From Congress petitions to Partition, India exited the Raj
The Indian independence movement was a multi-decade political struggle from the mid-eighteen eighties to nineteen forty-seven to end British colonial rule on the subcontinent. It mixed constitutional petitions, mass civil disobedience, socialist dreams, and sharper confrontations before the Indian Independence Act.
Nationalism rooted when the Indian National Congress formed in eighteen eighty-five; early moderates sought economic rights and the chance to sit Indian Civil Service exams in India. The nineteen oh five Partition of Bengal protests exposed reformism’s limits. Later came the Non-cooperation Movement of nineteen nineteen to twenty-two and Civil Disobedience of nineteen twenty-nine to thirty-one. Under Mahatma Gandhi, Congress embraced non-violence; allies included Motilal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and Maulana Azad, with intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore in the wider orbit.
Harsher currents grew after the Rowlatt Act allowed indefinite detention without trial, sparking Punjab protests met by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Ideologically the movement stayed anti-colonial while imagining secular, democratic, republican, civil-libertarian futures and, after the nineteen thirties, stronger socialist leanings.
It culminated in the Indian Independence Act of nineteen forty-seven, ending Crown suzerainty and partitioning British India into the Dominions of India and Pakistan. Decades of evolving tactics—petition, boycott, salt marches, and sacrifice—closed with both freedom and a border drawn in haste.
Resistance was far older than Congress. Europeans had arrived by sea when Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and the English opened their first trading post at Surat in 1613. After the East India Company won at Plassey and then at Buxar in 1764, it gained administrative rights over Bengal and Bihar, overthrew Mysore once Tipu Sultan fell in 1799, and annexed much of Punjab in 1849. Indigenous communities fought back again and again, most famously in the Santhal Hul of 1855 to 1857, which drew more than 60,000 people. The final push came with the Quit India Movement of 1942, and on 26 January 1950 a new constitution made India a republic.
Source: Indian independence movement
