Background
Isaacs had a prominent legal and diplomatic career in Britain before his appointment as Viceroy. Called to the bar and later elected to Parliament as a Liberal, he served as Attorney General, then as Lord Chief Justice of England, and as wartime and post-war British ambassador to the United States, where he helped coordinate Allied finance and supply. He arrived in India in 1921, at the age of sixty-one, as the Non-Cooperation Movement, launched the previous year by Gandhi in alliance with the Khilafat Movement, was near its peak, with widespread boycotts of British goods, courts and institutions underway across the country.
Non-Cooperation and Gandhi's trial
In February 1922, violence at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, where a mob killed a number of policemen, led Gandhi to call off the Non-Cooperation Movement, judging that it had strayed from strict nonviolent discipline. Reading's government subsequently arrested Gandhi in March 1922 and tried him on charges of sedition arising from articles published in Young India; Gandhi pleaded guilty and used the trial to make a public statement of his political position. He was sentenced to six years' imprisonment, of which he served roughly two years before being released in 1924 on health grounds.
Other events
Reading's term also saw the suppression of the Moplah (Mappila) rebellion in Malabar in 1921, an uprising with both agrarian and religious dimensions that was put down with substantial loss of life, and the Kakori conspiracy case of 1925, in which a group of revolutionaries, including Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan, were tried and several executed for a train robbery intended to fund armed revolutionary activity. The period also saw a marked deterioration in Hindu-Muslim political cooperation following the collapse of the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation alliance, with communal tensions rising in several provinces.
Departure
Reading also dealt with continued unrest in the princely states and pressed, with limited success, for greater fiscal autonomy for the Government of India from the India Office in London, an issue that had long strained relations between Calcutta (and later Delhi) and Whitehall. He left India in 1926 and was succeeded by Lord Irwin. His viceroyalty is generally treated as a period in which the colonial government reasserted firm control after the mass mobilisation of the Non-Cooperation years, without addressing the underlying political demands that had driven that movement.
Further reading
- Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Bloomsbury, 2019
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 August 2026.