The movement’s history is a history of methods. Each generation concluded that the previous method had reached its limit, and the sequence from petition to mass satyagraha is the argument the syllabus wants.
This is chapter 19 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Indian Government and Politics in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.
UPSC syllabus
Indian Nationalism: Political strategies of India’s freedom struggle: constitutionalism to mass Satyagraha, non-cooperation, civil disobedience; militant and revolutionary movements; peasant and workers movements.
In one page
- Moderate constitutionalism (1885–1905) worked by petition, prayer and protest, and by the drain theory. Its real achievement was intellectual: it demonstrated that British rule was economically extractive, using the government’s own statistics.
- Extremism (1905–1918) replaced petition with swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance, and made swaraj a demand rather than a request.
- Revolutionary movements ran alongside both, from Anushilan and Yugantar to the Ghadar Party and the HSRA. Bhagat Singh’s later writing shifts the aim from expelling the British to abolishing exploitation.
- Gandhi converts nationalism into a mass movement, and the innovation is technique: satyagraha makes participation possible for people with no vote, no property and no English.
- Non-cooperation (1920–22) withdraws collaboration; civil disobedience (1930–34) breaks a specific law; Quit India (1942) demands immediate withdrawal. The escalation is deliberate.
- Peasant movements run from Indigo (1859–60) through Deccan riots, Champaran, Kheda, Bardoli, the Kisan Sabhas, and Tebhaga and Telangana at the end. They were not simply the Congress’s rural wing.
- Workers’ organisation begins with AITUC in 1920 and becomes politically decisive in strikes at Bombay, Sholapur and elsewhere; the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33) marks the state’s response.
- The strategies were not sequential replacements. Constitutional work, mass movement and revolutionary action ran simultaneously after 1920, and each shaped what the others could do.
From constitutionalism to swadeshi
The Moderate method and what it achieved
The Congress founded in 1885 worked by what its critics called the three Ps: petition, prayer and protest. Its demands were representation in the legislative councils, Indianisation of the services, separation of executive from judiciary, and reduced military expenditure. Its method assumed that British rule rested on principles the British themselves professed, so that exposing the gap between profession and practice would produce reform. Naoroji, Gokhale, Ranade, Pherozeshah Mehta and Surendranath Banerjea are the names.
Two achievements deserve statement, because dismissing the Moderates is the commonest error.
The drain theory is the first. Dadabhai Naoroji‘s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), with R.C. Dutt’s economic history, argued that a substantial part of India’s annual product was transferred to Britain without a return: home charges, pensions, remittances, and the profits of a trade structured to serve British industry. The argument was constructed from official statistics, and it destroyed the moral case for empire more effectively than any appeal to rights could have. Every later economic nationalism in India descends from it.
The second is that the Moderates created a national political vocabulary and a pan-Indian organisation where none had existed. The Extremists could only attack the Congress because the Congress existed.
The method’s limit was structural. Petitioning presumes the addressee can be shamed, and the partition of Bengal in 1905 demonstrated that it could not.
Swadeshi and the Extremist turn
The Swadeshi movement (1905–08) is the hinge. Against the partition of Bengal it deployed boycott of British goods, promotion of indigenous production, national education through the Bengal National College and the Bengal Technical Institute, samitis for volunteer organisation, and the use of festivals and traditional forms to mobilise beyond the educated classes.
The Extremist argument, developed by Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo, was set out in Chapter 16: swaraj is a birthright; self-reliance replaces petition; and the aim is to make administration unworkable by withdrawing cooperation. Tilak’s use of the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals extended the movement’s reach and, as later scholarship notes, also gave it a Hindu idiom that had costs.
The movement’s limits are as instructive as its methods: it did not reach the Muslim peasantry of east Bengal in any depth, boycott hurt poorer consumers, and the Surat split of 1907 divided the Congress for nine years.
Gandhi and the mass phase
Gandhi’s importance here is not doctrinal, which Chapter 9 covers, but technical. He solved the problem that had defeated both earlier methods: how to give political agency to people who could not vote, petition in English or afford a boycott.
Satyagraha does that in three ways. It requires no property and no literacy, only willingness to suffer. It converts moral capital into political pressure, so that repression strengthens rather than weakens the movement. And it is scalable, since it can be practised by one person in a village or by millions simultaneously.
The local experiments came first: Champaran (1917) against the tinkathia system imposed on indigo cultivators, Kheda (1918) for revenue remission after crop failure, and Ahmedabad (1918) for mill workers’ wages, where he used a fast. Each was a limited, winnable, economic grievance, which is how the method was proved before being generalised.
Non-cooperation, 1920–22
Triggered by the Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919 and the Khilafat question, non-cooperation was adopted at Nagpur in December 1920. Its programme: surrender of titles and honorary offices, boycott of courts, schools, colleges and legislative councils, boycott of foreign cloth, and later a boycott of the Prince of Wales’s visit; alongside a constructive programme of khadi, national schools, panchayats and Hindu-Muslim unity.
Its significance is organisational as much as political. The Nagpur session reorganised the Congress into linguistic provincial committees with a working committee and mass membership at a nominal fee, converting a debating body into a machine. The Khilafat alliance produced the widest Hindu-Muslim cooperation of the entire movement.
Gandhi withdrew it after Chauri Chaura on 5 February 1922, when a crowd burned a police station killing twenty-two policemen. The withdrawal is the standing controversy: for Gandhi it followed necessarily from the inseparability of means and ends; for Nehru, Bose and most of the left it demobilised a movement at its peak over a single incident.
Civil disobedience, 1930–34
Where non-cooperation withdrew participation, civil disobedience broke a law. The Lahore Congress of December 1929 adopted purna swaraj, and 26 January 1930 was observed as Independence Day.
The Dandi march, 12 March to 6 April 1930, was chosen with great care: the salt tax fell on everyone including the poorest, salt could be made anywhere on the coast, and the illegality was visible and undramatic. It spread into no-tax campaigns in Gujarat, refusal of the chowkidari tax in Bihar and Bengal, forest-law defiance in Maharashtra and Karnataka, and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement under Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the North-West Frontier Province, where the Garhwali regiment refused to fire at Peshawar.
Women’s participation was on an unprecedented scale, in picketing liquor and cloth shops and in salt manufacture. The movement was suspended by the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, resumed after the second Round Table Conference failed, and formally withdrawn in 1934.
Quit India, 1942
The Cripps Mission’s failure and the Japanese advance produced the demand for immediate withdrawal. The All India Congress Committee resolution of 8 August 1942 was met with the arrest of the entire leadership within hours, so the movement was leaderless from the start, and became the most spontaneous and the most violent phase: railway lines torn up, telegraph wires cut, government buildings attacked, and parallel governments established at Ballia, Tamluk in Midnapore and Satara. Repression was severe.
Its significance is contested and both readings should be given: it was suppressed within months and did not force withdrawal, but it demonstrated that the administrative apparatus could not count on Indian obedience, and that judgement, reinforced by the Indian National Army trials and the naval ratings’ mutiny of February 1946, is what made continued rule appear impracticable.
Revolutionary and militant movements
The revolutionary strand is not a footnote and UPSC treats it as part of the syllabus line.
- Early phase. Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal; the Alipore and Muzaffarpur cases; Savarkar and Abhinav Bharat; the India House network in London.
- Ghadar Party (1913, San Francisco), drawing on Punjabi migrants in North America, which attempted a general rising in 1915 in coordination with the Komagata Maru returnees.
- Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (1928), renamed from the HRA to insert socialism deliberately. The Kakori conspiracy (1925), the killing of Saunders (1928), the Assembly bomb (April 1929) thrown to make the deaf hear rather than to kill, and the executions of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru on 23 March 1931.
- Chittagong armoury raid (1930) under Surya Sen, notable for the substantial participation of women including Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta.
Bhagat Singh‘s writing is what makes this strand intellectually examinable. “Why I am an Atheist” (1930) rejects religious sanction for politics; his statements distinguish the aim of replacing British rulers with Indian ones from the aim of abolishing exploitation, and his slogan Inquilab Zindabad was explicitly glossed as revolution meaning not the cult of the bomb and the pistol but the overthrow of a social order founded on manifest injustice.
Peasant and workers’ movements
Peasant movements
The 2025 paper asked specifically for peasant movements after 1857 and before independence, so the chronology must be secure.
| Movement | Grievance and method | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Indigo revolt, Bengal, 1859–60 | Forced indigo cultivation on the best land at ruinous prices; refusal to sow | Indigo Commission 1860; cultivation collapses in Bengal |
| Deccan riots, 1875 | Debt bondage to moneylenders after the cotton-boom collapse; seizure and burning of bonds | Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act 1879 |
| Champaran, 1917 | Tinkathia obligation on indigo planters’ tenants; satyagraha and systematic enquiry | Champaran Agrarian Act 1918 |
| Kheda, 1918 | Revenue demanded despite crop failure; no-revenue campaign | Remission for the poorest |
| Bardoli, 1928 | 22 per cent revenue enhancement; no-tax satyagraha under Vallabhbhai Patel | Enhancement cut to about 6 per cent; Patel named Sardar |
| Moplah, Malabar, 1921 | Tenancy insecurity under janmi landlords, fused with Khilafat mobilisation | Suppressed; communal violence damaged the wider movement |
| Eka and Kisan Sabha, Awadh, 1920–22 | Nazrana and eviction; Baba Ramchandra’s organisation | Oudh Rent Amendment Act 1921 |
| All India Kisan Sabha, 1936 | Zamindari abolition, rent reduction, debt relief; Sahajanand Saraswati, N.G. Ranga | Programme largely enacted after 1947 |
| Tebhaga, Bengal, 1946–47 | Sharecroppers’ demand for two-thirds instead of half | Partial legislative concession; suppressed |
| Telangana, 1946–51 | Vetti forced labour and land seizure under the Nizam; armed struggle | Land redistributed in villages; called off 1951 |
Two analytical points lift such an answer. First, the movements were not uniformly Congress-led; the Kisan Sabhas frequently pressed demands the Congress leadership found inconvenient, since the Congress included landholders. Second, their cumulative effect was to make zamindari abolition the first major legislative programme of independent India, which connects this chapter to Chapter 29.
Workers’ movements
Organised labour begins with the Bombay Mill-Hands Association (1890) and the Madras Labour Union (1918), and acquires national form with the All India Trade Union Congress in 1920 under Lala Lajpat Rai. The 1928 Bombay textile strike, the Girni Kamgar Union’s growth, and the Sholapur events of 1930 mark labour’s entry into the national movement.
The state’s response defines the period: the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33) prosecuted thirty-three communist and trade union organisers, and gave them a public platform that spread their ideas further than their organising had. The Congress Socialist Party (1934) and the Congress’s own Karachi resolution of 1931, which promised a living wage, limited hours and protection for women workers, register labour’s influence inside the movement.
Debate: Was the withdrawal of non-cooperation in 1922 a mistake?
Yes. The movement was at its height, the administration was visibly strained, and the Khilafat alliance had produced a Hindu-Muslim unity never recovered afterwards. A single incident in a small town was allowed to demobilise a subcontinental movement, and the leadership’s real motive, on the left reading, was fear of a mobilisation passing beyond its control. Motilal Nehru, Lajpat Rai and Subhas Bose all objected; C.R. Das called it a disaster. No. Gandhi’s premise is that a movement whose method collapses has already lost, whatever its numbers. Chauri Chaura demonstrated that the discipline satyagraha requires had not been built, and a movement that turned violent would have justified overwhelming repression and lost the moral advantage that was its only real weapon. The subsequent constructive phase built the organisation that made 1930 possible. The examiner’s line. Judge it by what the method needs rather than by the numbers lost. Gandhi was consistent, and consistency is the point of a doctrine in which means and ends are inseparable; but the cost was real and the Khilafat unity was never rebuilt. The most defensible verdict is that the decision was correct on Gandhi’s premises and that those premises carried a price the movement paid in 1922 and again in 1940–41.
By Revolution we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change
Bhagat Singh, statement in the Assembly bomb case, 1929
Where answers lose marks
- Dismissing the Moderates. The drain theory was constructed from official data and destroyed the economic justification for empire; say what it did before saying what it failed to do.
- Treating the strategies as a clean sequence. After 1920 constitutional work, mass movement and revolutionary action ran simultaneously and interacted.
- Confusing non-cooperation with civil disobedience. The first withdraws participation; the second breaks a specific law. The escalation is the analytical point.
- Listing peasant movements without their specific grievances. Tinkathia, nazrana, the Bardoli enhancement and the tebhaga share are what distinguish a trained answer.
- Treating peasant movements as the Congress’s rural wing. The Kisan Sabhas often pressed demands the Congress leadership resisted.
- Omitting the revolutionaries’ ideas. Bhagat Singh’s atheism and his redefinition of revolution as the end of exploitation are examinable, not just his execution.
Asked before
- Explain briefly the role of Peasant Movements after 1857 and before independence. (2025, Paper I, 10 marks)
- Satyagraha and Indian Nationalism. (2023, Paper I, 10 marks)
Answer skeleton
Explain briefly the role of Peasant Movements after 1857 and before independence. (10 marks, 150 words)
Frame. One line: peasant movements supplied the national movement with mass depth and with its post-independence agrarian agenda, while retaining objectives of their own.
Phase one, autonomous, 1859–1900. Indigo revolt 1859–60 against forced cultivation, producing the Indigo Commission; Deccan riots 1875 against debt bondage, producing the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act 1879. Local, economic, not yet nationalist.
Phase two, absorbed into the movement, 1917–28. Champaran 1917 against tinkathia; Kheda 1918 on revenue remission; Bardoli 1928 against a 22 per cent enhancement. Gandhi’s method proved on limited, winnable demands.
Phase three, organised and radical, 1920–47. Awadh Kisan Sabha and Eka against nazrana and eviction; Moplah 1921; All India Kisan Sabha 1936 under Sahajanand Saraswati and N.G. Ranga demanding zamindari abolition; Tebhaga 1946; Telangana against vetti.
Assess the role. Three contributions: they extended the movement beyond the towns; they forced land into the national agenda, making zamindari abolition the first major legislative act after 1947; and they created independent peasant organisation that sometimes pressed against Congress’s landholding members.
Close on the limit. Demands remained largely economic and local, and the movements did not by themselves produce a national peasant party, so the agenda was inherited by the state rather than by a peasant political force.
Last-mile revision
- Moderates 1885–1905: petition, prayer, protest; drain theory, Naoroji Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), R.C. Dutt.
- Swadeshi 1905–08: boycott, swadeshi, national education, samitis; Surat split 1907.
- Gandhi’s local experiments: Champaran 1917, Kheda 1918, Ahmedabad 1918.
- Non-cooperation 1920–22: Nagpur session December 1920, Congress reorganised on linguistic lines; Khilafat alliance; withdrawn after Chauri Chaura, 5 February 1922.
- Civil disobedience 1930–34: Lahore 1929 purna swaraj, 26 January 1930; Dandi 12 March to 6 April 1930; no-tax and forest satyagrahas; Khudai Khidmatgar; Gandhi-Irwin Pact March 1931.
- Quit India, 8 August 1942: leadership arrested at once; parallel governments at Ballia, Tamluk, Satara; INA trials and the naval mutiny of February 1946 as the sequel.
- Revolutionaries: Anushilan, Jugantar, Ghadar 1913, HSRA 1928, Kakori 1925, Assembly bomb 1929, executions 23 March 1931, Chittagong 1930.
- Peasant movements table; workers: AITUC 1920, Bombay strike 1928, Meerut Conspiracy Case 1929–33, Karachi resolution 1931.
Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.
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