The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 / Edition 2

by Gyanendra Pandey

Overview

A revised edition of the classic monograph. The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh investigates the social contradictions, class forces, and efforts at political organization and mobilization that lay behind the emergence of a powerful nationalist movement in Uttar Pradesh in the later 1920s and early 1930s. It also considers the concurrent emergence of Hindu-Muslim differences as a major factor affecting nationalist politics and the anti-colonial struggle in India. With a revised introduction and conclusion incorporating material from new research, and corresponding revisions throughout the text, the new edition extends the scope of the original work to cover the entire inter-war period, 1920-40.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843310563
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	07/01/2002
Series:	Anthem South Asian Studies
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Gyanendra Pandey is Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

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The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh

Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940

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By Gyanendra Pandey

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2002 Gyanendra Pandey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-762-5

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The years between the two World Wars bore witness to a radical transformation in the Indian political scene. During this time the anti-colonial struggle developed into a powerful mass movement, and its leading party, the Indian National Congress, moved from well-ordered annual meetings and polite calls for constitutional reform to the demand for 'complete (political) independence' and extensive debate on the conditions that would make for social and economic independence at the same time. By the end of this period, indeed, when, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the British colonial rulers looked for its cooperation in the pursuit of the war, the Congress was insisting on 'independence now' It was by then very much the party in waiting, demonstrably ready and able to head a successor regime.

Historians of all shades of opinion have recognized this advance — or at least, some aspects of it. To many the strength and popularity of the Congress and the nationalist movement appeared as a steadily rising curve all the way from the late nineteenth century, with only occasional and negligible downward movements. The ascent was seen to be especially steep in the period after 1919. From the Hindu nationalist R C Majumdar to the secular liberal Jawaharlal Nehru and the Marxist R P Dutt, nationalist and anti-imperialist writers seemed to be at one on this point. It was noted that some 60,000 satyagrahis were arrested in less than a year of civil disobedience in 1930–1, and at least 120,000 during the fifteen months from January 1932 to March 1933, compared with only 30,000 during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–2. The agitations of the early 1940s apparently achieved an even greater scale. Officials estimated that over 60,000 people were arrested, 18,000 detained without trial, 940 killed and 1,630 injured in police and military firing in under five months after 8 August 1942.

On the imperialist side too there were few dissenters from this view of the progress of the Indian nationalist movement. Some, in the earlier stages, had fondly clung to the opinion that the Congress was a small collection of self-seeking babus. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, they had to add that this coterie was capable of, and successful in, 'deluding the masses'. After the shock of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal and the even more massive Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements, 'it was ... generally agreed,' says Spear in a review of British writing on the Indian nationalist movement, 'that Gandhi had achieved the miracle of extending the movement to the masses.'

Such a view of the unilineal progress of Indian nationalism is perhaps somewhat oversimplified. For if this picture were true it would be difficult to explain the want of mass participation in the institutional politics of several parts of India and Pakistan in the years after independence. If mass involvement in Congress activities grew so distinctly and indubitably, under the guidance and encouragement of the Congress leadership, from 1885 to 1947, why is there some rather mixed evidence of it in the politics of the Congress after that date? Were the 'masses' of the sub-continent concerned solely with the removal of the British and content to retire from an active role in public affairs once this has been accomplished? R P Dutt's work provided a solitary, but extremely useful, lead towards an answer to this puzzle. There was, from the very beginning, a 'double strand' in Congress politics, he argued — 'on the one hand, the strand of cooperation with imperialism against the "menace" of the mass movement; on the other hand, the strand of leadership of the masses in the national struggle.'

Again the traditional account of a triumphant, all-encompassing nationalist movement provided no real explanation for the birth of two separate 'nation-states' in 1947. Owing to this particular weakness it left unanswered some of the questions posed by the Hindu chauvinist and British colonialist theories of Indian nationhood. On the one hand we have the point of view represented by Majumdar, that the Indian nationalist movement was nothing but a movement for the self-determination of what he calls 'the Hindu nation' (which, in his view, had in fact lost its 'independence' in the thirteenth century). The colonialist theory, on the other hand, denied the existence of an Indian nation, while insisting that Hindus, Muslims and indeed other communities, tribes and castes were deeply — not to say irremediably — divided. In this reading, what might follow the end of British rule in India was anybody's guess; and it would be matter for small surprise were the sub-continent to break up into two (or many more) successor states, if it did not descend into complete chaos.

In addition, there was nothing in either the liberal nationalist historiography or the Hindu chauvinist and British colonialist theories mentioned above that constituted a proper explanation of the differential role of the various social groups in the mass nationalist campaigns. For those who believed that the Hindus had constituted a nation since ancient times, as much as for those who altogether denied the existence of any Indian nationhood, the development of a powerful nationalist movement could be explained only by some sort of historical force — such as a 'man of destiny. And in yet another remarkable convergence of views the different schools of historians found in Gandhi their 'man of destiny. Majumdar called the period 1920-47 'The Age of Gandhi, for it was 'almost wholly dominated by the personality of Mahatma Gandhi. Nehru, in his turn, expressed the liberal's sense of relief as he recalled how

'Gandhi came ... like a powerful current of fresh air which made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths ... He sent us to the villages and the countryside hummed with the activity of innumerable messengers of the new gospel of action. The peasant was shaken up and he began to emerge from his quiescent shell.

Among one section of Indian historians, writing a little later, there was some recognition of the different class forces and interests encompassed by the nationalist movement. Following R P Dutt, these scholars suggested that there were two basic elements in the development of popular nationalism in India: the clash between the Indian and the British bourgeoisie, and the growing impoverishment of the peasantry, leading to mass unrest. Yet mass discontent was no recent phenomenon, and there was a need to explain how the link between the 'masses and the bourgeoisie (or the intelligentsia representing the bourgeoisie) was forged. Here the scholars returned to a trusted argument: Gandhi remained the magician, and the great mobilizer.

British observers too, barring some of the 'die-hard imperialists who were satisfied with the 'conspiracy theory of 'self-seeking babus' deluding 'dumb millions', came to emphasize the force of religion and the importance of Gandhi's 'saintliness'. Valentine Chirol provides a fair illustration: 'Gandhi acquired a personal hold, unexampled perhaps since Buddha, on the masses both in the congested slums of the modern cities and in the stagnant backwaters of agricultural India. For if he was a reckless agitator, the saint that was also in him was moved like the founder of Buddhism by a great compassion for the poor, the humble and the sinner.'

As the nationalist movement stabilized and broadened an updated version of the same view, garnished with liberal values, came to be put forward by British historians and administrators. Indian nationalism was henceforth to be identified as a product of Indo-British cooperation. It was something that the British had encouraged all along, the new argument ran, though it may have been hastened by the 'persuasive oratory' of nationalist leaders, by the emotive power of 'OM' and 'Bande Mataram' and by 'deep forces in Hinduism of which we know little'.

II

The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a more detailed historiography, based on recently released government documents and collections of private papers. The notion of a giant clash between imperialism and nationalism in the sub-continent was now increasingly contested by several groups of historians. Their researches focused on the regional variations of the Indian nationalist movement and the contradictions within it. Not only was the earlier vision of the unity of the movement challenged as a result; the continuity and indeed the very existence of the movement was again called into question in the writings of some of these scholars. Yet the mass of contemporary evidence, official and non-official, regarding something then perceived as a strong and lasting nationalist struggle, remained. Faced with this stubborn fact, the 'revisionist' historians found it necessary to admit that the nationalist movement was not entirely an optical illusion. However, their 'new' interpretation of its development marked a return to the stance of the post-Chirol liberal colonialists, only marginally modified by new data.

There was a revival of the view that English education produced a new 'class' that began and continued agitation for its own ends. British 'beneficence' and Indian 'intrigue' were thus again wedded. Subsequently a slight shift in emphasis led to a modification of this view of the Indian nationalists as the spiritual progeny of British liberal education. English constitutional innovation rather than Macaulay's cultural crusade was what was now supposed to have made a nationalist of an Indian. Making interesting use of some modern anthropological and sociological work, this particular version suggested that it was traditional local battles that provided the stuff of Indian politics. Increasingly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was argued, these battles were fought in modern (western) political forms, such as associations, parties, petitions and perhaps even agitations. The links between different levels of politics, different regions and different interests were provided by the formal political structure imposed on the country by the British.

Constitutional development then accounted for a lasting 'nationalist movement' and changes in constitutional structure explained changes in the intensity, scale and form of 'nationalist' struggle. In this interpretation, 'nationalist' agitations arose whenever constitutional change was anticipated and declined as soon as the nature of the change became clear and no further concessions could be gained by agitation. At that point, Indian 'nationalists' returned to the politics in which they thrived, the traditional politics of transaction and patronage, aimed at establishing or maintaining social position, rewarding kith and kin and associates, and pursuing old (caste and other) battles.

An obvious limitation of most of these analyses was the exclusive concentration on elites and the leadership elements. Differences among 'nationalist' leaders were read as decisive divisions in the 'nationalist' movement. Links between individual leaders became the critical 'nationalist' links. The patronage of influential men was seen as being the key element in drawing large numbers of men from less privileged sections of society into the politics of agitation. Local 'connections' and patron-client relationships were somehow reproduced — on a completely altered scale — at the district, the provincial and even the national level! There was something unfathomable in the culture and the country (as the old colonialists would have had it) that enabled all this to occur. This kind of argument required another assumption, that the hundreds and thousands, indeed tens of thousands, who turned out for nationalist protests and demonstrations in town and country had no judgement, or desires, of their own. Even historians who traced the rise of new elite groups in different parts of the country as the motor of modern politics ignored the identity and the concerns of those who provided the popular following of the new social and political movements.

Since the 1980s, the elitism of this historiography has been fundamentally challenged, one might even say overturned, by Subaltern Studies, by Sumit Sarkar's summation of new trends in the understanding of modern nationalism and politics in India, by the emergence of a distinct feminist historiography, and by a host of other writings foregrounding questions of difference and perspective, of marginalized groups and peoples, of lower castes and classes. What these interventions have done collectively is to banish once and for all any notion of the nation and nationalism as something eternal, homogenous, ready to be awakened by the first calls of a 'modern' (that is, Western educated) leadership. The new historiography has laid stress on the process of nation-formation, on the contradictions that marked this process reflecting both old and new contradictions within a changing Indian society, on the struggle to imagine the political community of the future, as well as the struggle between different imaginations and different visions of how these imaginations were to be realized. The national movement thus appears far more variegated, far richer, and — not to put too fine a point on it — far more historical than ever before.

III

The present work was one of the first of this new crop of studies that sought to analyze the differentiated character of the Indian national movement, stressing its multiple layers and points of initiative, underlining its contested character, and suggesting that the particularity and strength of the movement came from the imbrication of quite different kinds of politics, political attitudes and political expectations. The question of mobilization was central to this investigation. For this purpose, it focused on one north Indian province, UP (earlier called the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh, after independence Uttar Pradesh), and on a comparatively limited period of mobilization, organization and agitation, the decades between 1920 and 1940, which marked perhaps the most crucial advance in the popular phase of the national movement. It examined for that period the state of the movement and the factors responsible for its manifest strength and its equally obvious limitations.

The Indian National Congress occupied a central place in this study. Chapter 3 contains a detailed discussion of its organization and leadership in UP. Chapter 4 examines the techniques of mobilization used by the Congress leaders, the manner in which they sought to establish contact with 'the masses' and the message that they sought to put out. But this study was not concerned primarily with the Congress leadership and their actions. The finer details of the decision-making process and the discussion on these in the Congress councils were peripheral to the analysis. I felt the need to turn my attention rather more to the relationship between 'leaders' and 'followers' and the activities of individuals and groups outside the formal leadership. Chapter 4 considers the contributions of the revolutionary terrorists and other groups, with their own techniques of mobilization. It deals particularly with the cumulative impact of political demonstrations and acts of political violence, on the one hand, and of 'constructive' (social reform) activities aimed at promoting cottage industry or combating some of the consequences of Untouchability, on the other.

It was my concern to investigate in some detail the context and circumstances of particular political interventions by individuals as well as groups — the political climate of the time, the social conditions, the immediate and often crying economic problems. Chapter 6 charts the different patterns of mass mobilization and agitation in different parts of the province during the civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920s and 30s, seeking to establish 'how it all came about'. Chapter 5 deals with the very different question of why the Muslims of UP, who had responded in large numbers to the Congress and the Khilafat leaders' appeal for anti-British struggle at the beginning of the 1920s, took so little part in civil disobedience in the 1930s. All this allowed me to ask a further question about where the political initiative lay: in far-sighted and powerful urban leaders mobilizing the 'masses' at will; or also in the hands of little known men and women, scarcely distinguishable from the 'masses', who interpreted nationalist goals and demands in their own way and sometimes carried the 'leaders' along with them.

Any region of India could have served for a study of this kind. The choice of UP had the advantage that it was to the fore in the nationalist agitations of the last three decades of British rule. In the 1920s the province came to be regarded as a considerable thorn in the side of the British Government of India. By the 1930s the Congress in UP was clearly in control of wide-ranging forces of protest, and each of the contending parties — the Congress and the Government — was well aware of the other's strength and objectives. The Government frankly acknowledged the potency of the opposition that it faced. Malcolm Hailey, governor of the Punjab and UP successively in the 1920s and 1930s, affirmed that in UP, unlike in the Punjab, his task was 'to maintain the position of Government in view of the growing influence of the Congress'. Another letter, written to a Congress leader by another official who was acting Governor of the province in 1928, conveys a sense of the unusual respect with which the British rulers had come to view the leading nationalist party. 'You have ... undertaken a tall order,' it read. 'We are keeping a close eye on agricultural developments, and can compete with you by having our own staff not only in every district but in every tahsil and parganah.'

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh by Gyanendra Pandey. Copyright © 2002 Gyanendra Pandey. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents

Preface; List of Maps and Tables; Abbreviations; Introduction; Uttar Pradesh after the First World War; The Congress Organization, 1920-1940; Spreading the Nationalist Message; The Alienation of the Muslims; Mass Mobilization; Conclusion; Glossary; Bibliography; Notes; Index