International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

India's independence movement has widely been regarded as a prime example of a “peaceful” revolution. But the image of Gandhi's nonviolent national struggle conceals several strands of protest. Peasant and worker movements cannot be categorized as non-violent since they were not moved by the same ideals as Gandhi. Within the British armed forces, too, there were smaller revolts well before the great revolt of 1857, which saw the direct takeover of rule over India by the British state from the East India Company. From the late nineteenth century, middle-class youth were trying to organize the overthrow of British rule by force. British rulers designated as “terrorists” those who sought to end British rule by force of arms. Indian nationalists called them revolutionaries or militant nationalists, a term many nationalist historians in independent India have accepted. However, Sumit Sarkar (1973) , writing about the Bengali revolutionaries of the anti-Bengal Partition period, pointed out that the term terrorism was not inappropriate, since what the Indian freedom movement saw were not plebeian uprisings by the popular masses, as in Paris or Petrograd, nor long peasant wars, as in China, but assassinations of oppressive officials, spies, and traitors, bank robberies to finance political operations, and occasionally more grandiose plans for armed coups by penetrating the army's ranks. ... log in or subscribe to read full text