Indian Nationalism: From the Congress to Quit India

Indian nationalism developed over six decades, shifting from petitions by an educated elite to one of history's largest mass movements. The Indian National Congress, founded in Bombay in 1885, first sought a greater Indian role in government. The partition of Bengal in 1905 provoked the Swadeshi movement, which boycotted British goods, and leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak demanded self-rule, or swaraj.

Mohandas Gandhi, who returned from South Africa in 1915, transformed the movement through satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, mobilizing peasants and the urban poor in the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–22) and the Salt March of 1930. In 1942 Congress launched the Quit India Movement, and its leaders were imprisoned. Indian nationalism was also contested: the All-India Muslim League, founded in 1906, increasingly argued that Muslims formed a separate nation, and B. R. Ambedkar pressed for the rights of Dalits.

These debates over who the Indian nation included shaped independence and Partition in 1947.