The Indian Independence Movement incorporated the efforts by Indians to liberate the region from British rule and form the nation-state of India. It involved a wide spectrum of Indian political organizations, philosophies, and rebellions between 1857 and India's emergence as a unified nation-state on August 15, 1947. The Indian independence movement incorporated the efforts by Indians to liberate the region from British rule and form the nation-state of India. It involved a wide spectrum of Indian political organizations, philosophies, and rebellions between 1857 and India's emergence as a unified nation-state on August 15, 1947.
The initial Indian Rebellion of 1857 was sparked when soldiers serving in the BritishEast India Company's British Army and Indian kingdoms rebelled against the British. After the revolt was crushed, the British partitioned the region into British India and the Princely States. They tried to develop a class of educated elites, whose political organizing sought Indian political rights and representation. However, increasing public disenchantment with the British authority — their curtailing of Indian civil liberties (such as the Rowlatt Act), political rights, and culture as well as their avoidance of basic issues facing common Indians and an essential nonacceptance of foreign occupation — led to an upsurge in revolutionary activities aimed at overthrowing the European colonial powers, particularly the British.
The movement came to a head between 1918 and 1922 when the first series of non-violent campaigns of civil disobedience were launched by the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi — whose methods were to a large extent inspired by the philosophy and methods of Baba Ram Singh, a Sikh who led the Kuka Movement in the Punjab in the 1870s. Gandhi's movement came to encompass people from across India and across all walks of life. These initial civil disobedience movements soon came to be the driving force that ultimately shaped the cultural, religious, and political unity of a diverse nation.
Committing itself to Purna Swaraj in 1930, the Congress led mass struggles between 1930 and 1932. By the late 1930s, however, with growing disenchantments over the delaying tactics of the Raj and the Congress's failure to extract commitment on self-rule and political independence, a faction within the movement turned towards more radical ideas of Subhash Chandra Bose. Bose's actions proved controversial among the Congress party but popular within the Indian populace, when Bose defeated Gandhi's candidate in leadership elections in the Tripuri Session of the Congress Working Committee. However, this was the parting of ways between the radicals and the conservatives. Bose left the Congress to found his own party during the war, seeking first Soviet and then Axis help to raise a liberation force. The raising of the Indian National Army in 1942 by Subhash Chandra Bose would see a unique military campaign to end British rule. Following the trial of Indian National Army officers at the Red Fort, mutinies broke out in the navy, in the Air Force, and in the army. The Congress also led a civil disobedience movement in 1942 demanding that the British leave India (a movement called the Quit India Movement). Following these and widespread communal rioting in Calcutta, the Raj ended on the mid-night of 15th August, 1947, but only at the expense of thepartition of the country into India and Pakistan.
