Class 12 History Chapter 11 Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement NCERT Solutions in English

Q. How did Mahatma Gandhi seek to identify with the common people?

Answer:
Dress. While other nationalist leaders dressed formally, in a Western suit or an Indian bandgala, Gandhiji went among the people in a simple dhoti, and in 1921, during a tour of South India, he shaved his head and began wearing only a loincloth to identify further with the poor.
The charkha. He spent part of each day working on the charkha, both symbolising his identification with ordinary Indians and, through the act of spinning, breaking the traditional caste boundary between mental and manual labour.
Language and manner. Peasants and workers venerated him as “Mahatma” precisely because he dressed like them, lived like them, and spoke their language, unlike other leaders who stood apart from the common folk; he empathised with the labouring poor rather than merely addressing them from a distance.
Symbolism deliberately chosen. His asceticism and simple lifestyle, adopted despite being by caste a merchant and by profession a lawyer, were a shrewd, deliberate use of symbols that let ordinary Indians see themselves reflected in their leader.

Q. How was Mahatma Gandhi perceived by the peasants?

Answer:
A saviour figure. Historian Shahid Amin’s study of the local press during Gandhiji’s February 1921 tour of eastern Uttar Pradesh shows peasants receiving him with crowds of 10,000-20,000 at small stations, showering him with money, and calling him “Gandhi baba” or “Gandhi Maharaj”.
Belief in miraculous powers. Rumours spread that he could overrule local officials, that his power exceeded the English monarch’s, and that opposing him brought misfortune, a boiling karah splitting in two, a field of wheat turning to sesamum, a critic’s house catching fire.
What this reveals. These rumours are not evidence that Gandhiji actually possessed such powers; they are evidence of the hopes and expectations peasants placed in him as someone who would rescue them from high taxes and oppressive officials and restore dignity to their lives.
Why it worked. His ascetic lifestyle and shrewd use of symbols like the dhoti and charkha let him empathise with the labouring poor, and let them, in turn, empathise with him, unlike other politicians who “talked down” to them.

Q. Why did the salt laws become an important issue of struggle?

Answer:
A universal necessity. Salt was indispensable in every Indian household, yet the law forbade Indians from making salt even for domestic use, forcing them to buy it from shops at a high price under the state’s monopoly.
A “fourfold curse”. Gandhiji described the salt monopoly as depriving people of a valuable, easy village industry, involving wanton destruction of property nature produced freely, adding to national expenditure through that very destruction, and, worst of all, exacting an “unheard-of tax of more than 1,000 per cent” from a starving population.
Tactical wisdom. By targeting something every household needed and resented, Gandhiji could mobilise discontent far beyond politically active circles, unlike causes such as Champaran or Kheda that had remained localised.
The result. The march to break this one law grew into a genuinely nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement, with nearly 60,000 Indians arrested in its wake.

Q. Why are newspapers an important source for the study of the national movement?

Answer:
What they capture. Contemporary newspapers, in English and in Indian languages, tracked Gandhiji’s movements, reported his activities, and represented what ordinary Indians thought of him, giving historians a running, contemporaneous record no later source can fully replace.
Why they cannot be read literally. Newspapers were published by people with their own political opinions and world views, which shaped both what was published and how events were reported; a London newspaper’s account of an event differed sharply from an Indian nationalist paper’s account of the very same event.
Read with care. Every statement in such reports cannot be accepted literally as what was happening on the ground: they were shaped by the political opinions of their publishers, and official reports of the time often reflected the fears and anxieties of officials who could not control the movement and did not know whether to arrest Gandhiji or what an arrest would mean.
Conclusion. Newspapers matter precisely because they are partisan: read carefully, and cross-checked against other sources, they show not just what happened but how different sides wanted it to be seen.

Q. Why was the charkha chosen as a symbol of nationalism?

Answer:
A critique of the machine age. Gandhiji was profoundly critical of a modern age in which machines “enslaved humans and displaced labour”; he objected specifically to “labour-saving machinery” that threw thousands out of work, not to machinery as such.
Economic self-reliance. The spinning wheel could give the poor supplementary income and make them self-reliant, supporting his broader campaign for khadi over mill-made cloth imported from overseas.
Breaking caste boundaries. The daily act of spinning let Gandhiji personally break the traditional caste-based boundary between mental and manual labour, since he, a lawyer, worked with his hands like an ordinary artisan.
A symbol of identification. Alongside the plain dhoti, the charkha visibly linked Gandhiji to the labouring poor, becoming, in the chapter’s own words, “the most abiding image of Indian nationalism”.

Q. How was non-cooperation a form of protest?

Answer:
What it demanded. Non-cooperation asked Indians who wished colonial rule to end to renounce “all voluntary association” with the British Government: leaving government schools, colleges and law courts, and refusing to pay taxes. Gandhiji’s American biographer Louis Fischer called it “negative enough to be peaceful but positive enough to be effective… training for self-rule”.
How different groups joined in. Students left government institutions, lawyers boycotted courts, and industrial workers mounted 396 strikes in 1921 alone, involving 600,000 workers and costing seven million workdays. In the countryside, hill tribes in northern Andhra broke forest laws, Awadh farmers refused to pay taxes, and Kumaun peasants refused forced labour for officials.
Local reinterpretation. Many of these protests were carried out in defiance of local nationalist leadership; peasants, workers and others interpreted the call to “non-cooperate” in ways that suited their own interests, rather than strictly following instructions from above.
Linked to Khilafat. By joining Non-cooperation to the Khilafat Movement, Gandhiji hoped to unite India’s two major religious communities in one struggle, unleashing a surge of popular action unprecedented in colonial India, until the violence at Chauri Chaura led him to call the movement off.
Conclusion. Non-cooperation was a form of protest precisely because it withdrew the ordinary, everyday forms of cooperation, attendance, taxation, labour, that colonial rule quietly depended on, shaking the Raj more severely than anything since 1857.

Q. Why were the dialogues at the Round Table Conference inconclusive?

Answer:
The first Conference, November 1930. It proceeded without Gandhiji, the pre-eminent political leader in India, “thus rendering it an exercise in futility” from the outset.
The second Conference, late 1931. Gandhiji attended representing the Congress, but his claim to speak for all of India came under challenge from three separate directions: the Muslim League, which claimed to represent Muslim minority interests; the Princes, who argued the Congress had no stake in their territories; and B.R. Ambedkar, who argued that Gandhiji and the Congress did not truly represent the lowest castes.
A fundamentally contested claim. With three parties each denying that Congress spoke for the whole of India, and Gandhiji and Ambedkar disagreeing sharply over separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, no single, agreed settlement was possible within the Conference format.
The aftermath. The Conference ended inconclusively, and Gandhiji returned to India to resume civil disobedience; the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was deeply unsympathetic to him, as his private letter to his sister shows.
Conclusion. The dialogues failed not for want of goodwill on any single side, but because the Conference tried to settle, in one room, several genuinely separate and competing claims to represent India, no one of which its format could adjudicate.

Q. In what way did Mahatma Gandhi transform the nature of the national movement?

Answer:
From an elite affair to a mass movement. Before 1915, nationalism was largely a phenomenon of lawyers, doctors and landlords, a fact Gandhiji himself acknowledged in his 1916 BHU speech. Champaran, Kheda and Ahmedabad (1917-18) first demonstrated his personal commitment to the poor.
Genuinely mass participation. Non-cooperation combined with Khilafat (1920-22) brought in hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers and artisans, who venerated him as “Mahatma” because, unlike other leaders, he dressed, lived and spoke like them.
World attention and new participants. The Salt March (1930) extended the movement’s reach further, bringing global press coverage and, for the first time, large-scale participation by women, thanks partly to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.
Exposing real limits. At the same time, the Gandhi-Ambedkar clash over separate electorates showed that Gandhiji’s claim to represent “all of India” was itself genuinely contestable, not simply true by his own assertion.
The final mobilisation. Quit India (1942) was his last and most explosive mass movement, energising the young especially, even as Congress’s imprisonment let the Muslim League expand into new territory.
Conclusion. Gandhiji turned Indian nationalism from a narrow professional elite’s project into a genuinely mass movement built on deliberate symbolic identification with ordinary Indians, though the years after 1930 also exposed how contested his claim to speak for everyone really was.

Q. What do private letters and autobiographies tell us about an individual? How are these sources different from official accounts?

Answer:
Private letters. Letters give us a glimpse of a person’s private thoughts, their anger, pain, hopes and frustrations, in ways they might not express in public statements. But the private-public distinction often breaks down: many letters, though addressed to individuals, are written with an awareness that they may one day be published, as Gandhiji did by printing others’ letters to him in Harijan, and as Nehru did in “A Bunch of Old Letters”. Source 7’s 1936 exchange between Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Gandhiji shows exactly this, real personal hurt and frank argument, but written knowing it might later become part of the historical record.
Autobiographies. These give a rich, human account of the past, but they are retrospective, written very often from memory. They tell us what the author could recollect, what they saw as important, or how they wanted their life to be viewed by others; writing an autobiography is itself “a way of framing a picture of yourself”. A careful reader has to ask what the author does not tell us, and why, treating silences as evidence in their own right.
Official accounts, by contrast. Government records, such as the Home Department’s Fortnightly Reports, were compiled by officials keeping close watch on those they considered critical of the government. They were based on police information from the localities, but often expressed what higher officials saw, or wanted to believe, for instance, consistently downplaying the Salt March as “theatrical” even as the same reports later had to record the Salt Act being openly defied across the United Provinces.
The key difference. Letters and autobiographies reveal an individual’s own voice and self-presentation, however filtered; official accounts reveal an administrative apparatus’s anxieties and assumptions about the people it was watching. Neither can be taken at face value, but each has to be questioned in a different way, for a different kind of bias.

Q. Find out about the route of the Dandi March. On a map of Gujarat plot the line of the march and mark the major towns and villages that it passed along the route.

Answer (approach):
Start and end points from the chapter: the march began on 12 March 1930 at Gandhiji’s ashram at Sabarmati and ended about three weeks later at the seaside hamlet of Dandi, where Gandhiji spoke on 5 April and the salt law was broken on 6 April 1930.
On the route: the chapter names one village on the way, Wasna, where Gandhiji told the upper castes that “if you are out for Swaraj you must serve untouchables”. Mark Sabarmati, Wasna and Dandi, and draw the line of the march southwards towards the coast.
Other stops: the chapter does not list every halt. Use an atlas or a reliable account of the march to add the other towns and villages the march passed, and label them along your line.

Q. Read any two autobiographies of nationalist leaders. Look at the different ways in which the authors represent their own life and times, and interpret the national movement. See how their views differ. Write an account based on your studies.

Answer (approach for this project):
Choose two autobiographies of nationalist leaders (for example, those of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru).
Compare them under clear headings: how each author presents his own life and choices; how each describes key events of the national movement (for example Non-cooperation, the Salt March or Quit India); and how each judges other leaders.
Read them the way the chapter teaches. Autobiographies are retrospective accounts, often written from memory; writing one is “a way of framing a picture of yourself”. So note what each author does not tell us and try to explain those silences.
Conclude with how and why the two authors’ views of the national movement differ.

Q. Choose any event that took place during the national movement. Try and read the letters and speeches of the leaders of the time. Some of these are now published. He could be a local leader from the region where you live. Try and see how the local leaders viewed the activities of the national leadership at the top. Write about the movement based on your reading.

Answer (approach for this project):
Pick one event (for example Non-cooperation, the Salt Satyagraha or Quit India) and find published letters and speeches from that time, including those of a local leader from your region.
Use the chapter’s own example as a model: Source 7 shows how letters between Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Gandhiji in 1936 reveal disagreements inside the Congress and Gandhiji’s role as a mediator.
Remember the limits of the source: speeches give the public voice of a leader and letters a glimpse of private thoughts, but the private-public line often breaks down because letters may be written knowing they could be published.
Write your account showing how the local leader viewed the national leadership, where they agreed and where they differed.

Q. Find out more about the national movement in India before 1915 and see whether Mahatma Gandhi’s comments are justified.

Answer: In his speech at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University in February 1916, Gandhiji charged the Indian elite with a lack of concern for the labouring poor and said that salvation “can only come through the farmer. Neither the lawyers, nor the doctors, nor the rich landlords are going to secure it.” Largely justified: before 1915 the Indian National Congress had branches mainly in cities and towns; the Moderates such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale (and Mohammad Ali Jinnah) preferred a gradual and persuasive approach of petitions and speeches; and even the Swadeshi movement of 1905-07, with leaders like Lal, Bal and Pal, broadened the Congress’s appeal mainly among the middle classes. As the chapter puts it, the speech was “a statement of fact – namely, that Indian nationalism was an elite phenomenon, a creation of lawyers and doctors and landlords”. Peasants and workers, the majority of Indians, were absent from the movement’s leadership and from the audience at BHU. A qualification: India in 1915 was far more politically active than in 1893, and leaders from distant provinces had given the struggle an all-India character, so the movement was growing; but it had not yet become a mass movement of peasants, workers and artisans, which happened only after 1919-22 under Gandhiji.

Q. You have read about rumours in Chapter 10 and seen that the circulation of rumours tells us about the structure of the belief of a time: they tell us about the mind of the people who believe in the rumours and the circumstances that make this belief possible. What do you think these rumours about Gandhiji reflect?

Answer: (i) Deep faith and reverence: peasants saw Gandhiji as a “Mahatma”, “Gandhi baba” or “Gandhi Maharaj” with miraculous powers: a karah splitting in two, wheat turning into sesamum. (ii) Hope of rescue: people believed he had been sent to redress the grievances of farmers, could overrule local officials, and was more powerful than the English monarch; this reflects their suffering under high taxes and oppressive officials and their longing for a saviour who would restore their dignity. (iii) Moral pressure to follow his programme: rumours that those who questioned the charkha, abused him while gambling, or broke a pledge to give up liquor met with misfortune show that his message of spinning, temperance and self-discipline was spreading, and that people enforced it on one another. (iv) The peasants’ own understanding: they interpreted Gandhiji in the idiom of their own beliefs, not in the terms of the Congress leaders. (v) The circumstances: his ascetic lifestyle, his dhoti and charkha, his identification with the poor, his tours drawing crowds of thousands, and the local press that recorded and spread these stories made such beliefs possible.

Q. What was Non-cooperation? Find out about the variety of ways in which different social groups participated in the movement.

Answer: What it was: a campaign called by Gandhiji after the Rowlatt satyagraha, asking Indians who wished colonialism to end to adhere to a “renunciation of (all) voluntary association with the (British) Government”: to stop attending schools, colleges and law courts and not pay taxes. Gandhiji said India would win swaraj within a year, and joined it with the Khilafat Movement to unite Hindus and Muslims. Louis Fischer called it “negative enough to be peaceful but positive enough to be effective”. It was called off after the violence at Chauri Chaura in February 1922.
How different groups took part: (i) students stopped going to government schools and colleges; (ii) lawyers refused to attend court; (iii) the working class went on strike: 396 strikes in 1921, involving 600,000 workers and a loss of seven million workdays; (iv) hill tribes in northern Andhra violated the forest laws; (v) farmers in Awadh did not pay taxes; (vi) peasants in Kumaun refused to carry loads for colonial officials; (vii) foreign cloth was collected and burnt in bonfires (Fig. 11.4); (viii) Muslims joined through the Khilafat Movement. These groups often interpreted the call to “non-cooperate” in ways that suited their own interests, sometimes even defying the local nationalist leadership.

Q. Why was salt destroyed by the colonial government? Why did Mahatma Gandhi consider the salt tax more oppressive than other taxes?

Answer: Why salt was destroyed: the government had a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt. To prevent the use of salt on which the tax (at times fourteen times its value) had not been paid, it destroyed the salt it could not sell profitably, and posted salt officers wherever people living nearby might take natural salt for personal use, “for the sole purpose of carrying on destruction”. Maunds if not tons of salt were destroyed on the Konkan coast and at Dandi.
Why the tax was more oppressive: (i) it taxed “the nation’s vital necessity”, which every household, however poor, needed; (ii) it prevented people from making salt even for their own use; (iii) it destroyed “what nature manufactures without effort”, at national expense; (iv) it was “an unheard-of tax of more than 1,000 per cent” exacted “from a starving people”. Gandhiji called the salt monopoly a “fourfold curse”: it deprived people of a valuable village industry, destroyed property nature produced in abundance, made the nation spend money on that destruction, and imposed this huge tax.

Q. What does the speech tell us about how Gandhiji saw the colonial state?

Answer: (i) As powerful: it “could have arrested every one of us”, and Gandhiji had expected to be arrested even at Sabarmati. (ii) As open to moral pressure: he believed the march had reached Dandi due to “the power of peace and non-violence”; the government “felt ashamed to arrest such an army” of peace, and “He is a civilised man who feels ashamed to do anything which his neighbours would disapprove”. (iii) As sensitive to world opinion: he says it may have desisted “only from fear of world opinion”. (iv) With gentle irony: he “congratulates” the government on its patience and forbearance, while making clear that he would still break the salt law the next day, whether or not it tolerated this. (v) As unable to stop a roused nation: even if he and all the leaders were arrested, the movement would go on, because “when a whole nation is roused and on the march no leader is necessary”.

Q. Read Sources 5 and 6. Write an imaginary dialogue between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi on the issue of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes.

Answer (a sample dialogue built from the two sources):
Ambedkar: Mahatmaji, the Depressed Classes cannot sustain themselves in the struggle for existence. The religion to which they are tied brands them as lepers, not fit for ordinary intercourse.
Gandhiji: I agree that their condition is a disgrace. But separate electorates to the “Untouchables” will ensure them bondage in perpetuity. Do you want the “Untouchables” to remain “Untouchables” for ever?
Ambedkar: They are economically entirely dependent on the high-caste Hindus for their daily bread, with no independent way of living. Hindu society has tried to bolt every door so that they cannot rise. How will they protect themselves?
Gandhiji: Separate electorates would perpetuate the stigma and keep them apart from the rest of Hindu society. What is needed is the destruction of untouchability, the bar-sinister imposed by an insolent “superior” class upon an “inferior” class.
Ambedkar: Until that day comes, they face organised tyranny. Any fair-minded person will grant that some share of political power, so that they may protect themselves, is a paramount necessity.
Gandhiji: And when untouchability has been destroyed, to whom will you give the separate electorates? Let us work to integrate them into society, not to separate them for ever.
Ambedkar: Integration cannot be left to the goodwill of those who have oppressed them. Political power is the only path for a community so handicapped.

Q. Three questions on these letters: (a) What do the letters tell us about the way Congress ideals developed over time? (b) What do they reveal about the role of Mahatma Gandhi within the national movement? (c) Do such letters give us any special insight into the working of the Congress, and into the nature of the national movement?

Answer: (a) Development of Congress ideals: by the 1930s new ideas were entering the Congress. Nehru, influenced by socialism and the Soviet Union, spoke against fascism and upheld the demands of workers and peasants, stressing poverty and unemployment. The conservatives, led by Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel, complained that he spoke on “a topic which has not been accepted by the Congress” and acted as the mouthpiece of the minority. So Congress ideals developed through debate and conflict between socialist and conservative views, within an effort to preserve “a larger unity”.
(b) Gandhiji’s role: he was the mediator who held the Congress together. He met both sides at Wardha, restrained Nehru’s radicalism and persuaded Prasad and others to see the importance of Nehru’s leadership; the conservatives withdrew their resignation after a “long conversation with Mahatmaji”. He wrote to Nehru frankly but affectionately (“Love, Bapu”), explained the colleagues’ grievances, and urged him to keep “the crown of thorns” and resume his humour. Nehru thanked him for “smoothing over matters”.
(c) Special insight: yes. Letters show the private feelings behind public positions: hurt, anger, exhaustion (“I am an intolerable nuisance”), fear of being cast aside. They show that the Working Committee worked through discussion, threats of resignation and compromise, that industrialists also tried to influence it, and that the national movement was not a single block but a coalition of different groups and ideologies held together by negotiation. But we must remember the private-public line can break down: Nehru himself published these letters in A Bunch of Old Letters (1958), and letters may be written with an eye to later publication.

Q. Can you see any conflict between this image and what was reported in the Fortnightly Reports of the police?

Answer: Yes. Fig. 11.16 shows police clashing with Congress volunteers in Bombay during the Civil Disobedience Movement: a crowd of committed volunteers in open confrontation with the police, showing active popular participation and resistance. The Fortnightly Reports, by contrast, were unwilling to accept that Gandhiji’s actions evoked any enthusiastic response; they described the march as a drama, an antic, a desperate effort to mobilise people who were “happy under the Raj”, and said meetings excited “little or no interest”. The image suggests a serious, mass movement that the reports played down. (Even the reports note that in Bombay the national flag was saluted on 12 March.)

Q. Read the Fortnightly Reports carefully. Remember they are extracts from confidential reports of the colonial Home Department. These reports did not always accept what the police reported from different localities. (1) How do you think the nature of the source affects what is being said in these reports? Write a short note illustrating your argument with quotations from the above text. (2) Why do you think the Home Department was continuously reporting on what people thought about the possibility of Mahatma Gandhi’s arrest? Reread what Gandhiji said about the question of arrests in his speech on 5 April 1930 at Dandi. (3) Why do you think Mahatma Gandhi was not arrested? (4) Why do you think the Home Department continued to say that the march was not evoking any response?

Answer:
(1) Nature of the source: these were confidential reports of the colonial Home Department, based on police information but expressing what higher officials saw or wanted to believe. Written by the rulers for the rulers, they play down the movement and reassure themselves: “The peasantry is for the moment engaged in harvesting a good rabi; students are pre-occupied with their impending examinations”; “the meetings that have been held excite little or no interest and leave no profound impression on the general population”; “General opinion inclines to regard his march as theatrical and his programme as impracticable”; “there is little enthusiasm for the form of civil disobedience favoured by Gandhi”; “Very little salt has actually been manufactured”. Nationalist papers are described with hostility (“Press Kesari indulged in offensive language”). Yet the same reports let slip evidence of support: a crowd “of over 3000 people at Nagpur”, “ladies are attending these meetings in increasing numbers”, “most of the schools and colleges were deserted on the 12th March”, and the Salt Act “openly defied” in eleven towns of the United Provinces.
(2) Why they kept reporting on a possible arrest: because officials feared what an arrest would do. Gandhiji was “held in such personal reverence” that the possibility of arrest was “viewed with considerable misgiving” (Madras); in Bengal “if any action is taken against him, a spark will be set to much inflammable material”; Kesari said arrest would incur “the discontent of the nation” while leaving him alone would let the movement spread. The government faced a dilemma. Gandhiji’s Dandi speech explains why: he expected arrest, but said that even if all the leaders were arrested the movement would go on, because “when a whole nation is roused and on the march no leader is necessary”.
(3) Why he was not arrested (during the march): the government feared the public reaction in India and the creation of a martyr; it was conscious of world opinion, since the march was widely covered by the European and American press (Gandhiji said it desisted “only from fear of world opinion”); and Viceroy Irwin at first failed to grasp the significance of the action, while officials preferred to believe the march would fizzle out. (He was arrested later, along with nearly 60,000 others.)
(4) Why they kept saying there was no response: officials wanted to believe, and to convince their superiors, that British rule was secure and that the people were content; admitting mass support would mean admitting that they could not control the movement. As the chapter says, these reports “often reflect the fears and anxieties of officials who were unable to control a movement”, and the more the state watched the public, the more it worried about the basis of its rule.