Indian independence movement

Company Rule and Early Resistance

British involvement in India began with the East India Company, chartered in 1600, which established trading posts before turning to territorial conquest in the 18th century. The Company's victories at the Battle of Plassey (1757) and the Battle of Buxar (1764) gave it control of Bengal's revenues and, through the 1765 grant of diwani rights, effective rule over one of India's richest provinces. Over the following century the Company expanded across the subcontinent through conquest, subsidiary alliances, and policies such as Governor-General Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse, which annexed princely states whose rulers died without a natural heir.

Company rule combined heavy taxation with the dismantling of Indian manufacturing, most visibly the collapse of the Bengal textile industry, which had once supplied much of the world, under tariffs favoring British mill goods. Resentment built across social groups, from dispossessed nobility and disbanded soldiers to peasants facing new revenue demands.

The 1857 Rebellion

In May 1857, sepoys of the Bengal Army mutinied at Meerut, reportedly triggered by the introduction of cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike, though grievances over land, pay, and the erosion of Indian rulers' authority ran far deeper. The revolt spread across northern and central India, drawing in figures such as Bahadur Shah Zafar, the aged Mughal emperor whom rebels proclaimed their nominal sovereign, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, and Tantia Tope. British forces suppressed the uprising by mid-1858 after months of brutal fighting on both sides. In its aftermath, the British Crown abolished the East India Company and assumed direct rule through the Government of India Act 1858, inaugurating the period known as the British Raj.

The Congress and Constitutional Nationalism (1885-1919)

The decades between the 1857 rebellion and the Congress's founding saw the British administration extend limited consultative institutions through the Indian Councils Acts of 1861 and 1892, while at the same time provoking fresh grievances: the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 restricted the Indian-language press, and the 1883 Ilbert Bill controversy, in which British residents in India campaigned successfully to block a law permitting Indian judges to try European defendants, exposed the racial double standards of colonial governance to an emerging, English-educated Indian middle class from which the Congress would draw its early leadership.

The Indian National Congress was founded in Bombay in December 1885 by the retired civil servant Allan Octavian Hume together with Indian leaders including Dadabhai Naoroji and W.C. Bonnerjee. Its early moderate leadership sought incremental reform and greater Indian representation within colonial government rather than independence. Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905, widely seen as an attempt to weaken nationalist sentiment along religious lines, provoked the Swadeshi movement, a boycott of British goods, and pushed more assertive leaders, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Lala Lajpat Rai, to prominence; the Congress split along these lines at its 1907 Surat session. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 introduced limited separate electorates for Muslims, a step that would shape later communal politics. Alongside constitutional agitation, revolutionary groups such as the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal pursued armed resistance, and the Ghadar Party, founded by Punjabi and other expatriate Indians in San Francisco in 1913, plotted an armed uprising against British rule with support sought from Germany during the First World War. The Government of India Act, 1919, based on the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, introduced a limited system of dyarchy, dividing provincial subjects between elected Indian ministers and British-controlled departments, a step nationalists regarded as inadequate.

Gandhi, Mass Mobilization, and the Interwar Struggle (1919-1939)

The Rowlatt Act of 1919, which permitted indefinite detention without trial, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919, in which troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd in Amritsar, killing hundreds, transformed Indian politics. Mohandas Gandhi, who had returned from South Africa in 1915 after developing his philosophy of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha), emerged as the Congress's central figure. His Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-22), conducted jointly with the Muslim-led Khilafat movement, called for the boycott of British courts, schools, and goods; Gandhi called it off after a mob killed policemen at Chauri Chaura in February 1922.

A separate revolutionary current persisted alongside the Congress's mass movements through the 1920s and early 1930s. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, and Rajguru, organized through the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, carried out the 1928 killing of British police officer J.P. Saunders in revenge for a fatal police assault on Lala Lajpat Rai, and in 1929 threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi to protest repressive legislation, deliberately courting arrest rather than fleeing. Bhagat Singh and his co-accused were tried and hanged in March 1931, becoming lasting symbols of the movement's militant wing alongside its Gandhian mainstream.

The all-British Simon Commission, appointed in 1927 to review constitutional progress without a single Indian member, was boycotted by the Congress and met with black-flag protests across the country. In response the Congress convened its own committee under Motilal Nehru, whose 1928 report proposed a dominion-status constitution and rejected separate communal electorates, a position that alienated Jinnah and hardened the Muslim League's subsequent demands, articulated in Jinnah's Fourteen Points of 1929.

The Congress adopted the demand for complete independence, Purna Swaraj, at its Lahore session in December 1929, and proclaimed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day, observed annually until 1947 (the date was later chosen for the Constitution's adoption in 1950). Gandhi's Salt March of March-April 1930, a 240-mile walk from the Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi to defy the government salt monopoly, opened the Civil Disobedience Movement and drew mass participation. Talks with the Viceroy produced the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1931 and Gandhi's attendance at the Second Round Table Conference in London, where negotiations over minority representation produced the Communal Award and, after Gandhi's fast in protest, the Poona Pact of 1932 between Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar, replacing separate electorates for the "depressed classes" with reserved seats. The Government of India Act, 1935 introduced provincial autonomy, and the Congress formed ministries in most provinces after the 1937 elections, resigning them in 1939 in protest at India being declared a belligerent in the Second World War without Indian consent.

War, the Indian National Army, and Quit India (1939-1945)

The war years radicalized the movement further. The British Cripps Mission of 1942, offering eventual dominion status, was rejected by the Congress as inadequate. On 8 August 1942 Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, demanding immediate British withdrawal under the slogan "Do or Die"; the government responded by arresting the entire Congress leadership within hours, provoking widespread underground resistance and repression that lasted into 1944. Outside India, Subhas Chandra Bose, who had broken with Gandhi's nonviolent strategy, took command in 1943 of the Indian National Army, formed from Indian prisoners of war and expatriates in Southeast Asia with Japanese backing, and fought alongside Japanese forces in the failed 1944 Imphal-Kohima campaign. Though militarily unsuccessful, the INA's postwar Red Fort trials in 1945-46 triggered mass protests across religious lines and were widely credited, by contemporaries and later historians, with convincing British military planners that the loyalty of Indian forces could no longer be assumed, a concern reinforced by the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946.

Partition and Independence (1945-1947)

Attempts at a negotiated settlement before the war's end failed: the Simla Conference of 1945, convened by Viceroy Lord Wavell to form an interim government representative of the Congress and the League, broke down over the League's insistence on nominating every Muslim member. The Cabinet Mission of 1946 proposed a loose three-tier federation intended to hold India together without partition; the Congress and the League initially accepted it in principle but disagreed sharply over its interpretation, and the plan collapsed within months. An Interim Government was nonetheless formed in September 1946 under Nehru, with the League joining in October, though the two parties operated it in open rivalry rather than cooperation.

Postwar Britain, exhausted economically and facing a newly elected Labour government under Clement Attlee more disposed to withdrawal, moved toward a settlement. The All India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had by then hardened its 1940 Lahore Resolution demand for a separate Muslim state into an uncompromising position, and the failure of the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan to secure agreement on a unified India was followed by the League's Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946, which set off communal killings in Calcutta that spread to other regions. Lord Mountbatten, appointed Viceroy in early 1947, concluded that partition offered the only workable path to a rapid transfer of power. The Indian Independence Act, passed by the British Parliament on 18 July 1947, provided for the creation of two dominions, India and Pakistan, with boundaries in Punjab and Bengal drawn by a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, in a commission whose award was published only after independence, on 17 August 1947. India and Pakistan became independent at midnight on 14-15 August 1947.

Aftermath

Partition produced one of the largest forced migrations in history, as an estimated 10 to 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed the new borders; communal violence during the migration killed an uncertain number, with historians' estimates ranging from several hundred thousand to over a million. Mahatma Gandhi, who had opposed partition and worked to calm communal violence in Bengal and Delhi in its aftermath, was assassinated in New Delhi on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who accused him of favoring Muslims. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, oversaw the integration of some 565 princely states into the Indian Union through negotiation and, in a small number of cases including Hyderabad and Junagadh, military action; the accession of Jammu and Kashmir, contested by Pakistan, became the source of continuing conflict between the two new states. B.R. Ambedkar chaired the Constituent Assembly's Drafting Committee, producing the Constitution adopted on 26 January 1950. The movement's mix of Gandhian nonviolence, constitutional politics within the Congress, and armed and revolutionary currents including Bose's INA has left a contested historiography over the relative weight of each in securing British withdrawal, a debate that continues among historians of the period.