The Rise of Gandhi and the Dawn of Mass Nationalism (1915–1922)
The Rise of Gandhi
When we talk about the freedom struggle of India, there is a natural tendency to divide it into two great phases — before Gandhi and after Gandhi. Such was the transformative impact of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who soon came to be revered as the Mahatma. But Gandhi’s emergence was neither sudden nor accidental. It was the outcome of a long journey — of ideas, experiments, and moral courage — that began in small towns of Gujarat, passed through the polished legal circles of London, was tested in the fires of racial humiliation in South Africa, and finally took root in the soil of India at a time when the national movement was waiting for new energy, direction, and moral authority.
Born on October 2nd, 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat, Gandhi inherited a modest background. His father was a Dewan in princely states, and young Mohandas grew up in a deeply religious yet pragmatic household. His education in England as a barrister exposed him to Western liberal ideas, but Gandhi remained shy and hesitant as a professional lawyer. His true awakening began not in India, but in South Africa, where he had gone in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant, Dada Abdullah.
South Africa became the training ground of Gandhi’s political philosophy. For the first time, the young barrister who had lived in England without facing prejudice directly encountered the naked reality of racial discrimination. He was thrown out of a railway compartment despite holding a valid first-class ticket — a moment that shattered his faith in mere legal rights and compelled him to reflect deeply on justice, dignity, and human equality. Instead of returning to India disheartened, Gandhi resolved to fight. But he chose not the path of violence or hatred; rather, he experimented with a new moral weapon — Satyagraha, or the insistence on truth combined with non-violent resistance.
In South Africa, Gandhi established institutions that reflected his ideals: the Natal Indian Congress (1894) to organise Indians politically, the Phoenix Settlement (1894) and later the Tolstoy Farm (1910) to practice community living, and the journal Indian Opinion (1903) to give voice to the oppressed. He even formed an ambulance corps to help the British during the Boer War, believing that service to humanity was a higher calling. But his real contribution was organising mass struggles against humiliating laws — discriminatory passes, invalidation of Indian marriages, and unfair taxes on ex-indentured Indians. His first formal Satyagraha in 1906 against the Transvaal ordinance became the seed of a strategy that he would later transplant to India with astonishing effect.
When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he was already a seasoned leader — disciplined, morally anchored, and internationally recognised. Yet he did not jump immediately into national politics. On the advice of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi spent a year travelling across India, observing firsthand the poverty of peasants, the condition of workers, and the psychology of the masses. He realised that India’s true strength lay not in its urban elites, but in its villages and ordinary people.
His first major public speech at the Banaras Hindu University in 1916 shocked the audience. Instead of praising the grandeur of the occasion, Gandhi rebuked the Indian elite for their distance from the masses. This was Gandhi’s style: he spoke the uncomfortable truth, but in a way that stirred the conscience.
Soon after, Gandhi was drawn into three local struggles (1917–18) that marked his true entry into Indian politics:
- In Champaran, he fought against the exploitative Tinkathia system of indigo planters and secured relief for peasants.
- In Ahmedabad, he mediated between mill workers and owners, even fasting unto death to uphold justice, and achieved a fair wage settlement.
- In Kheda, he stood with drought-stricken peasants against unjust revenue demands, insisting that only those who could pay should be asked to do so.
These movements were small in scale compared to later national agitations, but they had immense significance. They demonstrated Gandhi’s method: rooting struggles in local grievances, involving the masses directly, upholding non-violence, and using moral force as much as political bargaining. Most importantly, they showed that ordinary Indians — peasants, workers, the poor — could be mobilised for collective action when given hope and leadership.
Thus, by the end of 1918, Gandhi had emerged as a leader unlike any India had seen before. He was not merely an agitator, but a moral teacher; not just a strategist, but a symbol of simplicity and sacrifice. In a country disillusioned with moderate petitions and fatigued with militant violence, Gandhi brought a new balance — a politics of mass mobilisation rooted in ethics.
The story of Gandhi’s rise is therefore not just about one man’s journey; it is about how a civilisation in bondage found its voice through a leader who blended ancient values with modern methods, personal spirituality with public action. From here onwards, the Indian freedom struggle entered a new chapter — one in which Gandhi became both its guiding light and its moral compass.
The Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement
The two years between 1919 and 1922 mark a dramatic turning point in the story of India’s freedom struggle. Until then, nationalism had largely been confined to petitions, resolutions, and occasional protests led by the educated middle class. But after the First World War, something fundamentally changed. A new phase of mass politics emerged, where millions of ordinary Indians — peasants, workers, students, women, and even small traders — entered the political arena for the first time. The spark that ignited this transformation was the coming together of two powerful streams of discontent: the Non-Cooperation Movement, led by Gandhi, and the Khilafat Movement, led by Muslim leaders upset with Britain’s treatment of Turkey after the war.
To understand why this moment was so explosive, we must look at the broader background. The First World War (1914–18) had shaken the world. For India, it brought both hope and disillusionment. Over a million Indian soldiers had fought for the British Empire, and Indian leaders expected constitutional concessions in return. Indeed, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 were announced as a gesture of goodwill, introducing dyarchy in provinces and a limited expansion of self-government. But the reforms fell far short of expectations, and the Congress dismissed them as hollow. Worse still, while one hand of the colonial government offered these “concessions,” the other hand wielded repression through the Rowlatt Act (1919), which allowed indefinite detention without trial.
The contradiction of carrot and stick soon led to a national eruption. Gandhi, who had returned to India just a few years earlier, launched his first all-India campaign through the Rowlatt Satyagraha. The agitation witnessed widespread hartals and protests, but it also provoked brutal repression, culminating in the horrific Jallianwala Bagh massacre (13 April 1919), where General Dyer’s troops fired on an unarmed gathering. The bloodshed in Amritsar seared itself into the national memory. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood, and Gandhi himself realised that India needed a new form of resistance — disciplined, non-violent, but rooted in mass participation.
At the same time, another current of anger was sweeping through the Muslim community. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the war and the British decision to weaken the position of the Khalifa, regarded as the spiritual leader of Muslims, created widespread resentment. The Khilafat Movement, led by figures such as the Ali brothers, demanded justice for Turkey and protection of the Khalifa’s authority. Gandhi saw in this movement not only a moral cause but also an opportunity for Hindu-Muslim unity. He boldly joined hands with the Khilafat leaders, believing that a united struggle could challenge the might of the Empire.
Thus, in 1920, the Non-Cooperation Movement was launched, with the Congress officially adopting Gandhi’s programme at its Nagpur Session (December 1920). The call was simple yet revolutionary: Indians were asked to withdraw their cooperation from the British system — boycott schools, courts, councils, and foreign goods, while building their own national institutions. Thousands of students left government schools to join national ones, lawyers gave up their practices, and women came forward in unprecedented numbers to picket liquor and foreign cloth shops. In towns and villages alike, the movement spread like wildfire.
But the genius of Gandhi’s approach lay not merely in these boycotts. He gave politics a moral tone, urging self-reliance, simplicity, and non-violence. At the same time, the movement unleashed forces beyond the Congress leadership’s control. In the countryside, peasants began to assert themselves against landlords; in towns, traders and workers linked the nationalist call to their own grievances. For the first time, the British faced a challenge that was not limited to intellectual debates in legislative councils but rooted in the collective will of the masses.
Yet, the experiment was fragile. Non-violence required immense discipline, and the anger of the oppressed sometimes spilled over. The tragic incident at Chauri Chaura (5 February 1922), where a mob set fire to a police station killing 22 policemen, convinced Gandhi that the movement was veering towards violence. In a move that shocked many of his colleagues but revealed his unwavering commitment to non-violence, Gandhi abruptly called off the movement. Soon after, he was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison, leaving the national movement at a crossroads.
The Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement may have formally ended in 1922, but its legacy was permanent. It marked the first time that Indian nationalism truly became a mass movement, transcending class, region, and religion. It also established Gandhi as the undisputed leader of the freedom struggle, giving him both moral authority and organisational influence. Above all, it showed that the Empire was vulnerable not only to armed revolutionaries but also to the silent, collective refusal of ordinary people to cooperate.