Concept

Indian independence movement

Overview

The Indian independence movement was a series of political efforts from the mid-1880s to 1947 that took place in the Indian subcontinent with the aim of ending British colonial rule.

The first nationalistic movement took root when the Indian National Congress (INC) was formed in 1885. Prominent moderate leaders of the INC worked on demands such as greater economic rights for Indians and the right to appear for Indian Civil Service examinations in British India.

The first half of the 20th century saw a progressively radical approach towards self-rule. This began with protests against the Partition of Bengal (1905), which exposed the limits of the moderate leaders' reformist agenda, and evolved into the Non-cooperation Movement (1919–1922), which demanded non-cooperation with colonial authorities. Momentum grew steadily through the Civil Disobedience Movement (1929–1931) that called for active disobedience to the colonial government, and culminated in the Quit India Movement (1942), which categorically demanded the end of British colonial presence in India, ultimately resulted in the transfer of power in 1947.

The stages of the independence struggle in the 1920s were characterised by the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Congress's adoption of his policy of non-violence and civil disobedience. Some of the leading followers of Gandhi's ideology were Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and Maulana Azad. Intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore, Subramania Bharati, and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay spread patriotic awareness. Female leaders such as Sarojini Naidu, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Pritilata Waddedar, and Kasturba Gandhi promoted the emancipation of Indian women and their participation in the freedom struggle.

A few leaders adopted a more violent approach, which grew in popularity following the passage of Rowlatt Act that permitted indefinite detention without trial. The Act sparked protests across India, particularly in the Punjab Province, where these demonstrations were violently suppressed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

The Indian independence movement was in constant ideological evolution. Essentially anti-colonial, it was supplemented by visions of independent economic development alongside a secular, democratic, republican, and civil-libertarian political structure. After the 1930s, the movement took on a strong socialist orientation. It culminated in the Indian Independence Act 1947, which ended Crown suzerainty and partitioned British India into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. On 26 January 1950, the Constitution of India came into effect, establishing the Republic of India, while the partitioned territories evolved into the independent nations of Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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The routine and stagnation of its mode of living, the hypnotic suggestion of peaceful legality, had already ceased to dominate the proletariat. But it had not yet stepped, consciously and courageously, on to the path of open revolutionary struggle. It wavered, passing through the last moment of unstable equilibrium. At such a moment of psychological change, the part played by the summit--the State, on the one hand…
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy
Close in meaning to Indian independence movement; the term itself is not named.
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But the war produced an altogether different succession of events. The army welded the peasants together, not by a political, but by a military tie. Before the peasant masses could be drawn together by revolutionary demands and ideas, they were already organized in regimental staffs, divisions and army corps. The representatives of petty bourgeois democracy, scattered through this army and playing a leading role in…
Leon Trotsky, From October to Brest-Litovsk
Close in meaning to Indian independence movement; the term itself is not named.
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Unfortunately, the basis of this new government has been laid on old, condemned delinquents, and its superstructure is raised out of prosecutors turned into protectors. The event has been such as might be expected. But if it had been otherwise constituted, had it been constituted even as I wished, and as the mover of this question had planned, the better part of the proposed establishment was in the publicity of its…
Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03
Close in meaning to Indian independence movement; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Indian independence movement

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Andhra University

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Part of Indian philosophy.

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