The prelude
(1857-1917)

To trace the history of a movement that is European in historical origin and proletarian in character, in an Asian ‘peasant country’ like India, one has to start with an understanding of two inter-related processes : (a) the changing social structure and political milieu of India under British rule and (b) the evolution of the guiding ideology of this movement on the question of revolution in such countries. The first part of our Introduction section is, therefore, devoted to this purpose.


Karl Marx and Nineteenth Century India Evolution of Marxist-Leninist Thought on
Revolution in the East
Anti-British and Other Movements
Upto 1917


Karl Marx And Nineteenth Century India

Karl Marx, whose interest in India was evident from such writings as the incomplete Notes on Indian History, referred to the British plunder of this resourceful country on many occasions in his Capital, e.g.,

“The English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India. The Governor-General reported in 1834-35 : ‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’ ”[1]

At what rate the colonial octopus was sucking India dry will be evident from a comparison between the two halves of the century. Whereas the first fifty years saw seven famines in which about 1.5 million people lost their lives, in the second half there were 28 famines resulting in 28.5 million deaths. Within the second half, again, the first 25 years (i.e., the third quarter of the century) saw 10 famines compared to 18 in the next (i.e., the last quarter).[2] This inhuman drainage of wealth was denounced with great patriotic feelings by early nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji, a successful businessman and Congress leader whose Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was published in London in 1901, and Justice Ranade. However, this early economic critique of colonialism, progressive as it was for the day, naturally suffered from two basic weaknesses. In the first place, they considered the inhuman plunder of India as something alien to the true nature of the great British (hence the remarkable word “Un-British” in the title of Dadabhai Naoroji’s book) and, secondly, they had no clear idea as to what this devastation will lead to. On both counts, Karl Marx had provided a strikingly deeper assessment half a century ago. Writing in the pages of New York Daily Tribune in early 1850s, he showed that there was nothing Un-British about this plunder, which was a normal rule of British colonialism, indeed of bourgeois colonialism in general; and that this destruction of medieval India was at the same time laying the foundation of a new, capitalist India. He thus noted the twin historical roles of British rule in India — the destructive and the regenerating. Most importantly, whereas the bourgeois illusions about some inherent greatness of the ‘world’s most civilised people’ led men like Naoroji to a course of fervent appeals after appeals to the true self of the magnanimous British, Marx had put forward a radically different revolutionary perspective. For Indians to “reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie”, said Marx, either of two conditions had to be fulfilled : a proletarian revolution in England or the overthrow of British rule by the Indians themselves. Already discernible in this clear contrast between the two seminal projections of the bourgeois and the proletarian viewpoints are the germs of the future conflict between the two major political trends within India’s freedom struggle : one led by Gandhi’s Congress; the other — by the communists. As we shall see subsequently, with the former, even mass struggles were to be conceived of as forms and methods of appealing to the slumbering British conscience; for the latter, even participation in Gandhian programmes would be taken as steps toward organising a popular uprising to overthrow the British yoke. It is in the fitness of things, therefore, that we open the Documents section with extracts from a couple of articles by Marx (Text  I 1 and I2), which also provide the briefest possible insight into an India in transition. Marx had to work with scanty information about India and subsequent research has pointed out certain inaccuracies in some details, but the main propositions of these articles stand basically corroborated by history.[3]

Proportionate to the worsening colonial plunder, however, revolts of the people became more and more widespread. The whole of the nineteenth century, particularly its second half, saw numerous peasant and tribal uprisings and revolts by native princes and feudal lords whose estates were usurped by the greedy British. Of these, mention must be made of the rebellions by the Kols and Bhils of Bombay presidency, which raged intermittently through 1818-31, 1839 and 1844-46; the Gond revolt in Orissa in 1846; the great Santhal Hool (Total Attack) of 1855 in Chhotanagpur (Bihar); the Indigo Rebellion of 1859-62 in Bengal; the 1879 peasant revolt in Maharashtra led by Vasudev Balwant Phadke; the Rampa (then in Madras province, now in Andhra) peasant rebellion of 1879-80 and the Ulgulan (Great Tumult) of Birsa Munda in Ranchi (Bihar) in 1889-90. The greatest of them, however, was the national outburst of 1857, which is popularly known as the Sepoy Mutiny and which Marx, again with his profound sense of history, immediately described as the “First Indian war of Independence”. This was indeed the first grave challenge to the British rule. Starting as a revolt by sepoys of Berhampur, Barrackpur (both in West Bengal) and then  Meerut (UP), it soon developed into a popular uprising in some parts of the country with the peasantry at its core. It was joined by practically every section of the population, including cheated native rulers like the Rani of Jhansi (now in UP), illtreated zamindars like Kunwar Singh of Bihar, disgruntled Muslim leaders like Maulavi Ahmadullah — men and women who, along with talented commanders like Nana Saheb and Tantia Tope, led the revolt in vast tracts of Northern and Central India. Superior fire power and better organisation finally enabled the British to crush the rebellion by 1859, but not before the thousands who embraced martyrdom gave the arrogant British a shudder in the spine. Their immediate reaction was to transfer the responsibility of governing the country from the hands of the East India Company to Queen Victoria; later they took more profound lessons and sought to forge closer alliance with native princes and feudal heads.

There is an old debate in the communist movement of our country on the assessment of 1857. One opinion, best represented by Rajani Palme Dutt and MN Roy, held that the revolt was “nothing more than the last spasm of dying feudalism” to reestablish itself and therefore “socially a reactionary movement”, although it was revolutionary “in so far as it aimed at the overthrow of foreign domination” (Roy in India in Transition). Countering this view the CPI(ML) sought to prove that the revolt of 1857 was revolutionary because “it was basically a peasant rebellion”, with “peasants in their thousands and tens of thousands” fighting “with arms in hand”.[4] Both the views miss the point that the objective character of the revolt was determined neither by the fact that almost all the heroes and leaders belonged to feudal classes nor by whether the broad peasantry was actively involved, but by the target of the attack. Unlike other revolts of the nineteenth century, that of 1857 was not localised or narrowly sectional in character and objectively it sought to resolve the principal social contradiction (British rule versus all sections of Indians). Thus it symbolised not “the last spasms of dying feudalism” but the birth-pangs of the Indian nation[5]. In this sense it was indeed the first national war of independence and to prove its progressive character one need not overplay the role of the toiling peasantry or underplay the feudal character of the leadership.

The Indian National Congress is born

The spontaneous uprisings and rebellions were propelled by traditional, and in most cases decaying, social forces of old India. So, for all their bravery, these struggles never developed into sustained, organised movements. But the third and fourth quarters of the century saw the emergence of new social forces and the first political formations in India, which assembled members of the enlightened gentry, the rising bourgeoisie and the new intelligentsia. Starting with the British Indian Association of Calcutta and the Bombay Presidency Association established in the 1850s, through a number of organizations like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (1870), the Indian Association based in Bengal (1876) and the Madras Mahajan Sabha (1884), the process culminated in the birth of the Indian National Congress (henceforth simply Congress) in 1885. The history of political India, in the modern sense of the term, dates from this event.

The main initiative in founding the Congress came from a retired British bureaucrat, Alan Octavian Hume, with approval from the then Viceroy, Lord Dufferin. To be sure, their motive was to let some steam out of the simmering nationalist cauldron. But the character of a modern political party — if it is really a party and not a sect — is determined not simply by the founder’s fancy but by the actual life and struggle of definite classes that constitute its social base and by the ideology of the class it basically represents. The intentions of Hume and Dufferin are, therefore, at best of secondary import; the historical truth is that the genesis and development of Congress was rooted in definite and long-standing economic, political and cultural processes.

The eco-political foundation for the emergence of the first modern political party in India was laid by a combination of such diverse factors as betterment of transport and communications; the growth, in the 1870s and ’80s, of the Indian textile and other industries and the rise of a tiny but articulate educated middle class. A capitalist class, mercantile in origin and basically comprador in character, came to voice its demands and interests vis-a-vis the British extremely politely yet consistently. For instance, a protracted campaign against reduction of import duties on textile imports, which would seriously hurt the nascent Indian industry, was carried on since 1875. The educated sections began to voice, in the ’60s and ’70s, such demands as the right of Indian judges to try Europeans in criminal cases, the Indianisation of civil services (this demand was intensified after Surendranath Bauerjee was removed from the Indian Civil Services in 1874), freedom of the press (against the Vernacular Press Act, 1878) etc. Some general democratic and patriotic demands like higher expenditure on famine relief, against expansion in Burma and Afghanistan and so on also came up during this period. All these prepared the political ground for the emergence of the first Indian nationalist party.

The cultural prerequisites were, however, developing from an earlier date. As early as in 1828, Raja Rammohan Roy wrote :

“I regret to say that the present system of religion is not well calculated to promote their political interest. The distinctions of castes introducing innumerable divisions and subdivisions among them, has entirely deprived them of patriotic feeling, and the multitude of religious rites and ceremonies ... have totally disqualified them for undertaking any difficult enterprise. It is, I think, necessary that some changes should take place in their religion at least for the sake of their political advantage and social comfort.”[6]

Without this attack against Hindu ritualism and casteism, no beginnings could be made in modern politics. Rammohan (known for campaign against the sati and one of the founders of the Brahmo Samaj), Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (known for campaigns against child marriage, for widow re-marriage etc.) and some others heralded what is loosely described as the “Bengal renaissance”. This was a reform movement pertaining to the Hindu society of Bengal that developed not against but in open collaboration with the British rulers. The latter provided financial, legal and other help because unlike earlier conquerors of India they needed certain material as well as super structural changes in the stagnant traditional society so as to bring a degree of compatibility between it and their own bourgeois society. In outlook and often also in class origin the stalwarts of this reform movement belonged to the enlightened gentry; they never concerned themselves with the peasant problem and had a very limited vision of change. It is on these grounds that the CPI(ML) had, two decades ago, condemned the “renaissance” as a British sponsored affair cut off from the broad anti-British movement. Basically this criticism was correct. But the point we missed at the time was that the “renaissance” did pave the way for the subsequent emergence of a socially progressive nationalist intelligentsia and with the next turn of events (particularly the partition of Bengal) the forces generated by it actually graduated into the mainstream of militant nationalism. This happened not because the “renaissance” had the vitality and dynamism necessary for this transition inherent in itself (as the CPI and CPI(M) historians suggest) but under the force of circumstances obtaining in the first few years of the twentieth century.

Apart from Bengal, in other provinces too various social and religious reform movements came up in the second half of the twentieth century such as the Arya Samaj (based in North India and Punjab), the Satya Sodhak Samaj set up in Maharashtra by Jyotiba Phule, a great lower caste crusader against Brahmanism, the Aligarh movement led by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan and so on. In the last quarter of the century, Vivekananda appeared on the scene with a splendid combination of patriotic pride in the Aryan ancestry and social service with concern for the poor and untouchables at its core — a combination that retained its appeal for the patriotic youth for many decades to come. The reformist movements, in most cases with loyalist overtones, and certain revivalist movements with clearer anti-British sentiments constituted the two poles of a new middle class socio-cultural awakening which, along with the spread of English education, preceded and accompanied the genesis of the Congress. Starting with the Amrita Bazar Patrika (1868), a plethora of broadly nationalist newspapers and periodicals like Tilaks’s Kesari in Marathi and Marhatta in English (1881) came up during the ’70s and ’80s. Apart from Tilak, a number of progressive journalists like GH Deshmukh, who wrote in the Poona daily Pravakar under the penname Lokhitwadi, carried on nationalist propaganda even in the face of severe restrictions (Incidentally, about 1/3 rd of the founders of the Congress were journalists). In literature and arts, a galaxy of poets, novelists, dramatists and theatrical personalities took shape. To name a few, there were Madhusudan Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (who authored Anandamath in 1882) and Dinabandhu Mitra (whose drama Neel Darpan portrayed the Indigo Rebellion) in Bengali, Bharatendu in Hindi, Sandarm Pillai and Ramalinga Swamy in Tamil etc. made great contributions in developing patriotic feelings.

The economic, political and cultural elements of India as a “nation-in-the-making” (to use a favourite phrase of SN Banerjee and Tilak) were thus taking shape in the second half of the nineteenth century and the Indian National Congress represented this process both in terms of its strong points and basic limitations. Here leadership had to belong to the new elite intelligentsia. They were continually torn asunder between western values and the great Indian nostalgia and between a sense of loyalty and an urge for protest; ideologically most of them represented the enlightened gentry and the flabby yet growing comprador bourgeoisie operating in a peculiar love-hate, dependence-conflict relationship with the colonial masters. It was but natural, therefore, that up to the end of the century the Congress was over-zeaious in proclaiming its ultimate loyalty to the Crown. In subsequent decades it gradually and haltingly grew into a broad-based, multi-class movement through which the big bourgeoisie and big landlords began to stake their claim for economic concessions and a share in political power — and then for full state power; this process we shall take up for discussion in the next parts of the present volume.

Notes:

1. Capital, Vol. I, Ch. XV, Section 5, Progress Publishers, Moscow.

2. India’s National Movement : A Short Account by Ayodhya Singh, (Calcutta, 1980), p 1.

3. Some years after Marx wrote these lines, it became clear that the railways, which Marx hailed as “the forerunner of modern industry”, was playing that role only in a very restricted sense, because the British chose to import the bulk of railway equipments from England, so that there was little development of ancillary engineering industries in India and also because the railway network, though extensive in size, was designed to serve narrow British commercial and strategic interests — not the interests of a free capitalist development. Marx never had the occasion or opportunity to return to the subject, but this aspect of retarded growth of capitalism in British India did not escape his notice. In a passing yet revealing comment in 1881, he said that the railways proved “useless to the Hindoos”.

4. See Liberation, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1968: “A New Assessment of the History of CPI”.

5. This is not to suggest that the rebellion was conducted by an all-India national leadership or that the economic conditions for the emergence of a nation in the Marxist sense of the term were already ripe. What we sought to emphasise here is that politically 1857 signalled the approach of the national movement on an all-India scale and in that sense it heralded the advent of the Indian nation.

6. Life and Letters of Rammohan Roy by Sophia Dobson Collet (Calcutta, 1913), p 124.


Evolution of Marxist-Leninist
Thought on Revolution in the East

India was certainly not alone in awakening to a protracted anti-imperialist struggle. Other peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies — popularly described at the time as “the East”, much in the same way as we now use the generic term “third world” — were bestirring themselves and the founders of scientific socialism were closely observing these from their internationalist standpoint. Thus in 1853 Marx wrote that “the next uprising of the people of Europe ... may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial empire [the Taiping rebellion in China — Ed.] than on any other cause that exists ...”. With great revolutionary optimism he added : “as the greater part of the regular commercial circle has already been run through by British trade, it may safely be argued that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions in the Continent. ...”[1]

Marx wrote these lines in his article “Revolution in China and in Europe”, published in the New York Daily Tribune. Similar views were expressed also by Engels in his “Persia and China”, an article he wrote in May 1857 for the same magazine, where he foresaw “the death struggle of the oldest empire in the world [meaning China — Ed.], and the opening day of a new era for all Asia.”[2]

The trend of analysis notable in these early writings took a clearer shape in 1867. In a letter to Engels, Marx expressly accorded priority to revolutionary action in a colony (Ireland) over the metropolitan country (England).

The “colonial question” used to be discussed in the Second international also. Lenin's first important write-up on the question happens to be an article of November 1907, where he summed up the debates on this score in the Stuttgart Congress, which he had just attended. Next year he wrote the well-known article “Inflammable Material in World Politics”. Here he saw, in a series of recent developments (Japan's victory over Tsarist Russia and the Russian revolution of 1905 and the revolutions in Persia and Turkey), the welcome signs of a forthcoming uprising of the oppressed people throughout the world. Then in his 1912 article “Democracy and Populism in China”, he referred to the example of Sun-Yat-Sen to draw attention to the revolutionary bourgeoisie of China, whose “main social support” was “the peasantry”, and differentiated it from the treacherous “liberal bourgeoisie” represented by men like Yuan Shi-Kai. Finally in “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia” (1913) he further developed and generalised the above ideas on a world scale.

During the First World War, Lenin wrote a series of articles liking the socialist revolution in the West with liberation movements in colonies and semi-colonies and stressing the latter's importance for the success of the former. The question, however continued to be debated. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, declared in 1916 that in the "historic milieu of modern imperialism ... wars of national self-defence are today no longer possible ...” To this Lenin replied that “National wars against the imperialist powers are not only possible and probable; they are inevitable, progressive and revolutionary ...” (See Lenin’s “The Junius Pamphlet”, Collected Works, Vol. 22, pp 305-19). Finally, in his great treatise Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), he presented a comprehensive historical analysis of the cardinal fact of our epoch. He showed that it was imperialist super-profits extracted from the colonies which enabled the Western bourgeoisie to bribe and corrupt important sections of the proletariat in their own countries into opportunism and social-chauvinism. The destruction of the colonial system thus became vital for successful socialist revolution in the West. That, however, was also the goal of the national liberation struggles, which thus constituted an integral part of the overall struggle of the world proletariat for its liberation. This holistic vision, as we shall see later, informed the general line of world communism in the decades to come. The Leninist line was briefly summed up by Stalin in his 1918 article entitled “Do not Forget the East”.

To take note of the continuity and development of these ideas in response to developments in the world situation is important for the purposes of this book. It shows that, simultaneously as India was proceeding towards a higher mass phase of freedom struggle and the first phase of organised working class movement, the theoretical arsenal for leading both these movements to victory was also being developed by the Leninist leadership of international proletariat. How during the 1920s these two protracted processes — one on the soil of India and the other in the arena of international class struggle — were forged together by the Bolshevik revolution into the communist movement of India, thereby adding a new dimension to the freedom struggle itself — this will be studied in Part II of this volume.

Notes:

1. Cited in Marxism And Asia by Helene Carrere d’Encausse and Stuart R Schram; Alien Lane, The Penguin Press; (1969), pp 119-20.

2. See On Colonialism — A collection of writings of Marx and Engels, FLPH, (Moscow), p 125.

 

Anti-British And Other Movements Upto 1917

The run-up to the initiation of the communist movement in India covered the first seventeen or eighteen years of the twentieth century. Let us, therefore, take a quick glance at the main political trends and events of this period.

For almost twenty years since its formation, the Indian National Congress remained under the domination of “moderate” leaders like SN Banerjee, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Gopal Krishna Gokhale etc. Besides journalistic activities, they carried on some propaganda work from within the Imperial and Provincial Legislative Councils. Though these councils were utterly powerless, leaders like Gokhale (particularly famous for his regular “budget speeches”) and Mehta utilised them with great oratory to level trenchant criticisms against the government. This helped spread strong nationalist fervour among educated sections. However, their demands – within legislatures and at annual Congress conferences — never went beyond rudimentary political and administrative reforms (e.g., demand for slight extension of the powers of the councils, Indianisation of the ICS etc.) and redressal of economic grievances. Organisationally, the Congress was more of an annual three-day show for passing paper resolutions than a party with different layers of committees etc.; it had very little funds, few regular activists and only a couple or so of secretaries.

The swadeshi movement

Criticism of the “mendicancy” of the Moderate Congress began to develop in the 1890s and became a strong, popular trend known as the “Extremists” around the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. That was the period of the famous swadeshi movement — in many ways the mother of political trends and forms of struggle that would become popular in the decades to come. The period was also known as the era of Lal-Bal-Pal, after the names of the leaders of the three most advanced provinces of anti-British militancy: Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab, Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal.

The swadeshi movement started in December 1903 as a spontaneous protest against the official proposal to partition Bengal. Only moderate methods like petitions, memoranda, public speeches etc were used. The Congress hesitantly passed the Boycott Resolution on August 7,1905. October 16, the day partition took effect, was observed as a day of mourning throughout Bengal with arandhan (leaving the cooking hearths unlit), rakhibandhan (tying wristlets of coloured thread on the hands of one another as a symbol of brotherhood), processions with vande mataram on people's lips, and mammoth rallies, particularly in Calcutta. Towards the end of the year, the Benares session of Congress supported the swadeshi and boycott movement for Bengal, defying the pressure of Lal-Bal-Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh to extend the movement to the rest of India and give it the broader scope of full-fledged mass political struggle aimed at Swaraj, Within less than two years, the political difference that surfaced here between Moderates and Extremists would mature into a split. For the time being, however, the Extremists carried the Congress in Bengal with themselves and 1906 and 1907 saw a rapid progress of the movement : the boycott of not only foreign goods like cloth, sugar, liquor and domestic utilities, but also of government schools, colleges and offices, courts, titles and government services. These techniques, along with efforts to organise strikes in European mills in Bengal, were sometimes called “passive resistance”.[1] The nationalist constructive programme envisaged promotion of swadeshi industries and other economic enterprises like banks, national education, arbitration courts etc.

The boycott of foreign goods helped the nascent bourgeoisie, but swadeshi goods — particularly cloth — were dearer than imported ones and this sometimes created a problem for the poorer sections. Anyway, small to medium scale swadeshi textiles, porcelain, soap and match factories mushroomed; a few banks and insurance companies were setup. The entrepreneurs were chiefly from urbanised landholding classes, with a sprinkling of big zamindars. Only a few of these enterprises, like the famous Bengal Chemicals Factory set up by PC Roy, lived long. But the spirit of the national bourgeoisie — so very rare in India — was discernible here in a classic form. The impact was truly great and lasting in literature and arts.

The swadeshi movement was basically limited to urban areas. But both in terms of mass participation and the agitational-organisational activities of the advanced elements (those who made public speeches and took the lead in organising processions, bonfires of foreign goods, picketing of shops etc.) the movement represented the initiation of modern mass politics in India. Though it lacked a centralised organisation, grassroots samitis or volunteer corps proved very effective. But such positive aspects were counter-balanced by the ugly face of Hindu-Muslim riots in East Bengal. Also the Muslim League was founded at the height of the movement (in October 1906) at Dacca. Provoked by the shrewd British propaganda that a separate province would bring more jobs and social domination for Muslims, a good section of the Muslim elite worked actively against the movement. However, in some cases the riots were targeted against Hindu zamindars and mahajans with even Hindu peasants participating.

The swadeshi movement also encouraged a spurt in working class movement; on the other hand, in the phase of decline (after 1907) it witnessed terrorism of revolutionary patriots. These we shall discuss under separate sub-headings.

Popular movements from below

The message and spirit of the movement was carried to the four corners of India thanks to efforts by Tilak (with his Marathi paper Kesari), Lajpat Rai (with his paper Punjabee), Syed Haider Roza, Chidambaram Pillai and Bipin Chandra Pal (Pal made an extensive lecture tour in Madras presidency). Enterprises like the Punjab National Bank was founded at the time. Typical swadeshi forms of protest, like bonfires of foreign cloth and defying police rules to sing vande mataram, were to be seen in such far-off centres as Raj amundhry and Kakinada, the port city of Tuticorin, Bombay, Benares and so on. Quite often, however, various local economic issues and state repression provoked militant struggles which merged with the broader all-India movement. Let us take just one example[2].

In 1907, when urban Punjab was seething with discontent on account of racist outrages and the prosecution of the Punjabee and witnessed militant demonstrations as well as stray attacks on whites, the British had more cause for alarm in the ferment among the peasantry. This was so particularly because Punjab supplied about a third of the British Indian Army. In the Chenab canal colony area centred around Lyallpur, which had been developed for cultivation by government-sponsored irrigation, land blocks were allotted to peasant immigrants, ex-soldiers and even urban investors. The entire area was administered by the British bureaucracy with characteristic highhandedness. In October 1906 the Chenab Colonies Bill was introduced to tighten up the system further, and the very next month canal water rate in the larger Bari Doab region was hiked by 25 to 50 per cent. General price rise and a plague that broke out at the time added to the people’s miseries. A protest movement had already started in 1903 and now these provocations led to its intensification. There were several strikes among revenue clerks. The cultivators settled here included Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus and a remarkable communal amity prevailed among them. While organising themselves, they were eagerly looking for broader political leadership. So they invited Lala Lajpat Rai who after much dilly-dallying addressed meetings in Lyallpur in February and March 1907. A much more active role was played by Ajit Singh (who happened to be Bhagat Singh’s uncle). He organised the—An-juman-i-Mohibban-i-Watan in Lahore with its journal Bharat-Mata — and the Punjab Lt. Governor Denzil Ibbetson was quick to take alarm at this combination of “Muhammadan and Hindu names”. Ajit Singh and his colleagues systematically campaigned for non-payment of revenue and water rates. The authorities were further worried at reports of sepoys attending “seditious meetings” at Ferozepur. A government move to debar five leading Rawalpindi lawyers from attending the courts for having sponsored an Ajit Singh meeting led to massive protests in the city. There were strikes by Muslim and Sikh arsenal and railway engineering workers and stray attacks on bunglows of Europeans.

The authorities came down heavily on the movement in May 1907, banning all political meetings and deporting Lajpat Rai as well as Ajit Singh. At the same time there were concessions too : the Chenab Colonies Bill was vetoed down by the Viceroy, water rates were reduced and the deported leaders released within four months. The very significant militant unity of the three communities was eroded after the movement was over. By 1908-09, Hindu sabhas largely replaced the defunct Congress bodies in most districts of Punjab. The best product of the movement — Ajit Singh and his associates — took to revolutionary terrorism along with some others like Har Dayal, a brilliant Delhi student.

This example, one of many such scattered over different regions and periods of history, shows how the raw impulses of class struggle and democratic movements from below contribute to the development of those with broader political scope consciously led by parties, often throwing up real leaders of the soil. Limited space will not allow us to pay due attention to this aspect of the freedom struggle and communist movement in India, but this does not detract from its great significance.

The revolutionary patriots

In late 1907-08, the political situation in the country underwent important changes. The Congress split in the Surat session of December 1907 and became practically defunct under the leadership of the Moderates. The latter had outlived their historically progressive role and had become a bar on the further growth of the national movement. The swadeshi movement in Bengal and beyond petered out under heavy repression and imprisonment of leaders like Tilak. Thus the militant nationalists or Extremists also were not on the scene; nor did they leave behind them, for all their trenchant critique of the moderates, any positive clear-cut programme for advance. In the political void the most fearless and patriotic among the youth had nothing but individual terrorism to espouse. And so they did. Naturally the main centre was Bengal, the stronghold of swadeshi. A few terrorist groups like the Anushilan Samiti (founded in 1902) became active and were Joined by a number of others. Their activities took mainly two forms — swadeshi dacoities to raise funds and assassinations of oppressive officials and traitors. The most famous early example was set by Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki who in April 1908 hurled a bomb at a carriage believed to be carrying Kingsford, a former magistrate of Calcutta. Unfortunately the carriage was occupied by two British ladies, who were killed. Chaki committed suicide while Khudiram was tried and hanged. The brave young martyrs (Khudiram was only 18) were mourned and admired throughout the country; a Bengali folk song, in which Khudiram promises to be born again with the mark of the rope round his neck, became instantly popular and remains so to this day. Out of the many revolutionary secret societies in Bengal, Anushilan Samiti and Yugantarviere most active and lasted longer than others. At Nasik in Maharashtra, VD Savarkar had organised such a secret society, Abhinav Bharat, and it succeeded in killing the Nasik district magistrate in December 1909.

Terrorist actions in Bengal and other places continued through ebbs and high tides (e.g., a bomb attack on the Viceroy Lord Hardinge in Delhi on December 23,1912). The revolutionary patriots also operated from London, Paris, Geneva, Tokyo, Berlin etc. They used to send arms, money, revolutionary literature etc. into India and many of them were influenced by various revolutionary theories including, as we shall see, Marxism. The first world war encouraged them to try and get financial and military help from Britain’s enemies, i.e., Germany and Turkey and to take advantage of the reduction in white soldiers. The number of swadeshi dacoities and assassinations reached an all-time high. Special mention should be made of the great plan for capturing the Fort William in Calcutta, together with other actions, conceived by Jatin Mukherjee and his associates. Arrangements were made for a shipload of German arms, for which Naren Bhattacharya (later to be known as MN Roy) was sent to Java, and contact was established with a section of the Indian troops stationed in the Fort William. The plan failed, the German arms never arrived and “Bagha (Tiger) Jatin”, who had gone to Balasore in Orissa coast to receive the arms, died with his comrades fighting valiantly against the police. Among others who planned to overthrow the British in a foreign-armed coup, mention must be made of Rashbehari Ghosh, Sachindranath Sanyal, Virendra-nath Chattopadhyay, Dr. Bhupen Dutta, Abani Mukherjee etc. But the most well-organised and massive plan was made by the Ghadr (rebellion), a US-Canada-based group known after its weekly organ of the same name.

Founded in San Fransisco in 1913 by Har Dayal, Bhai Parmanand and others, the Ghadr soon evoked an enthusiastic response from the 15000-odd Sikh, Muslim and Hindu (with the Sikhs numerically predominating) settlers in the Pacific coast states. It planned to send the emigrants in large numbers back to India to organise revolt in the Army and among the peasantry; accordingly a few thousands of them returned to Punjab but some of them were either interned or restricted to their villages while others did not find much of a response from the Indians. The Chief Khalsa Diwan declared the Ghadr followers to be “fallen” Sikhs and criminals and helped the authorities to find them out. There was hardly any progress on the soil of India and then Rashbehari Bose was invited by the Ghadrites to take overall charge of an armed rebellion. He agreed and came over to Punjab. A mutiny was planned for February 21, 1915, to be staged simultaneously in various centres in Punjab, UP and certain other places inside the country and also outside (e.g., Singapore). But the plan leaked out, resulting in hundreds of arrests and death-penalties in the Lahore conspiracy cases. The martyrs included the 19 year-old Kartar Singh and Abdulla, one of the rebel sepoys executed in Ambala, who when lured by the authorities to betray his kafir (non-Muslim) comrades, retorted: “It is with these men alone that the gates of heaven shall open to me.”[3] There were scattered revolts in some centres in India and more notably in Singapore, which were mercilessly crushed.

The Ghadr was not only the most broad-based of all the revolutionary-patriotic groups, it was marked by a strong secularism. This was a definite advancement over the Bengal terrorists’ intense religiosity, which kept the Muslim youth aloof (and provided an honourable escape route after failure, as in the case of Aurobindo Ghosh). Most importantly, they were deeply influenced by socialist ideas, including the teachings of Karl Marx (Har Dayal was the first Indian to write an article on Marx in the Modern Review, March 1912, published from Calcutta). A number of them, like Sohan Singh Bhakna, later became important peasant and communist leaders in Punjab.

Before we end the account of overseas national-revolutionary activities, mention must be made of the Provisional Government of Independent India, established in Kabul in 1915 with Barkatullah and Raja Mahendra Pratap at its head. This, like some other attempts to organise armed revolt with foreign backing, hardly made any impact on the soil of India.

The Home Rule agitation

The Home Rule Leagues set up by Tilak and Mrs. Annie Besant separately in 1916 were essentially pressure groups, first acting from outside the Congress and then merging with it in 1917. During 1914-17, very impressive propaganda and mass-mobilisation campaigns were organised by these two leaders and their followers on the central demand for home rule or self-government. This served to re-awaken the Congress out of the passivity it had fallen into with the ebb of the swadeshi and boycott movements and with the arrests of Tilak and other militant nationalists in 1908. By doing so, the agitation developed a whole new generation of nationalists and prepared the ground for the post-war mass phase of the Congress movement to be led by MK Gandhi, and here lies its historical significance.

Tribal risings and peasant struggles

Tribal unrest and revolts spilled into the twentieth century with sustained tenacity. Most of these were provoked by increasing restrictions over the original inhabitants’ traditional rights over forest products. In a few cases these were precipitated by succession disputes of tribal chieftains but soon the struggle would take on an anti-British character (e.g., the uprising in the Jagdalpur region of Bastar and the Khond rebellion in Orissa). The fire of the nineteenth century Rampa rebellion never died out, and in 1916 there was a revolt which prepared the ground for the more famous 1922-24 rebellion led by Alluri Sita-rania Raju. Special mention should also be made of the Bhil rebellion of Rajasthan, which had its origin in a reform movement for temperance and purification but developed into a fight to found a Bhil raj; the Oraon reform movement which with the onset of World War I took on a rebellious character; and the rebellion among the Thadoe Kukis in Manipur in 1917-18.

The most important region of early twentieth century peasant struggle was Mewar in Rajasthan. In 1905, 1913 and 1915 there were organised struggles against severe feudal exploitation and oppression perpetrated by pro-British jagirdars at Bijolia. The peasants had started the movement on their own, but in 1915 Bhoop Singh alias Vijay Singh Pathik, a revolutionary patriot externed here, added a new dimension to it. Jointly with ML Verma, a state official of the Maharana of Udaipur, he led a no-tax movement against the latter in 1916. When the World War I broke out, the peasants refused to contribute to war-loans. Later the movement came under the Gandhian fold, with Pathik and Verma emerging as important Congress leaders.

Mention may be made here of Champaran in Bihar and Kheda in Gujarat – the two districts where in 1917-18 Gandhi made his early experiments with peasant demands. Politically no less significant was the raiyat movement of Muslim peasants of Kamariachar in Mymensingh district of Bengal. In 1914 apraja conference organised by a rich raiyat formulated a charter of demands including end to various cesses, rent-reduction, right to plant trees and dig tanks without paying nazar (tribute) to zamindars, debt-reliefs and honourable treatment of Muslim peasants at the Hindu zamindar’s Katcheri (court). The charter included not a single demand of poor share-croppers. Attended by prominent Muslim political leaders like Fazlul Huq (who would head the provincial government in Bengal in late 1930s) the conference marked the beginning of a raiyat movement which gradually developed overt communal overtones (largely due to a conspicuous Hindu bias of the Congress in Bengal) and grew into an important factor in Bengal politics during 1920s and 1930s.

Working class movement

The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a few philanthropic organisations based among workers in Bombay and Calcutta and run by educated non-workers like NM Lokhande and Sasipada Banerjee respectively. This period also witnessed some primary forms of struggle like attacks on sardars and European officials as well as short-lived, sporadic strikes. RP Dutt in his India Today quotes the Director’s Report of the Budge Budge jute mill in 1895 to show that there was a six-week strike in the mill. Citing the Bombay Factory Report of the same year, he also takes note of a strike of 8,000 weavers against the Ahmedabad Mill-owners' Association. Patricidal skirmishes too would often take place between Hindu and Muslim workers and between local workers and those from other regions.

An upsurge in working class movement was effected in 1905-08 under the direct impact of the swadeshi and boycott movements. This will be evident from the following examples.

(1) During July-September in 1906, workers hi the Bengal section of the East India Railway launched a series of strikes against racial discrimination in wages, highhandedness of authorities, use of the derogatory term “native” and inhospitable dwelling places. The strike spread from Howrah to Raniganj, Asansol, Jamalpur, Sahabganj etc., though it was not well-coordinated and lasted for different periods at different centres. In massive meetings workers were urged to make the strike a success and at the same time join the swadeshi movement. According to a report of the Special Branch of Police, a number of workers’ meetings were also held in hiding in the face of savage repression. Though not successful in achieving the demands, the struggle definitely laid the basis for a series of rail-strikes in a number of important centres like Asansol, Mughalsarai, Allahabad, Kanpur, Ambala etc., spread intermittently over some eight months from May 1907.

(2) In the first week of May 1907, about 3,000 workers of the Rawalpindi railway workshop and hundreds of their brethren from other factories joined the students in a huge protest demonstration against the conviction of the editor of the Punjabee for publishing “seditious” matter. The militant rally, also participated by peasants from nearby areas, attacked everything in the city that had a British connection — offices, shops, missionary kulhis — and British individuals. There were violent street fights, first with the armed police and then with the military, resulting in many casualties.

(3) When Tilak was arrested on 24 June, 1908 at Bombay, there was an immediate storm of protest not only in Bombay but also in Sholapur, Nagpur, etc. With the progress of court proceedings against Tilak, workers of Bombay staged increasingly massive and militant processions and strikes, often leading to clashes with the police and military. In one of these street battles, on 18 July, several hundreds of workers were wounded or killed. The next day there was a strike by some 65,000 workers belonging to 60-odd mills. On 21 July, dock workers joined the strike movement. On July 22 Tilak was sentenced to 6 years’ rigorous imprisonment and for 6 days (counting one day for each year of the prison-term) the striking workers made Bombay into a battle-field. Tens of thousands of workers, later joined by students, small businessmen, domestic servants and other sections of the people, took part in the street fights and processions. The worker leaders who died fighting included Ganpat Govinda, Madhu Raghunath, Sitaram Sauni and many others. Referring to this struggle, Lenin commented on August 5,1908 :  “... this revenge against a democrat (meaning Tilak — Editor) by the lackeys of money-bags evoked street demonstrations and a strike in Bombay.

In India, too, the proletariat has already developed to conscious political mass struggle — and. that being the case, the Russian-style British regime in India is doomed !”[4]

In addition to the above, other important struggles of the swadeshi period include : the jute strikes of 1905-08 in Bengal, the strike of arsenal and railway engineering workers as part of the 1907 upsurge in Punjab, the swadeshi-imspired strikes in Tuticorin and Tirunelveli of Madras province in early 1908, and so on. A notable feature of this period was the birth of a few trade unions out of class struggle. Thus the Printers’ Union was established in October 1905 while a stubborn strike was going on in government presses and the East India Railway-men’s Union grew out of the strike struggle in July 1906.

During 1905-08, nationalist leaders like Bipin Chandra Pal and Liaqat Hussain in Bengal, Chidambaram Pillai and Subramaniya Siva in Madras presidency and Tilak in Bombay often addressed workers’ meetings while some of their lesser-known followers would carry on regular organisational work (e.g., AC Banerjee organising the Indian Millhands’ Union at the Budge Budge jute mill near Calcutta).

The history of working class movement upto the end of the first world war shows that the nascent working class fought much more valiantly for the overall political interest of the Indian people as a whole than for its own economic interests. Also characteristic were their organised militancy and patriotic fervour. But ideologically they were almost completely under the sway of bourgeois nationalists and followed their lead.

The latter consciously confined their agitational work to foreign-owned mill, railways etc., leaving the Indian capitalists free to exploit and oppress. Moreover, they made practically no effort to build sustained movements on economic demands: Bereft of political independence, the Indian proletariat was still a class-in-itself, and not a class-for-itself out to transform society in its distinct, that is socialist, world-view.

Cultural-regional awakenings, anti-Brahmanic movements

Nineteenth century progress in cultural fields has already been taken note of. It reached a much higher stage in the first couple of decades in the present century. Regional or nationality consciousness along linguistic lines took on a movemental character not only in swadeshi Bengal but elsewhere too, as in Tamil, Telugu, Malayali and Marathi speaking regions.

Discontent was growing among the educated Telugu youth for under-representation in public services in the Madras province, which then included the Andhra region. This feeling, coupled with a new Telugu literary upsurge as represented by Srinivasa Rao, Venkataraya Shastri etc., gradually led to an agitation demanding a separate province of Andhra. Around the year 1911, Deshabhimani (meaning “proud of one’s own land” — Ed.), published from Guntur, became the most popular mouthpiece of this aspiration of the emerging Telugu nationality. From 1913 onwards, the annual Andhra Conference systematically campaigned for a separate province and for Telugu as medium of instruction. It is from these conferences that the famous Andhra Mahasabha developed in the subsequent years.

In what is now known as Tamil Nadu, the cultural awakening, with its focus on ancient Tamil literature and the non-Aryan “Dravidian” heritage of the Deccan, was closely associated with a movement against Brahmanism. Various organisations spearheading the latter movement came up with different political approaches. Thus, whereas the Madras Presidency Association set up in late 1917 remained anti-British while demanding an end to Brahmin near-monopoly in the public services and in legislatures, the “Justice” movement launched about two years ago had adopted a manifestly pro-British stance. The latter had a narrow, predominantly landlord social base and its December 1916 Non-Brahman Manifesto strongly opposed any measure “to undermine the influence and authority of die British Rulers, who alone ... are able to hold the scales even between creed and class. ...” The Madras Presidency Association, on the other hand, had a broader social base and prepared the ground for the emergence, about a decade later, of a more radical anti-Brahman and anti-caste mass movement under the leadership of EV Rama Swami Naicker (better known as Periyar). However, a rare feature of the Justice movement was that it represented not only Tamil but also Telugu and Malayali intermediate castes.

Perhaps the most spectacular cultural-cum-social reform movement in the entire South was witnessed in Kerala. The great Ezhava (considered an untouchable caste at the time — Ed.) poet Kumaran Asan, graphically representing the patriotic trend of this movement, wrote in 1908:

Thy slavery is thy destiny, O Mother !
Thy sons, blinded by caste, clash among themselves
And get killed; what for is freedom then ?[5]

The flourish of Malayali literature and anti-Brahmanic movement had started much earlier, with Chander Menon’s Indulekha (1889) which attacked some old social customs and the Namboodiri Brahmin’s social domination, and with the birth of the Malayali Memorial (1891) which fought against Brahmanic near-monopoly in state jobs. However, it was in the early twentieth century that the movement assumed more radical dimensions. Remarkable in this regard were the works of such diverse personalities as Ramakrishna Pillai (whose political campaigns as editor of Swadeshabhimani led to his externment from the State and who published the first biography of Karl Marx in Malayalam in 1911), the great religious-reformist leader Sri Nara-yana Guru who gave the call: “one religion, one caste and one God for mankind” (later changed by his disciple Sahadaran Ayyapan into “no religion, no caste and no God for mankind”) and founded the Sri Narayana Dharma Pratipalana Yogam in 1902-03 jointly with Kumaran Asan and Dr. Palpu, the first Ezhava graduate; and many others.

These apart, many more caste movements and organisations sprang up in different parts of the country and a number of older ones like Jyotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj continued to grow richer in social content. Some of these movements had their social bases confined to affluent sections of intermediate or lower castes and worked for gaining some privileges for these sections, while others were more broad-based, pro-poor and more radical. Basically, however, most of them had the character of bourgeois democratic reform movements. Simultaneously, the period saw breakthroughs in modern Indian literatures : Prem Chand in Hindi, Fakirmohan Senapati in Oriya, Muhammad Iqbal in Urdu, Rabindranath Tagore and Sharat Chandra Chatierjee in Bengali and Harinarayan Apte in Marathi being some of the pioneers in modernity both as regards form and social content.

Notes:

1. See Doctrine of Passive Resistance by Aurobindo Ghosh, where he also advocated "social boycott" of loyalists, civil disobedience of unjust laws and recourse to armed struggle if British repression went too far.

2. What follows in the next two paragraphs is a summary of a somewhat detailed account given by Sumit Sarkar in his Modern India, Macmillan India, (1983) pp 127-29

3. See Modern India, op. cit., p 149

4. From “Inflammable Material in World Politics”, CW, Vol. 15, p 184

5. See Modern India, op. cit, p 163