Who among the following did not represent the militant nationalist school of thought in India ?

Correct — C, (c) Krishna Kumar Mitra. The other three names appear in the standard catalogue of the militant nationalist school; Mitra does not. He was a Brahmo Samaj leader and a journalist, editor of the Bengali weekly Sanjivani, which he ran from 1883, and a maternal uncle of Aurobindo Ghose. He was not a bystander to the Swadeshi years — Sanjivani urged the boycott of British goods in July 1905, and in 1908 the government removed him from Calcutta and detained him for his part in the agitation — but the question asks about a school of thought, not about activity or courage, and the school he belonged to was the moderate one. His method was constructive Swadeshi: self-help through indigenous enterprise, national education, temperance and social reform, carried on through a newspaper and an association rather than through a call for direct political action against the state. That is the distinction the item is built on, and it is a real one. The militant nationalist school, which became the Extremist wing of the Congress after the Surat split of 1907, rested on a definite set of propositions: that British rule was the cause of India's poverty and could not be reformed into benevolence; that swaraj, not administrative concession, was the goal; that the way to it was direct political action by the people — boycott, passive resistance, national education, swadeshi enterprise; and that the nation had to be prepared for suffering and sacrifice. Its acknowledged leaders were Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghose and Lala Lajpat Rai, and behind them stood an earlier generation of exponents — Rajnarain Bose and Ashwini Kumar Dutt in Bengal, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar in Maharashtra — from which three of this item's four options are drawn.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Ashwini Kumar Dutt — Ashwini Kumar Dutt of Barisal is one of the names the textbooks list as an early exponent of militant nationalism in Bengal, alongside Rajnarain Bose. He is remembered less for doctrine than for organisation: through the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti he carried the Swadeshi movement out of the Calcutta meeting hall and into the villages of Barisal, using a network of local committees that settled disputes, ran relief, enforced the boycott and reached ordinary cultivators — the nearest thing the Swadeshi years produced to a mass organisation. The government answered with the Barisal conference of 1906, where the police broke up the proceedings, and in 1908 Dutt was deported. He is the wrong answer here for the good reason that he is squarely inside the school the question asks about.
• (b)Vishnushastri Chiplunkar — Vishnushastri Chiplunkar is the Maharashtra name in the same list, and the one candidates most often fail to place because he died young, in 1882, before the Congress was founded. His importance is as the writer who gave militant nationalism a language. Through the essays of his Nibandhamala, begun in 1874, he attacked the assumption that Western civilisation was a gift and argued for pride in the country's own inheritance, and he is regarded as the father of modern Marathi prose for the way he did it. With Tilak and Agarkar he founded the New English School at Poona in 1880 and, in 1881, the newspapers Kesari in Marathi and Mahratta in English — the institutions through which Tilak would later work. The line of descent from Chiplunkar to Tilak is why he belongs to the militant nationalist school even though he did not live to see it named.
• (d)Lala Lajpat Rai — Lala Lajpat Rai is the most familiar member of the school, the Lal of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio with Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal. An Arya Samajist from Punjab, he opposed the Moderates' method of petition and prayer, was deported without trial to Mandalay in 1907 for his part in the Punjab agrarian agitation, took the Indian case to Britain and the United States during the First World War and founded the Indian Home Rule League of America, presided over the Calcutta special session of the Congress in 1920 that endorsed non-cooperation, and died in 1928 of injuries from a police lathi charge on a demonstration against the Simon Commission at Lahore. Nothing about him is moderate in the technical sense the question uses, so he cannot be the answer.

Between about 1885 and 1905 the Indian National Congress was led by men now called the Moderates — Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta, Ranade — who believed British rule could be made to answer to Indian opinion, and whose method was the petition, the resolution, the memorandum and the appeal to British public opinion, backed by careful economic argument such as the drain theory. Their achievement was to build a national political vocabulary and to prove, in print, that the empire impoverished India. Their failure was that thirty years of it produced very little. Out of that disappointment grew the militant nationalist or Extremist trend, given its impetus by the partition of Bengal in 1905 and by the famines, plague administration and racial arrogance of the preceding decade, and encouraged from outside by Ethiopia's defeat of Italy at Adowa, Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 and the revolutions in Persia, Turkey and Russia. Its adherents held that political rights are taken and not granted, that swaraj was the goal, and that the instruments were boycott, swadeshi, national education and passive resistance. The two trends split the Congress at Surat in 1907 and were reunited at Lucknow in 1916. A third current — the revolutionary nationalists of the Anushilan and Jugantar groups — is a separate category again, and should not be folded into the militant nationalist school.

Key facts

• Krishna Kumar Mitra was a Brahmo leader and editor of the Bengali weekly Sanjivani, which he ran from 1883; he was a maternal uncle of Aurobindo Ghose.
• Sanjivani called for the boycott of British goods in July 1905, and Mitra was detained and removed from Calcutta in 1908 for his Swadeshi activity, but his method was constructive Swadeshi and self-help.
• The early exponents of militant nationalism are conventionally given as Rajnarain Bose and Ashwini Kumar Dutt in Bengal and Vishnushastri Chiplunkar in Maharashtra.
• Its leaders at the height of the trend were Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghose and Lala Lajpat Rai; Tilak is treated as its outstanding representative.
• Its tenets were that foreign rule was the cause of India's condition, that swaraj was the goal, that direct political action was the method, and that self-sacrifice was required.
• Ashwini Kumar Dutt built the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti, which took Swadeshi into the villages around Barisal.
• Chiplunkar wrote the Nibandhamala essays from 1874, helped found the New English School at Poona in 1880 and, in 1881, Kesari and Mahratta.
• Moderates and Extremists split at the Surat session of the Congress in 1907 and reunited at Lucknow in 1916.

Common traps

• Equating imprisonment or deportation with militancy of thought. Moderates were deported too, and Krishna Kumar Mitra is the example this item uses.
• Merging the militant nationalists with the revolutionary terrorists. Boycott and passive resistance are not the same programme as individual assassination.
• Forgetting the earlier generation. Rajnarain Bose, Ashwini Kumar Dutt and Vishnushastri Chiplunkar are regularly asked about precisely because candidates learn only Lal-Bal-Pal.
• Assuming a Brahmo Samaj or social-reform background rules a man out of politics, or that a political record rules him out of the moderate camp.
• Placing Chiplunkar in the twentieth century. He died in 1882, three years before the Congress was founded.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Swadesh Bandhab Samiti, which carried the Swadeshi movement into the villages around Barisal, was organized by which one of the following ?

  • (a)Ashwini Kumar Dutt
  • (b)Chittaranjan Das
  • (c)Surendranath Banerjea
  • (d)Krishna Kumar Mitra

  Answer(a) Ashwini Kumar Dutt

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who among the following was not one of the leaders popularly known as ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’ ?

  • (a)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (b)Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • (c)Bipin Chandra Pal
  • (d)Aurobindo Ghose

  Answer(d) Aurobindo Ghose