India's ‘tryst with destiny’ began at the stroke of midnight of 14 August. While the world slept, India awoke to ‘life and freedom’; the ‘soul of a nation, long suppressed’ found utterance. A ‘period of ill fortune’ ended and India discovered herself again (Nehru 1950: 3). Nehru's speech, delivered at the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on the midnight of 14 August 1947, articulated the first Prime Minister's enthusiasm and exuberance at the birth of free India.

Nehru possibly could not have used a better phrase for his speech. Tryst it was indeed, with parts of the country barely recovering from the effects of a devastating famine and some others reeling from the magnitude of the violence occasioned by the partition. Nehru, too conscious of the calamity to ignore it, referred to ‘all the pains of labour’ Indians had to endure to give birth to ‘free, sovereign India’ and stated that ‘some of the pains continue even now’. Nevertheless, he hastened to add, ‘the past is over and it is the future that beckons us now’ (Nehru 1947).

What was this future that beckoned, and what were the pangs of the past that still continued? To understand this, we need to track the ideologies, policies, elements and processes that have crucially shaped India's democratic career for over 65 years of its existence.

The political partition of the country was a central fact of this birth—it critically marked the ‘present’ of the two nations and shaped the future in crucial ways.

This chapter examines the critical years between 1922 and 1935—the time between the suspension of the Non-Cooperation movement and the passing of the Government of India Act by the colonial state as a step towards self-rule. It is a period in which criss-crossing and contradictory processes and energies, often stimulated by the institutional reforms of the colonial state and moulded by the interface of ‘imperialism’ and ‘nationalism’, gave meaning to nation, community and identity and shaped the nationalist struggle in vital ways. It takes a quick look at the activities of peasant organizations prior to, during, and after non-cooperation, examines business attitudes toward nationalism, imperialism, and labour and tracks the evolution of the labour force in the context of both Communist and Congress activities and the effect of world economic processes. Finally, it discusses the Government of India Act of 1935 and its ramifications for colonial and independent India.

The efficacy of the Non-Cooperation movement in involving the ‘masses’ lay in its ability to draw in a diverse range of local struggles. The active participation of the peasants, in particular, was crucial for the movement. Chapter 7 discussed the critical role played by peasants in the United Provinces (UP), Bihar and several other regions. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 and consequent increase in the power of taluqdars in the region had brought the peasants under extreme strain and made them restive; members of UP's Home Rule League had taken the initiative in organizing the peasants.

These ‘words of explanation’ written by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) in his journal New India in 1921, about Hind Swaraj (1908), a work of his that had drawn considerable attention by the time, bears testimony to the ironies of history. A man who ‘taught the gospel of love in place of that of hate’ and urged his countrymen to replace ‘violence’ with ‘self-sacrifice’ was forced to die a violent death, and his ‘greatest aim and achievement’—India's independence from colonial rule—‘was marred by the bloody episode of the Partition’ (Arnold 2001: 1).

Is Gandhi emblematic of the contradictions of history? How is it that Gandhi, who almost never held any political office, commanded no army, and was not even a compelling orator, made a great mark on his time, and is perhaps the only figure of the twentieth century who has ‘stood the test of time’? (Markovits 2003: 1) This chapter explores Gandhi's ideology and strategies of struggle together with the diverse understandings of his message in order to understand his great influence and his continued significance.

The theme of battles, wars and struggles dominates this chapter: the Second World War and India's reaction to being involved in it; the all out ‘do or die’ Quit India movement against the British, the effort of Netaji Subhas and his Indian National Army to liberate India by means of an armed struggle, the final battle to win freedom without territorial division. Alongside, there is an examination of British overtures at conciliation and the hurried decision to transfer power that occasioned frenetic negotiation, contestation and turbulence and eventually culminated in the enormous tragedy of the partition.

In September 1939, India was declared a ‘belligerent’ against Germany in the Second World War along with Britain (Farley 1942: 99). India's automatic and arbitrary involvement, without consultation with the provincial ministries or nationalist leaders, was bitterly resented by the Congress and Indian nationalists, even though the Congress had been much more consistent in its hostility towards fascist aggression than Britain. It is worth remembering in this connection that Jawaharlal Nehru had attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities at Brussels in 1927, where revolutionaries and political exiles from Asian, African and Latin American countries had come together to develop a strategy for united struggle against imperialism. The founding of the League against Imperialism had been a result of this Congress and Nehru had been elected its member (Chandra et al. [1972] 1975: 203-04).

The story of nationalism and nationalist struggle that we have tracked so far is riddled with contention and negotiation. This is because, on the one hand, there were distinct ways of imagining the nation, and on the other, there were diverse understandings of Indian society that generated an array of visions with regard to individuals, groups and communities who peopled the society and were to inhabit the independent nation.

The Indian National Congress, established consciously as a ‘national’ organization, constantly accommodated contending groups and ideas in order to provide shelter to all factions and project itself as an all-encompassing consolidated entity representing Indian interests. Over time, fissures within the Congress became pronounced, and its claim as the political representative of all India came to be challenged and interrogated by a variety of associations and groups. The reforms introduced periodically by the British Raj from the second half of the nineteenth century, exacerbated this tension and competition.

The reforms, intended to give educated Indians some share in the governance of their own country, assured the Indians that they would eventually be given the responsibility of a representative self-government. The notion of representation, in conjunction with measures that categorized different groups and communities of Indians numerically and socially, came to engage the attention of different social groups, and a lot of energy was invested in trying to secure equal representation for all communities.

Thus ran a song in a popular Bengali film of the late 1970s, a poignant reminder of Queen Victoria's hold over the Indian middle classes, and possibly, the ‘people’ in general. In this chapter, we track the various processes spread across the late-nineteenth and the early-twentieth century that made Queen Victoria the imposing icon she continues to be.

Queen Victoria became the ruler of India after the Revolt of 1857, although she formally assumed the position in 1877. The recapture of Delhi by British troops on 20 September 1857, and the imprisonment and later deportation of Bahadur Shah signalled a reversal of fortune for the rebels, even though they put up strong resistance till early 1859. Governor-General Lord Canning gathered British forces in Calcutta and sent them first to Delhi and then to Benares, Allahabad, Kanpur and the rest of Awadh. By the beginning of 1859, Gwalior, Doab, Rohilkand, Lucknow and central India had been recaptured, owing to the unlimited men and resources that the British commanded and their ruthlessness in killing the rebels. The sipahis and other rebels, on the other hand, suffered from a chronic shortage of cash; moreover, they did not have the sophisticated weapons of the British army.

A humanist poet-philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, put an angry rhetorical question to the government of Lord Curzon, which had decided to partition the province of Bengal in 1905. The sensitive song articulated anger as well as determination—the colonized were ready to challenge and unsettle the ‘settled’ decisions made by the overbearing colonial government drunk on its own sense of power. This chapter explores the evolution of the nationalist struggle in the early decades of the twentieth century, keeping in view its entangled interaction with colonial policies, as well as its configuration on discursive and material planes. It also pays attention to the criss-crossing and contrasting identities, sentiments and passion that the struggle generated, leading to unwarranted and unfortunate consequences. Ironically, by the middle of the century, the colonized themselves authorized the colonial state to construct and divide India, and turned the poet's insightful allegory into a tragic reality.

The photograph that serves as the cover to this book depicts Gandhi as walking towards a distant horizon, leaning on the shoulders of a young man and a young woman. Under an overcast sky, does Gandhi appear tired? Or, is there determination in his posture and gait? Is Gandhi exhausted on account of shouldering the burden of freedom, worn down by the enormous cost of Indian independence? Or, is he confidently walking towards a new beginning, the birth of an independent nation?

There is purpose in beginning A History of Modern India with the uncertainty that marks the photo on the cover of the work. For, this book is aimed as an open-ended account that both unravels the making of modern India yet questions the intimate linkages between the writing of history and the narration of the nation. Here, I wish to engage students and scholars of history (as well as general readers) in a dialogue and debate concerning the nature of pasts and formations of the present. This is to say that, instead of a singular, seamless story, the chapters ahead offer a tapestry of diverse pasts and different perceptions that shaped modern India.

The open-ended account in itself has a past, formed and transformed over the last five years over which the book has taken shape. On the one hand, there is much owed here to hermeneutic traditions of history writing that emphasize interpretative understandings of the past and the present.

Jab chod chale Lucknow nagari (As/when I leave the city of Lucknow)…, lamented the poet Nawab Wajid Ali Shah on the eve of his departure from Lucknow when the East India Company formally annexed Awadh in 1856. What was this nagari of Lucknow and how had it become so dear to the nawab? To understand this lament, we need to enter the Lucknow of late-eighteenth century, the buzzingly dynamic capital set-up by Asaf-ud-Daula in 1775. Asaf-ud-Daula succeeded his father, the courageous warrior-king Shuja-ud-Daula, who had joined forces with the Nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim and the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, to fight the East India Company in the Battle of Buxar in 1764, and had zealously guarded Awadh's autonomy till his death.

Asaf-ud-Daula, the young nawab, ‘fat and dissolute’ and averse to politics, left the tiresome affairs of the state to his chief steward Murtaza Khan, packed up the court at Faizabad and moved to the small provincial town of Lucknow. This enabled him to evade the influence of his powerful mother and his father's retainers. The move turned Awadh's administration on its head and shattered the autonomy nurtured by Shuja. Yet, the lack of political prestige was compensated by the cultural prominence that Lucknow came to acquire. The simultaneously ‘debauched, corrupt and extravagant’ and ‘refined, dynamic and generous’ nawab founded a city that echoed his flamboyance; Lucknow was ‘awash with extravagance and excess’ and attracted pioneers, drifters and people on the make.

In his celebrated work, published a quarter of a century ago, Benedict Anderson had argued that nations are ‘imagined communities’ given concrete shape by institutions, such as print capitalism (Anderson 1991). Since then, writings on nationalism have tried to examine the distinct ways in which nations have been brought into being in different parts of the world, and these writings have tried to define what a nation is. If this underscores that scholars accept the ‘modernity’ of nations, the idea that the ‘naturalness’ of a national identity precedes history still has great prevalence in everyday worlds. In Anderson's words, there is a ‘paradox’ between the ‘objective modernity’ of nations to the ‘historian's eye’ and their ‘subjective antiquity’ in the ‘eyes of nationalists’ (ibid.: 5). This tension—of creating the nation while positing its long, unbroken existence—that lies at the heart of nationalism, makes the study of both nations and nationalisms fascinating, yet difficult.

A second tension underlies the historiography of nationalism. While it defines nationalism as a ‘discourse’ constituted at the level of ideas and consciousness, it seeks to make the nation concrete by locating it within institutions, social forms and practices. Stories of nationalism, therefore, ask ‘why’ the sentiment or idea, that is, nationalism emerged, and frequently and retrospectively, provide a social explanation for it by linking it to the rise of the middle-class, lending circularity to the story of nationalism (Seth 1999: 96).

Between 1757 and 1807, the 50 years that followed Plassey, Great Britain came to acquire a territorial empire in India run by a commercial organization, the English East India Company. The dramatic expansion of the Company and its engagement with the ‘business of empire’ created considerable uncertainties in Britain about its nature and the role it was to play in Britain and Asia (Bowen 2006: 7). The Company, as Stern's work suggests, made claims to sovereignty from the late-seventeenth century; however, it depended heavily on the home authorities for resources, manpower and legitimacy. As a maritime power, it also needed constant support of the British Admiralty to ensure the safety of sea-lanes to its factories in India and South East Asia (Stern 2011). If this made the early stages of the Company's ‘empire building’ in India appear to be a ‘performance for home authorities’ (Travers 2007: 32), the East India Company, through all this confusion and uncertainty, contributed to the ‘epochal shift’ in world power (Bayly 1988).

The shift was occasioned by the vigorous interventions caused by the militarization of European nation states in the agrarian empires of Asia that led to the foundation of colonial regimes (ibid.). The Company's close ties with the British Crown were too evident and its claims on autonomy brought it in competition with an ambitious British Parliament, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Wellesley was recalled from India in 1805. By the time he left, he had brought about a political revolution by acquiring for the Company territorial possessions as extensive and expensive as to ‘stagger the imagination of his contemporaries’ (Philips 1961: 103). The aristocrat had also occasioned a ‘cultural revolution’ by setting up the College of Fort William, the ‘Oxford of the East’ in 1800. The College wanted to transform ‘inept, self-seeking servants of the East India Company into efficient, devoted servants of the British Empire in India’ (Kopf 1969: 46—47). Between 1801 and 1805, the College evolved into an institution not only for training civil servants, but also for patronizing literary and linguistic research and Orientalist scholarship in general. Further, it gave the Asiatic Society—in disarray after the death of William Jones (in 1794)—a new breath of life by revitalizing its structure, promoting its scholarship and, most importantly, by producing a new generation of potential scholars among civil servants willing to carry on the work of the Society.

The College, moreover, interacted closely with the Serampore Mission. The Baptist missionaries were the only ones who had managed to evade the ban imposed by the Company on the entry of missionaries, by taking refuge in the Danish enclave at Serampore (Srirampur). Despite the Company administration's suspicion of missionary activities, the expertise of the missionaries as printers and publishers helped the College enormously (Hatcher 1996: 49).