The development of Indian nationalism, the Congress and Muslim League, Gandhi's mass campaigns, and the path to independence and partition

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to trace India's development from the consolidation of British imperial rule after the 1857 rebellion to independence and partition in 1947. You need to explain how the British Raj governed India, how an Indian national movement emerged and grew, the distinctive strategy of Mohandas Gandhi, the deepening division between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, and why independence in 1947 came with the trauma of partition. The elective is examined through source analysis and essays in the external paper.

The rebellion of 1857, often called the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence, ended the rule of the East India Company. The British Crown took direct control in 1858, creating the Raj governed by a Viceroy. British rule brought railways, a common administrative language, an English-educated elite and the rule of law, but also economic exploitation, recurrent famines, and racial hierarchy. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, at first sought only moderate reform and a greater Indian voice within the empire.

Nationalism radicalised in the early 20th century. The partition of Bengal in 1905 provoked the swadeshi (home production) boycott of British goods. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 introduced separate electorates for Muslims, institutionalising communal division. Indian contributions during World War I raised expectations of reform that were disappointed. The turning point came in 1919: the repressive Rowlatt Acts and the Amritsar Massacre, where troops under General Dyer killed hundreds of unarmed protesters, destroyed faith in British justice and pushed many towards mass resistance.

Gandhi led three great campaigns: Non-Cooperation (1920 to 1922), Civil Disobedience launched by the Salt March (1930), and Quit India (1942). His combination of non-violence, mass participation and moral appeal won broad support and international attention, though he suspended campaigns when violence broke out, as after Chauri Chaura in 1922. Jawaharlal Nehru emerged as Congress's leading younger figure. The British conceded limited self-government through the Government of India Act of 1935, but Indians wanted full independence.

The decisive problem was communal division. The Muslim League, led from the 1930s by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, came to fear Hindu majority rule in a unified India. In 1940 the Lahore Resolution called for a separate Muslim state, and Jinnah's "Two-Nation Theory" hardened. World War II accelerated the end of empire: Britain was exhausted, the 1942 Quit India movement showed Congress would no longer cooperate, and the post-war Labour government accepted that withdrawal was inevitable. Negotiations failed to produce a united India.

Independence came on 15 August 1947, but at terrible cost. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, rushed partition into the new dominions of India and Pakistan. The hastily drawn Radcliffe boundary cut through Punjab and Bengal. Around ten to fifteen million people were displaced and several hundred thousand to a million died in communal violence as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs fled across the new borders. Gandhi himself was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948.

Historiographically, nationalist accounts stress the agency of Congress and Gandhi in forcing Britain out. Imperial historians have emphasised British weakness after 1945 and the "transfer of power". The Cambridge School analysed Indian politics through local elites competing for power, while "subaltern" historians recovered the role of peasants and the marginalised. Debate over partition focuses on whether it was avoidable or the inevitable product of communal division and British policy.