“Anti-colonial Struggle in South Asia”
Pranav Jani and Mytheli Sreenivas
Draft of forthcoming entry in Historical Companion to Postcolonial
Literature
The anti-colonial struggle against the British
Empire in India was the product of various, often contradictory, social forces,
ideas, and tactics. Indians with
opposing interests – capitalists and workers, landowners and peasants – did
unite to fight the British, but also clashed over the movement’s directions and
ultimate aims. We are left, therefore,
with a contradictory legacy: the tremendous heroism of the ordinary people who
overthrew an empire, but also the tragedy of communal violence, partition, and
continuing social inequality.
Resistance to colonialism after the 1857 Revolt
was fragmented and sporadic. The
British had consolidated alliances with an old elite of landlords and princes;
an emerging new elite of English-educated civil servants and professionals was
tied to the colonial structure. The
peasant and tribal rebellions that did occur confronted their local oppressors,
not the colonial state – even when they saw ‘the foreigner’ as part of the
problem – and the fledgling urban classes were far from any nationalist
consciousness. The Indian National
Congress, formed in 1885 by new elites tiring of racist restrictions to their
advancement, confined its activities to petitioning the government. Despite some limited agitational politics in
the 1890s, it was only with the partition of Bengal Presidency in 1905 that the
possibilities of mass action became apparent.
The Swadeshi movement of 1905-08 began as a local initiative against the
partition, but soon progressed to question the entire colonial edifice. Activists boycotted British goods and
schools while developing plans for economic self-reliance and national
education. The British responded with
repression, but ultimately withdrew partition in 1911. Despite the victory of the Swadeshi
movement, colonial strategies of divide-and-rule met with some success,
especially in terms of Hindu-Muslim relations.
Communal riots and religious-based mobilisations existed alongside
instances of united, Hindu-Muslim opposition to partition. British claims that a divided East Bengal
would benefit Muslims was convincing to some Muslim elites, who were
under-represented in the class of English-educated men that constituted the
Congress party’s initial base. Under
these circumstances, and with the support of the colonial government, the
Muslim League was founded in 1906. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer and Congress
Party member who would become the leader of independent Pakistan, joined the
League in 1913.
The First World War and its
aftermath sparked political and economic changes that led to the expansion of
anti-colonial struggle. To finance the
war, British exploitation of the Indian economy via taxation intensified,
increasing unrest and lending support to nationalist theories of the ‘drain of
wealth’ from India to Britain. Further,
although the state had traditionally not supported industrialisation in the
colony, preferring India to be a market for British goods, the war forced the
government to give some measure of support to Indian industry. In terms of political activity, Home Rule Leagues
formed across India from 1916-18 under the leadership of Annie Besant and Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, using political education to inspire new layers of activists
to fight for Indian self-government.
Although far from Home Rule demands, some limited expansion of
‘responsible’ government through the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms in 1919 also
shaped the context for mass-based political activity.
It was at this juncture that
Mohandas K. Gandhi became the leader of Congress and reorganised the party into
a vehicle for mass struggle. Gandhi, a
London-trained lawyer from Gujarat, first achieved celebrity in South Africa,
where he led movements against the government’s racist policies towards the
Indian immigrant community. In these
struggles, Gandhi developed the methods of satyagraha,
emphasising the peaceful violation of specific laws by disciplined groups of
activists, that he would use in India after his return in 1914. His insistence on mass satyagraha
offered an alternative to existing forms of anti-colonial resistance, which had
been polarised between individual acts of revolutionary terrorism on the one
hand, and the constitutional agitation of the Congress party on the other.
Some historians have argued that it
is this vision of satyagraha – as a mass movement controlled from above
by Congress leadership – that explains Gandhi’s ability to unite various
classes and social groups in struggle.
Gandhi’s emphasis on non-violence and cross-class cooperation, they
suggest, gave confidence to landlords and capitalists to support anti-colonial
resistance (e.g., Sarkar 2002). Other
research has demonstrated the importance of rumours within a predominantly
illiterate society, suggesting that people in struggle attached their own,
often millenarian, meanings to the figure of Gandhi (Amin 1988). Indeed, we may trace a constant tension
between Gandhi’s attempts to discipline the masses into satyagraha and
the pressures from below that strained Congress demands.
Gandhi’s earliest activism in India, supporting indigo cultivators in
Champaran, peasants in Kheda, and industrial workers in Ahmedabad, began a
process of linking local actions to a broader nationalist movement. Gandhian methods of struggle emerged on the
national level in the ‘Rowlatt’ Satyagraha of 1919 and the
Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921-2. The
anti-Rowlatt agitations for civil rights faced heavy British repression,
culminating in the infamous Jallianwallah Bagh massacre of hundreds in
Punjab. But the Non-Cooperation
movement soon followed; with a clearer political orientation than the Swadeshi
movement, Indians again organised mass boycotts of British institutions and
goods and wore hand-woven cloth to symbolise economic and political
self-sufficiency.
The Non-Cooperation movement drew its strength from and inspired other
contemporary struggles. It represented
a highpoint of Hindu-Muslim political unity by linking with the anti-British
implications of the Khilafat movement, which had been building among Indian
Muslims since the defeat of the Turkish Caliphate in World War I. Peasant movements forged crucial connections
between nationalism and grassroots agitation.
The strike wave of 1919-21, forced by the shrinking of wartime demand,
also fuelled the radical drift.
However, as the anti-colonial movement proceeded with unprecedented intensity,
activism adopted non-Gandhian tactics and threatened to move beyond Congress’
control. Gandhi and Congress acted
decisively to maintain their leadership, severing their links to anti-landlord
agitations in Avadh and Malabar, and even calling off the Non-Cooperation
movement itself when protesters attacked and killed policemen in the town of
Chauri Chaura. Despite Congress’
restraining attempts, however, the radicalisation and mass character of the
1920s movements actually propelled anti-colonialism forward. In 1929, under pressure from labour
militants, the Congress party called for purna
swaraj (‘complete independence’), setting the stage for another upsurge
when the Great Depression struck.
During the Depression, rural India
suffered from a sharp decline in agricultural prices and urban areas faced high
unemployment and low wages. These
economic dislocations forced the colonial government to set up some protective
tariffs for India-based industry; the Indian economy thus continued its transformation
from being directly manipulated by Britain to being indirectly controlled by
British capitalists collaborating with Indian capitalists in joint
ventures. Nevertheless, even this could
not soften the brunt of a colonial economy in depression. In the face of economic crisis, Congress
mobilised masses of people into action through the Civil Disobedience campaigns
of the 1930s.
The Civil Disobedience of 1930-1 provides a sense of the movement’s
complex dynamics. It was launched by
Gandhi’s dramatic 287-mile march to the Gujarat seashore to make salt in
defiance of the British tax on this basic commodity. The salt march
electrified the nation by deftly tying the material needs of ordinary people to
the political struggle for independence and self-reliance. Congress sanctioned the mass, illegal
manufacture of salt, the boycott of foreign cloth and liquor, and the
initiation of no-revenue campaigns.
The movement soon threatened the
boundaries established by Congress, but Gandhi refused to call it off even when
faced with such non-Gandhian struggles as the takeover of the Chittagong
armoury, shootings of British officials in Bengal, militant forest satyagrahas by tribals against bans on
tree-cutting, and an uprising in Peshawar in which Hindu soldiers refused to
fire on the Muslim protestors. Overall,
participation was even more widespread than in the Non-Cooperation struggle,
and included unprecedented numbers of women, who were both mobilised by
Congress and organised independently.
However, Muslim participation was lower in comparison to 1921-2. Sometimes alienated by the Hindu idioms of
struggle (‘cow protection’ demands, for example), Muslims were also
disproportionately represented among the small urban traders who stood to lose
from the boycott of British goods.
The frequent and extended disruption of trade finally frightened
moderate Indian merchants, who lobbied Congress for an end to the upsurge. By March 1931, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was
signed, securing the release of Civil Disobedience prisoners but pulling back
from the demand for purna swaraj. Radicalised Indians were bitterly
disappointed by the Pact, including Left-leaning Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Prime Minister of
independent India. Meanwhile, the results
of the Congress’ rightward drift were felt at the Second Round Table Conference
in London. Having accommodated to Hindu
communalism, the party weakened its claim to represent all Indians;
organisations of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Dalits (‘untouchables’),
drawing support from the British, continued their campaign for separate
electorates under plans for ‘responsible’ government. The severe repression that followed the Round Table forced
Congress itself to call for a new round of Civil Disobedience in 1932. Thus what historian Bipan Chandra has
called the ‘Pressure-Compromise-Pressure’ pattern ([1979], 162) repeated itself through the 1930s: the
nation moved ever closer to independence through mass struggle, but also moved
away from the radical changes and communal unity required to bring more
fundamental liberation.
The Second World War again
heightened tensions between Indians and their British rulers. Price increases and shortages of rice and
salt produced rampant profiteering that went virtually unchecked by the British
government. Meanwhile, military
recruitment and the Japanese march across Southeast Asia brought the war ever
closer to home for many Indians. The
tragedy of the manmade Bengal famine sharply
demonstrated the toll taken by British rule on Indian society.
In
his declaration of war against Germany in August 1939, the British Viceroy
consulted no Indian leaders; Congress ministries that had been in power since
1937 resigned in protest. Congress
leaders demanded freedom as a necessary pre-condition for participating in the
war, but negotiations with the British, culminating in the Cripps Mission in
1942, were not successful. From this
point onwards, nationalist support for the British war effort was out of the
question – despite the strong anti-fascist traditions in Congress.
On 8 August 1942, the Congress issued its ‘Quit India’ resolution,
summoning Indians to non-violent mass struggle. Anticipating the arrest of Congress leaders, the resolution
called upon ‘every Indian who desires freedom and strives for it [to] be his
own guide’ (cited in Chandra, et. al., 1988, p. 469). The next morning most of the Congress leadership, including
Gandhi and Nehru, were indeed arrested.
Far from halting the movement, the arrests brought a new level of local
activists to the forefront. The result
was a powerful anti-colonial upsurge that frequently invoked the name of
Gandhi, but over which Gandhi himself had little control.
In the days following the Quit India resolution, urban areas witnessed
strikes, demonstrations, and clashes with the police and army. While posing a real challenge to colonial
rule, the militancy of August 1942 was quickly crushed by the massive force of
the British military in wartime. From
then on, new centres of struggle developed in the countryside, where the
peasant leadership sought to destroy the infrastructure of British
authority. In Midnapur (Bengal),
Talcher (Orissa), and Satara (Maharashtra), the people created ‘national
governments’ to take over the functions of the colonial state. Although this resistance continued until
1944, the threat to British rule was largely contained by the end of 1942.
Quit India successfully mobilised broad layers of Indian society in
anti-colonial struggle, but uneven participation in the movement makes apparent
its limitations. For example, the low
level of Muslim participation speaks to the Congress party’s weakening
influence among this population.
Dalits, many of whom were among the poorest of the poor, hesitated to
join a movement that was dominated by middle and bigger peasants. Overall, even in areas where rural
resistance became peasant rebellion, popular mobilisation did not lead to
social radicalism; peasant-landlord relations were relatively unquestioned and
land was not redistributed. Class
contradictions were relatively muted in urban areas as well, where nationalist
strikes received some support from Indian factory owners and labour militancy
was subsumed under calls for national unity.
Although
Quit India was the last Congress-led struggle before independence, the colonial
government faced significant resistance again in 1946, when a strike of 20,000
sailors on 78 ships in the Royal Indian Navy drew support from students and
workers across the country. Mutinous
ships hoisted Congress, Muslim League, and Communist Party flags on their masts
to show unity, but the strike was defeated when Congress and Muslim League
leaders – showing unity of a different sort – ordered sailors to surrender to
British troops.
By
the mid-1940s, the anti-colonial struggle had raised the economic and political
costs of empire to an unsustainable level.
However, critical questions about the timing and nature of Indian
independence were still open for debate.
The Muslim League’s claim to be the sole representative of Muslims in
India, implausible in 1937 when the League lost many reserved Muslim seats in
elections, had gained credibility during the war, in part through British
support. In 1940, the League adopted a
demand for a separate Muslim state of Pakistan; meanwhile, Hindu communalist
groups continued their efforts to paint all India with a Hindu brush. Congress, unable to unite Hindus, Muslims,
and Sikhs in common anti-colonial struggle on the eve of the British departure,
could not provide an effective counterweight to separatist demands. Instead, the partition
of the subcontinent produced two independent nations, India and
Pakistan, on 15 August 1947. In 1971,
East Pakistan broke away from the west to form Bangladesh.
In the years following independence, a central question for the
historiography of Indian nationalism has concerned the relationship between
elites and masses in anti-colonial struggle.
Early nationalist histories focused almost exclusively upon the actions
and ideologies of important Congress leaders, suggesting that they led the
masses, inexorably, towards freedom. A
contrary view has been developed by historians associated with the ‘Cambridge’
school, who have emphasized the role of the colonial administrative machinery
in shaping Indian politics. From this
perspective, competing Indian interests and factions jockeyed for control over
government bureaucracy largely for its patronage opportunities; nationalism was
merely a wider version of this process.
Both the nationalist and ‘Cambridge’ interpretations have been dismissed
as elitist by historians of the Subaltern Studies
school, who focus on the autonomous quality of subaltern
resistance. Rejecting the notion that
the history of elites can adequately explain anti-colonial struggle, Subaltern
Studies draws attention to peasant, labour, tribal, and Dalit resistance. In particular, the early contributors of the
Subaltern Studies school, from whom this entry draws heavily, demonstrated
persuasively that movements from below existed in complex interplay with
India-wide nationalist struggle. The
masses were not passively led to freedom, as nationalist historiography would
suggest, but propelled the movement forward, resulting in both victory (ending
colonialism) and failure (limited socio-economic transformations). Later Subalternists, however, have minimized
the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial nationalism itself.
Sri
Lanka
Sri Lanka’s path to independence from Britain in 1948 can be linked to
that of India and Pakistan in several ways.
On one level, patterns of Sri Lankan resistance were structured by the
general material and ideological conditions of colonial South Asia. Colonial exploitation of the economy and the
land (highlighted during the world wars and the Depression), the cultural
impact of English and Christian education, and undemocratic restrictions in
government and employment spurred nationalist and anti-colonial consciousness
among various sections of the populace.
Further, Sri Lanka (called Ceylon until 1972) had to grapple with the
classic problems of anti-colonial nationalism: the gap between the Westernised
elite and the majority of the people, the inherent tensions of cross-class alliances,
the urban/rural divide, and the clash of ethnic/regional/religious identities.
More specifically, from the early
twentieth century onwards, events in the subcontinent had both direct and
indirect implications for Sri Lankan politics.
As in the Indian case, the early decades of the century witnessed the
emergence of diverse forms of political expression, ranging from
Sinhala-Buddhist revivalism, as expressed in the temperance movements of 1903-5
and 1911-14, to the creation of the Ceylon National Congress in 1919, to rising
class consciousness in urban areas, leading to the general strike of 1923. However, whereas some left-leaning labour
leaders, such as A.E. Goonesinha drew inspiration from the mass actions and
boycotts of the Indian anti-colonial struggle, mainstream Sri Lankan
nationalism as embodied by the Ceylon National Congress did not develop a mass
base or an agitational politics. Wedded
to the ‘constitutionalist’ tactics that had been thoroughly rejected by the
Indian National Congress by the 1920s, various leaders of the Ceylon National
Congress – from P. Arunachalam to D.S. Senanayake – looked to gradual reform in
cooperation with the colonial government.
As a result, instead of the “Compromise-Pressure-Compromise” dynamic
that characterized Indian politics from the 1920s to the 1940s, the same period
in Sri Lanka witnessed the inauguration of administrative reforms from
above. Ironically, as exemplified by
the Donoughmore Commission’s recommendation for universal suffrage and rejection
of communal electorates in 1927, Sri Lankan reforms sometimes went beyond their
Indian counterparts.
The implications of the nationalists’ non-confrontational,
‘constitutionalist’ outlook became apparent in the communalisation of Sri
Lankan politics through the 1930s and 1940s.
During this period, although the Ceylon National Congress attempted to
build a more cohesive political and economic program, it ultimately did not
articulate a secular-nationalist vision that might bridge the growing divide between
the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu/Muslim minority. Communalist organizations formed and
flourished, from S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Maha Sabha (1937), the Ceylon
Indian Congress (1939), and the All-Ceylon Tamil Congress (1944). The Ceylon National Congress retained an
ambiguous relationship to communalism: by the early 1940s, joint membership
with both Congress and communal organizations was specifically banned, but the
Sinhala Maha Sabha remained within Congress and gained influence.
As independence approached, any political formation challenging the
‘constitutionalist’ strategy or the logic of mass-based, Sinhala nationalism
had been marginalized – a process
avidly encouraged by British officials.
Left critics like the Lanka Sama Samaj Party, though leading important
strikes and local struggles through the 1930s and 1940s, had a small base and
could not organize an ideological alternative to Sinhala communalism; in the
postcolonial period, they actually capitulated to it. Tamil nationalist leaders like G.G. Ponnambalam now became more
isolationist, either casting their lot with the British as sole protectors of
minority rights, only to be sorely disappointed, or retreating into the closed
universe of Tamil communalism. Meanwhile,
in sharp contrast to the Indian nationalists at this time, Sri Lankan leaders
continued their moderate course, committing themselves to and reaping benefits
from the British effort in World War II, and finally – via the Soulbury
Commission of 1944 – gaining Dominion Status in 1948.
In this context, the relatively peaceful nature of the ‘transfer of
power’ in Sri Lanka compared to that in India and Pakistan served as a
smokescreen for the actual weakness of that transformation in terms of secularism
and democracy, one that was to be viciously revealed in the communal violence
of the postcolonial period.
Developed in the context of colonial educational institutions and the
British introduction of print capitalism, modern South Asian literatures were
integrally linked to the colonial experience.
These literatures, especially in prose, drew from various reform and
nationalist movements; their growth was both the vehicle for, and the
beneficiary of, an explosion of ideas about culture, society, and identity in
the context of colonial rule. The
uneven content of the anti-colonial struggle, consequently, was reflected in
their pages.
Prior to the rise of mass struggle in the Indian subcontinent, texts
like Gopal Hari Deshmukh’s Satapatra
series (Marathi, 1848-50), called for national uplift but did not oppose
colonialism; later, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anand Math (Bengali, 1882) raised nationalist consciousness, but
with a distinctly anti-Muslim note.
Piyadasa Sirisena’s poetry asserted traditional Sinhalese values against
an encroaching Westernization. New
ideas about gender were central to early-twentieth-century writing in South
Asia: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s
Dream (English, 1905), envisioned a new society free from gender
oppression.
However, literary texts written around anti-colonial struggles explored
various aspects of the movements and their impact on consciousness. In one of Kumaran Asan’s poems (Malayalam,
1908), the poet complains to ‘Mother India’ about her children’s blindness
towards caste oppression. Rabindranath
Tagore addressed the Swadeshi movement’s backward ideas about gender and
society in Ghare-Baire (Bengali, 1914).
English-language novelists of the 1930s explored village life and its
links to colonialism and nationalism from different perspectives, as in J.
Vijayatunga’s Grass for My Feet (Sri Lanka, 1933), Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (India, 1935), and Raja
Rao’s Kanthapura (India, 1938). Martin Wickramasinghe’s nationalist novels
and literary criticism of the 1940s were central to the development of modern
Sinhalese literature. Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s
poem, ‘Dawn of Freedom’ (Urdu, 1947) sharply criticized politicians and
communalists outright after the devastation of partition, using imagery directly
referring to Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech on the eve of independence.
Colonial Indian literatures helped consolidate an India-wide debate
about the nation and the formation of a national consciousness as ideas
crackled across regional and linguistic boundaries. Literatures in English from postcolonial South Asia, more
generally, have repeatedly turned to the colonial experience and the
anti-colonial movements, as the social, political, and cultural dynamics of
that era continue to impact the present.
Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985), Rohinton Mistry’s A
Fine Balance (1995), and A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies (1997)
have employed a more realist mode in documenting the growth and aftermath of
nationalism in India and Sri Lanka –
with a specific
attention to its impact on the lower classes that hearkens back to the writings
of the early postcolonial period.
Representing the nation through a more postmodernist aesthetic, Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
(1988), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), and Shyam
Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens (1999), have highlighted the issues of
transnational, sexual, and/or gendered identities.
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Hosain, Attia (1961), Sunlight on
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