Nationalism in India
A sense of collective belonging
Explain how symbols and culture built a sense of nationhood in India.
How people come to feel like one nation. Nationalism spreads when people believe they all belong to the same nation. That feeling came partly from struggling together, and partly from culture: stories and histories, folk songs and tales, popular pictures and symbols.
Bharat Mata. A nation is often shown as a figure people can identify with. In India, this became Bharat Mata.
- Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote 'Vande Mataram' in the 1870s as a hymn to the motherland; it later went into his novel Anandamath and was sung widely in the Swadeshi movement.
- Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata (1905) as a calm, spiritual ascetic, giving learning, food and clothing.
- Later prints showed her differently, for example with a trishul, beside a lion and an elephant, symbols of power.
Being devoted to this mother figure became a sign that you were a nationalist.
Folk tales and songs. In the late 19th century, nationalists toured villages recording folk tales, songs and legends. They believed these showed the true traditional culture, damaged by outside forces, and that preserving them would restore pride in the past.
- In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore collected ballads, nursery rhymes and myths.
- In Madras, Natesa Sastri collected Tamil folk tales in four volumes, The Folklore of Southern India. He called folklore 'national literature'.
Flags.
- Swadeshi flag (Bengal): red, green and yellow, with eight lotuses (one for each province of British India) and a crescent moon standing for Hindus and Muslims.
- Swaraj flag (Gandhiji, 1921): red, green and white, with a spinning wheel in the centre for self-help.
Carrying the flag in marches became a sign of defiance.
Rewriting history, and its problem. The British called Indians backward, unable to rule themselves. In reply, Indians wrote histories of a glorious ancient past, when art, science, mathematics, philosophy and trade flourished, followed by decline under colonial rule. These histories urged pride and struggle. But there was a problem: when the past being praised was Hindu, and the images came from Hindu religious art, people of other communities felt left out.
Quit India (1942). The Cripps Mission had failed, and the hardships of the Second World War caused wide anger. On 14 July 1942 at Wardha, the Congress Working Committee passed the 'Quit India' resolution, demanding the British hand over power at once. On 8 August 1942 in Bombay, it was endorsed, and Gandhiji gave his 'Do or Die' speech. Students, workers and peasants joined in huge numbers, along with leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia, Aruna Asaf Ali and Jayprakash Narayan, and women such as Matangini Hazra (Bengal), Kanaklata Barua (Assam) and Rama Devi (Odisha). The British needed more than a year to crush it.
A nation with many voices. Anger against colonial rule brought many groups into one struggle, and the Congress tried to turn their grievances into organised movements. But each group had its own hopes, so each group pictured freedom in its own way. The Congress kept trying to stop one group's demands from alienating another, which is why unity often broke down after its high points. What emerged was a nation of many voices, all wanting freedom.
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