Trace the role of militant and revolutionary movements in Indian national movement. (2020, 15 Marks)
Revolutionary nationalism — organised, mostly secret, armed action against the colonial state — ran beside the constitutional and Gandhian tracks for half a century. Its role is best traced in three waves, each rising when the mainstream stalled, each carrying a wider idea of freedom.
Phase I (1897–1918): secret samitis to Ghadar
- Origins in frustration: the Chapekar brothers’ killing of plague commissioner W. C. Rand (Poona, 1897) opened the strand; the Partition of Bengal (1905) and the Surat split (1907) turned Anushilan Samiti and Yugantar into recruiting grounds for youth tired of petitions.
- Propaganda by deed: Khudiram Bose at Muzaffarpur (1908), the Alipore Bomb Case and Madan Lal Dhingra’s shooting in London (1909) proved the Raj could be defied.
- Ghadar (1913–15): built among Punjabi emigrants by Sohan Singh Bhakna and Lala Har Dayal, it attempted the only planned general rising (February 1915). Betrayal and the Defence of India Act, 1915 wiped out a cadre — Kartar Singh Sarabha was hanged at nineteen. Bipan Chandra nonetheless locates Ghadar’s greatest achievement in ideas: a secular, republican, internationalist critique of the drain carried to peasant-soldiers of every faith.
- Unintended mass effect: the Rowlatt Committee (1918), created to crush this “conspiracy”, produced the Act that provoked the 1919 satyagraha.
Phase II (1922–1934): from nationalism to socialism
Withdrawal of Non-Cooperation after Chauri Chaura (1922) sent disillusioned youth back to arms, now with a programme.
- Hindustan Republican Association (1924): the Kakori action (1925) ended with Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan among those hanged — a Hindu–Muslim martyrology deliberately publicised.
- HSRA (1928): the word Socialist shifted the goal from expelling the British to ending exploitation. Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad turned J. P. Saunders’ killing, the Assembly bomb (1929) and Jatindranath Das’s 63-day fast into national theatre, using the courtroom as platform. “By ‘Revolution’ we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change” — Bhagat Singh.
- Bengal: Surya Sen’s Chittagong armoury raid (1930), and the later actions of Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta in his group, drew women into the central act.
Phase III (1942–1946): an army of liberation
Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind government (1943) and the INA lost at Imphal–Kohima but won afterwards: the Red Fort trials (1945) united communities, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny (1946) showed Indian soldiery could no longer be trusted to hold India.
Weighing the role
- Nationalist reading: the movement’s conscience — keeping resistance alive in passive phases and restoring self-respect.
- Marxist critique: individual heroism substitutes for mass organisation and invites repression; Bhagat Singh conceded this in To Young Political Workers (1931), urging a mass party.
- Limits: no mass base, scarce arms, no Congress backing; the colonial label “terrorist” obscured that targets were officials, not civilians.
Conclusion
The revolutionaries could never have won independence alone; their role was catalytic — filling silences between mass waves, exposing the coercion behind the “rule of law”, and injecting socialism and secularism into nationalism. The ongoing 150-year commemoration of Vande Mataram (from November 2025) recalls the cry many carried to the gallows: a struggle plural in method, single in purpose.