Militant and Revolutionary Movements in 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

The revolutionary strand of the freedom struggle has always sat awkwardly in the standard account. It never commanded a mass base, it never received Congress support, it produced no lasting organisation, and by any narrow test of effectiveness it failed. Yet it occupied the space the mainstream movement vacated during every passive phase, it supplied the struggle with its most durable iconography, and in its final phase it produced the political thinking — on class, religion and the meaning of freedom itself — that the Congress mainstream had not attempted.

Placing the strand: what “militant nationalism” covers

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The syllabus phrase is broader than the secret societies, and it is worth separating the three things it is used to describe, because merging them produces confusion.

• Militant nationalism in the narrow sense means the Extremist politics of 1905-18 — Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo — which was open, legal and non-violent in practice while rejecting petition. It is “militant” relative to the moderates, not relative to the law.
• Revolutionary nationalism means the organised secret societies committed to armed action against the colonial state, from the Anushilan Samiti to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.
• Armed popular resistance means the tribal and peasant risings that used force against the state and its intermediaries, and which have a longer history than either of the above.
• The three overlap at the edges. The samitis created for the Swadeshi movement supplied recruits to the revolutionary cells; Aurobindo wrote openly for passive resistance while his brother organised bombs; and the Ghadar movement drew on both a diaspora political culture and a rural Punjabi one.

What made revolutionaries, and what they were not

• Revolutionary activity was a response to the exhaustion of other methods, and it recurs at exactly the points where the constitutional or mass track stalled.
  • After the Surat split of 1907 disabled the Congress, and again after the suspension of Non-Cooperation in 1922, young men who had believed in agitation concluded that agitation was a way of not acting.
  • Repression accelerated the process: the deportation of Extremist leaders, the Rowlatt Act, and the Punjab of 1919 destroyed the plausibility of lawful protest for a generation that was already impatient.
• The distinction between a revolutionary and a terrorist is analytically necessary, and the sources are consistent about where it lies.
  • Revolutionaries target the oppressor — an official, an institution, an armoury — and expressly reject the indiscriminate killing of civilians.
  • Their acts are propaganda by deed: designed to be tried in open court, reported in the press, and to demonstrate that the state can be defied.
  • The colonial description of them as “terrorists” was itself a political act, and later Indian writing has generally preferred revolutionary for that reason.
• Their intellectual sources were unusually eclectic, and they explain both the movement’s strength and its limits.
  • Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, with its sanyasi rebels and its hymn to the mother, provided a sacralised model of sacrifice.
  • Sachindranath Sanyal’s Bandi Jeevan and Bhagawati Charan Vohra’s The Philosophy of the Bomb were the movement’s own manifestos.
  • Irish nationalism, the Russian nihilists and later the Russian revolutionaries supplied both technique and vocabulary; the Irish parallel was invoked constantly.
  • Later, Marx, Lenin, Bakunin and Kropotkin entered through prison reading, and changed what the revolutionaries thought they were fighting for.

The revolutionaries were never a strategy for winning independence. They were a demonstration, addressed to Indians, that the colonial state could be defied by ordinary people at ordinary cost.

The first phase, 1897-1917

The social composition of the movement

• The Bengal groups were overwhelmingly bhadralok — educated, upper-caste, often unemployed or underemployed young men from families squeezed by the decline of rentier incomes and the shortage of professional openings.
  • This is why student bodies and schools were the recruiting ground, and why the movement was strongest in exactly the districts with the highest literacy.
  • It also explains a real limitation: a movement of the educated has no organic connection to the peasantry whose grievances it invokes.
• The Punjab strand was socially different — the Ghadar movement drew on peasant-soldiers and emigrant labourers, which gave it a mass character the Bengal cells never had, and a corresponding weakness in political theory.
• The Maharashtra strand ran through Chitpavan Brahmin networks connected to Tilak’s political world, and through the Savarkar brothers’ secret societies.
• Women entered as full participants, not auxiliaries, and their entry preceded the Congress’s mobilisation of women by two decades.
• The movement was consciously and demonstratively cross-communal in some strands and not in others. The Ghadar Party and the Kakori group made the point deliberately; the Bengal societies, with their initiation oaths before Kali, did not, and paid for it in reach.

Bengal

• The Chapekar brothers assassinated the plague commissioner Rand at Poona in 1897, conventionally treated as the opening act.
• The Anushilan Samiti, founded in 1902 and organised by figures including Pramathanath Mitra, Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Bhupendranath Datta, combined physical culture with secret political work; Yugantar emerged from it as the more activist wing with its own newspaper.
• The partition of Bengal in 1905 converted these samitis from cultural societies into a recruiting ground.
• Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill the magistrate Kingsford at Muzaffarpur in 1908 and killed two European women by mistake — an outcome that troubled the movement’s own doctrine of targeting the oppressor.
• The Alipore Bomb Case (1908-09) put the Bengal network on trial, sent Barindra Ghosh to the Andamans, and led Aurobindo Ghosh, acquitted, to withdraw from politics altogether.

Maharashtra and the wider network

• V. D. Savarkar’s Abhinav Bharat, developed from the Mitra Mela, extended the secret-society model to western India.
• India House in London, run by Shyamji Krishna Varma, was the movement’s overseas nerve centre; Madan Lal Dhingra shot Curzon Wyllie there in 1909, and his trial statement circulated widely in India.
• Madame Bhikaji Cama unfurled a version of an Indian flag at the international socialist congress at Stuttgart in 1907 and ran the movement’s European propaganda.
• The Delhi Conspiracy Case followed the 1912 bomb thrown at the Viceroy Hardinge during the ceremonial entry into Delhi, organised by Rash Behari Bose with Basanta Kumar Biswas.

Savarkar and the making of a revolutionary tradition

• V. D. Savarkar matters to this strand less as an operator than as the man who gave it a usable history and a literature.
  • The Indian War of Independence (1908) reinterpreted 1857 as a planned national war, was banned before publication, and circulated underground for decades as the movement’s founding text.
  • His translation of Mazzini’s autobiography supplied the Italian model of a secret society allied to a national movement, and Abhinav Bharat was built on it.
• His conviction in 1910 and the two life sentences — the first Indian sentenced to transportation twice over — made him the emblematic prisoner of the Cellular Jail in the Andamans, where the revolutionary generation of Bengal and Punjab was concentrated.
• His later political trajectory — the mercy petitions, the development of Hindutva as a theory of cultural nationhood, the presidency of the Hindu Mahasabha, and opposition to Quit India — belongs to a different chapter, and the two phases should not be collapsed into one another in either direction.
• The Cellular Jail itself became a political institution. Hunger strikes there in 1933 and 1937, and the campaign for repatriation of prisoners, kept the revolutionaries in national view long after their organisations had been broken.

The Ghadar movement

• Founded at San Francisco in 1913 among Punjabi migrants in North America, with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Lala Har Dayal as its principal propagandist, the party published the Ghadar newspaper in several Indian languages.
• Its politics were explicitly secular and republican — Sikh, Hindu and Muslim members were addressed as Indians, and the target was the empire rather than any community.
• The Komagata Maru episode of 1914, in which a shipload of intending Punjabi migrants was turned away from Canada and fired on at Budge Budge on return, radicalised the diaspora decisively.
• The planned rising of February 1915 in Punjab was betrayed and crushed; Kartar Singh Sarabha was hanged at nineteen. The Defence of India Act, 1915 and special tribunals were created largely to deal with it.
• The wartime effort extended abroad: the Berlin Committee, the German-supported “Hindu-German conspiracy”, and the Provisional Government of India proclaimed at Kabul in 1915 by Raja Mahendra Pratap with Maulana Barkatullah.

The Punjab strand between the wars

• The Babbar Akalis (1921-25) broke from the constitutional Akali movement to conduct armed action against loyalist intermediaries in rural Punjab, and were suppressed in a major conspiracy trial.
• The Kirti Kisan Party, founded by returned Ghadarites in 1926, connected the revolutionary tradition to peasant and worker organisation and to the emerging communist movement — one of the clearest routes by which revolutionary nationalism turned into left politics.
• The Naujawan Bharat Sabha, working openly in the same province, held that the national struggle had to be secular, socialist and youth-led, and required its members to keep clear of communal organisations.

The second phase, 1922-1935

The withdrawal of Non-Cooperation is the hinge. What emerged after it differed from the first phase in one crucial respect: it acquired an ideology beyond nationalism.

From the HRA to the HSRA

• The Hindustan Republican Association was founded in 1924 at Kanpur by Sachindranath Sanyal, Ramprasad Bismil and Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, with the declared aim of an armed revolution to establish a federal republic.
• The Kakori train action of 1925 — a robbery of government treasure — produced the movement’s first great trial; Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were hanged in 1927.
  • The Bismil-Ashfaqullah partnership was pointedly publicised by the revolutionaries themselves as a demonstration that the movement was not a Hindu one.
• In September 1928, at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, the organisation was reconstituted as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. The inserted word was deliberate: the aim was no longer only to remove the British but to abolish the exploitation of man by man.
• Chandrashekhar Azad commanded its armed wing; Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Batukeshwar Dutt and Bhagawati Charan Vohra formed its intellectual core.
• The Naujawan Bharat Sabha (1926) was its open, legal front, organising students, workers and peasants — evidence that the group already understood the limits of secret action.

The Lahore sequence

• Lala Lajpat Rai died in November 1928 after a lathi charge during the Simon Commission protest at Lahore; Saunders was shot the following month in retaliation.
• On 8 April 1929, Bhagat Singh and B. K. Dutt threw two low-intensity bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly and courted arrest — the bombs were designed not to kill but, in the phrase they took from a French anarchist, to make the deaf hear.
  • The purpose was the trial, not the explosion: a national platform from which to state a case that no newspaper would otherwise carry.
• The hunger strike in jail for political-prisoner status ran for months and produced the death of Jatindranath Das after 63 days, which turned the prisoners into national figures.
• Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were executed on 23 March 1931; Chandrashekhar Azad had been killed at Alfred Park, Allahabad, in February.

Bengal again

• The Chittagong armoury raid of April 1930 under Surya Sen seized the armouries, cut communications and proclaimed a provisional government — the most ambitious single operation attempted.
• It is notable above all for the scale of women’s participation: Pritilata Waddedar, who led the Pahartali club attack and took cyanide rather than be captured, and Kalpana Datta, tried alongside Surya Sen.
• Bina Das fired at the Governor of Bengal at a convocation in 1932; Santi Ghosh and Suniti Choudhury, both schoolgirls, shot the district magistrate of Comilla in 1931.
• The Bengal Volunteers carried out the Writers’ Building action of 1930 — Binoy Basu, Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta — against the inspector-general of prisons.
• The state’s answer was a battery of special ordinances, detention without trial, and the Cellular Jail in the Andamans, and by the mid-1930s the Bengal groups had largely been broken or had converted to communism.

The state’s counter-revolutionary apparatus

The legal machinery built to destroy this strand is an important part of the story, and it outlived both the revolutionaries and the empire.

• Special legislation replaced ordinary criminal procedure wherever the ordinary procedure proved slow: the Explosive Substances Act (1908), the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act (1908), the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1908) banning associations, the Indian Press Act (1910), and the Defence of India Act (1915) with its tribunals sitting without appeal.
• The Rowlatt Committee (1918) was appointed specifically to review revolutionary conspiracy, and its recommendation to carry wartime powers into peacetime produced the Rowlatt Act — which is how the suppression of the revolutionaries produced the mass movement of 1919.
• Bengal ordinances of the 1920s and 1930s allowed indefinite detention without trial, and thousands were held under them.
• Conspiracy trials — Alipore, Delhi, Lahore, Kakori, Meerut, Chittagong — were the state’s preferred instrument, and they consistently backfired by converting defendants into public figures with a national platform.
• The Andaman Cellular Jail was the physical expression of the policy, and the campaign against it — hunger strikes, deaths, and eventual repatriation of prisoners in the late 1930s — became a nationalist cause in its own right.

A chronology of the principal actions

How the organisations actually worked

• The cell structure was borrowed from European models: small groups bound by oath, minimal horizontal contact, and a central committee that few members could identify — which is why the trials repeatedly failed to reach the leadership.
• Recruitment ran through gymnasiums, libraries and student associations, institutions that were legal and could be joined without commitment before the political demand was made.
• Finance was the perennial constraint, and it dictated tactics: the Kakori action and other “political dacoities” were revenue operations, and they were politically costly because they were easy to represent as ordinary crime.
• Arms were scarce and mostly stolen or smuggled, which is why the armoury raid — Chittagong being the great example — recurs as an operational objective.
• Publication mattered as much as action. Yugantar, Sandhya, Bande Mataram, the Ghadar newspaper, and the smuggled pamphlet were the mechanism by which a handful of men produced a national effect.
• The overseas network — India House in London, the Berlin Committee, the Ghadar organisation in North America, and later the Indian Independence League in South-East Asia — gave the movement sanctuary, money and access to hostile powers, and it is the one structural advantage it possessed.

The ideas: why this strand is intellectually examinable

The second phase produced the only body of political thought the revolutionary tradition generated, and it is far more than a defence of political violence.

• Bhagat Singh redefined revolution away from the act of violence.
  • By revolution, he insisted, was meant not the cult of the bomb and the pistol but the overthrow of an order founded on manifest injustice.
  • The slogan Inquilab Zindabad was glossed in exactly these terms, which is why it survived the men who coined it.
• He redefined the goal of independence.
  • Replacing white rulers with brown ones would leave the structure of exploitation untouched; the aim had to be a socialist republic in which power rested with workers and peasants.
  • To Young Political Workers (1931) argues explicitly that a party with a mass base and a programme is required, and that the revolutionary conspiracy is at best an auxiliary — a self-criticism of his own method written in a condemned cell.
• He rejected religious sanction for politics.
  • “Why I am an Atheist” (1930) is a rationalist argument written under sentence of death, and it refuses the consolation of belief precisely where it would have been most useful.
  • His writing on communalism is unusually clear-sighted: he treated communal politics as an obstacle at least as dangerous as colonial rule, and identified the communal press as its principal engine.
• The Philosophy of the Bomb (1930), drafted by Bhagawati Charan Vohra in reply to Gandhi’s condemnation, is the movement’s formal answer to non-violence: it accepts the moral seriousness of the objection and denies that a state resting on organised violence can be persuaded by suffering alone.

“By ‘Revolution’ we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change.” — Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh and Gandhi compared

• The comparison is not a scorecard. Each identified precisely what the other underrated — Gandhi the necessity of mass organisation without violence, Bhagat Singh the class content of freedom and the danger of religious politics — and the Indian republic inherited both diagnoses.

Armed tribal and regional resistance

The syllabus phrase “militant movements” is wider than the urban revolutionary underground, and the risings that preceded and paralleled it are now central to how the period is understood.

• Tribal revolts were the most sustained armed resistance to colonial authority anywhere in India, and they were directed simultaneously at the state, the moneylender and the outsider landholder.
  • The Santhal hool of 1855-56 under Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu anticipated 1857 and was suppressed with comparable force.
  • Birsa Munda’s ulgulan of 1899-1900 in Chotanagpur combined a religious reform movement with an armed assertion of khuntkatti land rights, and produced the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908.
  • The Rampa rebellion of 1922-24 under Alluri Sitarama Raju in the Godavari agency fused forest-law grievance with the language of the national movement.
  • Others in the same family: the Kol, Bhil, Khond, Koya and Naga risings, and Rani Gaidinliu’s Heraka movement in the Naga hills, for which she was imprisoned for fourteen years.
• These movements were armed, local, and led from within the community, which is exactly why the older Congress-centred narrative had trouble accommodating them and why their recovery has changed the shape of the standard account.
• The colonial state understood these risings as the more serious threat, which is why the legal architecture of forest law, criminal tribes legislation and scheduled-area administration was built around them.
  • The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 designated whole communities as habitually criminal, and its repeal in 1952 left the denotified tribes with a stigma that outlasted the statute.
  • Scheduled district and excluded area administration removed tribal regions from the ordinary political process, which is one reason their resistance never connected to the national movement organisationally.
• Their political content has been recovered rather than invented. The demand in almost every case combined land, forest access, freedom from forced labour and freedom from the outsider — a programme that the Constitution’s Fifth and Sixth Schedules and the later forest-rights legislation are still working through.

The Indian National Army and the final phase

Subhas Chandra Bose and the militant tradition inside the Congress

• Bose belongs to this strand as much as to the Congress, and treating him only as a Congress dissident misses the point of his politics.
• His disagreement with Gandhi was strategic before it was personal: he held that a colonial power would concede only to force or to the threat of force, that the Congress should present a time-bound ultimatum, and that the war was an opportunity rather than a moral problem.
• The Tripuri crisis of 1939 — his re-election as Congress president against Gandhi’s candidate, followed by the Working Committee’s resignation and his own — is the point at which the militant and the Gandhian conceptions of struggle became organisationally incompatible.
• The Forward Bloc, founded in 1939, was intended as a consolidated left within the Congress; his escape from house arrest in 1941 and journey to Germany and then Japan turned him into the head of an armed force.
• His political thought — set out in The Indian Struggle — combined socialism with a strong state, an admiration for planned economies, and an insistence that national reconstruction required discipline; the phrase “samyavada” covers his attempt to fuse the two.
• The assessment has to hold two things together: the INA never won a battle of consequence, and the INA trials did more than any single event to demonstrate that the loyalty of Indian soldiers could no longer be assumed.
• Rash Behari Bose, in exile in Japan since 1915, and Captain Mohan Singh organised the first Indian National Army from prisoners of war after the fall of Singapore in 1942, alongside the Indian Independence League.
• Subhas Chandra Bose took command in 1943, having left India in 1941 and travelled by submarine from Germany; he proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind) on 21 October 1943.
  • Its Rani of Jhansi Regiment, led by Lakshmi Sahgal, was among the first women’s combat formations raised by any Asian force.
  • Its slogan set — “Jai Hind”, “Dilli Chalo”, “Give me blood and I shall give you freedom” — entered the national vocabulary permanently.
• The Imphal-Kohima campaign of 1944 failed militarily, and the INA collapsed with the Japanese retreat.
• Its political effect came after its defeat. The INA trials at the Red Fort from November 1945 — deliberately staging a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh officer together — produced a wave of public support that cut across communities, and the Congress defended the accused despite its own commitment to non-violence.
• The Royal Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946 at Bombay and Karachi was the point at which the loyalty of the armed services itself came into question, and it is the single event most often cited in explaining the timing of British withdrawal.

Assessment

What the revolutionaries contributed

• They filled the vacuum. Whenever the mainstream movement entered a passive phase, revolutionary activity kept the fact of resistance visible.
• They restored self-respect. The recurring claim in the sources is that the revolutionaries gave Indians back a lost pride, and the psychological point should not be dismissed: a subject population that believes resistance is impossible has already been governed.
• They forced the state to reveal itself. Special tribunals, detention without trial, the Andamans and the ordinance regime made the claim of rule of law difficult to sustain.
• They opened political space for women earlier and more radically than the Congress did. Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Datta, Bina Das, Santi Ghosh, Suniti Choudhury, Bhikaji Cama and Lakshmi Sahgal were not auxiliaries but participants in the central act.
• They introduced socialism into the nationalist argument, and did so before the Congress Socialist Party existed. The line from the HSRA to the socialist current inside the Congress is direct.
• They supplied the movement’s martyrology, which mattered more for recruitment than any programme.

What they could not do

• They had no mass base, and knew it. Secret organisation is by definition small, and a strategy of individual heroism cannot generate the numbers that force a state to leave.
• They lacked resources and a supply of arms, and every large operation — 1915, Chittagong — foundered on that.
• They never obtained Congress support, which denied them both political cover and access to the countryside.
• The state’s coercive advantage was overwhelming, and each cycle of action was followed by the destruction of the network that carried it out.
• The tactic was self-limiting even on its own terms. Bhagat Singh’s own late writing concedes it: the bomb creates sympathisers, not a revolution, and the movement’s most acute thinker died arguing for the mass party he had not built.

• The two strands are best read as interdependent rather than rival. The revolutionaries were sustained by the political consciousness the Congress created; the Congress benefited from the contrast, since a government negotiating with Gandhi was implicitly negotiating against the alternative.

The scholarly debate about this strand

• The nationalist assessment treats the revolutionaries as the movement’s conscience — heroic, self-sacrificing, and necessary to keep the flame alive during the passive phases.
• The Marxist assessment is more critical and more interesting. It holds that individual terrorism substitutes the heroism of the few for the organisation of the many, that it lets the state justify repression, and that it cannot by its nature build the mass force that displaces a ruling power.
  • The same tradition credits the HSRA’s turn to socialism as the moment the strand became politically serious, and treats Bhagat Singh as a genuine revolutionary theorist rather than a martyr.
• The label “revolutionary terrorism”, long standard in Indian textbooks, has been increasingly criticised — on the ground that it imports the colonial state’s own description, and that the actions were directed at officials and installations rather than at civilians.
• The comparative frame matters to the assessment. The Irish and Russian models the revolutionaries copied both operated in contexts with either a mass constitutional movement running alongside or a collapsing state; India in 1908 or 1929 had neither in the required form.
• The subaltern reading notices something the others miss: the revolutionaries’ iconography and songs travelled far beyond their organisations, and the popular memory of Bhagat Singh in Punjab was a political fact independent of the HSRA’s actual reach.

Contemporary relevance

• The boundary of who counts as a freedom fighter has moved substantially, and this is the most significant current development in how the period is treated.
  • Janjatiya Gaurav Divas, observed on 15 November — Birsa Munda’s birth anniversary — since 2021, together with the network of tribal freedom fighter museums, marks the formal entry of adivasi armed resistance into the official national narrative.
  • Parakram Diwas on 23 January and the installation of a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose at India Gate in 2022 reflect a parallel elevation of the INA strand.
  • The renaming of the Andaman islands in 2018 — Ross to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep, Neil to Shaheed Dweep, Havelock to Swaraj Dweep — turns the site of revolutionary imprisonment into a memorial landscape.
• The scholarly reassessment runs in the same direction but with more caution, treating the revolutionaries as a genuine political tradition with its own theory rather than as a romantic footnote, while resisting the temptation to make martyrdom a substitute for analysis.
• Bhagat Singh’s writings have had a second life in Indian political argument precisely because they are not reducible to nationalism: the atheism, the anti-communal writing and the socialism are quoted by people who agree on almost nothing else.
• The legal architecture built to suppress this strand outlived it. Preventive detention, special tribunals and offences framed around waging war against the state were carried into independent India’s statute book, and the debates about anti-terror legislation and preventive detention are conducted in vocabulary inherited directly from the colonial response to the revolutionaries.

Conclusion

Judged by their own stated aim — the overthrow of British rule by armed action — the revolutionary movements failed completely, and their most thoughtful participants said so before the state killed them. Judged by what they actually did, the record is different.

• They kept resistance visible through every trough in the mainstream movement, and made the colonial claim to consent harder to sustain.
• They changed what independence was understood to mean by insisting, from 1928 onward, that a transfer of power without the abolition of exploitation would settle nothing.
• They widened participation — of women, of students, of tribal communities — in ways the constitutional and mass tracks were slower to manage.
• Their weakness was structural and not moral: heroism at the scale of the individual cannot substitute for organisation at the scale of a population, which is precisely the conclusion Bhagat Singh reached and had no time left to act on.