Growing discontent

Anger kept growing after 1857, and it took very different forms in different places.

In Punjab, Baba Ram Singh led the Kuka or Namdhari Movement. 'Namdhari' means those who uphold the name of God; followers were called Kukas from the high-pitched chants (kūks) of their prayers.

It reformed Sikh society: stopping female infanticide (killing baby girls) and child marriage, and simplifying marriage rituals to end dowry.

But look at what else they did, and when. They rejected foreign goods, wore simple hand-spun white clothes, and set up their own postal system and private courts to avoid British institutions, decades before any of this became national policy.

In 1872, after Kukas attacked government-approved slaughterhouses, the response was brutal: 65 Kukas executed without trial, many tied to the mouths of cannons and blown away. Baba Ram Singh was exiled to Burma and died there.

In western Maharashtra, famine was followed by bubonic plague in 1896, and the authorities' harsh control measures were hated. The next year the three Chapekar brothers shot dead the British Plague Commissioner of Poona and a military officer; betrayed, they were hanged. Secret groups formed too: in Bengal, the Anushilan Samiti was set up in 1902, with centres in many towns and villages, to give intellectual, moral and physical training to young men.

And Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a founding member of the Congress, found its leaders too moderate. He wrote fiercely in his Marathi newspaper Kesari, and turned Ganesh Chaturthi and the Shivaji festival into big public events, using religious and patriotic symbols to call people to resist.

He was jailed for 18 months for sedition (stirring rebellion) although there was no evidence, and became 'Lokmanya', 'revered by the people'. He also translated the Bhagavad Gita into Marathi, published in English as The Gita Rahasya.