CBSE Class 10 Social Science Nationalism In India Notes Set 03

These CBSE Class 10 History notes for Chapter 2 Nationalism in India cover the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation Movements, the movement in towns, the countryside and the plantations, the Simon Commission, the Salt March and Civil Disobedience Movement, how a sense of collective belonging was built, and the Quit India Movement, with important terms defined at the end.

The Rowlatt Act (1919) and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

The Rowlatt Act (1919) was rushed through the Imperial Legislative Council despite opposition from its Indian members. It gave the colonial government sweeping powers to crush Indian political activities, including the power to detain political prisoners for up to two years without trial. Mahatma Gandhi decided to launch a nationwide Satyagraha against this unjust law.

The sequence of events unfolded as follows:

• 18 March 1919: the Rowlatt Act was passed by the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi; Gandhi issued a call for a nationwide hartal (strike/protest), to be observed on 6 April.
• 6 April 1919: the hartal was observed across the country — rallies were organised in cities, railway workshop workers went on strike, shops shut down, and railways and telegraphs were disrupted.
• 10 April 1919: local leaders were arrested, including Dr Satyapal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew in Amritsar; Gandhi himself was barred from entering Delhi.
• 9 April 1919: Ram Navami celebrations saw Hindus and Muslims uniting together, alarming the colonial authorities, who resolved to suppress any large-scale organised movement early.
• 13 April 1919, morning: on Baisakhi day, after prayers at the Golden Temple, a crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, partly to demand the release of Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew.
• 13 April 1919, about 5:30 pm: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer and his troops opened fire on the unarmed crowd, including women, children and the elderly, for about ten minutes, killing and wounding hundreds of people.

Colonel Reginald Edward Harry Dyer (1864-1927), a temporary Brigadier-General, was responsible for the massacre and became known as the "Butcher of Amritsar". Michael Francis O'Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor of Punjab from 1913 to 1919, publicly endorsed Dyer's action. Martial law was imposed, under which no more than two people were allowed to assemble in one place, in an effort to suppress organised protest.

News of the massacre spread rapidly, provoking strikes, clashes with police, and attacks on government property across the country; the government responded with ruthless repression, including public floggings and the aerial bombing of villages. Seeing the growing violence, Gandhi called off this phase of protest.

The Khilafat Movement (1919-1924)

The Khilafat Movement gave Mahatma Gandhi an opportunity to bring Hindus and Muslims together under a common cause. After Ottoman Turkey's defeat in the First World War, rumours spread that a harsh peace treaty would be imposed on the Ottoman Emperor, the spiritual head (Khalifa) of the Islamic world. In response, Indian Muslims formed a Khilafat Committee in Bombay in March 1919, led by figures such as Maulana Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Hasrat Mohani. A new generation of Muslim leaders, including the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, began discussing united mass action on the issue with Gandhi. In 1920, an alliance was formed between the Khilafat leaders and the Indian National Congress, with both sides agreeing to work together for the causes of Khilafat and Swaraj; Indians also donated funds to support the Ankara government of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey.

The Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-1922)

In his 1909 work Hind Swaraj, Gandhi argued that British rule in India survived only because Indians cooperated with it, and that if Indians withdrew that cooperation, British rule would collapse. After the repression of Jallianwala Bagh and the denial of justice that followed, Gandhi concluded that the only effective way to assert national honour, and prevent a repeat of such wrongs, was to establish Swaraj. The Non-Cooperation Movement was formally adopted by the Congress inSeptember 1920, and launched in support of the Khilafat Movement.

Gandhi proposed that the movement would unfold in stages: it would begin with the surrender of government titles and the boycott of civil services, the army, the police, courts, legislative councils, schools and foreign goods; if the government continued to use repression, a full civil disobedience campaign, including the non-payment of taxes, would follow. The movement was formally adopted in December 1920 and launched in January 1921.

Movement in the towns: it began with participation from the middle class — teachers resigned, lawyers gave up legal practice, and students left government-controlled schools and colleges. Council elections were boycotted in most provinces, except Madras, where the Justice Party, representing non-Brahmans, came to power. On the economic front, merchants and traders boycotted foreign goods, liquor shops were picketed, and foreign cloth was publicly burned; the production of Indian textiles and handloom cloth increased, and imports of foreign cloth halved between 1921 and 1922.

Movement in the countryside: in Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra, a sanyasi who had earlier worked as an indentured labourer in Fiji. Peasants, who were forced to perform begar (unpaid forced labour) on landlords' farms, demanded the abolition of begar and a reduction in revenue; the movement here was directed chiefly against talukdars and landlords who extracted high rents and other cesses. Panchayats organised "nai-dhobi" bandhs, where barbers and washermen refused services to oppressive landlords, and in many places local leaders told peasants that Gandhi had declared that no taxes were to be paid and land would be redistributed among the poor. In June 1920, Jawaharlal Nehru began visiting Awadh's villages to understand peasant grievances; in October, he and others founded the Oudh Kisan Sabha, which had over 300 branches within a month. In 1921, the peasant movement intensified, with attacks on the houses of talukdars and merchants, looted bazaars, and seized grain stores.

Tribal peasants: in the early 1920s, a militant guerrilla movement arose in the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, led by Alluri Sitaram Raju. Colonial authorities had closed off large forest areas, preventing hill people from grazing cattle or collecting firewood, violating what they saw as their traditional rights; when the government also began demanding begar for road construction, the hill people revolted, attacking police posts and killing British officials. Raju was captured and executed in 1924.

Swaraj on the plantations: for plantation labourers in Assam, freedom meant the ability to move freely in and out of the plantations while maintaining ties to their native villages. Under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859, plantation workers were not permitted to leave the tea gardens without permission. On hearing of the Non-Cooperation Movement, thousands of workers defied this restriction, believing that "Gandhi Raj" was coming and that land would be given to everyone in their home villages; many never reached home, stranded by a railway and steamer strike, and were caught and brutally beaten by the police.

The government's response: police firing claimed a number of lives; the Congress and Khilafat volunteer organisations were declared unlawful; public meetings were banned, and most leaders, other than Gandhi himself, were arrested. Prominent figures who joined the movement included C. Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai Patel, Gopabandhu Das, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru, while Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das gave up their legal practices to join it.

Withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement (February 1922): Gandhi called off the movement after a violent mob at Chauri Chaura, in the United Provinces, attacked a police station, killing 22 policemen. He felt the movement was turning violent in too many places, and that a largely untrained mass of satyagrahis could not sustain a non-violent struggle against a far more powerful colonial force. Khadi cloth also proved more expensive than British mill-made cloth, putting it out of reach for the poor, and there were no fully developed alternative institutions to replace the British ones being boycotted, so many students, teachers and lawyers eventually returned to them.

Even so, the movement had carried nationalist sentiment to every corner of the country and politicised every section of the population, boycotted foreign goods and halved foreign cloth imports, built unity around shared grievances against British rule while establishing Gandhi as the unchallenged national leader, and led to the founding of national institutions such as the Gujarat Vidyapith, Kashi Vidyapith and Bengal National University.

Towards Civil Disobedience

The Swaraj Party (1923): leaders such as Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, who wanted to continue political activity through the legislative councils, formed the Swaraj Party in December 1922 and were known as Swarajists; they argued it was important to oppose British policies from within the councils as well.

The Simon Commission (1927): a commission set up in November 1927 to examine India's constitutional structure and recommend reforms, officially known as the Indian Statutory Commission. When it arrived in India in 1928, it was met with protests from all parties, since it included no Indian members at all, and was widely seen as a direct insult to Indian self-respect, with no sign that the government was willing to consider demands for Swaraj. The Simon Commission eventually led to the Government of India Act, 1935, which became the basis for parts of the present Indian Constitution, and its arrival gave fresh impetus to the independence movement by galvanising leaders and the public.

To placate Indian leaders, Viceroy Lord Irwin offered an ambiguous promise of eventual Dominion status for India and proposed a Round Table Conference.

Purna Swaraj (1930): in December 1929, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Lahore session of the Congress formally adopted the demand for "Purna Swaraj" (complete independence), and declared that 26 January 1930 would be observed as Independence Day, when people would pledge to struggle for complete independence. The occasion drew relatively little public attention, prompting Gandhi to look for a way to connect this abstract idea of freedom to more concrete, everyday issues.

The Round Table Conferences: a series of conferences in London to discuss constitutional reform in India. The first was held from 12 November 1930 to 19 January 1931; most Congress leaders could not attend it, as many were then engaged in the Civil Disobedience Movement. The second was held from 7 September to 1 December 1931, with Gandhi himself attending on behalf of the Congress. The third and final session was held in November 1932, with most major Indian political figures, including the Congress and Britain's Labour Party, staying away.

The Poona Pact (September 1932): signed between Dr B. R. Ambedkar and Gandhi, providing reserved seats for the "depressed classes" in provincial and central legislative councils, to be elected by the general electorate.

The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement

On 31 January 1930, Gandhi sent a letter to Viceroy Irwin setting out eleven demands and announcing his planned Dandi March against the tax on salt. Salt was consumed by rich and poor alike, and the government's monopoly over its production and sale, enforced through this tax, was, in Gandhi's view, one of the most oppressive aspects of British rule. When Irwin refused to negotiate, Gandhi set out with 78 volunteers on the Salt March, covering about 240 km over 24 days from his ashram at Sabarmati to the coastal town of Dandi in Gujarat. On 6 April 1930, the marchers reached Dandi and ceremonially broke the law by making salt from seawater, marking the start of the Civil Disobedience Movement.

The movement spread quickly: K. Kelappan led a similar march in the Malabar region, from Calicut to Payyanur, while C. Rajagopalachari led one along the southeast coast, from Tiruchirapalli to Vedaranyam in Tamil Nadu. Thousands of women also took part in the satyagraha. Around 60,000 people, including Gandhi himself, were eventually arrested; its non-violent character made the movement difficult for the government to suppress through force alone, and it visibly shook the colonial administration.

Causes of the Civil Disobedience Movement included: the failure of the demand for Dominion status; the Nehru Report of 1928 not being considered by the British; a new generation of younger Congress leadership, with Jawaharlal Nehru taking up the call for Purna Swaraj; the formation of the all-British Simon Commission, with no Indian representation; protests against the arrest of revolutionaries; and a general policy of repression by the government.

Effects of the movement (1930-1934): colonial laws were openly violated, with salt illegally manufactured in numerous places and forest laws defied; the movement spread across the country; foreign cloth was burned and liquor shops picketed; and many peasants refused to pay revenue and the chaukidari tax.

Different groups, different perspectives:

The business class: Indian merchants and industrialists, who had grown wealthy during the First World War, wanted protection from foreign imports. Organisations such as the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress (formed in 1920) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI, set up in 1927) criticised colonial control over the Indian economy and supported the Civil Disobedience Movement, at least in its early phase.

Poor peasants: mainly wanted lower revenue demands, but since the Congress was reluctant to support outright "no rent" campaigns in most areas, its relationship with poorer peasants remained uncertain.

Rich peasants: communities such as the wealthy Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh, hit hard by the trade slump and falling prices, joined the movement enthusiastically, seeing the struggle for Swaraj as, for them, chiefly a struggle against high revenue demands.

Industrial workers: did not participate in large numbers, except in the Nagpur region, partly because industrialists grew closer to the Congress during this period, which kept workers somewhat distant; still, there were railway worker strikes in 1930 and dock worker strikes in 1932.

Women: participated on a large scale, joining protest marches, manufacturing salt, and picketing foreign cloth and liquor shops; many went to jail. In urban areas, participants tended to come from high-caste families, while in rural areas they typically came from rich peasant households.

The government's response: included the arrest of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in April 1930 and of Gandhi himself in May 1930, and the promulgation of the Bengal Ordinance on 23 August 1930, which made life very difficult for freedom fighters. Gandhi eventually agreed to attend the Round Table Conference, travelling to London in December 1931 for the second session, after the government agreed to release political prisoners; the movement was called off under the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, signed on 5 March 1931. It was later relaunched, but had largely lost momentum by 1934, with little concrete progress achieved for India as a result of the second Round Table Conference.

Limitations of the Civil Disobedience Movement included: many peasant demands going unmet; limited participation by industrial workers; limited participation by Dalits, who felt the Congress remained too closely aligned with upper-caste interests; reduced participation by many peasants and business groups when the movement was relaunched; the spread of some militant activity; and reduced Muslim participation, as many Muslims grew wary of the Hindu Mahasabha's and Muslim League's communal propaganda and feared Hindu dominance.

Non-Cooperation vs. Civil Disobedience: the Non-Cooperation Movement was launched in September 1920 and withdrawn in February 1922 (following the Chauri Chaura incident of 4-5 February 1922); it aimed to bring the working of government to a halt simply by withdrawing cooperation, and remained largely confined to certain parts of the country. The Civil Disobedience Movement began on 12 March 1930 with the launch of the Salt Satyagraha; it aimed to paralyse the administration by openly breaking specific laws, spread more widely across the country, but saw less participation from Muslims, amid communal propaganda from the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, and was eventually withdrawn following the Gandhi-Irwin Pact.

The Sense of Collective Belonging

Nationalism spreads when people across many regions and communities come to share a sense of collective belonging, often represented through a common figure or image.

Fiction, folklore and songs: in the 1870s, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay composed "Vande Mataram" as a hymn to the motherland; it was later included in his novel Anandamath and widely sung during Bengal's Swadeshi movement. Rabindranath Tagore painted a well-known image of "Bharat Mata". In the late nineteenth century, nationalists also began collecting folk tales sung by village bards, travelling from village to village to gather them — for example, Natesa Sastri published a four-volume collection, The Folklore of Southern India, believing that such folklore constituted a form of national literature.

Redefining history: by the end of the nineteenth century, many Indians felt that Indian history needed to be reinterpreted to inspire pride in the nation, prompting a search for evidence of India's great historical achievements.

Icons and symbols: as the national movement grew, nationalist leaders increasingly recognised the power of icons and symbols to unite people and build a sense of nationalism. A tricolour flag, designed during Bengal's Swadeshi movement, included eight lotuses representing the eight provinces of British India and a crescent moon representing Hindus and Muslims together. By 1921, Gandhi had devised the Swaraj flag, a tricolour with a spinning wheel (charkha) at its centre.

Positive and negative aspects of the national struggle: the movement succeeded in bringing diverse groups and classes together into a common struggle for freedom, with India emerging as a nation with many voices united against colonial rule. At the same time, different groups often participated with different personal goals in mind, so that freedom from colonial rule meant different things to different people — which sometimes led to tension between groups and strained the unity of the movement.

The Quit India Movement

When the Second World War began in September 1939, India was declared a participant on the Allied side without being consulted. On 10 August 1940, the Viceroy announced the "August Offer" to try to secure Indian participation in the war effort. On 11 March 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that a mission led by Sir Stafford Cripps would be sent to India to try to resolve the constitutional crisis. Following the failure of the Cripps Mission, Indian leaders launched the Quit India Movement in 1942, with Gandhi drafting the Quit India Resolution and issuing his famous call to action, "Do or Die".

Important Terms

Colonialism: the policy or practice of gaining full or partial political control over another country, occupying it and exploiting it economically.
Movement: a set of coordinated efforts aimed at achieving a shared goal.
Nationalism: a sense of patriotism and pride in one's own nation.
Nation-State: a state in which a shared sense of identity and heritage is built not just by its rulers, but by the population as a whole.
Hartal: a general strike or shutdown, used as a form of protest against a government action or political situation.
Khalifa: a title for the spiritual leader of Islam.
Picket: to stand outside a workplace or venue to protest or discourage others from entering, typically during a strike or boycott.
Plantation: a large agricultural estate growing a particular crop, typically worked by hired or indentured labourers.
Boycott: to express disapproval by refusing to buy a product or take part in an activity.
Kheda Satyagraha (1918): a Satyagraha led by Gandhi in the Kheda district of Gujarat; the third such movement in the independence struggle, after the Champaran Satyagraha and the Ahmedabad mill strike.
Champaran Movement (1916): Gandhi's first Satyagraha in India, launched to oppose the injustices faced by tenant farmers under the indigo plantation system in Champaran, Bihar.
Chauri Chaura: the incident on 4-5 February 1922, in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces, in which a violent crowd attacked and set fire to a police station, prompting Gandhi to call off the Non-Cooperation Movement.