A Highlight · History
The Indian Independence Movement
From the 1857 revolt to Partition — every satyagraha, revolutionary and Congress leader, in one place. 70 entries.
Overview
- Indian independence movementThe Indian independence movement was the sustained political, social, and armed struggle against British colonial rule that culminated in the independence and partition of British India into India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947.
- Indian National CongressThe Indian National Congress is India's oldest political party, founded in 1885 as a forum for Indian political opinion under British rule and later the principal organization leading the country's independence movement and, after 1947, its dominant governing party for most of the following seven decades.
- Elections before Indian independenceElections before Indian independence were a series of increasingly broad but communally structured electoral exercises held under British colonial law between 1909 and 1946 that culminated in the polarized 1946 polls preceding partition.
- Partition of IndiaThe Partition of India in 1947 divided British India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan, ending British colonial rule and triggering mass migration and communal violence on a scale unmatched in modern history.
Key figures
The Congress old guard
- Dadabhai NaorojiDadabhai Naoroji was a Parsi scholar, businessman and early Indian nationalist politician, the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons and a founding figure of the Indian National Congress.
- Gopal Krishna GokhaleGopal Krishna Gokhale was a moderate leader of the Indian National Congress, founder of the Servants of India Society, and an early political mentor to Mohandas Gandhi.
- Bal Gangadhar TilakBal Gangadhar Tilak was a nationalist leader, journalist and Sanskrit scholar who was among the first prominent Indian politicians to demand Swaraj (self-rule) as an unconditional right, and who led the "Extremist" wing of the Indian National Congress in the early twentieth century.
- Lala Lajpat RaiA Punjabi nationalist leader, writer and one of the "Lal-Bal-Pal" trio of assertive Congress leaders in the early twentieth century, whose death followed injuries sustained during a protest against the Simon Commission in 1928.
- Bipin Chandra PalA Bengali nationalist leader, journalist and orator, one of the "Lal-Bal-Pal" triumvirate associated with the assertive wing of the Indian National Congress in the early twentieth century.
- Annie BesantAnnie Besant (1847-1933) was a British-born theosophist, social reformer and Indian home rule campaigner who became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress.
Leading the movement, 1917–1947
- Mohandas Karamchand GandhiMohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was an Indian lawyer and political leader who developed satyagraha, a method of organised nonviolent resistance, and led the campaigns that became central to India's independence movement before his assassination in 1948.
- Motilal NehruMotilal Nehru was an Allahabad lawyer and Indian National Congress leader who served twice as Congress president, co-founded the Swaraj Party, and authored the 1928 Nehru Report on constitutional reform; he was the father of Jawaharlal Nehru.
- Jawaharlal NehruJawaharlal Nehru was an Indian nationalist leader and the first Prime Minister of independent India, serving from 1947 until his death in 1964.
- Abul Kalam AzadAbul Kalam Azad was an Islamic scholar turned Indian nationalist leader who served as Congress president through the Quit India years and became independent India's first Minister of Education.
- Rajendra PrasadRajendra Prasad was an Indian independence movement leader and Congress politician from Bihar who presided over the Constituent Assembly and became the first President of India.
- Chakravarti RajagopalachariChakravarti Rajagopalachari was a Congress leader from Madras who served as Premier of Madras Presidency, proposed the controversial 1944 "C.R. formula" for Congress-League cooperation, and became independent India's last Governor-General and first Indian to hold the office.
- Sarojini NaiduSarojini Naidu was a poet and nationalist leader who became a prominent figure in the Indian National Congress, the first Indian woman to serve as its president, and, after independence, the first woman to serve as governor of an Indian state.
- Khan Abdul Ghaffar KhanA Pashtun nationalist leader from the North-West Frontier Province who founded the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, a nonviolent resistance organisation allied with the Indian National Congress, and who opposed the Partition of India.
- Vallabhbhai PatelVallabhbhai Patel was an Indian independence leader and, as the country's first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister from 1947, the principal architect of the integration of over five hundred princely states into the Indian Union.
- Muhammad Ali JinnahMuhammad Ali Jinnah was a lawyer and politician who led the All-India Muslim League to the demand for a separate Muslim state and became the founding Governor-General of Pakistan in 1947.
- Bhimrao Ramji AmbedkarA jurist, economist and social reformer who led the movement for Dalit rights under colonial rule, chaired the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution, and became independent India's first law minister.
- Jayaprakash NarayanA socialist political leader and freedom-movement activist, prominent in the Quit India Movement of 1942, who later became a central figure in the anti-corruption and anti-Emergency movement of the mid-1970s.
The revolutionary current
- Bhagat SinghBhagat Singh (1907-1931) was a revolutionary nationalist and self-described socialist, executed by the colonial government for his role in the killing of a police officer and the 1929 bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly, who became one of the most widely commemorated martyr-figures of the Indian independence movement.
- Chandrashekhar AzadChandrashekhar Azad was an Indian revolutionary who led the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and died by his own hand in 1931 rather than be captured by police.
- Ram Prasad BismilRam Prasad Bismil was a revolutionary nationalist and Hindi and Urdu poet who co-founded the Hindustan Republican Association and was executed for his leading role in the 1925 Kakori train robbery.
- Ashfaqulla KhanAshfaqulla Khan was a revolutionary of the Hindustan Republican Association executed in 1927 for his role in the 1925 Kakori train robbery.
- Khudiram BoseKhudiram Bose was a Bengali revolutionary hanged at eighteen for his role in the 1908 Muzaffarpur bombing, one of the earliest attempts to assassinate a British official in colonial India.
- Surya SenSurya Sen was a Bengali schoolteacher and revolutionary who organised and led the 1930 Chittagong armoury raid against British colonial rule, for which he was later captured and executed.
- Udham SinghUdham Singh was a Punjabi revolutionary who assassinated former Punjab Lieutenant Governor Michael O'Dwyer in London in 1940 in retribution for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
- Vinayak Damodar SavarkarVinayak Damodar Savarkar was a nationalist revolutionary, writer and political ideologue whose 1923 pamphlet "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?" supplied the foundational political vocabulary of Hindu nationalism, and who later led the Hindu Mahasabha.
- Subhas Chandra BoseSubhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) was a Bengali nationalist leader who broke with Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress to pursue armed struggle against British rule, commanding the Indian National Army and the Japanese-backed Provisional Government of Free India before his disputed death in 1945.
- Subhas Chandra Bose and the freedom struggleThis entry examines the long-running historiographical debate over how much credit Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army deserve for hastening the end of British rule in India in 1947, alongside the mass non-violent movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.
Events
1857–1919 · the early movement
- Revolt of 1857A large-scale uprising against East India Company rule that began among sepoys of the Bengal Army in May 1857 and spread across much of north and central India before being suppressed in 1858.
- Partition of Bengal (1905)The 1905 division of the Bengal Presidency by Viceroy Lord Curzon into two provinces along broadly religious lines, an act that provoked mass protest and the Swadeshi movement.
- Swadeshi movementThe Swadeshi movement was a campaign to boycott British goods and promote Indian-made products, launched in Bengal in 1905 in protest against the partition of the province and lasting through the following decade as a major current in nationalist politics.
- Surat Split (1907)The Surat Split was the December 1907 breakup of the Indian National Congress into rival Moderate and Extremist factions at its annual session in Surat.
- All India Muslim LeagueThe All India Muslim League was a political organization founded in 1906 to safeguard Muslim political interests in British India, which by the 1940s had become the principal vehicle for the demand for a separate state of Pakistan.
- Morley-Minto reformsThe Morley-Minto reforms, enacted as the Indian Councils Act of 1909, enlarged Indian representation on British Indian legislative councils and introduced separate electorates for Muslims.
- Ghadar movementThe Ghadar movement was a revolutionary organization of Indian emigrants on the Pacific coast of North America that sought to overthrow British rule in India by armed insurrection, most notably during the First World War.
- Champaran SatyagrahaA 1917 civil resistance campaign led by Mohandas Gandhi among indigo cultivators in Champaran district, Bihar, against a system of forced indigo cultivation imposed by European planters.
- Kheda SatyagrahaThe Kheda Satyagraha was a 1918 no-tax campaign in Gujarat led by Mohandas Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel, demanding land-revenue relief for farmers hit by crop failure.
- Montagu-Chelmsford reformsThe Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were a set of constitutional changes to British Indian governance, announced in 1917 and enacted as the Government of India Act 1919, that introduced limited provincial self-government through "dyarchy" while retaining ultimate authority in British hands.
- Rowlatt ActA 1919 law passed by the Imperial Legislative Council that extended emergency wartime powers of detention without trial into peacetime, becoming a major flashpoint for Indian nationalist opposition.
- Jallianwala Bagh massacreThe 13 April 1919 killing of unarmed civilians by troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer at a walled garden in Amritsar, Punjab, a defining atrocity of British rule in India.
1919–1934 · mass movements
- Khilafat movementThe Khilafat movement was a pan-Islamic political campaign by Indian Muslims between 1919 and 1924 to pressure the British government to preserve the Ottoman caliphate after the First World War, which merged with Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement to form the broadest joint Hindu-Muslim mobilisation of the early nationalist period.
- Non-Cooperation MovementThe Non-Cooperation Movement was a mass campaign of boycott and civil disengagement from British institutions launched by Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress in 1920 and called off in early 1922.
- Chauri Chaura incidentThe Chauri Chaura incident was a clash on 4 February 1922 in which a crowd associated with the Non-Cooperation Movement killed police personnel and set fire to a police station, leading Mahatma Gandhi to call off the movement nationwide.
- Simon CommissionThe Simon Commission was a British parliamentary body appointed in 1927 to review the working of the Government of India Act of 1919 and recommend further constitutional reform, boycotted across India because it included no Indian members.
- Nehru Report (1928)The Nehru Report was a 1928 draft constitution for India written by an all-parties committee chaired by Motilal Nehru, produced as an Indian answer to the British-only Simon Commission.
- Purna SwarajPurna Swaraj ("complete self-rule") was the declaration of full political independence as the Indian National Congress's official goal, adopted at its Lahore session in December 1929 and formally proclaimed on 26 January 1930.
- Salt MarchThe Salt March was a 24-day protest walk led by Mohandas Gandhi in March–April 1930 from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi, where he broke the British salt law by producing salt from seawater, opening the Civil Disobedience Movement.
- Civil Disobedience MovementThe Civil Disobedience Movement was a mass campaign of organized, non-violent law-breaking led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress between 1930 and 1934, launched with the Salt March, that sought to force constitutional concessions from British rule by deliberately defying specific colonial laws.
- Round Table ConferencesA series of three conferences held in London between 1930 and 1932 in which representatives of British India, the Indian princely states and British political parties discussed constitutional reform for India.
- Gandhi-Irwin PactA March 1931 agreement between Mohandas Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Irwin that suspended the Civil Disobedience Movement in exchange for the release of political prisoners and Congress participation in constitutional talks.
- Communal AwardThe Communal Award was a decision announced by British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in August 1932 granting separate electorates to the Depressed Classes, Muslims, Sikhs and other minority communities in British India, which provoked Gandhi's fast in protest and led directly to the Poona Pact.
- Poona PactThe Poona Pact was a September 1932 agreement between Mohandas K. Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar that replaced separate electorates for the Depressed Classes with reserved seats within a joint electorate.
1935–1947 · to independence
- Government of India Act 1935The Government of India Act 1935 was a British statute that granted provincial autonomy to British India, proposed an unrealized all-India federation, and served as the framework closest to a constitution that British India possessed until 1947.
- 1937 provincial electionsThe 1937 provincial elections were the first held under the Government of India Act of 1935, in which the Indian National Congress won a majority or plurality of seats in most provinces and formed ministries in the majority of them.
- August OfferThe August Offer was a set of constitutional proposals issued by Viceroy Lord Linlithgow on 8 August 1940, offering limited concessions in exchange for Indian support in the Second World War.
- Individual SatyagrahaIndividual Satyagraha was a deliberately limited civil disobedience campaign launched by Mohandas Gandhi in October 1940, in which selected volunteers, one at a time, publicly opposed India's forced involvement in the Second World War and courted arrest.
- Cripps MissionThe Cripps Mission was a March 1942 British initiative, led by Sir Stafford Cripps, offering post-war dominion status in exchange for Indian cooperation in the Second World War; it was rejected by both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League.
- Quit India MovementThe Quit India Movement was a mass civil disobedience campaign launched by the Indian National Congress in August 1942 demanding an immediate end to British rule, met with swift, extensive government suppression that included the arrest of the entire senior Congress leadership within a day of the call.
- Bengal famine of 1943A famine in the Bengal province of British India in 1943 that caused large-scale death from starvation and disease amid wartime disruption, administrative failure and export/procurement policy, with death toll estimates commonly ranging from roughly 1.5 to 3 million.
- Indian National ArmyThe Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj) was an armed force raised during the Second World War, first from Indian prisoners of war in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia and later reorganized under Subhas Chandra Bose, to fight for India's independence from British rule.
- Royal Indian Navy mutinyA five-day uprising by Indian ratings of the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946, beginning in Bombay and spreading to other ports, over service conditions and colonial rule.
- Cabinet Mission planThe Cabinet Mission plan was a proposal put forward in May 1946 by a three-member British cabinet delegation for a united, federal, independent India with a weak central government and provinces grouped by region, intended as an alternative to outright partition.
- Direct Action DayDirect Action Day was a general strike and demonstration called by the All-India Muslim League for 16 August 1946 to press its demand for a separate Pakistan, which triggered several days of severe communal violence in Calcutta and beyond.
- Mountbatten PlanThe Mountbatten Plan, announced on 3 June 1947 by Viceroy Louis Mountbatten, set out the partition of British India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan and fixed the transfer of power for August 1947.
- Radcliffe LineThe Radcliffe Line is the boundary drawn in 1947 by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe to partition British India into the new dominions of India and Pakistan, fixing the borders through Punjab and Bengal.
- Indian Independence Act 1947The Indian Independence Act 1947 was the Act of the British Parliament that partitioned British India into the two independent dominions of India and Pakistan with effect from 15 August 1947.