The Government's response to the Revolt was rather restrained and not as harsh as in the case of civil rebellions and tribal uprisings. It had just undergone the harrowing experience of the Santhal uprising and the Revolt of 1857. It was also able to see, in time, the changed temper of the peasantry and was influenced by the support extended to the Revolt by the intelligentsia and the missionaries. It appointed a commission to inquire into the problem of indigo cultivation. Evidence brought before the Indigo Commission and its final report exposed the coercion and corruption underlying the entire system of indigo cultivation. The result was the mitigation of the worst abuses of the system. The Government issued a notification in November 1860 that ryots could not be compelled to sow indigo and that it would ensure that all disputes were settled by legal means. But the planters were already closing down the factories - they felt that they could not make their enterprises pay without the use of force and fraud.

Large parts of East Bengal were engulfed by agrarian unrest during the 1870s and early 1880s. The unrest was caused by the efforts of the zamindars to enhance rent beyond legal limits and to prevent the tenants from acquiring occupancy rights under Act X of 1859. This they tried to achieve through illegal coercive methods such as forced eviction and seizure of crops and cattle as well as by dragging the tenants into costly litigation in the courts.

The peasants were no longer in a mood to tolerate such oppression. In May 1873, an agrarian league or combination was formed in Yusufshahi Parganah in Pabna district to resist the demands of the zamindars. The league organized ma.s.s meetings of peasants. Large crowds of peasants would gather and march through villages frightening the zamindars and appealing to other peasants to join them. The league organized a rent-strike - the ryots were to refuse to pay the enhanced rents - and challenged the zamindars in the courts. Funds were raised from the ryots to meet the costs. The struggle gradually spread throughout Pabna and then to the other districts of East Bengal. Everywhere agrarian leagues were organized, rents were withheld and zamindars fought in the courts. The main form of struggle was that of legal resistance. There was very little violence - it only occurred when the zamindars tried to compel the ryots to submit to their terms by force. There were only a few cases of looting of the houses of the zamindars. A few attacks on police stations took place and the peasants also resisted attempts to execute court decrees. But such cases were rather rare. Hardly any zamindar or zamindar's agent was killed or seriously injured. In the course of the movement, the ryots developed a strong awareness of the law and their legal rights and the ability to combine and form a.s.sociations for peaceful agitation.

Though peasant discontent smouldered till 1885, many of the disputes were settled partially under official pressure and persuasion and partially out of the zamindar's fear that the united peasantry would drag them into prolonged and costly litigation. Many peasants were able to acquire occupancy rights and resist enhanced rents.

The Government rose to the defence of the zamindars wherever violence took place. Peasants were then arrested on a large scale. But it a.s.sumed a position of neutrality as far as legal battles or peaceful agitations were concerned. The Government also promised to undertake legislation to protect the tenants from the worst aspects of zamindari oppression, a promise it fulfilled however imperfectly in 1885 when the Bengal Tenancy Act was pa.s.sed.

What persuaded the zamindars and the colonial regime to reconcile themselves to the movement was the fact that its aims were limited to the redressal of the immediate grievances of the peasants and the enforcement of the existing legal rights and norms. It was not aimed at the zamindari system. It also did not have at any stage an anti-colonial political edge. The agrarian leagues kept within the bounds of law, used the legal machinery to fight the zamindars, and raised no anti-British demands. The leaders often argued that they were against zamindars and not the British. In fact, the leaders raised the slogan that the peasants want 'to be the ryots of Her Majesty the Queen and of Her only.' For this reason, official action was based on the enforcement of the Indian Penal Code and it did not take the form of armed repression as in the case of the Santhal and Munda uprisings.

Once again the Bengal peasants showed complete Hindu-Muslim solidarity, even though the majority of the ryots were Muslim and the majority of zamindars Hindu. There was also no effort to create peasant solidarity on the grounds of religion or caste.

In this case, too, a number of young Indian intellectuals supported the peasants' cause. These included Bankim Chandra Chatterjea and R.C. Dutt. Later, in the early 1880s, during the discussion of the Bengal Tenancy Bill, the Indian a.s.sociation, led by Surendranath Banerjea, Anand Mohan Bose and Dwarkanath Ganguli, campaigned for the rights of tenants, helped form ryot' unions, and organized huge meetings of upto 20,000 peasants in the districts in support of the Rent Bill. The Indian a.s.sociation and many of the nationalist newspapers went further than the Bill. They asked for permanent fixation of the tenant's rent. They warned that since the Bill would confer occupancy rights even on non-cultivators, it would lead to the growth of middlemen - the jotedars - who would be as oppressive as the zamindars so far as the actual cultivators were concerned. They, therefore, demanded that the right of occupancy should go with actual cultivation of the soil, that is, in most cases to the under- ryots and the tenants-at-will.

A major agrarian outbreak occurred in the Poona and Ahmednagar districts of Maharashtra in 1875. Here, as part of the Ryotwari system, land revenue was settled directly with the peasant who was also recognized as the owner of his land. Like the peasants in other Ryotwari areas, the Deccan peasant also found it difficult to pay land revenue without getting into the clutches of the moneylender and increasingly losing his land. This led to growing tension between the peasants and the moneylenders most of whom were outsiders - Marwaris or Gujaratis.

Three other developments occurred at this time. During the early 1860s, the American Civil War had led to a rise in cotton exports which had pushed up prices. The end of the Civil War in 1864 brought about an acute depression in cotton exports and a crash in prices. The ground slipped from under the peasants' feet. Simultaneously, in 1867, the Government raised land revenue by nearly 50 per cent. The situation was worsened by a succession of bad harvests.

To pay the land revenue under these conditions, the peasants had to go to the moneylender who took the opportunity to further tighten his grip on the peasant and his land. The peasant began to turn against the perceived cause of his misery, the moneylender. Only a spark was needed to kindle the fire.

A spontaneous protest movement began in December 1874 in Kardah village in Sirur taluq. When the peasants of the village failed to convince the local moneylender, Kalooram, that he should not act on a court decree and pull down a peasant's house, they organized a complete social boycott of the 'outsider' moneylenders to compel them to accept their demands in a peaceful manner. They refused to buy from their shops. No peasant would cultivate their fields. The bullotedars (village servants) - barbers, washermen, carpenters, ironsmiths, shoemakers and others would not serve them. No domestic servant would work in their houses and when the socially isolated moneylenders decided to run away to the taluq headquarters, n.o.body would agree to drive their carts. The peasants also imposed social sanctions against those peasants and bullotedars who would not join the boycott of moneylenders. This social boycott spread rapidly to the villages of Poona, Ahmednagar, Sholapur and Satara districts.

The social boycott was soon transformed into agrarian riots when it did not prove very effective. On 12 May, peasants gathered in Supa, in Bhimthari taluq, on the bazar day and began a systematic attack on the moneylenders' houses and shops. They seized and publicly burnt debt bonds and deeds - signed under pressure, in ignorance, or through fraud - decrees, and other doc.u.ments dealing with their debts. Within days the disturbances spread to other villages of the Poona and Ahmednagar districts There was very little violence in this settling of accounts. Once the moneylenders' instruments of oppression - debt bonds - were surrendered, no need for further violence was felt. In most places, the 'riots' were demonstrations of popular feeling and of the peasants' newly acquired unity and strength. Though moneylenders' houses and shops were looted and burnt in Supa, this did not occur in other places.

The Government acted with speed and soon succeeded in repressing the movement. The active phase of the movement lasted about three weeks, though stray incidents occurred for another month or two. As in the case of the Pabna Revolt, the Deccan disturbances had very limited objectives.There was once again an absence of anti-colonial consciousness. It was, therefore, possible for the colonial regime to extend them a certain protection against the moneylenders through the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879.

Once again, the modern nationalist intelligentsia of Maharashtra supported the peasants' cause. Already, in 1873-74, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, led by Justice Ranade, had organized a successful campaign among the peasants, as well as at Poona and Bombay, against the land revenue settlement of 1867. Under its impact, a large number of peasants had refused to pay the enhanced revenue. This agitation had generated a mentality of resistance among the peasants which contributed to the rise of peasant protest in 1875. The Sabha as well as many of the nationalist newspapers also supported the D.A.R. Bill.

Peasant resistance also developed in other parts of the country. Mappila outbreaks were endemic in Malabar. Vasudev Balwant Phadke, an educated clerk, raised a Ramosi peasant force of about 50 in Maharashtra during 1879, and organized social banditry on a significant scale. The Kuka Revolt in Punjab was led by Baba Ram Singh and had elements of a messianic movement. It was crushed when 49 of the rebels were blown up by a cannon in 1872. High land revenue a.s.sessment led to a series of peasant riots in the plains of a.s.sam during 1893-94. Scores were killed in brutal firings and bayonet charges.

There was a certain shift in the nature of peasant movements after 1857. Princes, chiefs and landlords having been crushed or co-opted, peasants emerged as the main force in agrarian movements. They now fought directly for their own demands, centered almost wholly on economic issues,and against their immediate enemies, foreign planters and indigenous zamindars and moneylenders. Their struggles were directed towards specific and limited objectives and redressal of particular grievances. They did not make colonialism their target. Nor was their objective the ending of the system of their subordination and exploitation. They did not aim at 'turning the world upside down.'

The territorial reach of these movements was also limited. They were confined to particular localities with no mutual communication or linkages. They also lacked continuity of struggle or long-term organization. Once the specific objectives of a movement were achieved, its organization, as also peasant solidarity built around it, dissolved and disappeared. Thus, the Indigo strike, the Pabna agrarian leagues and the social-boycott movement of the Deccan ryots left behind no successors. Consequently, at no stage did these movements threaten British supremacy or even undermine it.

Peasant protest after 1857 often represented an instinctive and spontaneous response of the peasantry to its social condition. It was the result of excessive and unbearable oppression, undue and unusual deprivation and exploitation, and a threat to the peasant's existing, established position. The peasant often rebelled only when he felt that it was not possible to carry on in the existing manner.

He was also moved by strong notions of legitimacy, of what was justifiable and what was not. That is why he did not fight for land ownership or against landlordism but against eviction and undue enhancement of rent. He did not object to paying interest on the sums he had borrowed; he hit back against fraud and chicanery by the moneylender and when the latter went against tradition in depriving him of his land. He did not deny the state's right to collect a tax on land but objected when the level of taxation overstepped all traditional bounds. He did not object to the foreign planter becoming his zamindar but resisted the planter when he took away his freedom to decide what crops to grow and refused to pay him a proper price for his crop.

The peasant also developed a strong awareness of his legal rights and a.s.serted them in and outside the courts. And if an effort was made to deprive him of his legal rights by extra-legal means or by manipulation of the law and law courts, he countered with extra-legal means of his own. Quite often, he believed that the legally-const.i.tuted authority approved his actions or at least supported his claims and cause. In all the three movements discussed here, he acted in the name of this authority, the sarkar.

In these movements, the Indian peasants showed great courage and a spirit of sacrifice, remarkable organizational abilities, and a solidarity that cut across religious and caste lines. They were also able to wring considerable concessions from the colonial state. The latter, too, not being directly challenged, was willing to compromise and mitigate the harshness of the agrarian system though within the broad limits of the colonial economic and political structure. In this respect, the colonial regime's treatment of the post-1857 peasant rebels was qualitatively different from its treatment of the partic.i.p.ants in the civil rebellions, the Revolt of 1857 and the tribal uprisings which directly challenged colonial political power.

A major weakness of the 19th century peasant movements was the lack of an adequate understanding of colonialism - of colonial economic structure and the colonial state - and of the social framework of the movements themselves. Nor did the 19th century peasants possess a new ideology and a new social, economic and political programme based on an a.n.a.lysis of the newly const.i.tuted colonial society. Their struggles, however militant, occurred within the framework of the old societal order. They lacked a positive conception of an alternative society - a conception which would unite the people in a common struggle on a wide regional and all-India plane and help develop long-term political movements. An all-India leadership capable of evolving a strategy of struggle that would unify and mobilize peasants and other sections of society for nation-wide political activity could be formed only on the basis of such a new conception, such a fresh vision of society. In the absence of such a new ideology, programme, leadership and strategy of struggle, it was not too difficult for the colonial state, on the one hand, to reach a conciliation and calm down the rebellious peasants by the grant of some concessions and, on the other hand, to suppress them with the full use of its force. This weakness was, of course, not a blemish on the character of the peasantry which was perhaps incapable of grasping on its own the new and complex phenomenon of colonialism. That needed the efforts of a modern intelligentsia which was itself just coming into existence.

Most of these weaknesses were overcome in the 20th century when peasant discontent was merged with the general anti-imperialist discontent, and their political activity became a part of the wider anti-imperialist movement. And, of course, the peasants' partic.i.p.ation in the larger national movement not only strengthened the fight against the foreigner, it also, simultaneously, enabled them to organize powerful struggles around their cla.s.s demands and to create modern peasant organizations.

4.

Foundation of the Congress: The Myth

Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 by seventy-two political workers. It was the first organized expression of Indian nationalism on an all-India scale. A.O. Hume, a retired English ICS officer, played an important role in its formation. But why was it founded by these seventy-two men and why at that time?

A powerful and long-lasting myth, the myth of 'the safety valve,' has arisen around this question. Generations of students and political activists have been fed on this myth. But despite widespread popular belief, this myth has little basis in historical fact.

The myth is that the Indian National Congress was started by A.O. Hume and others under the official direction, guidance and advice of no less a person than Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, to provide a safe, mild, peaceful, and const.i.tutional outlet or safety valve for the rising discontent among the ma.s.ses, which was inevitably leading towards a popular and violent revolution. Consequently, the revolutionary potential was nipped in the bud. The core of the myth, that a violent revolution was on the cards at the time and was avoided only by the foundations of the Congress, is accepted by most writers; the liberals welcome it, the radicals use it to prove that the Congress has always been compromising if not loyalist vis-a-vis imperialism, the extreme right use it to show that the Congress has been anti-national from the beginning. All of them agree that the manner of its birth affected the basic character and future work of the Congress in a crucial manner.

In his Young India published in 1916, the Extremist leader Lala Lajpat Rai used the safety-valve theory to attack the Moderates in the Congress. Having discussed the theory at length and suggested that the Congress 'was a product of Lord Dufferin's brain,' he argued that 'the Congress was started more with the object of saving the British Empire from danger than with that of winning political liberty for India. The interests of the British Empire were primary and those of India only secondary.'And he added: 'No one can say that the Congress has not been true to that ideal.' His conclusion was: 'So this is the genesis of the Congress, and this is sufficient to condemn it in the eyes of the advanced Nationalists.'1 More than a quarter century later, R. Palme Dutt's authoritative work India Today made the myth of the safety-valve a staple of left-wing opinion. Emphasizing the myth, Dutt wrote that the Congress was brought into existence through direct Governmental initiative and guidance and through 'a plan secretly pre-arranged with the Viceroy' so that it (the Government) could use it 'as an intended weapon for safeguarding British rule against the rising forces of popular unrest and anti-British feeling.' It was 'an attempt to defeat, or rather forestall, an impending revolution.' The Congress did, of course, in time become a nationalist body; 'the national character began to overshadow the loyalist character.' It also became the vehicle of ma.s.s movements. But the 'original sin' of the manner of its birth left a permanent mark on its politics. Its 'two-fold character' as an inst.i.tution which was created by the Government and yet became the organizer of the anti-imperialist movement 'ran right through its history.' It both fought and collaborated with imperialism. It led the ma.s.s movements and when the ma.s.ses moved towards the revolutionary path, it betrayed the movement to imperialism. The Congress, thus, had two strands: 'On the one hand, the strand of cooperation with imperialism against the "menace" of the ma.s.s movement; on the other hand, the strand of leadership of the ma.s.ses in the national struggle.' This duality of the Congress leadership from Gokhale to Gandhi, said Dutt, in fact reflected the two-fold and vacillating character of the Indian bourgeoisie itself; 'at once in conflict with the British bourgeoisie and desiring to lead the Indian people, yet feeling that "too rapid" advance may end in destroying its privileges along with those of the imperialists.' The Congress had, thus, become an organ of opposition to real revolution, that is, a violent revolution. But this role did not date from Gandhiji; 'this principle was implanted in it by imperialism at the outset as its intended official role.' The culmination of this dual role was its 'final capitulation with the Mountbatten Settlement.'2 Earlier, in 1939, M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS chief, had also found the safety-valve theory handy in attacking the Congress for its secularism and, therefore, anti-nationalism. In his pamphlet We Golwalkar complained that Hindu national consciousness had been destroyed by those claiming to be 'nationalists' who had pushed the 'notions of democracy' and the perverse notion that 'our old invaders and foes', the Muslims, had something in common with Hindus. Consequently, 'we have allowed our foes to be our friends and with our hands are undermining true nationality.' In fact, the fight in India was not between Indians and the British only. It was 'a triangular fight.' Hindus were at war with Muslims on the one hand and with the British on the other. What had led Hindus to enter the path of 'denationalization,' said Golwalkar, were the aims and policy laid down by Hume, Cotton, and Wedderburn in 1885; 'the Congress they founded as a "safety valve" to "seething nationalism," as a toy which would lull the awakening giant into slumber, an instrument to destroy National consciousness, has been, as far as they are concerned, a success.'3 The liberal C.F. Andrews and Girija Mukerji fully accepted the safety-valve theory in their work, The Rise and Growth of the Congress in India published in 1938. They were happy with it because it had helped avoid 'useless bloodshed.' Before as well as after 1947, tens of scholars and hundreds of popular writers have repeated some version of these points of view.

Historical proof of the safety-valve theory was provided by the seven volumes of secret reports which Hume claimed to have read at Simla in the summer of 1878 and which convinced him of the existence of 'seething discontent' and a vast conspiracy among the lower cla.s.ses to violently overthrow British rule.

Before we unravel the mystery of the seven volumes, let us briefly trace the history of its rise and growth. It was first mentioned in William Wedderburn's biography of A.O. Hume published in 1913. Wedderburn (ICS) found an undated memorandum in Hume's papers which dealt with the foundation of the Congress. He quoted at length from this doc.u.ment.4 To keep the mystery alive so that the reader may go along with the writer step by step towards its solution, I will withhold an account of Wedderburn's writing, initially giving only those paragraphs which were quoted by the subsequent writers. According to Lajpat Rai, despite the fact that Hume was 'a lover of liberty and wanted political liberty for India under the aegis of the British crown,' he was above all 'an English patriot.' Once he saw that British rule was threatened with 'an impending calamity,' he decided to create a safety valve for the discontent.

As decisive proof of this Lajpat Rai provided a long quotation from Hume's memorandum that Wedderburn had mentioned along with his own comments in his book.5 Since this pa.s.sage is quoted or cited by all subsequent authors, it is necessary to reproduce it here at length.

' "I was shown," wrote Hume, "several large volumes containing a vast number of entries; English abstracts or translations - longer or shorter - of vernacular reports or communications of one kind or another, all arranged according to districts (not identical with ours) . . . The number of these entries was enormous; there were said, at the time to be communications from over 30,000 different reporters." He (Hume) mentions that he had the volumes in his possession only for a week . . . Many of the entries reported conversations between men of the lowest cla.s.ses, "all going to show that these poor men were pervaded with a sense of the hopelessness of the existing state of affairs; that they were convinced that they would starve and die, and that they wanted to do something, and stand by each other, and that something meant violence . .. a certain small number of the educated cla.s.ses, at the time desperately, perhaps unreasonably, bitter against the Government, would join the movement, a.s.sume here and there the lead, give the outbreak cohesion, and direct it as a national revolt." '

Very soon, the seven volumes, whose character, origin, etc., were left undefined in Lajpat Rai's quotation, started undergoing a metamorphosis. In 1933, in Gurmukh Nihal Singh's hands, they became 'government reports.'6 Andrews and Mukerji transformed them into 'several volumes of secret reports from the CID' which came into Hume's possession 'in his official capacity.'7 The cla.s.sical and most influential statement came from R. Palme Dutt. After quoting the pa.s.sage quoted by Lajpat Rai from Wedderburn, Dutt wrote: 'Hume in his official capacity had received possession of the voluminous secret police reports.'8 Numerous other historians of the national movement including recent ones such as R.C. Majumdar and Tara Chand, were to accept this product of the creative imagination of these writers as historical fact.

So deeply rooted had become the belief in Hume's volumes as official doc.u.ments that in the 1950s a large number of historians and would-be historians, including the present writer, devoted a great deal of time and energy searching for them in the National Archives. And when their search proved futile, they consoled themselves with the thought that the British had destroyed them before their departure in 1947. Yet only if the historians had applied a minimum of their historiographic sense to the question and looked at the professed evidence a bit more carefully, they would not have been taken for a ride. Three levels of historical evidence and logic were available to them even before the private papers of Ripon and Dufferin became available.

The first level pertains to the system under which the Government of India functioned in the 1870s. In 1878, Hume was Secretary to the Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce. How could the Secretary of these departments get access to Home Department files or CID reports? Also he was then in Simla while Home Department files were kept in Delhi; they were not sent to Simla. And from where would 30,000 reporters come? The intelligence departments could not have employed more than a few hundred persons at the time! And, as Lajpat Rai noted, if Congress was founded out of the fear of an outbreak, why did Hume and British officialdom wait for seven long years?

If these volumes were not government doc.u.ments, what were they? The clue was there in Wedderburn's book and it was easily available if a writer would go to the book itself and not rely on extracts from it reproduced by previous authors as nearly all the later writers seem to have done. This brings us to the second level of historical evidence already available in Wedderburn.

The pa.s.sages quoted by Lajpat Rai, R. Palme Dutt and others are on pages 80-81 of Wedderburn's book. Two pages earlier, pages 78-80, and one page later, 82-83, Wedderburn tells the reader what these volumes were and who provided them to Hume. The heading of the section where the quoted pa.s.sages occur is 'Indian religious leaders.' In the very beginning of the section, Wedderburn writes that a warning of the threatened danger came to Hume 'from a very special source, that is, from the leaders among those devoted, in all parts of India, to a religious life.' Hume referred in his memorandum to the legions of secret quasi-religious orders, with literally their millions of members, which form so important a factor in the Indian problem." These religious sects and orders were headed by Gurus, "men of the highest quality who . . . have purged themselves from earthly desires, and fixed their desires on the highest good." And "these religious leaders, through their Chelas or disciples, are fully informed of all that goes on under the surface, and their influence is great in forming public opinion." It was with these Gurus, writes Wedderburn, 'that Mr. Hume came in touch, towards the end of Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty.' These Gurus approached Hume because Hume was a keen student of Eastern religions, but also because they "feared that the ominous 'unrest' throughout the country . . . would lead to terrible outbreak" and it was only men like Hume who had access to the Government who could help 'avert a catastrophe.' "This," wrote Hume, "is how the case was put to me." With this background the pa.s.sages on pages 80-81 become clearer.

In other words, the evidence of the seven volumes was shown to Hume by the Gurus who had been sent reports by thousands of Chelas. But why should Hume believe that these reports 'must necessarily be true?' Because Chelas were persons of a special breed who did not belong to any particular sect or religion or rather belonged to all religions. Moreover they were 'bound by vows and conditions, over and above those of ordinary initiates of low grade.' They were 'all initiates in some of the many branches of the secret knowledge' and were 'all bound by vows, they cannot practically break, to some farther advanced seeker than themselves.' The leaders were of 'no sect and no religion, but of all sects and all religions.' But why did hardly anyone in India know of the existence of these myriads of Gurus and Chelas? Because, explained Hume, absolute secrecy was an essential feature in their lives. They had communicated with Hume only because they were anxious to avert calamity.

And, finally, we come to the third level of historiography, the level of profound belief and absolute fantasy. The full character of the Gurus and Chelas was still not revealed by Wedderburn, for he was sheltering the reputation of his old friend, as friendly biographers usually do. The impression given by him was that these Gurus and Chelas were ordinary mortal men. This was, however, not the case. Reconstructing the facts on the basis of some books of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky and the private papers of the Viceroys Ripon and Dufferin, we discover that these Gurus were persons who, because of their practice of 'peculiar Eastern religious thought,' were supposed to possess supernatural, occult powers; they could communicate and direct from thousands of miles, enter any place, go anywhere, sit anywhere unseen, and direct men's thoughts and opinions without their being aware of it.

In 1881, Hume came under the spell of Madame Blavatsky who claimed to be in touch with these Gurus who were described by her as mahatmas. These mahatmas lived as part of a secret brotherhood in Tibet, but they could contact or 'correspond' with persons anywhere in the world because of their occult powers. Blavatsky enabled Hume to get in touch with one of these mahatmas named 'Koot Hoomi Lal Singh.' It is this invisible brotherhood that gathered secret information on Indian affairs through their Chelas. In a book published in 1880, A.P. Sinnet, editor of the Pioneer and another follower of Blavatsky, had quoted a letter from Koot Hoomi that these mahatmas had used their power in 1857 to control the Indian ma.s.ses and saved the British empire and that they would do the same in future.

Hume believed all this. He was keen to acquire these occult powers by which the Chelas could know all about the present and the future. He started a 'correspondence' with the mahatmas in Tibet. By 1883 Hume had quarrelled with Blavatsky, but his faith in the Gurus or mahatmas continued unabated. He also began to use his connection with the mahatmas to promote political objectives dear to his heart - attempting to reform Indian administration and make it more responsive to Indian opinion.

In December 1883, he wrote to Ripon: 'I am a.s.sociated with men, who though never seen by the ma.s.ses . . . are yet reverenced by them as G.o.ds, . . . and who feel every pulse of public feeling.' He claimed a superior knowledge 'of the native mind' because 'a body of men, mostly of Asiatic origin . . . who possess facilities which no other man or body of men living do, for gauging the feelings of the natives . . . have seen fit . . . to give me their confidence to a certain limited extent.' In January 1884, he informed Ripon that even earlier, in 1848, he had been in contact with the brotherhood or a.s.sociation of his mystical advisers and that it was their intervention which had defeated the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and the 'mutiny' of 1857. From distant Tibet they were now acting through him and others like him to help Ripon introduce reforms and avoid 'the possibility of such a cataclysm recurring.' This a.s.sociation of mahatmas was also helping him, he told Ripon, to persuade the Queen to give a second term as Viceroy to Ripon and to 'tranquilize the native press.'9 Hume tried to play a similar role with Dufferin, but more hesitatingly, not sharing with him the information that his advisers were astral, occult figures, so that even many historians have a.s.sumed that these advisers were his fellow Congress leaders! Only once did he lift the veil before Dufferin when the latter during 1887 angrily pressed him to reveal the source through which he claimed to have gained access to the Viceroy's secret letter to the Secretary of State. Pressed to the wall, Hume told him copies of the letter had been obtained by his friends through occult methods or 'through the medium of supernatural photography.'And when Dufferin showed him the original letter, proving that the copy was false, Hume had no answer.10 Once earlier, too, Hume had indirectly tried to tell Dufferin that his advisers were not ordinary political leaders but 'advanced initiates' and mahatmas; but he had done so in a guarded fashion. In a letter to Dufferin in November 1886, he said that he had been trying to persuade those who had shown him the volumes in Simla to also show them to Dufferin so that the Viceroy could get their veracity checked by his own sources. But, 'at present they say that this is impossible.' Nor would they agree to communicate with the Viceroy directly. 'Most of them, I believe, could not. You have not done, and would not do, what is required to enable them to communicate with you directly after their fashion.' But there was hope. 'My own special friend' who spent more than a month with Hume in Simla (in 1878), and who was often in India might agree to see the Viceroy. Hume suggested: 'if ever a native gentleman comes to the Private Secretary and says that Mr. Hume said the Viceroy would like to see him, see him at once. You will not talk to him ten minutes without finding out that he is no ordinary man. You may never get the chance - goodness knows - they move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform.'11 But Hume was worried that he could offer no visible or direct proof of his knowledge or connections. He told the Viceroy that he was 'getting gradually very angry and disgusted' because he was not able to get 'this vouching for directly.' None of the 'advanced initiates' under whose 'advice and guidance' he was working would 'publicly stand by me,' so that most Europeans in India 'look upon me either as a lunatic or a liar.' And hence, he informed the Viceroy, while he had decided to continue the political work, he had decided to 'drop all references to my friends.'12 Thus, it turns out that the seven volumes which Hume saw were prepared by mahatmas and Gurus, and his friends and advisers were these occult figures and not Congressmen!

Further proof offered for the safety-valve theory was based on W.C. Bonnerjee's statement in 1898 in Indian Politics that the Congress, 'as it was originally started and as it has since been carried on, is in reality the work of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.' He stated that Hume had, in 1884, thought of bringing together leading political Indians once a year "to discuss social matters" and did not "desire that politics should form part of their discussion." But Dufferin asked Hume to do the opposite and start a body to discuss politics so that the Government could keep itself informed of Indian opinion. Such a body could also perform 'the functions which Her Majesty's Opposition did in England.'13 Clearly, either W.C. Bonnerjee's memory was failing or he was trying to protect the National Congress from the wrath of the late 19th century imperialist reaction, for contemporary evidence clearly indicated the opposite. All the discussions Hume had with Indian leaders regarding the holding of an annual conference referred to a political gathering. Almost the entire work of earlier a.s.sociations like the Bombay Presidency a.s.sociation, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Madras Mahajan Sabha and Indian a.s.sociation was political. Since his retirement from the Indian Civil Service in 1882, Hume had been publicly urging Indians to take to politics. He had also been asking his Indian friends not to get divided on social questions.

When, in January 1885, his friend B.M. Malabari wrote some editorials in the Indian Spectator urging educated Indians to inaugurate a movement for social reform, Hume wrote a letter to the Indian Spectator criticizing Malabari's proposals, warning against the dangerous potential of such a move, and arguing that political reforms should take precedence over social reform.14 Dufferin, on his part, in his St. Andrews' Day dinner speech in 1888, publicly criticized the Congress for pursuing politics to serve narrow interests rather than take to social reform which would benefit millions.15 Earlier he had expressed the same sentiment in a private letter to the Secretary of State.

A perusal of Dufferin's private papers, thrown open to scholars in the late 1950s, should have put an end to the myth of Dufferin's sponsorship of or support to the Congress. It was only after Hume had sent him a copy of the letter to the Indian Spectator with a covering note deprecating Malabari's views on social reform that Dufferin expressed agreement with Hume and asked him to meet him. Definite confirmation of the fact that Hume never proposed a social gathering but rather a political one comes in Dufferin's letter to Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay, after his first meeting with Hume in May 1885: "At his last interview he told me that he and his friends were going to a.s.semble a political convention of delegates, as far as I understood, on the lines adopted by O'Connell previous to Catholic emanc.i.p.ation."16 Neither Dufferin and his fellow-liberal Governors of Bombay and Madras nor his conservative officials like Alfred and J.B. Lyall, D.M. Wallace, A. Colvin and S.C. Bayley were sympathetic to the Congress. It was not only in 1888 that Dufferin attacked the Congress in a vicious manner by writing that he would consider 'in what way the happy despatch may be best applied to the Congress,' for 'we cannot allow the Congress to continue to exist.'17 In May 1885 itself, he had written to Reay asking him to be careful about Hume's Congress, telling him that it would be unwise to identify with either the reformers or the reactionaries.18 Reay in turn, in a letter in June 1885, referred with apprehension to the new political activists as 'the National Party of India' and warned against Indian delegates, like Irish delegates, making their appearance on the British political scene. Earlier, in May, Reay had cautioned Dufferin that Hume was 'the head-centre of an organization . . . (which) has for its object to bring native opinion into a focus.'19 In fact, from the end of May 1885, Dufferin had grown cool to Hume and began to keep him at an arm's length. From 1886 onwards he also began to attack the 'Bengali Baboos and Mahratta Brahmins' for being 'inspired by questionable motives' and for wanting to start Irish-type revolutionary agitations in India.20 And, during May-June 1886, he was describing Hume as 'cleverish, a little cracked, excessively vain, and absolutely indifferent to truth,' his main fault being that he was 'one of the chief stimulants of the Indian Home Rule movement.'21 To conclude, it is high time that the safety-valve theory of the genesis of the Congress was confined to the care of the mahatmas from whom perhaps it originated!

5.

Foundation of The Indian National Congress: The Reality

In the last chapter we began the story of the foundation of the Indian National Congress. We could not, however, make much headway because the cobwebs had to be cleared, the myth of the safety-valve had to be laid to rest, the mystery of the 'missing volumes' had to be solved, and Hume's mahatmas had to be sent back to their resting place in Tibet. In this chapter we resume the more serious part of the story of the emergence of the Indian National Congress as the apex nationalist organization that was to guide the destiny of the Indian national movement till the attainment of independence.

The foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was not a sudden event, or a historical accident. It was the culmination of a process of political awakening that had its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s and took a major leap forward in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The year 1885 marked a turning point in this process, for that was the year the political Indians, the modern intellectuals interested in politics, who no longer saw themselves as spokesmen of narrow group interests, but as representatives of national interest vis-a-vis foreign rule, as a 'national party,' saw their efforts bear fruit. The all-India nationalist body that they brought into being was to be the platform, the organizer, the headquarters, the symbol of the new national spirit and politics.

British officialdom, too, was not slow in reading the new messages that were being conveyed through the nationalist political activity leading to the founding of the Congress, and watched them with suspicion, and a sense of foreboding. As this political activity gathered force, the prospect of disloyalty, sedition and Irish-type agitations began to haunt the Government.

The official suspicion was not merely the over-anxious response of an administration that had not yet recovered from the mutiny complex, but was, in fact, well-founded. On the surface, the nationalist Indian demands of those years - no reduction of import duties on textile imports, no expansion in Afghanistan or Burma, the right to bear arms, freedom of the Press, reduction of military expenditure, higher expenditure on famine relief, Indianization of the civil services, the right of Indians to join the semi-military volunteer corps, the right of Indian judges to try Europeans in criminal cases, the appeal to British voters to vote for a party which would listen to Indians - look rather mild, especially when considered separately. But these were demands which a colonial regime could not easily concede, for that would undermine its hegemony over the colonial people. It is true that any criticism or demand no matter how innocuous its appearance but which cannot be accommodated by a system is in the long-run subversive of the system.

The new political thrust in the years between 1875 and 1885 was the creation of the younger, more radical nationalist intellectuals most of whom entered politics during this period. They established new a.s.sociations, having found that the older a.s.sociations were too narrowly conceived in terms of their programmes and political activity as well as social bases. For example, the British Indian a.s.sociation of Bengal had increasingly identified itself with the interests of the zamindars and, thus, gradually lost its anti-British edge. The Bombay a.s.sociation and Madras Native a.s.sociation had become reactionary and moribund. And so the younger nationalists of Bengal, led by Surendranath Banerjea and Anand Mohan Bose, founded the Indian a.s.sociation in 1876. Younger men of Madras - M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramaniya Iyer, P. Ananda Charlu and others - formed the Madras Mahajan Sabha in 1884. In Bombay, the more militant intellectuals like K.T. Telang and Pherozeshah Mehta broke away from older leaders like Dadabhai Framji and Dinshaw Pet.i.t on political grounds and formed the Bombay Presidency a.s.sociation in 1885. Among the older a.s.sociations only the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha carried on as before. But, then, it was already in the hands of nationalist intellectuals.

A sign of new political life in the country was the coming into existence during these years of nearly all the major nationalist newspapers which were to dominate the Indian scene till 1918 - The Hindu, Tribune, Bengalee, Mahratta and Kesari. The one exception was the Amrita Bazar Patrika which was already edited by new and younger men. It became an English language newspaper only in 1878.

By 1885, the formation of an all-India political organization had become an objective necessity, and the necessity was being recognized by nationalists all over the country. Many recent scholars have furnished detailed information on the many moves that were made in that direction from 1877. These moves acquired a greater sense of urgency especially from 1883 and there was intense political activity. The Indian Mirror of Calcutta was carrying on a continuous campaign on the question. The Indian a.s.sociation had already in December 1883 organized an All-India National Conference and given a call for another one in December 1885. (Surendranath Banerjea, who was involved in the All-India National Conference, could not for that reason attend the founding session of the National Congress in 1885).

Meanwhile, the Indians had gained experience, as well as confidence, from the large number of agitations they had organized in the preceding ten years. Since 1875, there had been a continuous campaign around cotton import duties which Indians wanted to stay in the interests of the Indian textile industry. A ma.s.sive campaign had been organized during 1877-88 around the demand for the Indianization of Government services. The Indians had opposed the Afghan adventure of Lord Lytton and then compelled the British Government to contribute towards the cost of the Second Afghan War. The Indian Press had waged a major campaign against the efforts of the Government to control it through the Vernacular Press Act. The Indians had also opposed the effort to disarm them through the Arms Act. In 1881-82 they had organized a protest against the Plantation Labour and the Inland Emigration Act which condemned plantation labourers to serfdom. A major agitation was organized during 1883 in favour of the Ilbert Bill which would enable Indian magistrates to try Europeans. This Bill was successfully thwarted by the Europeans. The Indians had been quick to draw the political lesson. Their efforts had failed because they had not been coordinated on an all-India basis. On the other hand, the Europeans had acted in a concerted manner. Again in July 1883 a ma.s.sive all-India effort was made to raise a National Fund which would be used to promote political agitation in India as well as England. In 1885, Indians fought for the right to join the volunteer corps restricted to Europeans, and then organized an appeal to British voters to vote for those candidates who were friendly towards India. Several Indians were sent to Britain to put the Indian case before British voters through public speeches, and other means.

It, thus, becomes clear that the foundation of the Congress was the natural culmination of the political work of the previous years. By 1885, a stage had been reached in the political development of India when certain basic tasks or objectives had to be laid down and struggled for. Moreover, these objectives were correlated and could only be fulfilled by the coming together of political workers in a single organization formed on an all-India basis. The men who met in Bombay on 28 December 1885 were inspired by these objectives and hoped to initiate the process of achieving them. The success or failure and the future character of the Congress would be determined not by who founded it but by the extent to which these objectives were achieved in the initial years.

India had just entered the process of becoming a nation or a people. The first major objective of the founders of the Indian national movement was to promote this process, to weld Indians into a nation, to create an Indian people. It was common for colonial administrators and ideologues to a.s.sert that Indians could not be united or freed because they were not a nation or a people but a geographical expression, a mere congeries of hundreds of diverse races and creeds. The Indians did not deny this but a.s.serted that they were now becoming a nation. India was as Tilak, Surendranath Banerjea and many others were fond of saying - a nation-in-the-making. The Congress leaders recognized that objective historical forces were bringing the Indian people together. But they also realized that the people had to become subjectively aware of the objective process and that for this it was necessary to promote the feeling of national unity and nationalism among them.

Above all, India being a nation-in-the-making, its nationhood could not be taken for granted. It had to be constantly developed and consolidated. The promotion of national unity was a major objective of the Congress and later its major achievement. For example, P. Ananda Charlu in his presidential address to the Congress in 1891 described it 'as a mighty nationalizer,' and said that this was its most 'glorious' role.1 Among the three basic aims and objectives of the Congress laid down by its first President, W.C. Bonnerji, was that of 'the fuller development and consolidation of those sentiments of national unity.'2 The Russian traveller, I.P. Minayeff, wrote in his diary that, when travelling with Bonnerji, he asked, 'what practical results did the Congress leaders expect from the Congress,' Bonnerji replied: 'Growth of national feeling and unity of Indians.'3 Similarly, commenting on the first Congress session, the Indu Prakash of Bombay wrote: 'It marks the beginning of a new life . . . it will greatly help in creating a national feeling and binding together distant people by common sympathies, and common ends.'4 The making of India into a nation was to be a prolonged historical process. Moreover, the Congress leaders realized that the diversity of India was such that special efforts unknown to other parts of the world would have to be made and national unity carefully nurtured. In an effort to reach all regions, it was decided to rotate the Congress session among different parts of the country. The President was to belong to a region other than where the Congress session was being held.

To reach out to the followers of all religions and to remove the fears of the minorities, a rule was made at the 1888 session that no resolution was to be pa.s.sed to which an overwhelming majority of Hindu or Muslim delegates objected.5 In 1889, a minority clause was adopted in the resolution demanding reform of legislative councils. According to the clause, wherever Parsis, Christians, Muslims or Hindus were a minority their number elected to the Councils would not be less than their proportion in the population.6 The reason given by the mover of the resolution was that India was not yet a h.o.m.ogenous country and political methods here had, therefore, to differ from those in Europe.

The early national leaders were also determined to build a secular nation, the Congress itself being intensely secular.

The second major objective of the early Congress was to create a common political platform or programme around which political workers in different parts of the country could gather and conduct their political activities, educating and mobilizing people on an all-India basis. This was to be accomplished by taking up those grievances and fighting for those rights which Indians had in common in relation to the rulers.

For the same reason the Congress was not to take up questions of social reform. At its second session, the President of the Congress, Dadabhai Naoroji, laid down this rule and said that 'A National Congress must confine itself to questions in which the entire nation has a direct partic.i.p.ation.' Congress was, therefore, not the right place to discuss social reforms. 'We are met together,' he said, 'as a political body to represent to our rulers our political aspirations.'7 *

Modern politics - the politics of popular partic.i.p.ation, agitation, mobilization - was new to India. The notion that politics was not the preserve of the few but the domain of everyone was not yet familiar to the people. No modern political movement was possible till people realized this. And, then, on the basis of this realization, an informed and determined political opinion had to be created. The arousal, training, organization and consolidation of public opinion was seen as a major task by the Congress leaders. All initial activity of the early nationalism was geared towards this end.

The first step was seen to be the politicization and unification of the opinion of the educated, and then of other sections. The primary objective was to go beyond the redressal of immediate grievances and organize sustained political activity along the lines of the Anti-Corn Law League (formed in Britain by Cobden and Bright in 1838 to secure reform of Corn Laws). The leaders as well as the people also had to gain confidence in their own capacity to organize political opposition to the most powerful state of the day.

All this was no easy task. A prolonged period of politicization would be needed. Many later writers and critics have concentrated on the methods of political struggle of the early nationalist leaders, on their pet.i.tions, prayers and memorials. It is, of course, true that they did not organize ma.s.s movements and ma.s.s struggles. But the critics have missed out the most important part of their activity - that all of it led to politics, to the politicization of the people. Justice Ranade, who was known as a political sage, had, in his usual perceptive manner, seen this as early as 1891.When the young and impatient twenty-six-year-old Gokhale expressed disappointment when the Government sent a two line reply to a carefully and laboriously prepared memorial by the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Ranade rea.s.sured him: 'You don't realize our place in the history of our country. These memorials are nominally addressed to Government, in reality they are addressed to the people, so that they may learn how to think in these matters. This work must be done for many years, without expecting any other result, because politics of this kind is altogether new in this land.'8 *

As part of the basic objective of giving birth to a national movement, it was necessary to create a common all-India national-political leadership, that is, to construct what Antonio Gramsci, the famous Italian Marxist, calls the headquarters of a movement. Nations and people become capable of meaningful and effective political action only when they are organized. They become a people or 'historical subjects' only when they are organized as such. The first step in a national movement is taken when the 'carriers' of national feeling or national ident.i.ty begin to organize the people. But to be able to do so successfully, these 'carriers' or leaders must themselves be unified; they must share a collective identification, that is, they must come to know each other and share and evolve a common outlook, perspective, sense of purpose, as also common feelings. According to the circular which, in March 1885, informed political workers of the coming Congress session, the Congress was intended 'to enable all the most earnest labourers in the cause of national progress to become personally known to each other.'9 W.C. Bonnerji, as the first Congress President, reiterated that one of the Congress objectives was the 'eradication, by direct friendly personal intercourse, of all possible race, creed, or provincial prejudices amongst all lovers of our country,' and 'the promotion of personal intimacy and friendship amongst all the more earnest workers in our country's cause in (all) parts of the Empire.'10 In other words, the founders of the Congress understood that the first requirement of a national movement was a national leadership. The social-ideological complexion that this leadership would acquire was a question that was different from the main objective of the creation of a national movement. This complexion would depend on a host of factors: the role of different social cla.s.ses, ideological influences, outcomes of ideological struggles, and so on.

The early nationalist leaders saw the internalization and indigenization of political democracy as one of their main objectives. They based their politics on the doctrine of the sovereignly of the people, or, as Dadabhai Naoroji put it, on 'the new lesson that Kings are made for the people, not peoples for their Kings.'

From the beginning, the Congress was organized in the form of a Parliament. In fact, the word Congress was borrowed from North American history to connote an a.s.sembly of the people. The proceedings of the Congress sessions were conducted democratically, issues being decided through debate and discussion and occasionally through voting. It was, in fact, the Congress, and not the bureaucratic and authoritarian colonial state, as some writers wrongly argue, which indigenized, popularized and rooted parliamentary democracy in India.

Similarly, the early national leaders made maintenance of civil liberties and their extension an integral part of the national movement. They fought against every infringement of the freedom of the Press and speech and opposed every attempt to curtail them. They struggled for separation of the judicial and executive powers and fought against racial discrimination.

It was necessary to evolve an understanding of colonialism and then a nationalist ideology based on this understanding. In this respect, the early nationalist leaders were simultaneously learners and teachers. No ready-made anti-colonial understanding or ideology was available to them in the 1870s and 1880s. They had to develop their own anti-colonial ideology on the basis of a concrete study of the reality and of their own practice.

There could have been no national struggle without an ideological struggle clarifying the concept of we as a nation against colonialism as an enemy. They had to find answers to many questions. For example, is Britain ruling India for India's benefit? Are the interests of the rulers and the ruled in harmony, or does a basic contradiction exist between the two? Is the contradiction of the Indian people with British bureaucrats in India, or with the British Government, or with the system of colonialism as such? Are the Indian people capable of fighting the mighty British empire? And how is the fight to be waged?

In finding answers to these and other questions many mistakes were made. For example, the early nationalists failed to understand, at least till the beginning of the 20th century, the character of the colonial state. But, then, some mistakes are an inevitable part of any serious effort to grapple with reality. In a way, despite mistakes and setbacks, it was perhaps no misfortune that no ready-made, cut and dried, symmetrical formulae were available to them. Such formulae are often lifeless and, therefore, poor guides to action.

True, the early national leaders did not organize ma.s.s movements against the British. But they did carry out an ideological struggle against them. It should not be forgotten that nationalist or anti-imperialist struggle is a struggle about colonialism before it becomes a struggle against colonialism. And the founding fathers of the Congress carried out this 'struggle about colonialism' in a brilliant fashion.