1 - The Anticolonial Movement

Summary

The writer who wishes to bring about a social revolution may nonetheless be a century ahead of his time; the tribune, however, which has in view a political revolution, cannot remove itself too far from the masses.

—Heinrich Heine, Französische Zustände

Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.

—Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiographyof Kwame Nkrumah

We shall not subvert the British Empire by allowing the Bengali Babu to discuss his own schools and drains.

—Evelyn Baring, quoted in Sumit Sarkar,Modern India: 1885–1947

In 1885, Alan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant and amateur ornithologist, gathered together seventy or so politically active Indian professionals in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) for a conference. They called themselves the Indian National Congress (hereafter, Congress). Hume was no charismatic founder of political movements. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of increasingly assertive political activities by educated professional classes in India, resulting in the formation of various regional political associations. Hume's was just the most successful effort in bringing them together on a single ‘national’ platform. At the time, neither the British nor the Indians saw the birth of the Congress as a major event. However, over the subsequent decades, the Congress would become the largest and the best organized party of the anticolonial cause. By the time of decolonization, most colonies would have their own version of the Congress. These were parties of the urban educated professional classes. In every colony, this class was a miniscule part of the population. So, the party of the professionals had to go in search of a social base. In the colonized world the largest social base was the peasant masses. By the end of the First World War, it became clear to any ambitious nationalist leader that mobilizing these masses was the only path to a successful anticolonial movement. Most anticolonial parties tried, some succeeded. None more so than the Congress which turned itself into a genuinely mass party under the leadership of M. K. Gandhi, eventually becoming the party of the postcolonial government.