The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 By GYANENDRA PANDEY Anthem Press London Anthem Press is an imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company PO Box 9779. London. SW 19 7QA This edition first published by Wimbledon Publishing Company 2002 © Gyanendra Pandey All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Wimbledon Publishing Company, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the afJfJropriate reprographics rights organization. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress in Publication Data A catalogue record has been applied for ISBN Hb I 84331 056 2 Pb I 84331 0570 To my mother and to the memory of my father Contents Preface ix List of Maps and Tables xv Abbreviations xvii Chapter I Introduction Chapter 2 Uttar Pradesh after the First World War 9 Chapter 3 The Congress Organization, 1920-1940 25 Chapter 4 Spreading the Nationalist Message 6 I Chapter 5 The Alienation of the Muslims 95 Chapter 6 Mass Mobilization 13 I Chapter 7 Conclusion 173 Glossary 189 Bibliography 191 Notes 201 Index 231 Preface to the second edition All the histories of Indian nationalism that I had come across in my years in school and college were preoccupied with the matter of how the nation achieved its independence. There was never any question of how the idea of the 'nation' itself came into existence, or how this par ticular nation came to be thought. For these were taken to be natural, given conditions - with their roots lying very far back in history, in a dimly perceived and distant past. The historical investigation was lim ited to the way in which the people of India struggled to realize this readymade conception, how they worked for freedom and the right to determine their own conditions of corporate life. Based on a doctoral dissertation that was researched in the 1970s, this book was another attempt to study the process of mobilization in the Indian national movement, yet one that marked something of a departure from the perspective outlined above, as I trust the following pages will show. The anti-colonial struggle in India was one of the two or three great mass movements of the first half of the twentieth century. By 1939, it was possible for Jawaharlal Nehru to claim that the frontiers of the Indian national movement lay in China on the east and Spain in the west, reflecting the international aspect of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. By that time, too, the demand for social transformation and economic justice was a feature of the anti-colonial and nationalist struggle, the "workers' and peasants' state" in Russia was being hailed as a beacon light, and working people all over British India were beginning to demand the rights of full citizens. The struggle against colonialism in the subcontinent began of course in a far more scattered and tentative form. In the later nineteenth century, urban professionals and notables had formed diverse public associations that held occasional meetings and produced moderate manifestos and