Indian History Collective (2025)

02/10/2025

On the question of nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi found himself challenged by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921, sparking a debate over morality, reason, and the limits of nationalist action.

Tagore’s critique, published as The Call of Truth, questioned the rationale behind burning foreign cloth and submitting blindly to symbolic injunctions. He argued that swaraj could not be achieved through mere apparel or ritual acts, but required the cultivation of an awakened and disciplined mind. For Tagore, moral action without reason could reinforce the very weaknesses it sought to eradicate.Tagore condemned the spectacle of burning cloth, pointing out that it was often done without regard for those in immediate need. Blind adherence to symbolic acts, he argued, risked the erosion of reason, and any true movement for swaraj must begin with the mind.

Gandhi responded with a careful acknowledgment of Tagore’s warnings while asserting the practical urgency of India’s condition. He agreed that mindless obedience is dangerous, but maintained that the spinning wheel was a sacrament that engaged India’s millions in productive labor, restoring both dignity and economic agency. Gandhi emphasized that the country was “a house on fire,” with hunger, unemployment, and systemic exploitation making immediate action necessary. For those who were idle yet fed by the spoilation of others, spinning was a moral duty and a step toward collective swaraj.

Gandhi framed non-cooperation not as hostility toward Britain, but as resistance to a system that exploited India’s resources and people. The spinning wheel symbolized self-reliance, the ethical employment of enforced idleness, and the revival of local industry. He distinguished between moral and economic wrongs, insisting that it was sinful to profit from exploitation or foreign goods when it could be avoided.

The debate encapsulates the tension between reasoned moral philosophy and urgent nationalist action. Together, their exchange remains a defining moment in the intellectual history of Indian nationalism.

To read the original texts of this remarkable exchange between the two, head over to our website.

02/10/2025

Founded on the day of Dussehra in 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) turns a hundred today.

One turning point in its history came under Balasaheb Deoras, who made it into a political kingmaker.

The Emergency of 1975–77 changed RSS’s course. Thousands of swayamsevaks were arrested and the RSS was banned. Through the Lok Sangharsh Samiti, its members worked with opposition parties, building alliances that would matter when elections were held.

As Pralay Kanungo notes in RSS’s Tryst with Politics: From Hedgewar to Sudarshan, this experience pushed the organisation to rethink its strategy. When the ban was lifted, Balasaheb Deoras, the RSS’s third sarsanghchalak, argued that running shakhas alone would not protect it from future state action. He encouraged tighter coordination with affiliates like the ABVP and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and supported the formation of the Janata Party, which brought the Jana Sangh together with other opposition groups. For the first time, swayamsevaks entered government as ministers after the 1977 election.

This phase was brief. The Janata experiment soon collapsed when critics demanded that Janata Party leaders who were also members of the RSS give up their “dual membership,” splitting the coalition. The split led to the creation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980, which tried to project itself as centrist, using the language of “Gandhian Socialism,”even while continuing to take its ideological direction from the RSS headquarters in Nagpur.

Outside parliament, the RSS turned to mass mobilisation. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) organised huge gatherings like the Virat Hindu Sammelan and the Ekatmata Yatra, seeking to unify Hindus across caste and region. The mass conversion of Dalits to Islam at Meenakshipuram in 1981 added urgency to these efforts.

By the mid-1980s, the VHP had made Ayodhya its focus, demanding a Ram temple on the site it identified as Ram Janmabhoomi. The campaign linked faith with questions of national pride and drew unprecedented participation. Kanungo marks this moment as the RSS’s shift from backstage organiser to a central player in India’s political drama.

23/09/2025

Who is the Hindu painter who redefined art at Akbar’s mughal courts?

When people talk about Mughal art, names like Akbar, Jahangir, and Bichitr might come up. But one of the most important figures in the story of Mughal painting remains largely forgotten: Basawan. A Hindu artist working at Akbar’s court in the late 16th century, Basawan helped transform Mughal painting from Persian-style miniatures into something far more ambitious—dynamic, realistic, and visually complex.

According to Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s official chronicler, Basawan stood out for his skill in composition, facial features, colour handling, and portraiture. Some even rated him above the famed Daswanth. But Basawan’s real legacy lies in how he introduced entirely new ways of seeing. He was among the first Mughal artists to experiment with European techniques, thanks to engravings brought in by Jesuit missionaries and traders. From these, Basawan picked up ideas of linear perspective, naturalistic shading, and three-dimensional modelling—visual strategies that had never before appeared in Indian painting.

In manuscripts like the Tutinama, Hamzanama, and the Akbarnama, Basawan’s hand can be seen shaping battle scenes, landscapes, portraits, and courtly moments with new depth and realism. A painting of a night attack on Malik Iraj’s camp shows dense trees and rock formations that mirror European spatial techniques. Another image, of a Brahmin and a Muslim pilgrim, places realistically modelled figures in a receding natural landscape, clearly drawn from European sources but adapted to an Indian setting.

What makes Basawan's story remarkable isn’t just his artistic innovation, but the moment he worked in. Akbar’s court was a space where Persian, Indian, and now European elements were all being tested together. Basawan was one of the few painters who could fuse them. His work helped lay the foundation for the sophisticated, portrait-heavy Mughal style that flourished under Jahangir and Shah Jahan.

16/09/2025

In 1950, Nehru’s envoy K. M. Panikkar was India’s eyes and ears in Beijing.

The War, fought between North Korea (with allies such as China and Soviet Russia) and South Korea (with the US and other UN forces) was bringing the world to the edge of war, and China, recently unified under Mao Zedong, was preparing to assert control over Tibet. Both crises had direct implications for India. Tibet shared a border with India, and Chinese expansion there threatened the security of the northern frontier. Meanwhile, the Korean War demonstrated how quickly regional conflicts could escalate and involve global powers, raising the stakes for Delhi in protecting its interests while maintaining neutrality.

At the centre of these pressures was Panikkar, India’s ambassador in Beijing. An intellectual turned diplomat, Panikkar was tasked with interpreting China’s intentions and advising Nehru’s government. In September 1950, Zhou Enlai warned Panikkar that if UN forces crossed the 38th parallel in Korea, China would intervene. Panikkar reported this urgently to Delhi, London, and Washington. While the warning proved accurate, many Western officials dismissed Panikkar as unreliable, dubbing him “Panicky Panikkar”.

The situation in Tibet escalated even more rapidly. Tibetan leaders sought India’s support, but Nehru, informed by Panikkar’s insights, urged negotiation for autonomy rather than armed resistance. In October 1950, Chinese troops advanced into eastern Tibet, taking both Lhasa and Delhi by surprise. Historians continue to debate India’s response. Could Nehru have acted differently, or were Panikkar’s reports the best possible guidance in a volatile situation? Questions of foresight, and diplomatic prudence remain open, and Panikkar’s dispatches are often cited in discussions of India’s early foreign policy.

In her book A Man for All Seasons, Narayani Basu
underscores Panikkar’s ability to navigate these crises. The episode illustrates the uncertainties and the challenges India faced in interpreting rapidly unfolding events.

Read more about Panikkar, his dispatches, and the decisions that shaped India’s early China policy on our website. Link in bio.

05/09/2025

By candlelight, in secret, a young girl in purdah learned Bengali and English. She would later be known as Begum Rokeya, one of the most influential figures in the history of women’s education in India.

Born in 1880 into an aristocratic Bengali Muslim family in Rangpur, Rokeya was denied formal schooling. Like other girls in her household, she was kept in strict seclusion from the age of five. Her elder brother Ibrahim Sabre quietly taught her to read at night, while her sister Karimunnessa encouraged her learning. These clandestine lessons gave Rokeya the education her society sought to withhold and prepared her for the work that would define her life.

After her marriage to the liberal-minded deputy judge Sakhawat Hossain, Rokeya received support to write and publish. Works like Sultana’s Dream (1908) and Motichur (1905) established her as a sharp critic of patriarchy. In 1911, she opened the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School in Calcutta, starting with five students. She went door to door persuading Muslim families, assuring them the school would respect purdah, and even arranged carriages so girls could travel safely.

The curriculum combined Quranic recitation with Bengali, English, Urdu, Persian, home nursing, cookery, and vocational training. Rokeya also founded the Muslim Women’s Association in 1916, organised conferences on women’s education, and in 1919 established a training school for female teachers when few were available in Calcutta. She remained principal of the Sakhawat Memorial School for over two decades, defending it against constant opposition.

At the 1926 Bengal Women’s Education Conference, she challenged the argument that religion forbade women’s learning, arguing that entrenched custom,not Islam,was the obstacle. She insisted education was the only path to independence and dignity for Muslim women.

That Rokeya herself had never entered a school, yet built institutions where others could learn, remains one of colonial Bengal’s most striking paradoxes. Her work ensured middle-class Muslim girls began to leave the home for study, reshaping women’s education in India.

31/08/2025

In 1831, Hindu College fired the teacher accused of corrupting the youth who became India’s first radicals.

The decision followed sustained attacks in the conservative press. Newspapers like the Samachar Chandrika accused Henry Derozio of spreading atheism and disrespect for tradition. He had encouraged students to debate religious authority, question caste rules, and read widely, including texts in history, philosophy, and politics. The Academic Association, which he helped found, became a platform for open discussion that unsettled much of Calcutta’s conservative elite. Opposition was so intense that families sometimes resorted to drugging and abducting their sons to prevent them from joining the discussions.

Derozio died later that year, aged just twenty-two. But the habits of public reasoning he promoted survived. Over the next decade, a group of his students and their peers began to speak, write, and argue in ways that were recognisably political. They came to be known as Young Bengal.

As Rosinka Chaudhuri notes in India’s First Radicals, their work spanned courtrooms, newspapers, and debating halls. Radhanath Sikdar, employed by the Survey of India, filed a legal complaint against a British officer for abusing labourers. Social reformer Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee’s 1843 speech criticising racial injustice in the courts was interrupted by the Hindu College principal, who accused him of disloyalty. Ramgopal Ghose, one of the leaders of the Young Bengal Group, gave public addresses on the legal rights of Indian peasants and the misconduct of colonial police.

Chaudhuri credits the group with many firsts, including forming India’s first political party — the Bengal British India Society, in 1843 in association with British orator George Thompson. She further notes that Young Bengal generated a language of leftist politics in India, and they were among the earliest advocates of constitutional reform under colonial rule.

Their moment was brief. But in print, speech, and legal action, they insisted that Indians had the right to participate in political life as reasoning public actors. Read a fascinating excerpt from their story on our website. Link in bio.

25/08/2025

The only American jailed for India’s freedom was not in Delhi or Bombay , but was in a remote Himachali village.

Samuel Evans Stokes arrived in India in 1904 as a Quaker missionary. Drawn to the ascetic life of the Himalayas, he settled in Kotgarh, a small village near Shimla. Over the next two decades, he transformed from a Christian evangelist into an unlikely nationalist, a man who rejected the privileges of being an American in British India to live, dress, and work like his Indian neighbours.

By the 1920s, Stokes had become deeply involved in anti-colonial politics. He joined the Indian National Congress, campaigned against forced labour imposed by British officials, and openly criticised colonial economic policies that impoverished peasants. Stokes encouraged self-sufficiency in agrarian communities, famously introducing apple cultivation to Himachal Pradesh, a move that would later change the region’s economy. He also started a Hindi newspaper, Satya, to reach rural readers with nationalist ideas. When Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement, Stokes was one of the few activists in the hill provinces to take up the cause. He urged villagers to boycott government schools, law courts, and foreign goods.

His arrest in 1921 made headlines across India: he was the only American imprisoned for the movement. Gandhi praised him publicly, saying Stokes had proved that “the message of non-violence and swadeshi” was not bound by race or nationality.

What made Stokes’s work distinctive was how closely it intersected with the region’s agrarian politics. British rule in the hill states rested on a system of begar (forced labour) and heavy land revenue assessments, which caused growing resentment among cultivators. Stokes openly criticised these practices, petitioned local authorities, and linked economic grievances to the larger nationalist programme. His decision to publish in Hindi rather than English indicated a deliberate attempt to reach peasants rather than urban elites. In this sense, his politics aligned with other regional movements of the 1920s that connected local discontent to the wider Congress-led struggle.

19/08/2025

In 1909, a book written under the pseudonym “An Indian Nationalist” was immediately banned by the British, but its afterlife would reshape Indian nationalist memory.

Titled The Indian War of Independence, it was authored by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar while a law student in London and a key figure in the India House circle of political exiles. Written in Marathi, it framed 1857 not as scattered mutinies but as a unified nationalist struggle for swaraj. The text cast Bahadur Shah Zafar as a legitimate emperor and presented Hindu-Muslim unity as the revolt’s defining feature.

Savarkar wrote the manuscript under surveillance, and its publication reflected this danger. He completed it in 1907 at India House but found no European publisher because it was in Marathi. He therefore arranged an English translation. With help from expatriate revolutionaries and sympathetic European intermediaries, the manuscript was smuggled to Paris and published in the Netherlands under a false imprint. The British banned the book even before its first copy entered India, making its possession or circulation a criminal offence.

Despite the ban, it spread widely through underground networks in India and among revolutionaries abroad. Copies were disguised with false dust wrappers—posing as The Pickwick Papers and other classics—and shipped in bulk to India, where it became a bible of political extremists. It was excluded from the British Library catalogue to prevent Indian students from accessing it and remained banned in India until the end of the Raj.

As Vinayak Chaturvedi notes in Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History, Savarkar’s turn to history was not about empiricism but about constructing what he called “a history in full”, meant to mobilise national sentiment. Vikram Visana, in Savarkar before Hindutva, argues that the book offered an early articulation of a populist theory of sovereignty rooted in the heroic revolutionary.

Although Savarkar would later be known for majoritarian politics, this early text promoted a vision of composite nationalism that was strategically universal.

18/08/2025

In 1909, a book written under the pseudonym “An Indian Nationalist” was immediately banned by the British, but its afterlife would reshape Indian nationalist memory.

Titled The Indian War of Independence, it was authored by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar while a law student in London and a key figure in the India House circle of political exiles. Written in Marathi, it framed 1857 not as scattered mutinies but as a unified nationalist struggle for swaraj. The text cast Bahadur Shah Zafar as a legitimate emperor and presented Hindu-Muslim unity as the revolt’s defining feature.

Savarkar wrote the manuscript under surveillance, and its publication reflected this danger. He completed it in 1907 at India House but found no European publisher because it was in Marathi. He therefore arranged an English translation. With help from expatriate revolutionaries and sympathetic European intermediaries, the manuscript was smuggled to Paris and published in the Netherlands under a false imprint. The British banned the book even before its first copy entered India, making its possession or circulation a criminal offence.

Despite the ban, it spread widely through underground networks in India and among revolutionaries abroad. Copies were disguised with false dust wrappers—posing as The Pickwick Papers and other classics—and shipped in bulk to India, where it became a bible of political extremists. It was excluded from the British Library catalogue to prevent Indian students from accessing it and remained banned in India until the end of the Raj.

As Vinayak Chaturvedi notes in Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History, Savarkar’s turn to history was not about empiricism but about constructing what he called “a history in full”, meant to mobilise national sentiment. Vikram Visana, in Savarkar before Hindutva, argues that the book offered an early articulation of a populist theory of sovereignty rooted in the heroic revolutionary.

Although Savarkar would later be known for majoritarian politics, this early text promoted a vision of composite nationalism that was strategically universal.

15/08/2025

Why did Gandhi refuse to celebrate 15 August 1947?

Mahatma Gandhi spent that day in Hyderi Manzil, a modest bungalow in Beliaghata, Calcutta, a neighbourhood scarred by communal violence during partition. He arrived on 9 August in order to help curb tensions in the city itself. Over the following days he walked through riot-ravaged wards, visited refugee camps, held meetings with Hindu and Muslim leaders, and firmly urged peace.

Beliaghata had been among the worst-hit during the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 and later unrest. Gandhi stayed in a house recently vacated by a Muslim family and invited H. S. Suhrawardy, former Premier of Bengal widely blamed by Hindu groups for the 1946 riots, to stay with him. The move drew protests—crowds gathered, stones were thrown. Gandhi addressed the demonstrators directly. Suhrawardy admitted publicly to failing to prevent the killings. Gandhi continued his street walks, joined by volunteers from both communities.

On 15 August there was no celebration beyond his regular prayer meetings. Horace Alexander, a British Quaker and Gandhi’s close associate, recorded that Gandhi spent the day praying, fasting, and spinning khadi. When the new Governor of West Bengal, C Rajagopalachari, congratulated Gandhi on the “miracle he had wrought”, by stopping violence in the city, Gandhi replied that he “could not be satisfied until Hindus and Muslims felt safe in one another’s company and returned to their own homes to live as before. Without that change of heart, there was likelihood of future deterioration in spite of the present enthusiasm."

That day, ministers of the West Bengal government visited for his blessings. Gandhi told them, “Today, you have worn on your heads a crown of thorns. The seat of power is a nasty thing. You have to remain ever wakeful on that seat.”

By month’s end, British police reports noted Calcutta and Bengal had remained free of communal violence for over two weeks—an outcome many officials directly credited to Gandhi’s presence and intervention.

11/08/2025

A British editor smuggled out the truth about Jallianwala Bagh and the British Raj deported him for it.

In 1919, Benjamin Guy Horniman, the British editor of the Bombay Chronicle, published eyewitness accounts of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in open defiance of colonial censorship imposed under martial law. For this, he was arrested and deported to England without trial. A loyal subject of the Crown by birth, Horniman had become one of the most vocal white critics of British rule in India.

Born in Sussex in 1873, Horniman first arrived in India in 1906. Initially supportive of British policies, his perspective shifted sharply within a few years. By 1913, he was editor of the Bombay Chronicle, a nationalist daily run by Pherozeshah Mehta. Horniman’s editorials increasingly reflected sympathy for Indian demands, particularly as the colonial government cracked down on dissent during World War I. But it was the events of April 1919 that made him a direct target of the British administration.

Following General Dyer’s massacre in Amritsar, Punjab was placed under martial law. The press was censored and journalists were barred from reporting independently. Horniman, however, obtained eyewitness testimonies and smuggled photographs of the killings. He published them prominently in the Bombay Chronicle, breaking through official silence. The colonial government acted swiftly. On 27 June 1919, Horniman was arrested and forcibly sent to London. No trial, no charges, just removal.

As Ramachandra Guha writes in Rebels Against the Raj, Horniman’s was possibly the only instance in which a European journalist was summarily deported by the colonial state for writing against it. His case became a symbol of how seriously the British viewed media dissent and how far they would go to suppress it, even when it came from a fellow Briton.

Horniman returned to India in 1926 and remained committed to the cause of Indian self-rule. He helped start the Indian National Herald and continued to defend civil liberties, especially the freedom of the press.

05/08/2025

Visualising Violence: Partition Through the Eyes of Modern Indian Artists

The Partition of 1947 displaced over 14 million people and killed at least one million. While history remembers the event in terms of political negotiations and mass migrations, few accounts focus on how modern Indian painters reflected this trauma. A paper by historian Jagtej Kaur Grewal Concerning The Human Condition: Social Content in Modern Indian Painting highlights how four artists, Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Nalini Malani, and Arpana Caur, engaged with Partition in their art, not as a one-time event but as an enduring rupture in the Indian social and emotional fabric.

Satish Gujral, born in Jhelum, was a direct witness to the violence of Partition. His early works (Mourning, Despair, Wail etc) use bold, contorted figures and sweeping strokes to portray the anguish of people uprooted by a nation’s division. These expressionist canvases captured not just Gujral’s personal displacement, but a broader narrative of national catastrophe.

Krishen Khanna, born in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), migrated to India in 1947. His painting The Memory of 1947 features a co**se wrapped in white, symbolising both death and hopelessness. In other works, like Flight from Pakpattan, Khanna visualises the chaos and dread of migration.

Nalini Malani and Arpana Caur, born post-Partition, were not direct witnesses, but both inherited the trauma through family memory. Caur’s Wounds of 84 revisits Partition through the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, portraying an aged Sikh man (her grandfather) wrapped in white, linking two episodes of state failure and communal violence. Malani, primarily known for her feminist and anti-authoritarian work, often draws from myth to portray cycles of violence and dislocation.

Grewal’s paper underscores a critical historical point: modern Indian art has not been socially detached. On the contrary, its post-Independence phase includes a deeply visual archive of suffering, migration, and marginalisation, particularly through the lens of artists affected by the 1947 rupture. These works offer a counter-history to celebratory nationalist narratives, foregrounding human cost.

Indian History Collective

02/10/2025

02/10/2025

23/09/2025

16/09/2025

05/09/2025

31/08/2025

25/08/2025

19/08/2025

18/08/2025

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