Calls for Independence

27.3.7: Calls for Independence

The Indian independence movement, which achieved its goal in 1947, was one of many independence struggles that intensified after World War II across Asia and Africa.

Learning Objective

Connect calls for independence in India to worldwide movements for independence

Key Points

  • The decades following the Indian Rebellion of 1857 were a period of growing political awareness, manifestation of Indian public opinion, and emergence of Indian leadership at both national and provincial levels. Members of the upwardly mobile and successful western-educated elites established organizations that aimed to ensure that they would gain influence in Indian politics but were not focused on the question of Indian independence.
  • By 1900, although the Indian National Congress, the leading independence movement organization, emerged as an all-India political organization, its achievement was undermined by its failure to attract Muslims. In response, the All India Muslim League was founded to secure the interests of the Muslim diaspora in British India. In the 1940s, the League played a decisive role during the 1940s in the Indian self-rule movement and developed into the driving nationalist force that led to the creation of Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent.
  • The early part of the 20th century saw a more radical approach towards political self-rule (swaraj) propagated by increasingly influential Mahatma Gandhi. From the 1920s, the Congress adopted Gandhi’s policy of nonviolence and civil resistance and Muhammad Ali Jinnah focused on constitutional struggle for the rights of minorities in India. Some activists preached armed revolution, literary professionals used texts as a tool for political awareness, feminists promoted the emancipation of Indian women, and some groups championed the cause of the disadvantaged sections of Indian society. The work of these various movements led ultimately to the Indian Independence Act 1947, which ended the suzerainty in India and the creation of Pakistan.
  • In the aftermath of World War II, European colonies, controlling more than one billion people throughout the world, still ruled most of the Middle East, southeast Asia, Africa, and  until 1947 the Indian subcontinent. Independence movements emerged across Africa and in regions of Asia that remained under the European control. They often referred to the 1941 Atlantic Charter and applied a number of strategies, both militant and based on the civil disobedience model.
  • New modernizing forms of African nationalism gained strength in the early 20th-century with the emergence of Pan-Africanism. By the 1930s, the colonial powers in Africa had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite group of leaders who advocated the idea of self-determination. The struggle culminated in 1960, known today as the Year of Africa, when the number of independent countries rose from nine to 26 and African nations were recognized as a force to be reckoned with on the international arena. Many colonies continued to fight for their independence throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
  • In Asia, the image of European pre-eminence was shattered by the wartime Japanese occupations of large portions of British, French, and Dutch territories in the Pacific. The destabilization of European rule led to the rapid growth of nationalist movements, and nearly all Asian colonies gained independence in the aftermath of World War II, sometimes as a result of violent conflicts.

Key Terms

Indian National Congress
One of two major political parties in India, founded in 1885 during the British Raj. In the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, it became a pivotal participant in the Indian independence movement, with over 15 million members and over 70 million participants in its opposition to British colonial rule in India.
swaraj
A Hindi term that means generally self-governance or self-rule and was used to refer to Gandhi’s concept for Indian independence from foreign domination. It put stress on governance not by a hierarchical government, but through individual self-governance and community building focused  on political decentralization.
Quit India Movement
A civil disobedience movement launched in Bombay by Mahatma Gandhi on August 8, 1942, during World War II, demanding an end to British Rule of India. Gandhi made a call to do or die in a speech delivered in Bombay at the Gowalia Tank Maidan. The All-India Congress Committee launched a mass protest demanding what Gandhi called “An Orderly British Withdrawal” from India. Almost the entire leadership of the Indian National Congress was imprisoned without trial within hours of Gandhi’s speech.
Pan-Africanism
A worldwide intellectual movement to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all people of African descent. Based upon a common fate going back to the Atlantic slave trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans, with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the United States. It is based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social, and political progress and aims to “unify and uplift” people of African descent.
Atlantic Charter
A pivotal policy statement issued in 1941 that defined the Allied goals for the post-war world. The leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States drafted the work and the Allies of World War II later confirmed it. The document stated the ideal goals of the war: no territorial aggrandizement; no territorial changes against the wishes of the people; right to self-determination; restoration of self-government to those deprived of it; reduction of trade restrictions; global cooperation to secure better economic and social conditions for all; freedom from fear and want; freedom of the seas; and abandonment of the use of force, as well as disarmament of aggressor nations.
Indian Civil Service
The elite higher civil service of the British Empire in British India during British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947.
Year of Africa
A term used to refer to 1960 because of the independence of 17 African nations that took place that year, highlighting the growing Pan-African sentiments in the continent. The year brought about the culmination of African independence movements and the subsequent emergence of Africa as a major force in the United Nations.
All India Muslim League
A political party established during the early years of the 20th century in the British Indian Empire. Its strong advocacy for the establishment of a separate Muslim-majority nation-state, Pakistan, successfully led to the partition of British India in 1947 by the British Empire.

 

Indian Independence Movement

The decades following the Indian Rebellion of 1857 were a period of growing political awareness, manifestation of Indian public opinion, and emergence of Indian leadership at both national and provincial levels. Members of the upwardly mobile and successful western-educated elites, engaged in professions such as law, teaching, and journalism, established organizations to ensure they would gain influence in Indian politics (e.g., East India Association in 1867, Indian National Association in 1876, the Indian National Congress in 1885). Despite their claims to represent all India, these organizations initially voiced the interests of urban elites, and the number of participants from other social and economic backgrounds remained negligible.

This new middle class of educated professionals, although spread thinly across the country, expressed the growing sense of solidarity, empowerment, and discontent with the British rule, fueled by success in education and accordant benefits, including employment in the Indian Civil Service. Many Indians were especially encouraged when Canada was granted dominion status in 1867 and established an autonomous democratic constitution. Furthermore, the work of contemporaneous scholars like Monier Monier-Williams and Max Müller, who presented ancient India as a great civilization, contributed to the growing feeling of national pride. Discontent, on the other hand, came not just from policies of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from specific government actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns (e.g. in the Second Anglo-Afghan War) and the attempts to control the vernacular press.

Viceroy Lord Ripon’s partial reversal of the Ilbert Bill (1883), a legislative measure that proposed putting Indian judges in the Bengal Presidency on equal footing with British ones, that transformed the discontent into political action. The event contributed to the establishment of the Indian National Congress, the single most influential organization of the Indian independence movement. During its first twenty years, Congress primarily debated British policy toward India. However, its debates created a new outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and using Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India.

By 1900, although the Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization, its achievement was undermined by its singular failure to attract Muslims, who felt that their representation in government service was inadequate. In response, the All India Muslim League was founded in 1906. In 1916, the League’s leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, joined the Indian National Congress. Like most of the Congress at the time, Jinnah did not favor outright self-rule, considering British influences on education, law, culture, and industry as beneficial to India. To secure the interests of the Muslim diaspora in British India, the League eventually played a decisive role during the 1940s in the Indian self-rule movement and developed into the driving nationalist force that led to the creation of Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent.

The nationalistic sentiments among Congress members led the movement to be represented in the bodies of government and the legislation and administration of India. Congressmen saw themselves as loyalists, but wanted an active role in governing their own country, albeit as part of the Empire. However, the early part of the 20th century saw a more radical approach towards political self-rule (swaraj) propagated by increasingly influential Mahatma Gandhi. Swaraj put stress on governance not by a hierarchical government, but by individuals and community building. The focus was on political decentralization. Since this was against the political and social systems followed by Britain, swaraj advocated India’s discarding British political, economic, bureaucratic, legal, military, and educational institutions.

Demonstration against the British rule in India, c. 1930s: By 1929, in the midst of rising political discontent and increasingly violent regional movements, the call for complete sovereignty and end of British rule began to find increasing grounds within the Congress leadership. Under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru at his historic Lahore session in December 1929, the Indian National Congress adopted a resolution calling for complete self-rule and end of British rule.

The last stages of the self-rule struggle from the 1920s saw the Congress adopt Gandhi’s policy of nonviolence and civil resistance, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s constitutional struggle for the rights of minorities in India, and several other campaigns. Some activists preached armed revolution to achieve self-rule. Poets and writers used literature, poetry, and speech as toolS for political awareness. Feminists promoted the emancipation of Indian women and their participation in national politics. Others championed the cause of the disadvantaged sections of Indian society within the larger self-rule movement. The period of the Second World War saw the peak of the campaigns by the Quit India Movement, which demanded what Gandhi called “an orderly British withdrawal” from India, and the Indian National Army movement – an armed force formed by Indian nationalists in 1942 in Southeast Asia that fought against the British. The work of these movements led ultimately to the Indian Independence Act 1947, which ended the suzerainty in India and the creation of Pakistan. India remained a Dominion of the Crown until 1950, when the Constitution of India came into force, establishing the Republic of India. Pakistan was a dominion until 1956, when it adopted its first republican constitution. In 1971, East Pakistan declared independence as the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

 

Decolonization as Global Struggle

The independence struggle of India was only one of many that succeeded in the post-World War II era.In the aftermath of World War II, European colonies, controlling more than one billion people throughout the world, still ruled most of the Middle East, southeast Asia, Africa, and until 1947 the Indian subcontinent. Independence movements applying a number of different strategies, both militant and based on the civil disobedience model, emerged across the African continent and in regions of Asia that remained under the European control.

In Africa, Britain, and France had the largest holdings, but Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal also had colonies. As a result of colonialism and imperialism, a majority of Africa lost sovereignty and control of precious natural resources. By the 1930s, the colonial powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of leaders educated in Western universities and advocated the idea of self-determination. These leaders came to lead the struggles for independence and included leading nationalists such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Gold Coast, now Ghana), Julius Nyerere (Tanganyika, now Tanzania), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), and Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Côte d’Ivoire).

In the northeast the continued independence of the Empire of Ethiopia remained a beacon of hope to pro-independence activists. However, with the anti-colonial wars of the 1900s barely over, modern forms of African nationalism gained strength in the early 20th-century with the emergence of Pan-Africanism. This worldwide intellectual movement aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all people of African descent. It was based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social, and political progress and aims to “unify and uplift” people of African descent. Modern Pan-Africanism began around the start of the 20th century. The African Association, later renamed the Pan-African Association, was established around 1897 by Henry Sylvester-Williams, who organized the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900.

The red, black, and green Pan-African flag designed by the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1920: Variations of the flag have been used in various countries and territories in Africa and the Americas to represent Pan-Africanist ideologies. Among these are the flags of Malawi, Kenya, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Several Pan-African organizations and movements have often employed the emblematic red, black, and green tri-color scheme in variety of contexts. Additionally, the flags of a number of nations in Africa and of Pan-African groups use green, yellow, and red. This color combination was originally adopted from the 1897 flag of Ethiopia and was inspired by the fact that Ethiopia is the continent’s oldest independent nation 

In 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the postwar world, resulting in the Atlantic Charter. It was not a treaty and was not submitted to the British Parliament or the Senate of the United States for ratification, but became a very influential document. Among the principal points of the Charter were post-war territorial adjustments to be decided in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned and the statement that all people had a right to self-determination. While Churchill rejected its universal applicability when it came to the self-determination of subject nations, after World War II, the U.S. and the African colonies put pressure on Britain to abide by the terms of the Atlantic Charter.

In Asia, the image of European pre-eminence was shattered by the wartime Japanese occupations of large portions of British, French, and Dutch territories in the Pacific. The destabilization of European rule led to the rapid growth of nationalist movements—especially in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, and French Indochina. In the Philippines, the U.S. remained committed to its previous pledges to grant the islands their independence, and the Philippines became the first of the Western-controlled Asian colonies to become independent post-World War II. However, the Philippines remained under pressure to adopt a political and economic system similar to their old imperial master.A year after India gained its independence, the exhausted British granted independence to Burma and Ceylon. In the Middle East, Britain granted independence to Jordan in 1946 and two years later ended its mandate of Palestine. Following the end of the war, nationalists in Indonesia demanded complete independence from the Netherlands. A brutal conflict ensued and in 1949, through United Nations mediation, the Dutch East Indies achieved independence, becoming the new nation of Indonesia. France granted the State of Vietnam based in Saigon independence in 1949 whilst Laos and Cambodia received independence in 1953.

In Africa, the struggle culminated in 1960, known today as the Year of Africa, when the number of independent countries rose from nine (with population 95 million) to 26 (population 180 million), gaining their independence from Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. The Year of Africa altered the symbolic status of Africans worldwide by forcing the world to recognize the existence of African nations on the international arena. It marked the beginning of a new, more Afrocentric era in African studies and it was a major boost for African Americans, who were engaged in a civil rights strife within their own country. The struggle of independence in Africa, however, did not end but was fueled by the events of 1960 as many colonies continued to fight for their independence throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Attributions