Modern Indian History and Freedom Struggle

Social and educational reformers

Social and educational reformers of modern India worked to remove caste discrimination, widen access to schooling, improve the status of women and challenge orthodox religious practices. Many of them founded schools, colleges, mandals and samajs, and many wrote essays or pamphlets to spread their ideas. A useful way to remember them is to link each reformer with the institution he or she founded and the reform that person championed. The founder of the Central Hindu School at Benares in 1898 was Annie Besant, and that school later grew into the Central Hindu College, which Madan Mohan Malaviya helped develop into Banaras Hindu University. Malaviya is therefore associated with the university, not with the founding of the school.

Reformers were often known by a title or pen name rather than by their full names. Gopal Hari Deshmukh wrote under the pen name Lokahitwadi, meaning a well-wisher of the people, and was known by that name in Maharashtra. Thakkar Bapa, the name by which Amritlal Vithaldas Thakkar was popularly known, is linked with the Bhil Seva Mandal, founded in 1922 at Dohad in Gujarat for the welfare of tribal communities.

Some reformers worked through the legislature. In 1911, Gopal Krishna Gokhale moved a bill in the Imperial Legislative Council seeking compulsory and free primary education throughout British India. The bill was opposed by the government and was not passed, but it remains an important landmark in the history of education policy.

Reform movements also arose in southern India. The Self-Respect Movement, started in 1925 in Tamil Nadu by E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, popularly known as Periyar, campaigned against caste discrimination and for rationalism and equality, and it operated separately from the Indian National Congress.

Reformers based their arguments on different sources of authority. Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the Arya Samaj in 1875, urged Hindus to return to the Vedas, which he regarded as the true foundation of religion, and he rejected later practices such as image worship and the authority of the Puranas.

Orthodox groups opposed reform as well. Radhakanta Deb founded the Hindu Dharma Sabha in 1830 as a conservative body that stood against the reformist campaigns associated with Ram Mohan Roy, who had founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828. Keshab Chandra Sen, by contrast, led the Brahmo Samaj later in the nineteenth century.

Among the Servants of India Society, Hriday Nath Kunzru is credited with founding the Seva Samiti at Allahabad in 1914, a social service organisation linked with the Society's work. Several other Society members were prominent, but they are not credited with this founding.

Women reformers and writers also contributed to this field. Tarabai Shinde wrote the Marathi book Stri Purush Tulana, published in 1882, which criticised the colonial and patriarchal assumption that men alone enjoyed the rights and benefits of change. Sarojini Naidu led a women's delegation to London to demand the female franchise, so her role lies in political campaigning rather than in medicine or writing. Pandita Ramabai is known for her work in women's education and welfare, not for the book named above.

Nationalist and revolutionary organisations

Nationalist and revolutionary organisations of the early twentieth century differed in their methods. Some worked for armed revolution, some organised emigrants abroad, some built political programmes inside the Congress, and some sought independence through mass non-violent campaigns. Knowing the founding members, headquarters and leaders of each body is the key to answering questions on them. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association was formed in September 1928 at a meeting in Delhi, and its founder members included Bhagat Singh, Jatindranath Das, Ajoy Ghosh and Phanindranath Ghosh.

Within the Indian National Congress, the period after 1920 saw debate over council entry. The No-Changers opposed entry into the legislatures set up under the Government of India Act, 1919, and wanted to continue the boycott programme. Leaders such as Rajagopalachari and Kasturi Ranga Iyengar were prominent No-Changers. Vithalbhai Patel, by contrast, was a Swarajist, the group led with Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das that contested council elections in order to obstruct the government from within.

The Ghadar Party was founded in 1913 among Indian emigrants on the Pacific coast of the United States. Its headquarters was at San Francisco, where it was set up at the Yugantar Ashram, and it brought out the newspaper Ghadar from there. The movement took its name from this weekly, which was published in several Indian languages. Sohan Singh Bhakna and Lala Har Dayal were associated with its leadership.

Revolutionary literature was also an important part of this movement. Sachindranath Sanyal, a founder of the Hindustan Republican Association, wrote Bandi Jivan, published in 1922, which describes life as a revolutionary prisoner. Other well-known figures of the period, such as Savarkar, are known for their own books, and their works should not be confused with this one.

Subhas Chandra Bose reorganised the Indian National Army in Southeast Asia. After its formation, he recruited large numbers of Indian soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese army, and he organised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, a women's combat unit named after the queen of Jhansi who fought in 1857. Both measures were part of the same programme.

East India Company trade and business

The East India Company began as a trading body, and its commercial activities in India changed over time, especially after the Company acquired political power. Its trade rights were restricted by a series of Charter Acts, and the Company's commercial privileges were gradually withdrawn. The Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company's monopoly of trade with India, though it did not at once end the monopoly of trade with China. The Charter Act of 1833 ended the Company's monopoly of the China trade, and after that its role as a commercial body in India also came to an end.

A dastak was a trade pass or permit that allowed goods to move without paying the customary transit duties. In the eighteenth century, Company servants misused dastaks to carry on private trade, which damaged the revenue of the Nawabs of Bengal. The word therefore denotes a permit for trade, not a signature, a land document or a tax.

The British also shaped the railway system in India through a policy that favoured private investors. Under this arrangement, the government provided land free of cost to the railway companies and guaranteed a return of about 5 percent on the capital invested, which the government made up if the lines ran at a loss or earned too little profit. The railways were run by private companies under this guarantee system and were not jointly managed by the government.

Colonial economic policy also led to deindustrialisation, the decline of Indian handicrafts under competition from British manufactured goods. Cheap machine-made cloth from Lancashire mills flooded the Indian market, and handloom cotton weavers suffered the most severe loss among the affected industries. Cotton textiles therefore show the clearest case of this decline in the nineteenth century.

After Independence, British managing agencies in India were gradually sold to Indian business houses. The Soorajmull-Nagarmull group of Calcutta acquired McLeod & Co., a British agency house with tea and other interests in eastern India, which is the firm linked with this transfer of ownership. Other British agency houses, such as Octavius Steel, Davenport and Andrew Yule, were separate firms and were not the ones taken over by this group.

Anglo-Maratha treaties and wars

The Anglo-Maratha conflicts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were marked by a series of treaties, conventions and wars, and students must know the sequence of these agreements and the wars they ended or affected. The First Anglo-Maratha War lasted from 1775 to 1782. It began with the Treaty of Surat in 1775, a short-lived agreement with Raghunathrao, and was followed by the Treaty of Purandar in 1776, which the Bombay Council later disavowed. The Convention of Wadgaon in 1779 was a British defeat that was repudiated, so the fighting continued.

The war was finally concluded by the Treaty of Salbai in 1782, which was signed between the East India Company and Mahadji Scindia. The treaty restored the pre-war position, although the British retained Salsette Island. Because it ended the conflict, the Treaty of Salbai is the agreement associated with the close of the First Anglo-Maratha War, while the earlier treaties and conventions did not end it.

The Second Anglo-Maratha War was connected with the Treaty of Bassein, signed on 31 December 1802 between the British East India Company and Peshwa Baji Rao II. Under this treaty the Peshwa accepted the Subsidiary Alliance, which placed British troops in his territory and brought his foreign relations under British control. The treaty was signed by the Peshwa himself, not by other Maratha chiefs such as the Holkars or the Scindias.

Salt Satyagraha

The Salt Satyagraha of 1930 was the most widely known campaign of the Civil Disobedience Movement. It protested against the salt tax and the government monopoly on salt, and it began with the march to Dandi in March-April 1930 led by Mahatma Gandhi. The movement was not limited to men. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a socialist leader of the Congress, persuaded Gandhiji to allow women to take part, and women then joined the protests in large numbers across the country.

The chronology of the events around this movement is important for answering questions. The Dandi March took place in 1930, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was signed in March 1931, and the Second Round Table Conference was held in London from September to December 1931. The Muslim League's resolution demanding a separate state, usually called the Pakistan Resolution, was adopted in March 1940, which places it much later than the Salt Satyagraha.

Salt was made in various coastal areas, and protests were organised at several salt-making sites. Sanikatta, a coastal salt-making site in Uttara Kannada district, is located in Karnataka and became linked with the Salt Satyagraha. Gujarat is associated with Dandi, where the march began, while Tamil Nadu and Kerala have other associations and did not host the Sanikatta works.

Nationalist newspapers

Nationalist newspapers and journals were vital instruments for spreading political ideas in colonial India. Many were founded or edited by leaders who used them to express national opinion, criticise government policy and mobilise public support. Each paper is linked with a particular editor, so it is important to match the newspaper with its founder or editor. Kesari, the Marathi weekly, was founded in 1881 by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who is also known as Lokmanya Tilak, and it was published alongside the English weekly Mahratta.

Mahatma Gandhi edited Navajivan, a journal through which he explained his ideas on non-violence and social reform, while Tilak edited the Mahratta and Surendranath Banerjea edited The Bengalee. Journals such as Young India and Harijan are also associated with Gandhi, but they are different from Kesari.

Several Indian journals of the period were linked with reform and political causes. Kudi Arasu, the Tamil weekly, was associated with E.V. Ramaswami Naicker. The Kisan Bulletin was linked with Indulal Yagnik, the Bombay Chronicle was associated with Pherozeshah Mehta, and the pamphlet Bhawani Mandir was written by Aurobindo Ghosh. Matching each publication with the right person requires knowing these individual associations.

Early Indian political associations

The early political associations of India were regional bodies formed by educated Indians before the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. They presented local public opinion to the colonial government and prepared the ground for an all-India movement. Their dates of formation are a frequent subject of questions, so it is useful to learn the year and the place of each. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was established in Pune in 1870 by leaders including M.G. Ranade and G.V. Joshi, and it was one of the earliest organised public bodies of its kind.

The Indian Association, founded in 1876 by Surendranath Banerjea and his associates in Calcutta, was another early body. The Madras Mahajan Sabha followed in 1884, and the Bombay Presidency Association was formed in 1885 by leaders such as Pherozeshah Mehta and Badruddin Tyabji.

The Indian National Congress grew out of these regional efforts. Surendranath Banerjee and his group planned an Indian National Conference at Calcutta in 1883, which was an early attempt to unite Indians across the country. Allan Octavian Hume later founded the Indian National Congress in 1885 as a body meant to act as a safety valve for the discontent of the educated middle class, rather than as a rival designed to voice the grievances of the poor and marginalised.

Land revenue settlements

Land revenue settlements determined who paid the land revenue to the state and how that revenue was fixed. The three main systems in British India were the Permanent Settlement, the Mahalwari system and the Ryotwari system, and each gave a different role to zamindars, peasants and village communities. In the ryotwari system, the cultivator, or ryot, paid revenue directly to the state without an intermediary. This was a direct contract between the ryot and the state, and the settlement was usually fixed for about thirty years. Because the system bypassed the zamindars, it weakened the former intermediary elite rather than strengthening it, so the statement that it strengthened the zamindars is the incorrect one. Ryotwari was adopted mainly in southern and western India.

The Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal fixed the revenue demand on zamindars, who were given hereditary rights as landholders. Under the arrangement, zamindars were expected to disband their armed retainers, which reduced their military power. Within the villages, however, the jotedars, substantial peasant cultivators who controlled large holdings and sub-leases, often exercised more effective authority than the zamindars.

Rural cultivation in Bengal also involved sharecropping arrangements. Bargadars and adhiyars were sharecroppers who cultivated land they did not own, so they could not be described as owners of the land they worked. Understanding these tenure relationships is essential for judging statements about the Bengal countryside under the Permanent Settlement.

Quit India movement

The Quit India Movement, launched by the Indian National Congress in August 1942, demanded an immediate end to British rule in India. Its leaders were arrested within hours of the call, so the struggle was carried forward largely by younger activists and local leaders who worked underground. In several regions they set up parallel administrations, known as prati sarkars, which tried to run local government and keep the movement alive. The best-known example was in Satara district of Maharashtra, where young leaders organised seva dals (volunteer corps) and tufan dals (village-level units) to sustain the rebel administration. The movement also produced local martyrs who died in clashes with the police during the 1942-43 phase, such as Matangini Hazra in Bengal and Lakshman Naik in Odisha. Students often confuse Quit India with the Non-Cooperation or Civil Disobedience movements, but Quit India was a demand for the immediate withdrawal of the British, not a boycott or a salt campaign.

Gandhi's early career in India

Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 and began his public work in India gradually, first through speeches and local campaigns before he led mass movements. His first major public appearance in India is generally taken to be the speech he gave at the inauguration of the Banaras Hindu University in February 1916. In the next few years he led a series of local struggles: the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 against indigo planters, the Kheda campaign of 1918, and the Ahmedabad mill workers' strike of 1918, which was connected with the Satyagraha Sabha. The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 then brought him to national prominence. Champaran (1917) was the earliest of these events, and the Ahmedabad mill strike and the Satyagraha Sabha both belong to 1918, which places the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 last in any chronological sequence of these events.

Non-Cooperation Movement

The Non-Cooperation Movement, adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1920 under Gandhi's leadership, aimed at withdrawing cooperation from the British government through boycotts and self-reliance. Its action programme included the surrender of titles and honours conferred by the government, the boycott of government-affiliated schools and colleges, courts and legislative councils, and the boycott of foreign cloth. It also called for extending the Congress organisation down to the village and mohalla level. The call to renounce voluntary associations with the government was part of this programme. Taking control of the State's law and order machinery was never part of the Non-Cooperation action plan, since the movement was built on non-violent withdrawal rather than on seizing state power. The movement was suspended in 1922 after the Chauri Chaura incident. It should not be confused with the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930, which centred on defiance of the salt law, or with the Swadeshi movement that opposed the partition of Bengal in 1905.

European trading companies in India

The Portuguese, Dutch, French and English East India Companies competed for trade and political influence in India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Dutch East India Company was a major rival of the English in the spice trade, and its ambitions on the southwest coast of India were checked by local rulers. In 1741 Marthanda Varma, the ruler of Travancore, defeated the Dutch at the Battle of Colachel. The Dutch commander Eustachius De Lannoy was taken prisoner, and this victory ended Dutch political ambitions in the region. Students should not confuse this battle with later contests such as the Battle of Wandiwash in 1760, which was fought between the British and the French in the Carnatic. Battles such as Porto Novo and Pollilore were fought between Hyder Ali and the British, and Rakshasi-Tangadi (1565) was a defeat of the Vijayanagara Empire by the Deccan sultanates.

Indian social movements

Indian social movements addressed caste, religion, gender and livelihood, and they are often studied by their period of launch. The Satyashodhak Samaj, founded by Jyotiba Phule in 1873, challenged caste hierarchy and promoted the rights of lower castes. The Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 in Gujarat was a peasant tax-resistance campaign led by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The Chipko Movement began in 1973 in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, where villagers embraced trees to prevent their felling, and it is an environmental movement. In chronological order, the Satyashodhak Samaj came first, followed by the Bardoli Satyagraha, and the Chipko Movement came last.Temple entry campaigns formed another strand of social reform. In 1930 Dr. B. R. Ambedkar led a satyagraha at the Kalaram temple in Nashik, Maharashtra, to secure entry for Dalits. The Vaikom satyagraha in Kerala is another famous temple entry movement, but the Kalaram temple is not located there.

Slavery Abolition Act 1843 (India)

Act V of 1843 declared slavery illegal in British India by withdrawing legal recognition from it. Its most important feature was that the courts were no longer to enforce a master's claims over slaves, so masters could not use the judicial system to assert their rights over them. The Act did not give masters the right to keep slaves tied to their estates, and it did not transfer land ownership to slaves. Its purpose was to end the legal support for slavery rather than to create new rights for the enslaved, and this distinction is the key to answering questions on the Act.

British Indian Medical Service

The Indian Medical Service (IMS) was the medical arm of the British administration in India. Its origin is traced to the medical establishment set up by the East India Company in 1764, which was first meant to look after the Company's troops. Over time its responsibilities widened to include civil health and sanitary duties. Entry was made by a competitive examination, and the service was not closed to Indians. Indians were admitted gradually, so a statement that the service never admitted Indians is incorrect. Students should remember the 1764 origin and the troop-care purpose as the first features of the service.