Origins of the nationalist movement
The Indian National Congress held its first meeting in December 1885 in Bombay city while British Indian troops were still fighting in Upper Burma. Thus, just as the British Indian empire attained its outermost limits of expansion, the institutional seed of the larger of its two national successors was sown. Provincial roots of Indian nationalism, however, may be traced to the beginning of the era of crown rule in Bombay, Bengal, and Madras. Nationalism emerged in19th-century British India both in emulation of and as a reaction against the consolidation of British rule and the spread of Western civilization. There were, moreover, two turbulent national mainstreams flowing beneath the deceptively placid official surface of British administration: the larger, headed by the Indian National Congress, which led eventually to the birth of India, and the smaller Muslim one, which acquired its organizational skeleton with the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 and led to the creation of Pakistan. Many English-educated young Indians of the postmutiny period emulated their British mentors by seeking employment in the ICS, the legal services, journalism, and education. The universities of Bombay, Bengal, and Madras had been founded in 1857 as the capstone of the East India Company’s modest policy of selectively fostering the introduction of English education in India. At the beginning of crown rule, the first graduates of these universities, reared on the works and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Macaulay, sought positions that would help them improve themselves and society at the same time. They were convinced that, with the education they had received and the proper apprenticeship of hard work, they would eventually inherit the machinery of British Indian government. Few Indians, however, were admitted to the ICS; and, among the first handful who were, one of the brightest, Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1925), was dismissed dishonourably at the earliest pretext and turned from loyal participation within the government to active nationalist agitation against it. Banerjea became a Calcutta college teacher and then editor of The Bengalee and founder of the Indian Association in Calcutta. In 1883 he convened the first Indian National Conference in Bengal, anticipating by two years the birth of the Congress on the opposite side of India. After the first partition of Bengal in 1905, Banerjea attained nationwide fame as a leader of the swadeshī (“of our own country”) movement, promoting Indian-made goods, and the movement to boycott British manufactured goods. During the 1870s, young leaders in Bombay also established a number of provincial political associations, such as the Poona Sārvajanik Sabhā (Poona Public Society), founded by Mahadev G. Ranade (1842–1901), who had graduated at the top of Bombay University’s first bachelor of arts class in 1862. Ranade found employment in the educational department in Bombay, taught at Elphinstone College, edited the Indu Prakāsh, helped start the Hindu reformist Prārthanā Samāj (Prayer Society) in Bombay, wrote historical and other essays, and became a barrister, eventually being appointed to the bench of Bombay’s high court. Ranade was one of the early leaders of India’s emulative school of nationalism, as was his brilliant disciple Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), later revered by Mahatma Gandhi as a political guru (preceptor). Gokhale, an editor and social reformer, taught at Fergusson College in Poona (Pune) and in 1905 was elected president of the Congress.Moderation and reform were the keynotes of Gokhale’s life, and by his use of reasoned argument, patient labour, and unflagging faith in the ultimate equity of British liberalism, he was able to achieve much for India.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), Gokhale’s colleague at Fergusson College, was the leader of Indian nationalism’s revolutionary reaction against British rule. Tilak was Poona’s most popular Marāṭhī journalist, whose vernacular newspaper, Kesari (“Lion”), became the leading literary thorn in the side of the British. The Lokamānya (“Revered by the People”), as Tilak came to be called after he was jailed for seditious writings in 1897, looked to orthodox Hinduism and Marāṭhā history as his twin sources of nationalist inspiration. Tilak called upon his compatriots to take keener interest and pride in the religious, cultural, martial, and political glories of pre-British Hindu India; in Poona, former capital ofthe Marāṭhā Hindu glory, he helped found and publicize the popular Ganapati and Śivājī festivals in the 1890s. Tilak had no faithin British justice, and his life was devoted primarily to agitation aimed at ousting the British from India by any means and restoring swarāj (“self-rule” or independence) to India’s people. While Tilak brought many non-English-educated Hindus into the nationalist movement, the orthodox Hindu character of his revolutionary revival (which mellowed considerably in the latter part of his political career) alienated many within India’s Muslim minority and exacerbated communal tensions and conflict. The viceroyalties of Lytton and Lord Ripon (governed 1880–84) prepared the soil of British India for nationalism, the former by internal measures of repression and the futility of an external policy of aggression, the latter indirectly as a result of the European community’s rejection of his liberal humanitarian legislation. One of the key men who helped arrange the first meeting of the Congress was a retired British official, Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912), Ripon’s radical confidant. After retiring from the ICS in 1882, Hume, a mystic reformer and ornithologist, lived in Shimla, where he studied birds and theosophy. Hume had joined the Theosophical Society in 1881, as had many young Indians, who found in theosophy a movement most flattering to Indian civilization. Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), the Russian-born cofounder of the Theosophical Society, went to India in 1879 to sit at the feet of Swāmi Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), whose “back to the Vedas” reformist Hindu society, the Ārya Samāj, was founded in Bombay in 1875. Dayananda called upon Hindus to reject the “corrupting” medieval excrescences of their faith, including idolatry, the caste system, and infant marriage, and to return to the original purity of Vedic life and thought. The Swāmi insisted that post-Vedic changes in Hindu society had led only to weakness and disunity, which had destroyed India’s capacity to resist foreign invasion and subjugation. His reformist society was to take root most firmly in the Punjab at the start of the 20th century, and it became that province’s leading nationalist organization. Blavatsky soon left Dayananda and established her own “Samāj,” whose Indian headquarters were outside Madras city, at Adyar. Annie Besant (1847–1933), the Theosophical Society’s most famous leader, succeeded Blavatsky and became the first and only British woman to serve as president of the Indian National Congress (1917).