Nationalism in India

Why This Matters

Today you are free. You can vote. You can speak your mind. You can go to any school you like. None of this was true a hundred years ago. Back then, India was ruled by people from a small island far away — Britain. Indians had almost no say in how their own country was run.

So how did that change? It did not change because of one big war or one great king. It changed because, slowly, millions of ordinary people — students, farmers, factory workers, women, traders — began to feel something new. They began to feel that they were all one people, one nation, with the right to rule themselves. And they decided to fight for it. But they fought in a way the world had never seen before: mostly without guns, mostly without violence.

This chapter is the story of how that feeling grew, and how one leader — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whom people came to call Mahatma (“great soul”) — gave it a shape. It is also an honest story. The people who joined the fight did not all want the same thing. A farmer and a factory owner both shouted “Swaraj!”, but they meant very different things by it. Understanding why they joined, and why they sometimes drifted apart, is the real heart of this chapter. This is the story of how your freedom was won.

The Big Idea

Modern nationalism in India grew out of the struggle against British rule. People from many different groups discovered a shared bond: they were all being oppressed by the same foreign power. That shared pain tied them together into one nation. But each group felt colonialism differently, and each one had its own dream of freedom. The Congress, under Mahatma Gandhi, tried to gather all these groups into one movement, using a new weapon — satyagraha, the force of truth and non-violence. Gandhi led great mass movements: the Non-Cooperation Movement (refuse to help the British) and the Civil Disobedience Movement (actively break unjust British laws). Different social groups joined the same movement for different reasons — and that is also why the unity often broke. Some groups, like many dalits and several Muslim organisations, stayed away or grew disappointed. Alongside the struggles, a sense of being one nation also grew through shared symbols — the image of Bharat Mata, folk songs, flags, and a proud retelling of India’s past.

Let’s Break It Down

Before we start, let us refresh a few words that this whole chapter rests on. If these are clear, everything else will follow.

The First World War created deep hardship

In India, modern nationalism is closely tied to the fight against colonial rule. People found their unity while struggling together against the British. And the years after 1919 saw the movement spread to new areas, pull in new groups, and try new methods. But to understand why it suddenly grew so strong, we have to start with the First World War.

The war (1914–1918) changed India’s economy and politics. Wars cost a huge amount of money. So the British raised that money by squeezing India:

• They raised taxes. They increased customs duties and brought in income tax for the first time.

• They took huge war loans from people.

• Prices doubled between 1913 and 1918. When prices double, the same wages buy only half as much food. So ordinary people suffered terribly.

On top of this, villages were ordered to supply soldiers. Often men were taken by forced recruitment — the colonial state simply forced people to join the army. This caused widespread anger in the countryside.

Then nature struck too. In 1918–19 and 1920–21, crops failed in many parts of India. This caused a severe shortage of food. At the same time, a deadly influenza (flu) epidemic spread across the country. According to the census of 1921, between 12 and 13 million people died from the famines and the epidemic together. That is a staggering number — more than the entire population of many countries today.

People had hoped that all this hardship would end once the war was over. But it did not. The taxes stayed high. The prices stayed high. The anger had nowhere to go. And exactly at this point, a new leader appeared with a new way of fighting. Figure 2.1 below traces this whole chain — from the war’s hardships down to the mass movement that followed.

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The idea of Satyagraha — fighting with the force of truth

Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in January 1915. He came from South Africa, where he had successfully fought a racist government using a completely new method of mass protest. He called this method satyagraha.

The word satyagraha is made of two ideas: satya (truth) and agraha (a firm holding-on, an insistence). So satyagraha means holding firmly to the truth — the force of truth. Gandhi’s belief was simple but bold. He said: if your cause is true, and your fight is against injustice, then you do not need physical force or violence to win. A satyagrahi does not want revenge and is never aggressive. Instead, a satyagrahi wins by non-violence, by appealing to the conscience of the oppressor — that is, by touching the sense of right and wrong inside the other person. The aim was not to force the enemy to accept the truth, but to persuade him to see the truth. Gandhi believed that if you do this, truth must win in the end. And he believed this dharma of non-violence could unite all Indians, of every religion.

But here a sharp question must be asked, and NCERT mostly leaves it unanswered. How could simply being peaceful — refusing to fight back — actually defeat a mighty empire with guns, armies and prisons? It sounds almost foolish. Surely the side with the guns wins? To really understand this chapter, you must understand why Gandhi’s method could work. There are three reasons, and Figure 2.2 below lays them out side by side.

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So the logic is this. First, British rule was not really run by the British alone. It was run by Indians — Indian clerks, Indian policemen, Indian soldiers, Indian judges, and Indians who paid taxes and bought British goods. As Gandhi argued in his famous book Hind Swaraj (1909): British rule was set up with the cooperation of Indians, and it survived only because of that cooperation. Second, it follows that if Indians simply stopped cooperating — left their government jobs, schools and courts, and stopped buying British goods — the whole machine would slow down and stop. The country would become impossible to govern. Third, when peaceful protesters take blows without hitting back, the violence of the rulers looks ugly and unjust. This wins over people’s hearts everywhere, and shames the oppressor. So non-violence was not weakness. It was a clever and powerful kind of strength.

Gandhi did not start with a giant national movement. He started small, proving the method worked. He led three early satyagrahas, and won them:

These wins gave Gandhi — and the country — confidence. The new method worked. Now it could be tried on a far bigger stage.

The Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre

Made bold by these successes, Gandhi decided in 1919 to launch a nationwide satyagraha against a hated new law: the Rowlatt Act (1919).

This Act had been rushed through the Imperial Legislative Council even though every Indian member opposed it. Why were Indians so outraged? Because the Act gave the government enormous powers to crush political activity. Worst of all, it allowed the government to jail political prisoners without any trial for two years. Think about how frightening that is: you could be locked up for two years without a court, without a chance to defend yourself, without being told what you did wrong. It made a mockery of justice.

Gandhi called for non-violent civil disobedience against this unjust law. It would begin with a hartal (a complete shutdown — shops closed, work stopped) on 6 April. The response was huge. Rallies filled the cities. Workers struck in railway workshops. Shops shut down.

The British government got alarmed. It feared that lines of communication — the railways and the telegraph — would be cut off. So it cracked down. Local leaders were arrested in Amritsar. Gandhi was stopped from entering Delhi. On 10 April, police in Amritsar fired on a peaceful procession. This set off attacks on banks, post offices and railway stations. Martial law (army rule) was declared, and General Dyer took command.

Then came one of the darkest days in Indian history. On 13 April 1919, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place. A large crowd had gathered in an enclosed ground in Amritsar called Jallianwala Bagh. Some had come to protest. Many others had simply come for the annual Baisakhi fair. Many were villagers from outside the city who did not even know that martial law had been imposed. General Dyer entered, blocked the only exits, and opened fire on the trapped, unarmed crowd. Hundreds were killed. Dyer later admitted his aim was to “produce a moral effect” — that is, to fill the minds of Indians with terror.

But the terror did not crush the people — it enraged them. As news spread, crowds poured into the streets of north Indian towns. There were strikes, clashes with police, and attacks on government buildings. The government answered with brutal cruelty meant to humiliate people: satyagrahis were forced to rub their noses on the ground, to crawl on the streets, and to salute every British “sahib”. People were flogged. Villages around Gujranwala in Punjab (now in Pakistan) were even bombed from the air. Seeing the violence spreading on both sides, Gandhi called off the movement. He did not want a struggle that turned violent.

The Khilafat issue and the Non-Cooperation Movement

The Rowlatt satyagraha had been widespread, but it was mostly limited to cities and towns. Gandhi now wanted a much bigger, broader movement that reached the whole country. And he was sure of one thing: such a movement could not succeed unless Hindus and Muslims came together. He looked for an issue that could unite them. He found it in the Khilafat issue.

Here is the background. The First World War had ended with the defeat of Ottoman Turkey. The Ottoman emperor was the Khalifa — the spiritual head of the Muslim world. There were rumours that a harsh peace treaty would be forced on him, stripping away his powers. Many Indian Muslims were deeply upset by this. To defend the Khalifa, a Khilafat Committee was formed in Bombay in March 1919. A new generation of Muslim leaders — the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali — began talking to Gandhi about a united mass action. Gandhi saw a golden chance to bring Hindus and Muslims under one national movement. At the Calcutta session of the Congress in September 1920, he convinced the other leaders to start a Non-Cooperation Movement — in support of both Khilafat and swaraj.

Why “non-cooperation”? Because of the very logic we saw in Figure 2.2. Gandhi argued in Hind Swaraj that British rule survived only because Indians cooperated with it. So if Indians refused to cooperate, that rule would collapse within a year, and swaraj would come.

How would non-cooperation actually work? Gandhi proposed that it should unfold in stages:

• Stage 1 — surrender the titles the government had awarded; and boycott the civil services, the army, the police, the courts, the legislative councils, schools, and foreign goods.

• Stage 2 — if the government responded with repression, then launch a full civil disobedience campaign.

Not everyone in the Congress agreed at first. Many were unwilling to boycott the council elections set for November 1920. Others feared the movement might turn violent. There was an intense tussle inside the Congress between September and December. Finally, at the Nagpur session in December 1920, a compromise was reached and the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted. The great movement was ready to begin.

Differing strands — the same call, different dreams

The Non-Cooperation–Khilafat Movement began in January 1921. Many social groups joined it. But here is the single most important idea in this whole chapter: they all answered the call of “Swaraj”, but the word meant something different to each of them. Figure 2.3 below shows this clearly — one word in the middle, six very different hopes around it.

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Let us walk through each group, and see how their dreams differed.

The movement in the towns. The movement started with the middle class in the cities. Thousands of students left government schools and colleges. Headmasters, teachers and lawyers gave up their jobs and practices. Council elections were boycotted in most provinces (except Madras). On the economic side, the effect was dramatic: foreign goods were boycotted, liquor shops were picketed, and foreign cloth was burnt in huge bonfires. The import of foreign cloth fell by half between 1921 and 1922 (its value dropped from ₹102 crore to ₹57 crore). As people stopped buying imported cloth and wore only Indian cloth, Indian mills and handlooms did more business.

But the town movement slowly slowed down. Why? For practical reasons. Khadi (hand-spun Indian cloth) was often more expensive than cheap mill-made cloth, so poor people could not afford to keep boycotting mill cloth. And boycotting British schools and courts only works if there are Indian schools and courts to use instead — and these were slow to come up. So students and teachers began trickling back to government schools, and lawyers returned to government courts.

Rebellion in the countryside. From the cities, the movement spread to the villages. In Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra, a sanyasi who had once been an indentured labourer in Fiji. Their fight was against the talukdars and landlords who charged terribly high rents and forced peasants to do begar — unpaid, forced labour on the landlords’ farms. The peasant movement demanded a cut in rent, an end to begar, and a social boycott of cruel landlords. In June 1920, Jawaharlal Nehru went around the Awadh villages, listening to grievances, and the Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up. But the peasant movement developed in ways the Congress leaders did not like. As it spread in 1921, the houses of talukdars and merchants were attacked, bazaars were looted, and grain hoards were seized. In many places, peasants believed Gandhi had said no taxes were to be paid and the land would be shared among the poor.

Tribal peasants read swaraj in yet another way. In the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, a militant guerrilla movement rose in the early 1920s. The colonial government had closed off large forest areas, stopping the hill people from grazing cattle or collecting fuelwood and fruit. This was a blow to both their livelihood and their traditional rights. When the government then forced them to do begar for road-building, they revolted. Their leader was Alluri Sitaram Raju, who claimed special powers and praised Gandhi and the Non-Cooperation Movement — but who also insisted that India could be freed only by force, not non-violence. The Gudem rebels attacked police stations and fought a guerrilla war. Raju was captured and executed in 1924, and became a folk hero.

Swaraj in the plantations. For the plantation workers in Assam, freedom had a very specific meaning: the right to move freely in and out of the tea gardens where they were locked in, and to keep a link with the home villages they had come from. Under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859, these workers were not allowed to leave the tea gardens without permission — which was rarely given. When they heard of the Non-Cooperation Movement, thousands defied the authorities, left the plantations, and headed home, believing that “Gandhi Raj” was coming and everyone would get land in their own villages. But they never reached home — they were stranded by a railway and steamer strike, caught by the police, and brutally beaten.

These many visions were not defined by the Congress programme. Each group imagined swaraj as a time when all their own troubles would end. And yet, when tribals chanted Gandhi’s name, or workers linked their struggle to the Congress, they were reaching beyond their own little locality and joining an all-India movement. That was how a single nation began to take shape — out of many different dreams.

Why Gandhi called off Non-Cooperation: Chauri Chaura

In February 1922, something happened that made Gandhi do something startling. At Chauri Chaura, a small place in Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh), a peaceful demonstration in a bazaar turned violent. A clash with the police led to a police station being set on fire, and policemen inside died.

When Gandhi heard of this, he decided to withdraw the Non-Cooperation Movement — at the very moment it was at its height. Many people, then and now, find this hard to understand. Why stop a successful movement just because of one violent incident?

To Gandhi, the reason was the very soul of his method. Remember from Figure 2.2 that satyagraha’s power came from moral force — from staying peaceful even while suffering. The moment protesters turned violent, that moral force was lost. A movement that killed policemen was no different, in spirit, from the violence of the rulers it opposed. Gandhi also felt that ordinary satyagrahis were not yet properly trained in non-violence and were not ready for mass struggle. He believed it was better to pause and prepare than to let the movement betray its own principle. To him, how you fight mattered as much as whether you win. A victory won through violence was, in his eyes, a defeat.

Towards Civil Disobedience

After Non-Cooperation was withdrawn, the Congress argued about what to do next. Some leaders were tired of mass struggle and wanted to fight from inside the councils. C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party to argue for a return to council politics. But younger leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose pushed for more radical mass action and full independence.

Then two things shaped politics in the late 1920s. First, a worldwide economic depression hit. Farm prices began falling from 1926 and collapsed after 1930. Peasants could not sell their harvests or pay their revenue, and by 1930 the countryside was in turmoil. Second, the British set up the Simon Commission.

The Simon Commission, under Sir John Simon, was sent to look into India’s constitutional system and suggest changes. The problem was glaring: it had not a single Indian member — they were all British. How could a body decide India’s future without one Indian on it? When it arrived in 1928, it was greeted everywhere with the slogan “Go back Simon”. All parties, including the Congress and the Muslim League, joined the protests. (In one such protest, the leader Lala Lajpat Rai was badly beaten by the police, and later died of his injuries.)

Trying to calm things, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, offered in October 1929 a vague promise of “dominion status” for India at some unspecified future date, plus a Round Table Conference. This did not satisfy the Congress. In December 1929, at the Lahore Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress formally demanded Purna Swaraj — complete independence. It declared that 26 January 1930 would be celebrated as Independence Day. But the celebrations drew little attention. Gandhi needed to connect this grand, abstract idea of freedom to the real, everyday life of ordinary people. And he found the way.

The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement

Gandhi found his connection in the most ordinary thing imaginable: salt.

This was a stroke of genius, and it is worth pausing to ask why salt. NCERT says salt was used by rich and poor alike, but it is worth seeing the full picture — because the choice of salt is a perfect lesson in how to build a mass movement. Figure 2.4 below shows the four reasons that made salt the ideal symbol.

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So salt was perfect because: (1) everyone uses it, rich and poor alike, so everyone shared the grievance; (2) it was taxed, so even the poorest paid money to the British for a basic food; (3) the government held a monopoly — only the state could make or sell salt, so Indians could not even legally make their own from the sea on their own coast; and (4) breaking the salt law was easy and safe — anyone could do it by simply boiling sea water — so millions could join. To Gandhi, the salt tax and the salt monopoly showed “the most oppressive face of British rule”.

On 31 January 1930, Gandhi sent Viceroy Irwin a letter with eleven demands, mixing general demands with specific ones for different classes — so that every class could find something in it and all could unite. The most stirring demand was to abolish the salt tax. The letter was an ultimatum: if the demands were not met by 11 March, the Congress would launch civil disobedience. Irwin refused to negotiate.

So Gandhi began his famous Salt March. With 78 trusted volunteers, he set out from his Sabarmati ashram and walked over 240 miles (about 24 days, roughly 10 miles a day) to the coastal town of Dandi in Gujarat. Thousands gathered to hear him at every stop. On 6 April 1930, he reached Dandi and ceremonially broke the law by making salt from sea water. This single act launched the Civil Disobedience Movement.

How was Civil Disobedience different from Non-Cooperation? This is a favourite exam question, and the difference is simple but important. Figure 2.5 below puts the two movements side by side.

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So in Non-Cooperation, people simply refused to cooperate. In Civil Disobedience, they went further: they actively broke the colonial laws. Across the country, thousands broke the salt law and made salt. Peasants refused to pay revenue and chaukidari taxes. Village officials resigned. Forest people broke forest laws to collect wood and graze cattle. Foreign cloth was boycotted and liquor shops were picketed.

The government answered with arrests and force. When Abdul Ghaffar Khan was arrested in April 1930, crowds in Peshawar faced armoured cars and police firing, and many died. When Gandhi himself was arrested a month later, workers in Sholapur attacked police posts, courts and railway stations — all symbols of British rule. The government beat peaceful satyagrahis, including women and children, and arrested about 100,000 people.

Faced with this, Gandhi once again called off the movement and signed the Gandhi–Irwin Pact on 5 March 1931. He agreed to attend the Round Table Conference in London, and the government agreed to release the political prisoners. But when Gandhi went to London in December 1931, the talks broke down, and he came home disappointed. He found a fresh wave of repression waiting — leaders jailed, the Congress declared illegal, meetings banned. With deep worry, he relaunched Civil Disobedience. It continued for over a year, but by 1934 it had lost its strength.

Who joined Civil Disobedience — and who did not

Just as before, different groups joined for different reasons — and the limits of the movement teach us as much as its successes.

Rich peasants — like the Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh — joined eagerly. As producers of cash crops, they were hit hard by the trade depression and falling prices. When their cash income vanished, they could not pay the government’s revenue, and the government refused to lower it. So for them, swaraj meant a fight against high revenue. But when the movement was called off in 1931 without the revenue being lowered, they felt let down, and many refused to join again in 1932.

Poor peasants wanted more than lower revenue. Many were small tenants who rented land from landlords. In the depression, they could not pay their rent, and they wanted their unpaid rent to be cancelled (“no rent”). They joined radical movements led by Socialists and Communists. But the Congress, afraid of upsetting the rich peasants and landlords, was unwilling to support “no rent” campaigns. So the bond between the poor peasants and the Congress stayed shaky.

The business class had grown rich and powerful during the war. They wanted protection from foreign imports and a fair exchange rate. They formed bodies like FICCI (1927), and at first strongly supported Civil Disobedience — giving money and refusing to trade in foreign goods. For them, swaraj meant a time when colonial restrictions on business would vanish and trade would flourish freely. But after the Round Table Conference failed, they grew nervous — worried about militant activity, prolonged disruption of business, and the rise of socialism among young Congress members.

Industrial workers mostly stayed away (except in Nagpur), partly because the industrialists were now close to the Congress. Still, some workers joined, adopting ideas like the boycott of foreign goods. But the Congress was reluctant to take up workers’ demands, fearing it would drive away the industrialists.

Women took part on a large scale, a striking new feature of this movement. Thousands came out of their homes to join marches, make salt, and picket foreign cloth and liquor shops. Many went to jail. They came to see service to the nation as a sacred duty. Yet this larger public role did not bring real change in how women’s position was seen: Gandhi felt a woman’s duty was to look after home and hearth, and for a long time the Congress kept women out of positions of real authority, wanting mainly their symbolic presence.

The limits of Civil Disobedience

Not everyone was moved by the abstract idea of swaraj. Two groups, in particular, stood apart — and their reasons reveal the deep cracks inside the national movement.

The dalits and Dr Ambedkar. The dalits — the people then called “untouchables”, who from the 1930s began calling themselves dalit (meaning “oppressed”) — were largely outside the movement. For years the Congress had ignored them, afraid of offending conservative high-caste Hindus. Gandhi declared that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability was not ended. He called them harijan (“children of God”), organised satyagraha for their entry into temples and access to wells, roads and schools, and even cleaned toilets himself to dignify that work. But many dalit leaders wanted a different solution: real political power. Dr B. R. Ambedkar, who founded the Depressed Classes Association in 1930, demanded separate electorates for dalits — seats voted for only by dalits. He clashed with Gandhi over this at the second Round Table Conference. When the British agreed to Ambedkar’s demand, Gandhi began a fast unto death, fearing separate electorates would keep dalits forever cut off from the rest of society. In the end, Ambedkar accepted Gandhi’s position, and the Poona Pact (September 1932) was signed: it gave the Depressed Classes reserved seats in the councils, but voted in by the general electorate. Still, the dalit movement stayed wary of the Congress.

Muslim political organisations. Many Muslim organisations were lukewarm towards Civil Disobedience. After the Non-Cooperation–Khilafat Movement faded, a large section of Muslims felt distant from the Congress. From the mid-1920s, the Congress seemed more visibly tied to openly Hindu groups like the Hindu Mahasabha. Relations between the two communities worsened, with religious processions and riots deepening the distance. The Congress and the Muslim League did try to renegotiate unity — in 1927 it briefly seemed possible — but the key dispute was over representation in future assemblies. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was willing to give up separate electorates if Muslims were guaranteed reserved seats and fair representation, but the talks collapsed at the All Parties Conference in 1928. So when Civil Disobedience began, there was an atmosphere of suspicion. Many Muslims feared that, as a minority, their culture and identity would be swallowed up under a Hindu majority. This fear would grow heavier in the years to come.

The making of a collective national identity

Movements alone do not make a nation. A nation also forms when people feel they belong together. So how did Indians — of different regions, languages and faiths — come to feel like one people? Partly through shared struggle. But also through powerful cultural processes: history and fiction, folklore and songs, prints and symbols.

The most important of these symbols was the figure of Bharat Mata — Mother India. A nation is hard to picture in your head; it has no single face. So people gave the nation a face: a mother goddess. The idea grew from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s hymn “Vande Mataram” (1870s), later included in his novel Anandamath. Moved by the Swadeshi movement, Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata in 1905 — calm, divine and spiritual. Devotion to this mother figure came to mean love of the nation. Figure 2.6 below shows the image and what its symbols meant.

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Two more cultural movements helped. First, a revival of folklore: nationalists toured villages collecting folk tales, songs and legends, believing these held the true, pure spirit of the nation that foreign rule had damaged. Rabindranath Tagore collected ballads and myths in Bengal; Natesa Sastri published a four-volume collection of Tamil folk tales. Second, flags. During the Swadeshi movement a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow) was designed, with eight lotuses for the eight provinces and a crescent moon for Hindus and Muslims. By 1921, Gandhi had designed the Swaraj flag (red, green and white) with a spinning wheel in the centre, standing for self-help. Carrying the flag aloft during marches became an act of defiance.

Finally, history itself was reinterpreted. The British called Indians backward and unfit to rule themselves. In reply, Indians looked into their past and wrote proudly about ancient India’s great achievements in art, science, mathematics, religion and philosophy — a glorious age, they said, that declined only under colonial rule. These histories urged readers to take pride in the past and fight to change the present.

But these efforts had a problem. When the glorious past being celebrated was a Hindu past, and the images came from Hindu tradition, people of other communities felt left out. So the very symbols meant to unite could also divide. What was emerging, in the end, was a nation with many voices — all wanting freedom from colonial rule, but not always agreeing on what that freedom should look like.

Common Mistakes

Let us clear up the misunderstandings that trip students up most often in this chapter.

Quick Check

Test yourself before moving on to the practice problems.

Practice Problems

These are written in the style of CBSE board questions, with full model answers. Try each one yourself before revealing the solution.

Easy

Medium

Challenge

Finally, here is the whole journey of these two decades laid out on a single line, so you can see how one struggle flowed into the next:

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Summary

You should now be able to explain:

• The First World War brought higher taxes, doubled prices, forced recruitment, crop failures and a flu epidemic that killed 12–13 million people. This deep hardship turned into anger against British rule and created the ground for a mass movement.

• Satyagraha is Gandhi’s method of fighting injustice through the force of truth and non-violence — an active struggle, the weapon of the strong, that wins by withdrawing cooperation and appealing to the oppressor’s conscience. Gandhi proved it worked at Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda.

• The Rowlatt Act (jailing people without trial) sparked nationwide protest; the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (13 April 1919) showed the cruelty of colonial rule and enraged the nation.

• The Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–22), joined with the Khilafat issue to unite Hindus and Muslims, asked Indians to refuse to cooperate — boycotting schools, courts, councils, titles and foreign goods. Different groups joined for different meanings of swaraj. Gandhi called it off after the Chauri Chaura violence, because violence destroyed satyagraha’s moral power.

• The Civil Disobedience Movement (1930), begun with the Salt March to Dandi, went further: people actively broke colonial laws. Salt was the perfect symbol — used by all, taxed, a government monopoly, and easy to break.

• Different groups (rich and poor peasants, business class, workers, women) joined for their own reasons; many — dalits and Dr Ambedkar, and several Muslim organisations — stayed away or grew disappointed. The Poona Pact (1932) settled the dispute over separate electorates for dalits.

• A collective national identity grew through shared symbols — the image of Bharat Mata, a revival of folklore, flags like the Swaraj flag, and a proud reinterpretation of history — though Hindu-centred symbols sometimes left other communities out.

What’s Next

You have seen how Indians began to feel like one nation and struggled together for freedom. The next chapter, The Making of a Global World, zooms out from India to the whole planet. It tells how, over centuries, distant parts of the world became tightly connected — through trade, the movement of people, crops, money, ideas, and even diseases. You will learn how this “globalisation” reshaped economies and lives everywhere, how it brought both gains and great suffering (such as for those carried away as indentured labourers, like Baba Ramchandra), and how it links back to the very colonial system that India was fighting in this chapter.