to be dissolved rather than as a structure to be dismantled, which is why Gandhi appears in the Dalit and socialist accounts as the obstacle rather than the leader.
• The defence is that no other conception could have produced participation on the scale that occurred without either arms or a party apparatus, and that a movement built on interest alone would have fractured along the lines its critics identify.

The socialist perspective

The socialists argued from inside the movement, which gives their critique its distinctive character: they accepted the national goal and disputed its sufficiency.

• The founding claim is that political independence without economic democracy transfers power to landlords and industrialists and leaves the substance of Indian life unchanged.
• Nehru was the pivotal figure in bringing this into the Congress mainstream, through his presidential addresses at Lahore (1929) and Lucknow (1936) and through The Discovery of India.
• The Karachi Resolution of 1931 on Fundamental Rights and Economic Policy is the movement’s clearest socialist statement — a living wage, limits on hours, protection for women workers, the right to organise, state ownership of key industries, and substantial reduction of rent and revenue.
• The Congress Socialist Party, founded at Patna in May 1934, worked to radicalise the Congress from within rather than to split it.
  • Its leading figures were Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Deva, Ashok Mehta, Minoo Masani and Rammanohar Lohia.
  • Its founding documents state the strategy plainly.
    • The Meerut Thesis sets the immediate task as developing the national movement into a real anti-imperialist movement, directed at both the foreign power and the native system of exploitation, and drawing anti-imperialist elements away from bourgeois leadership.
    • It cautions, with unusual tactical realism, against putting a full socialist programme before the Congress, against capturing committees and offices, and against obstructing the constructive programme.
  • The Faizpur conference a year later described the Congress as the principal existing mass organisation of national liberation and set the task as broadening it into a united anti-imperialist front.
• The intellectual trajectory is worth tracing, because it explains why the socialists never became a rival to Gandhi.
  • Acharya Narendra Deva, in Socialism and National Revolution, held that Gandhi’s attempt at reconciliation between classes was impractical, disliked his religious idiom, and rejected non-violence as a viable general method.
  • Jayaprakash Narayan’s Why Socialism? found the Gandhian programme utopian and accused Gandhi of deliberately ignoring the contradictions in Indian society; the book became the textbook of a generation of young Congressmen.
  • Both later concluded that open opposition to Gandhi was political suicide, that swaraj was a loose enough concept to be given socialist content, and that the correct course was to keep organic links with the Congress while maintaining ideological difference.
  • Bhagat Singh had reached the same conclusion from a different direction, converting the Hindustan Republican Association into the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.
• The perspective’s strength is that it identified, before independence, the precise gap post-colonial India would have to close.
• Its blind spot is that it assumed the state would deliver the transformation after 1947, and had no strategy for the case in which the state declined to.
  • Lohia supplied the sharpest internal correction: a socialism that sees class and not caste will misread India entirely, because caste is congealed class and class is mobile caste.

The Marxist perspective

The Marxist reading asks a different set of questions: which class led, which classes followed, and whose interests the outcome served.

• Marx himself analysed the Revolt of 1857 as a revolt of feudal elements — a judgement that stands in direct opposition to Savarkar’s, and which set the tone for the tradition’s scepticism about pre-Congress resistance.
• M. N. Roy’sIndia in Transition argued that India had already entered the ambit of global capitalism, so that the dominant Indian class was not feudal but bourgeois.
  • Because feudalism was already receding, the Indian bourgeoisie had turned conservative rather than revolutionary; only the workers could now be a revolutionary force.
  • Indian nationalism was therefore the political ideology of native capitalism, and the national movement expressed the aspirations of a youthful bourgeoisie.
• R. Palme Dutt’sIndia Today is the classical statement and the version to state first.
  • The Congress is the political organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie, which has a genuine conflict with imperialism over markets and industrial policy and an equally genuine fear of the mass movement it needs.
  • The resulting pattern is a twofold character: mobilise the masses to pressure the British, then withdraw before the movement threatens property. On this reading 1922, 1931 and 1934 are class decisions, not moral ones, and 1947 is a transfer of power to that same class.
  • He is harshest on Gandhi, whom he calls the “mascot of the bourgeoisie”, and he traces a shifting class base across the movement’s phases — big bourgeoisie and progressive landowners first, urban petty bourgeoisie before the First World War, then peasants and workers — with leadership remaining with the propertied throughout.

“The Congress was the political organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie.” — R. Palme Dutt, India Today

• A. R. Desai’s Social Background of Indian Nationalism grounds nationalism in the social changes colonialism itself produced — new property relations, a modern intelligentsia, railways, print and a national market — and periodises the movement into five phases, each resting on a different social class.

• Later Indian Marxist writing complicates all of this, and an account that stops at Dutt is dated.
  • Bipan Chandra’s own position moved a long way, and the movement is instructive.
    • In The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India he rejected as “crude mechanical materialism” the definition of intellectuals by class origin, arguing that nationalist intellectuals could act above the class they came from.
    • At that stage he still described the movement as bourgeois-democratic under the hegemony of the industrial bourgeoisie; his later work abandons that framework for the Gramscian one described above.
  • Sumit Sarkar, in The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal and Modern India, calls the Dutt-Desai position a “simplistic version of the Marxian class approach”.
    • He explains the leaders through Trotsky’s “substitutism” — an intelligentsia acting as proxy for as-yet passive social forces with which it had little organic connection — and through Gramsci’s distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals, placing Indian nationalist leaders firmly among the traditional.
    • He denies that Gandhi was a “mere bourgeois tool” or a puppet, while insisting on an occasional coincidence of aims and inhibitions with Indian business interests.
    • His warning to his own tradition is the fairest summary available.
    • It is true that the Congress programme was not in the masses’ interest and that the struggle did not much benefit them.
    • It is equally true that the Congress had no conscious or planned anti-mass strategy, and that Indians were not so sharply divided that they could not be united.
• The perspective’s strength is that it explains what the liberal account treats as incidental — the recurring pattern of advance and retreat, and the class composition of the leadership.
• Its weakness is that determinism makes agency vanish: if every decision is class-determined, the strategic differences between Gandhi, Bose, Nehru and Patel become inexplicable.

The wider Marxist scholarship on colonial India

• D. D. Kosambi and Irfan Habib shifted Indian Marxist history away from the political narrative toward the structures of production, revenue and class formation, and Habib’s work on the Mughal agrarian system reframed what colonialism actually displaced.
• The mode of production debate of the 1970s asked whether colonial India was feudal, capitalist, semi-feudal or a distinct colonial mode, and it matters here because the answer determines who the revolutionary class was supposed to be.
  • Hamza Alavi’s account of the post-colonial state — overdeveloped relative to the society beneath it, and mediating between metropolitan capital, the indigenous bourgeoisie and the landed classes — is the most influential structural reading of what 1947 produced.
• Bipan Chandra’s later concept of the colonial economy as a structure, rather than a set of policies, connects the moderates’ drain theory to a fully worked account of underdevelopment.
• The tradition’s internal disputes are its strength: Dutt, Desai, Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar and Habib disagree with one another more sharply than any of them disagrees with the liberal account, and an answer that presents “the Marxist view” as a single position misrepresents it.

The radical humanist perspective

This must not be merged with the Marxist position, and the distinction is a matter of grounds rather than degree.

• M. N. Roy began as a Marxist critic of the Congress and ended as a critic of nationalism as such.
  • The early charge, in India in Transition, is that the Congress is a bourgeois party and Gandhi a bourgeois leader.
  • The later and distinctive charge is that nationalism suppresses the individual: it makes an abstraction — the nation — the bearer of value, so that independence can be achieved without any individual becoming freer.
  • His prescription is a cosmopolitan union of liberated persons, not a free nation among nations.
• His opposition to Quit India in 1942 follows directly from that premise, and was politically ruinous.
  • He argued that fascism was the greater danger and that India’s freedom would be worthless if won under a fascist world order, and that the Congress leaders were being driven by “narrow-minded nationalism and spitefulness” toward betrayal of their own ideals.
  • He supported a national government not led by the Congress — a war cabinet chosen on individual merit — and set this out in Nationalism, Democracy and Freedom.
• The second charge is against the movement’s idiom. A politics conducted in religious and spiritual language, however sincerely, cultivates habits of faith and obedience rather than reason and criticism, and those habits survive the change of flag.
• The positive programme was radical democracy, pursued through the Radical Democratic Party and later the radical humanist movement.
  • Its institutional form is party-less democracy — people’s committees with real powers, candidates chosen on individual merit, and a philosophical revolution through education preceding the political one.
  • Its immediate content was nationalisation of land and industry, protection of minorities, compulsory education, and the purification of politics.
• Its blind spot is that it underrates what national independence made possible, and its own isolation is part of the evidence: a doctrine with no account of how programmes are aggregated at national scale never had to face the test.

The Dalit perspective

The question this perspective puts is short and cannot be answered in the terms the others use: whose freedom?

The tradition before Ambedkar

• Jyotirao Phule is the first ideologue of the modern anti-caste movement, and his reading of history is the foundation.
  • Gulamgiri reinterprets the past as the subjugation of an indigenous people by an Aryan Brahmin priesthood, and calls for caste to be discarded.
  • He judged British rule better than Peshwa rule, welcoming equality before law and access to education, while remaining critical of colonial failings.
  • He was a natural critic of Congress nationalism, which he equated with another form of Brahmanism, and stated the objection exactly: there can be no nation worth the name until Shudras, Ati-Shudras, Bhils and fishermen are educated, able to think independently, and genuinely integrated.
  • His project was the unification of the bahujan samaj, and he was equally critical of the reform bodies — Brahmo, Prarthana and Arya Samaj — for rationalising the Brahmanical system instead of dismantling it.
• Periyar E. V. Ramasamy left the Congress over the Brahminical attitudes of its leadership and founded the Self-Respect Movement in 1925, rejecting Brahmanism and, ultimately, Hinduism itself; the Justice Party in Madras had already built non-Brahmin politics into electoral form.
• The tradition was nationwide, not regional: M. C. Rajah in Tamil Nadu, Narayana Guru in Kerala, Bhagyareddy Varma in Andhra, Mangoo Ram in Punjab, Achhutanand in the United Provinces, and Panchanan Barma and Jogendra Nath Mandal in Bengal.

Ambedkar’s argument

• The nation did not yet exist. Hindus are segmented communities, so India is not a nation but a community of communities; without fraternity there is no political unity, and without political unity India is a state and not a nation.
• Nationalism itself is defined socially, not territorially — a consciousness of kind, ties of kinship, an inner unity and a process of social assimilation, and therefore the negation of casteism, rooted in humanism.
• Priority. Social reform must precede or accompany political independence. To postpone it in the name of unity is to make a decision about who bears the cost of unity.
  • His formulation in Bahishkrit Bharat is the sharpest available: if Tilak had been born a Dalit, he would have demanded the annihilation of caste as his birthright. For Dalits, swaraj without the extinction of caste carries no meaning.
  • His two names for the country capture the whole position — India as both prabuddha Bharat, the enlightened India that might be, and bahishkrit Bharat, the ostracised India that is.
• Representation. Only self-chosen representatives can speak for the excluded, which is why separate electorates mattered and why the outcome of the Poona Pact was experienced as a loss — Congress-nominated Dalit representatives are chosen by caste-Hindu majorities.
• The record. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables is the charge sheet: temple entry and Harijan uplift addressed symptoms and left the structure intact.
• The charge extends to workers. Once Congress ministries took office in 1937, they brought in conservative measures — including the amendment of industrial dispute law to make certain strikes illegal in Bombay — which he read as proof that the movement’s leadership was not merely indifferent to Dalits but to labour generally.
• The freedom being demanded, he argued, was the freedom of the governing class to rule the servile classes; words like society, nation and country are amorphous unless the freedom of the classes composing them is secured.
• Hence the tactical support some Dalit leaders gave the colonial government — not out of loyalty, but on the calculation that a transfer of power without social revolution would simply tighten upper-caste control.

Gandhi and the Dalit question

• Gandhi’s concern was real but framed differently. He held that without eradicating untouchability root and branch the honour of Hinduism cannot be saved — a formulation that makes the reform of Hinduism, rather than the emancipation of Dalits, the object.
• The Congress record is not empty: the Calcutta session of 1917 resolved against untouchability; Nagpur in 1920 wrote it into the non-cooperation programme; Gandhi backed the Vaikom satyagraha in 1924; and the Working Committee created an anti-untouchability sub-committee in 1929 under Madan Mohan Malaviya.
• The Communal Award and the Poona Pact are the decisive episode.
  • Gandhi read the separate electorate for the Depressed Classes as a British design to divide Indian society, and resisted it with a fast unto death.
  • The Poona Pact substituted reserved seats within a joint electorate, and on the arithmetic it gave Dalits substantially more seats than the Award had — 148 against 71 — while removing the separate electorate that would have made those representatives answerable to Dalit voters alone.
  • The perspective’s lasting point is that the cost of unity was borne by those with the least power to refuse it.
• The deeper methodological difference is over the language of change.
  • Gandhi’s approach rested on moral categories — service, compassion, care — which tend to dissolve the contradiction and remove the possibility of oppositional imagination.
  • Dalit leaders preferred struggle and self-help, which presuppose that the contradiction is real and must be won rather than transcended.
  • Gandhi’s own caste position gave him a “seamless spatiality” — the ability to move in and out of any social space at will — which was precisely what those he spoke for did not have.

Assessment and the counter-argument

• Gail Omvedt concludes that the Dalit and anti-caste movements were a crucial expression of the democratic revolution in India — more consistently democratic, and in the end more consistently “nationalistic”, than the elite-controlled Congress.
• Valerian Rodrigues finds a shared positive conception across Dalit-Bahujan thinkers: the nation as a good society whose members respect one another, protect mutual rights and show solidarity — from which it follows that as long as untouchability exists, all talk of freedom and self-rule is empty.
• S. N. Gaikwad’s verdict is that even if Ambedkar is called anti-national, he was right to reject elite hegemony, and he forced the Congress to become more responsive; there is no justification for a patriotism that amounts to submission to local tyrants.
• The nationalist criticism, associated with Arun Shourie, is that the Dalit position was anti-national in effect. Gopal Guru’s reply is that the criticism is politically motivated and that Ambedkar’s perspective requires scientific rather than polemical treatment.
• The strongest counter on the merits is twofold.
  • The anti-caste movements’ willingness to work with the colonial state limited their reach and their alliances.
  • The Constitution of 1950, substantially shaped by Ambedkar himself, delivered instruments no colonial arrangement had offered — abolition of untouchability, justiciable equality, reservation, and universal suffrage from the first election.

The Dalit perspective’s permanent contribution is that it identified the cost of unity and named who paid it, at a time when every other perspective was arguing about who should lead.

The feminist perspective

Women’s participation is now the fastest-growing area of writing on the national movement, and it has produced a perspective in its own right rather than a supplement to the others.

• The empirical recovery came first, and it is substantial.
  • Pre-Congress figures — Ahilyabai Holkar, Rani Chennamma of Kittur, Rani Lakshmibai and Begum Hazrat Mahal — establish that armed political leadership by women preceded the movement.
  • Within the movement: Sarojini Naidu, Bhikaji Cama, Annie Besant, Kasturba Gandhi, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Sucheta Kripalani, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Aruna Asaf Ali, Rani Gaidinliu, and the Chittagong revolutionaries.
  • In social and economic work: Pandita Ramabai, Durgabai Deshmukh, Basanti Devi and Suniti Devi, and the organisations — the Women’s Indian Association (1917), the National Council of Women in India (1925) and the All India Women’s Conference (1927).
• The analytical claim is sharper than the recovery. Women participated in multiple modes — as satyagrahis, picketers, spinners, revolutionaries, prisoners and organisers — and yet the women’s question was never a core issue of the movement.
• The diagnosis of why has three parts, and they are cumulative.
  • The movement was begun on women’s behalf by men, and its leaders were, in the standard formulation, not full-blooded liberals; women’s emancipation was pursued so far as it served national ends and no further.
  • Gandhi mobilised women as a resource for mass action, and his framing of their special aptitude for suffering both enabled participation and confined it to a register that left the household untouched.
  • Nationalism resolved the women’s question by relocating it. In the account of the inner spiritual domain, women were made the custodians of an authentic national culture — honoured, and thereby removed from political contest.
• The evidence for the charge is the legislative record. The resistance within the Congress to Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bill, including from figures as senior as Rajendra Prasad, showed how narrow the consensus on women’s legal equality actually was once independence had been won.
• The counter-argument is that the movement delivered universal adult franchise without a suffrage struggle, wrote equality and non-discrimination into the Constitution, and produced a generation of women in public life — outcomes that no comparable society achieved at that date.
• The most defensible position parallels the Dalit one: participation was wide, agenda-setting was not, and what was ultimately conceded constitutionally went beyond what the movement had been willing to fight for politically.

Every perspective on the national movement is a claim about who made it; the disagreement about what it was follows from that and never precedes it.

The post-colonial perspective

A sixth position, developed after the classical five and now unavoidable in any current treatment, asks not who made the movement but what conceptual equipment it was obliged to use.

• Edward Said’s account of Orientalism — the West’s production of the East as its knowable, governable other — supplies the frame: colonial knowledge was not a description of India but an instrument of rule, and Indian nationalism had to argue inside categories that colonialism had defined.
• Partha Chatterjee applies this to nationalism directly: the anti-colonial movement inverted the colonial claim without escaping its terms, accepting the framework of nation, progress and modernity while contesting who should administer them.
• Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe pushes further, arguing that European political categories are “indispensable and inadequate” for writing Indian history — indispensable because there are no others available, inadequate because they render whole domains of Indian experience unintelligible.
• Gyan Prakash and others extended the argument to colonial science, medicine and enumeration, showing how the census, the survey and the classification of castes produced the social facts later politics took as given.
• The criticism of this perspective is the one Sumit Sarkar made from inside it: an emphasis on discourse that loses the material history of exploitation and resistance has changed the subject rather than deepened it.
• Its permanent contribution is the recognition that the categories of the debate are themselves part of what has to be examined — including “nation”, “communalism”, “caste” and “tribe”, each of which acquired its modern Indian meaning under colonial administration.

Gandhi and Ambedkar: the argument that organises the Dalit perspective

• The disagreement is not resolvable within either man’s framework, and the Indian Constitution is best read as an attempt to legislate both positions at once — national unity and a justiciable assault on the social order.

Subaltern Studies

• Ranajit Guha’s founding charge, from 1982, organises much of the subsequent debate: the historiography of Indian nationalism has long been dominated by elitism — colonialist elitist and bourgeois-nationalist elitist — and neither can see the autonomous domain of subaltern politics, which was neither created by nor dependent on elite mobilisation.

“The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism.” — Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies I

• In The Prose of Counter-Insurgency he attacks existing peasant and tribal history for treating rebellion as purely spontaneous and unpremeditated and for ignoring the consciousness of the rebels themselves; Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India reconstructs insurgency as a form with its own logic of negation, solidarity and territoriality.
• His essay on dominance without hegemony argues that the colonial state ruled far more by coercion than by consent, so Gramscian hegemony does not straightforwardly apply — a direct challenge to the war of position reading.
• The empirical work is what made the school persuasive: Gyanendra Pandey on peasant revolt in Awadh arising before and independently of Non-Cooperation, Shahid Amin on the peasant construction of Gandhi as a figure of rumour and miracle, and Sumit Sarkar on Bengal in 1921 showing masses outstripping leaders until the leaders called a halt.
• The later turn — Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe — moved toward the critique of modernity and of European categories themselves.
• The internal criticism, made most sharply by Sumit Sarkar after he left the collective, is that this turn abandoned the social history of actual subaltern lives that was the project’s original strength.

Two perspectives outside the syllabus list

• The Hindu Mahasabha’s position defined the nation culturally. Savarkar’s Hindutva rests on three essentials — a common rashtra (nation), jati (race or descent) and sanskriti (culture) — with the further criterion that India be both pitrubhumi and punyabhumi, fatherland and holyland; the movement’s secular-territorial nationalism is rejected as insufficiently grounded.
• The Muslim League’s position arrived at the same structure with the opposite content.
  • Jinnah’s formulation is that Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions, and therefore to two different civilisations — “the heroes of one are the villains of the other”.
  • The two-nation theory is in this sense the mirror image of cultural nationalism rather than its opposite, which is why the two positions hardened together.
• The feminist reading is a genuine sixth perspective that the standard list omits.
  • Sumit Sarkar notes that although the women’s movement in India was started by men and women were active participants in the Congress, its leaders were not full-blooded liberals and the women’s question was never a core issue.
  • Gandhi’s movement used women largely as a resource for mass mobilisation rather than pursuing their emancipation as an end, and like the concerns of peasants and workers, women’s issues stayed on the periphery.
  • The patriarchal limit is visible in the strong resistance to Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bill, which came even from leaders such as Rajendra Prasad.
  • Partha Chatterjee’s account explains the structure: nationalism “resolved” the women’s question by assigning women to the inner spiritual domain as custodians of an authentic culture, which simultaneously honoured them and removed their situation from political contest.

The perspectives applied to four episodes

Reading the perspectives against particular events shows more than any abstract comparison, because each has to commit itself.

The perspectives compared

• No perspective is simply wrong. The productive way to hold them together is to notice that what each cannot see is usually what the next was formed to say.
• Gandhi occupies a different position in each — national leader, insufficient revolutionary, class mediator, obstacle to reason, defender of the caste order, and, in the subaltern reading, a figure the peasantry largely invented for itself.

Was the movement genuinely inclusive?

• The case that it was.
  • Its formal commitments were secular and democratic from Karachi in 1931, and it produced universal adult suffrage at the first election without the phased extension every Western democracy required.
  • Mass participation crossed region, religion, class and gender on a scale no other anti-colonial movement matched.
  • Reserved seats, the abolition of untouchability and a justiciable equality clause came from within its own constitutional settlement.
• The case that it was not.
  • Inclusion in mobilisation is not inclusion in decision. The leadership remained overwhelmingly upper-caste and English-educated.
  • Caste and gender questions were consistently postponed to unity, and the Muslim League’s separate trajectory after 1937 indicates a failure of inclusion rather than merely of negotiation.
  • Ambedkar’s charge stands: a movement can enlist the excluded without conceding them power.
• The defensible verdict distinguishes participation, which was genuinely wide, from representation and agenda-setting, which were not — and notes that the constitutional outcome went considerably further than the movement’s own practice, largely because the excluded had organised independently and forced the question.

Contemporary relevance

• Indian nationalism’s own character is again a live political question.
  • The standard description — territorial rather than ethnic, plural rather than homogenising, non-coercive and civic, with anyone living on Indian soil a member of the national community — is the constitutional settlement’s self-understanding.
  • It is now contested from the cultural-nationalist direction in current politics, not merely in historiography, which is why this chapter’s arguments recur in contemporary public debate.
• The Dalit perspective has acquired new institutional force. The decision to include caste enumeration in the Census of 2027 — the first full official caste count since 1931 — makes the measurement of graded inequality a live administrative fact, which is precisely the terrain Ambedkar argued the national movement had refused to enter.
• The subaltern turn has reshaped public commemoration as much as scholarship, visible in the recovery of tribal and regional risings into the official narrative of the freedom struggle.
• The historiographical field has moved on again. Recent work has turned to environmental, legal, gender and global-connection histories of the movement, and to the study of Indian anti-colonialism as part of transnational networks rather than as a purely national story — a direction that cuts across all the classical perspectives.
• Ranajit Guha’s death in 2023 closed the founding generation of Subaltern Studies, and the assessments written since have tended to treat the school as a decisive methodological intervention whose later idealist turn was a genuine cost — which is close to Sarkar’s original objection.
• The imperialist and Cambridge argument has not disappeared either; it recurs whenever the movement’s leadership is described as a self-interested elite, and it has to be answered on the evidence rather than dismissed as colonial.
• Bipan Chandra’s Gramscian reading remains the dominant textbook account in India, which is itself a fact about how the movement is officially remembered, and one that the subaltern and Dalit positions were formed to contest.
• The argument over school and university curricula — what is taught about the movement, whose leaders are named, which risings are included — is the form in which this historiography now reaches the largest audience, and it is the most visible sign that the perspectives are political positions and not merely academic ones.

Conclusion

The five perspectives named in the syllabus are not five opinions about the same agreed set of events. Each is a claim about who made the national movement, and each generates its own account of what the movement therefore was.

• The liberal account sees a nation being constructed, and treats unity as the condition of everything else.
• The socialist and Marxist accounts see class content, differing over whether the leadership was a proxy for passive social forces or the agent of a specific one.
• The radical humanist account rejects the nation as the unit of value altogether.
• The Dalit account asks whose freedom was being demanded and answers that a society of graded inequality cannot free itself by changing rulers.
• The subaltern account denies that any of the others can see the people it claims to speak about.
• The strongest position is not to adjudicate between them but to specify what each perspective sees, and what evidence constrains it — which is also the only honest description of a movement large enough to have been all of these things at once.