Historiographical Perspectives on the National Movement

• Colonialist — no Indian nation; British brought order
• Nationalist — national awakening; selfless leaders
• Marxist — bourgeois-led, within colonial capitalism
• Cambridge — elite competition for office
• Subaltern — autonomous people’s politics below the elite
• Radical Humanist — freedom needs rational, ethical individuals

Six lenses, one movement — each answers “how should we read the freedom struggle?” differently.

18.1 Colonialist Perspective

Claim: India was not a nation; British rule created order and unity; Congress was an elite agitation.

Writers: James Mill · Mountstuart Elphinstone · Henry M. Elliot · John Dowson · William Wilson Hunter · Herbert Hope Risley · Vincent Arthur Smith · Valentine Chirol · John Strachey · Sir John Robert Seeley.

“A variegated jumble of races and peoples.”

Valentine Chirol, on India

Criticism: ignored anti-imperialist consciousness; justified colonial rule; reduced Indian politics to division.

18.2 Nationalist Perspective

Claim: India had a growing modern unity or an ancient civilisational unity; Congress represented national awakening; leaders were patriotic and selfless; economic exploitation, racial discrimination and repression generated nationalism.

Scholars & leaders: Surendranath Banerjea · Bisheshwar Prasad · Ramesh Chandra Majumdar · Tara Chand · Radha Kumud Mookerji · Har Bilas Sarda · Lala Lajpat Rai · Kashi Prasad Jayaswal · Rabindranath Tagore · Mahatma Gandhi · Subhas Chandra Bose · Jawaharlal Nehru · C.F. Andrews · Girija Mukerji.

Limit: sometimes overemphasised unity; underplayed caste, class and subaltern autonomy.

18.3 Marxist Perspective

Claim: nationalism emerged within colonial capitalism; Congress was influenced by bourgeois interests; anti-imperialism coexisted with class contradictions.

Thinkers: M.N. Roy · S.A. Dange · Rajani Palme Dutt · A.R. Desai · E.M.S. Namboodiripad · Hiren Mukherjee · Sumit Sarkar · Bipan Chandra · Irfan Habib.

A.R. Desai — five phases of the movement by its changing class base. –1885 (intelligentsia) → 1885–1905 (nascent bourgeoisie) → 1905–1918 (lower middle classes) → 1918–1934 (peasants & workers enter; capitalist-led) → 1934–1939 (socialists, depressed classes, linguistic & communal forces)

18.4 Cambridge School

Historians: John Gallagher · Ronald Robinson · Anil Seal · Gordon Johnson · Christopher Alan Bayly · David Washbrook · Christopher John Baker · Brian Roger Tomlinson.

Arguments:

• No central contradiction between imperialism and the Indian people; the main conflict was among Indian elites.
• Nationalism emerged from competition for offices and representation.
• Politics was driven by caste, community, locality and patron-client networks; Congress rhetoric often masked local interests.

“Much attention has been paid to the apparent conflicts between imperialism and nationalism; it would be at least equally profitable to study their real partnerships.”

Anil Seal

Criticism: downplays anti-imperialism; echoes colonialist scepticism; underestimates mass movements and sacrifices.

18.5 Subaltern Perspective

Scholars: Ranajit Guha · Gyanendra Pandey · Shahid Amin · David Hardiman · Sumit Sarkar · Partha Chatterjee · Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Core arguments: elite historiography ignored people’s politics; peasants, workers and tribals had autonomous political domains; subaltern mobilisation was horizontal, spontaneous and militant; elite nationalism restrained popular radicalism.

• Ranajit Guha — in The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, attacked accounts that denied rebel consciousness.
• Gyanendra Pandey — the Awadh peasant revolt arose independently of Non-Cooperation.
• Shahid Amin — studied popular appropriation of Gandhi as Mahatma.
• Sumit Sarkar — masses in Bengal sometimes outpaced the leaders.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — questioned whether the subaltern can truly “speak” in history.
• Partha Chatterjee — introduced the idea of the “subalternity of the elite”.

Criticism: overstates autonomy; underestimates nationalist influence; the later postmodern turn weakened attention to material conditions.

18.6 Radical Humanist Perspective

M.N. Roy’s Radical Humanism (New Humanism) centres on the individual. Key work: Reason, Romanticism and Revolution.

Principles:

• Individual is prior to society; individual is an end, society a means
• Freedom and truth are fundamental urges
• Reason is biological and moral; ethics is necessary for politics
• History is shaped by ideas and human will, not economics alone

Critique of nationalism:

• Collectivist nationalism suppresses individual freedom
• Political independence alone is insufficient
• Congress and Gandhi ignored rational–ethical awakening
• Religious mobilisation reinforced traditionalism
• Parliamentary democracy bred power-seeking parties

ROY’S ALTERNATIVE — Party-less democracy · decentralised people’s committees · radical democracy · compulsory education · purification of politics · nationalisation of land · abolition of feudalism · minority rights · modernised industry.

“His (M.N. Roy) innovative reconceptualization has resulted into astonishingly daring radicalism and tragic heteronomy.”

Sudipto Kaviraj

Limitations: party-less democracy is hard in a mass society; underestimates collective identities; assumes high civic education before any democratic restructuring.

M. N. Roy — from Marxism to Radical Humanism

M. N. Roy (1887–1954), born Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, is modern India’s most striking ideological traveller: revolutionary nationalist, founding international communist, and finally a radical humanist who placed the free individual above class, nation, party and state.

Roy’s four phases — one search for freedom. Militant nationalism (armed struggle against colonial rule) → Marxism (Mexico 1917; Comintern; colonial revolution) → Congress radicalism (critic from within Indian politics) → Radical Humanism (sovereign individual; reason and morality)

Mexico, the Comintern and the colonial thesis

Mexico (1917) was the turning point: Roy helped found the Mexican Communist Party and was drawn into the Communist International. At its Second Congress (1920) he clashed with Lenin over the National and Colonial Questions. Bipan Chandra notes that Roy, “along with Lenin, helped evolve the Communist International’s policy towards the colonies.”

The Roy–Lenin difference on colonial revolution

Roy made the colonies central to world revolution · colonial revolt → collapse of empire → weakening of European capitalism → socialism in the West

His India in Transition (1922) applied Marxism to Indian conditions. Even here Roy read Marx morally: “Capital is a treatise on social ethics — a powerful protest against the servitude of the toiling majority.”

The humanist critique of Marxism

Expelled from the Comintern (1929) and disillusioned by Stalin‘s suppression of dissent, Roy turned critic. He rejected the sufficiency of economic change — “The abolition of private property, state ownership of the means of production and planned economy do not by themselves end exploitation of labour nor lead to an equal distribution of wealth” — and attacked the fallacy of economic determinism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the reduction of the person to a class. Communism in practice, he warned, “has come to be a spectre, terrifying not only the bourgeoisie; it is causing grave misgivings even among the progressive forces of the modern world.”

Radical Humanism — the individual first

In New Humanism — A Manifesto (1947) Roy made freedom the first value and the individual prior to society.

“Freedom is the supreme value of life, because the urge for freedom is the essence of human existence.”

M. N. Roy

It rests on three supports — reason · morality · scientific materialism — with ethics drawn from the “rational desire for harmonious and mutually beneficial social relations.” Sudipta Kaviraj sees beneath the communist and humanist phases “a substratum of philosophic continuity”; Roy’s mature test of any social order was “the actual measure of freedom it gives to the individual.”

Radical Democracy and the Indian polity

Politically this became Radical Democracy — a party-less, organised democracy of local people’s committees, with maximum power at the base and minimum at the apex, achieved by “revolution by consent and education,” not by seizure. The blueprint was his “22 Theses” / Principles of Radical Democracy (1946). Watching independent India, he warned that concentrated power hollows out form:

“When political power is concentrated in the hands of a small community, you may have a facade of parliamentary democracy, but for all political purposes it will be a dictatorship, even if it may be paternal and benevolent.”

M. N. Roy

He read Gandhi as a religious revivalist and rejected trusteeship and the spinning-wheel cult, calling the Congress High Command “authoritarian.” Kaviraj later called Roy a “remarkable failure” — not for poverty of thought, but because Indian politics never embraced the rationalist, ethical individualism he urged. That is also why he matters: a serious Indian attempt to ground politics in freedom and reason rather than class, faith or nation.