Discuss the social background of Indian nationalism. (2014)
“Social background” is best read in the plural. Indian nationalism did not rise from one social base but from several distinct formations that colonial rule created or remade — agrarian, professional, print-and-reform, subaltern and regional — which the movement then had to weld together. A. R. Desai‘s Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948) supplies the framework; the interesting dispute is over what it omits.
The agrarian background
- The Permanent Settlement (1793), ryotwari and mahalwari replaced layered customary rights with alienable property, producing zamindars, tenants-at-will, landless labour and a rural creditor. Daniel Thorner classified the result into rent-receivers, cultivating owners and labourers.
- Commercialisation exposed the cultivator to distant prices; indebtedness and famine became the recurring grievance.
- This base supplied nationalism its numbers and its most explosive demands — no-rent and no-tax — which the leadership alternately used and restrained.
The professional and intelligentsia background
- De-industrialisation destroyed artisans without a factory sector to absorb them: David Clingingsmith and Jeffrey G. Williamson estimate India’s share of world manufacturing output falling from about 25 per cent in 1750 to 2 per cent in 1900.
- English education after Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s Minute (1835) created lawyers, teachers, journalists and clerks — the first stratum to think in all-India terms, and the first whose ambitions were blocked by racial exclusion from the higher services.
- Indian industrial capital and an industrial working class arrive later, changing both the movement’s finance and its tactical limits.
The reform and print background
- Socio-religious reform — the Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, Arya Samaj and Aligarh — produced both self-criticism and self-respect, and trained a generation in public argument.
- Cheap vernacular print let strangers read the same news on the same day: the mechanism Benedict Anderson calls print capitalism in Imagined Communities (1983). The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 confirmed its power.
The subaltern background
- Nationalism absorbed struggles it did not begin: the Santhal rebellion (1855–56), the Indigo revolt (1859–60), the Deccan riots (1875), Birsa Munda’s ulgulan (1899–1900), Champaran (1917) and Bardoli (1928).
- Ranajit Guha, in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), argued that this domain had an autonomous political grammar rather than being mobilised from above; Shahid Amin‘s study of Chauri Chaura showed peasants reworking the leader’s message into their own idiom.
- D. N. Dhanagare, in Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950, showed the class composition of agrarian mobilisation varying sharply by region.
The regional and linguistic background
- Bengal, Maharashtra and Madras produced separate publics with separate grievances before any all-India body existed. Anil Seal, in The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (1968), read the movement as provincial elites competing for office and patronage rather than as a nation awakening.
- Language became the organising unit once the Congress reorganised itself on linguistic lines in 1920; nationalism travelled in Marathi, Bengali and Tamil before English.
Correctives to the class account
Desai reads each widening of the movement’s social base as accompanied by tightening propertied control of its content. Two correctives matter. Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), locates nationalism’s first sovereignty in an inner cultural domain no economic account reaches. B. R. Ambedkar, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), exposes a nationalism that postponed social revolution and so secured freedom largely for the already free.
Conclusion
No single background explains Indian nationalism. The agrarian and subaltern bases gave it numbers, the professional base gave it leadership and vocabulary, reform and print gave it a public, and region gave it its working units. Desai’s class map remains the most usable single account — but his expectation that caste would dissolve into class has not held, as the restoration of caste enumeration in Census 2027, the first since 1931, makes plain.