Early career and rise in Congress
Rajagopalachari trained as a lawyer and entered Congress politics in the 1910s, becoming closely associated with Gandhi; the two families were further linked when Gandhi's son Devadas married Rajagopalachari's daughter. He held senior positions within the Congress organization and was regarded as one of Gandhi's most trusted lieutenants in South India. During the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 he led the Vedaranyam Salt March, a coastal march in Tamil Nadu timed to parallel Gandhi's Dandi March in Gujarat, breaking the salt laws on the shore of the Bay of Bengal and establishing his standing as a mass leader in the Madras Presidency independent of his role as a party organiser and legal adviser to Gandhi.
Premier of Madras
Under the provincial autonomy provisions of the Government of India Act 1935, Congress won the 1937 provincial elections in Madras, and Rajagopalachari formed the presidency's first elected Congress ministry, serving as Premier from 1937 to 1939. His ministry introduced compulsory Hindi teaching in Madras schools, a policy that provoked sustained anti-Hindi agitation in the Tamil-speaking districts and was later withdrawn; the episode prefigured recurring language politics in the region long after his tenure. In 1939, along with Congress ministries in other provinces, his government resigned in protest at the British decision to declare India a party to the Second World War without consulting Indian elected representatives.
The C.R. formula
In 1944, amid the wartime impasse between Congress and the Muslim League, Rajagopalachari put forward a proposal, later known as the C.R. formula, offering to concede a form of self-determination to Muslim-majority areas in the northwest and east after independence, in exchange for League cooperation with Congress in the immediate struggle for freedom and a joint approach to the British. Gandhi endorsed discussing it with Jinnah, and the two held extended talks in September 1944 on that basis, but the formula drew sharp criticism from within Congress, including from figures who saw it as conceding the substance of the Pakistan demand, and Jinnah ultimately rejected it as insufficient, objecting in particular to its proposal for a joint mechanism to settle boundary and other post-partition questions rather than an unconditional acceptance of Pakistan. The episode remains a point of historiographical debate over how far Congress moderates were willing to go to avert partition and at what cost.
Post-independence career
After independence, Rajagopalachari served as Governor of West Bengal and then, in 1948, succeeded Lord Mountbatten as Governor-General of India, becoming the first and only Indian to hold that office before it was abolished with the adoption of the republican constitution in 1950. He subsequently served as Union Home Minister and as Chief Minister of Madras. In 1959 he broke with the Congress party's economic direction and founded the Swatantra Party, advocating free-market and limited-government positions in opposition to Nehruvian state planning; the party became one of independent India's more significant early opposition formations before its influence declined in the following decade. Rajagopalachari was also a prolific writer in English, producing widely read prose retellings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1954.
Further reading
- Chandra, Bipan. India's Struggle for Independence. Penguin, 1989
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi. Ecco, 2007
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 August 2026.