Chapter 2: Nationalism in India Long Questions | history Class 10 CBSE

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Chapter 2: Nationalism in India Long Questions | history Class 10 CBSE | ByteNotes.in

Long Answer

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Hard

Question 1

Long Form

Analyse how the First World War created conditions that made mass nationalism possible in India. How did Gandhi channel these conditions into the Non-Cooperation Movement?

The war caused defence expenditure to skyrocket, financed by war loans and higher taxes; prices doubled between 1913 and 1918, causing extreme hardship. Forced recruitment in rural areas and crop failures in 1918-21 — accompanied by an influenza epidemic that killed 12-13 million — deepened mass grievance against colonial rule.
Gandhi introduced satyagraha — the power of truth and non-violence — as a novel weapon; early campaigns at Champaran, Kheda, and Ahmedabad built his credibility and tested the method before launching national campaigns.
The Rowlatt Act (1919) and Jallianwalla Bagh massacre (1919) radicalised Indian opinion; Gandhi channelled anger into the nationwide Rowlatt Satyagraha and then argued for a broader movement linking Hindu-Muslim unity via the Khilafat issue.
At the Calcutta Congress (1920) Gandhi convinced leaders to adopt Non-Cooperation, and at Nagpur (December 1920) a formal programme was adopted — surrendering titles, boycotting courts, schools, councils, and foreign goods — making colonial rule economically and administratively costly.
Different social groups joined for different reasons: students and professionals boycotted institutions, peasants linked it to economic grievances, and Muslim communities linked it to Khilafat, demonstrating Gandhi's skill in forging a broad coalition.

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Hard

Question 2

Long Form

Compare and contrast how different social groups — peasants, tribal communities, and plantation workers — interpreted swaraj during the Non-Cooperation Movement. How did their visions differ from the Congress programme?

Awadh peasants, led by Baba Ramchandra, interpreted swaraj as relief from oppressive rents, begar, and insecurity of tenure; they organised nai-dhobi bandhs and, in 1921, attacked landlord houses and looted bazaars, going beyond the Congress's non-violent agenda.
Tribal peasants in the Gudem Hills under Alluri Sitaram Raju linked swaraj to restoration of forest rights denied by the colonial government; they wore khadi and cited Gandhi but rejected non-violence, conducting guerrilla raids on police stations — a method the Congress could not sanction.
Plantation workers in Assam equated swaraj with freedom of movement — the right to leave tea gardens without permission — and the hope of returning to their villages, motivated by faith that Gandhi Raj would distribute land; they were not pursuing Congress-defined political goals.
Each group emotionally connected to the Congress's all-India agitation by invoking Gandhi's name or linking their actions to the national movement, yet their immediate aspirations — land redistribution, forest rights, freedom from indentured conditions — were specific and local.
The Congress leadership was uncomfortable with violent or radical peasant and tribal methods, as these threatened property relations and landlord support that the Congress needed; this tension between the Congress programme and grassroots aspirations remained unresolved throughout the movement.

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Long Answer

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Hard

Question 3

Long Form

Examine the Salt March of 1930 as a political strategy. Why was it effective, and how did the Civil Disobedience Movement that followed differ from the Non-Cooperation Movement?

Gandhi chose salt as a symbol because it was consumed by every Indian regardless of class or region, making the tax on salt a concrete symbol of British oppression that united rich and poor; his letter to Irwin listing eleven demands, including abolition of the salt tax, made the political challenge explicit.
The 240-mile march from Sabarmati to Dandi, completed in 24 days with 78 volunteers, attracted massive crowds at every stop and international press attention, turning a single act of law-breaking into a national spectacle.
When Gandhi manufactured salt at Dandi on 6 April 1930, it triggered a cascade: thousands across India broke the salt law, peasants refused to pay revenue and chaukidari taxes, forest people violated forest laws, and village officials resigned — a much broader, active law-breaking campaign compared to the 1921 movement.
Unlike the Non-Cooperation Movement, which asked people to refuse cooperation, the Civil Disobedience Movement required people to actively break colonial laws; this escalation drew in diverse groups more directly and tested the limits of colonial authority.
The movement's scale — about 100,000 arrests, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, and eventual relaunching in 1932 — demonstrated both its power in forcing the British to negotiate and its fragility as different social groups withdrew when their specific grievances went unaddressed.

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Question 4

Long Form

Critically examine the participation of women in the Civil Disobedience Movement. Did this participation lead to meaningful changes in their social and political status?

Thousands of women came out of their homes during Gandhi's salt march; they participated in protest marches, manufactured salt, picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops, and went to jail — a remarkable departure from their confined domestic roles.
In urban areas these were largely high-caste women; in rural areas they came from rich peasant households; moved by Gandhi's call, they began to see service to the nation as a sacred duty, giving their participation a moral and spiritual framing.
The movement created a new public identity for women and demonstrated that they could be effective political actors on a mass scale, challenging colonial assumptions about Indian passivity.
However, Gandhi was convinced that women's primary duty was to look after home and hearth and be good mothers and wives; this limited the transformative impact of their participation.
The Congress remained reluctant to allow women to hold positions of authority within the organisation, seeking only their symbolic presence; thus, despite unprecedented public participation, no fundamental restructuring of women's political or social position within nationalist institutions occurred.

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Hard

Question 5

Long Form

Analyse the tensions between Mahatma Gandhi and Dr B. R. Ambedkar over the question of dalit political representation. How was the conflict resolved and what were the implications?

Gandhi declared that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability was not eliminated; he called untouchables 'harijans', organised satyagraha for their entry into temples and public spaces, and personally cleaned toilets to dignify their work.
Ambedkar took a different approach: he organised dalits into the Depressed Classes Association in 1930 and demanded reserved seats in educational institutions and a separate electorate to choose dalit members for legislative councils, arguing that political empowerment would resolve social disabilities.
When the British government conceded Ambedkar's demand for separate electorates, Gandhi began a fast unto death, arguing that separate electorates would permanently segregate dalits and slow their social integration.
Ambedkar ultimately accepted Gandhi's position, resulting in the Poona Pact of September 1932, which gave Depressed Classes reserved seats in provincial and central legislative councils but with those seats voted in by the general electorate, not a separate dalit electorate.
The Poona Pact reflected the fundamental tension between Gandhi's vision of a socially reformed Hindu society and Ambedkar's demand for structural political safeguards; the dalit movement remained apprehensive of the Congress, and this unresolved conflict had long-term implications for post-colonial Indian politics.

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Hard

Question 6

Long Form

Explain how cultural processes — folklore revival, national symbols, and the concept of Bharat Mata — contributed to the development of a sense of collective belonging in India.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay created the image of Bharat Mata through his hymn 'Vande Mataram' in the 1870s, later popularised through Anandamath and the Swadeshi movement; Abanindranath Tagore's painting depicted her as calm and ascetic, creating a visual icon with which Indians could identify the nation.
Nationalist leaders initiated a folklore revival — Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal and Natesa Sastri in Madras collected folk tales and ballads, arguing that folklore represented authentic national culture that colonialism had corrupted; preserving it was essential to recovering national identity.
Nationalist historians reinterpreted ancient Indian achievements in art, science, philosophy, and trade to instil pride, contrasting this glorious past with present colonial degradation and urging struggle for independence.
Flags became symbols of national unity: the Swadeshi-era tricolour (red, green, yellow) had eight lotuses for eight provinces and a crescent moon for Hindus and Muslims; Gandhi's 1921 Swaraj flag added a spinning wheel symbolising self-help, and carrying it on marches became an act of defiance.
However, these cultural processes were not without problems: when glorified history was Hindu or when Bharat Mata imagery was drawn from Hindu iconography, people of other communities felt excluded — highlighting that the cultural construction of Indian nationalism had inherent communal limitations.

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Hard

Question 7

Long Form

Examine the reasons for the growing estrangement between the Congress and Muslim political organisations in the 1920s. How did this affect the Civil Disobedience Movement?

The decline of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement marked a turning point: the unity achieved briefly under Gandhi fractured, and many Muslims felt alienated from the Congress, which increasingly appeared associated with Hindu nationalist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha.
From the mid-1920s, Hindu-Muslim communal riots worsened in various cities as religious processions were conducted with militant fervour; each riot deepened distrust and made political unity harder to sustain.
Negotiations at the 1928 All Parties Conference over Muslim representation in future assemblies failed when M. R. Jayakar of the Hindu Mahasabha strongly opposed compromise proposals; Muhammad Ali Jinnah's willingness to give up separate electorates for assured reserved seats in the Central Assembly went unreciprocated.
In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal as president of the Muslim League articulated the necessity of separate electorates to protect Muslim minority political interests, providing an intellectual framework that later justified the demand for Pakistan.
As a result, during the Civil Disobedience Movement there was an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust; large sections of Muslims could not respond to the call for a united struggle, fundamentally undermining Congress's goal of a mass movement encompassing all communities.

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Hard

Question 8

Long Form

Discuss how the worldwide economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s shaped the political landscape in India and contributed to the launch of the Civil Disobedience Movement.

Agricultural prices began to fall from 1926 and collapsed after 1930, as the demand for agricultural goods fell and exports declined; peasants found it impossible to sell harvests and pay government revenue, putting the countryside in turmoil.
Rich peasant communities like the Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh, who produced commercial crops, found their cash incomes disappearing; the government's refusal to reduce revenue demand despite the depression turned them into enthusiastic supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Smaller tenant farmers faced double hardship — falling cash incomes and difficulty paying rents to landlords — and joined radical movements led by Socialists and Communists, though the Congress was reluctant to support no-rent campaigns fearing alienation of landlords.
Business communities, which had prospered during World War I, now resented colonial policies limiting business; organisations like FICCI supported the Civil Disobedience Movement, seeing swaraj as removing colonial trade restrictions.
Gandhi's eleven demands to Viceroy Irwin (January 1930) were carefully designed to address specific grievances of each distressed class — from abolition of the salt tax to reduction of land revenue — making the Civil Disobedience Movement relevant to virtually every section of Indian society.

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Long Answer

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Hard

Question 9

Long Form

Analyse why the Non-Cooperation Movement faded in cities while growing in the countryside. What does this reveal about the social basis of Indian nationalism in the early 1920s?

In cities, the movement faced structural problems: khadi was more expensive than mill cloth, making sustained boycott unaffordable for ordinary people; alternative Indian institutions to replace British schools and courts were slow to develop, so students, teachers, and lawyers gradually returned to government institutions.
In the countryside, the movement merged with pre-existing agrarian grievances — high rents, begar, insecurity of tenure, forest rights — giving it a more concrete and urgent meaning for peasants and tribals who had more immediate stakes.
The urban middle class, which led the initial phase, was particularly dependent on British institutions for livelihoods and professional status; the economic cost of sustained non-cooperation was higher for them than the rhetoric of sacrifice suggested.
In contrast, rural communities, tribals, and plantation workers, who had little to lose and much to gain, threw themselves into the movement more wholeheartedly, though often in forms the Congress could not control.
This divergence reveals that Indian nationalism was a composite phenomenon: it had a thin urban constitutional surface and a deep rural agrarian base with different motivations; the Congress's challenge was to hold these together without alienating either, which it only partially achieved.

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Medium

Question 10

Long Form

Examine the role of Jawaharlal Nehru in shaping the direction of the national movement in the late 1920s. How did his leadership at the Lahore Congress differ from that of moderate leaders?

After the withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement, moderate leaders like C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party to work within colonial councils, accepting the framework of British-supervised constitutional reform rather than demanding complete independence.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, as younger leaders, pressed for more radical mass agitation and full independence, rejecting the gradualism of the Swaraj Party and the vague offer of dominion status by Viceroy Irwin in October 1929.
At the Lahore Congress in December 1929, under Nehru's presidency, the demand for Purna Swaraj (complete independence) was formalised — a decisive break from the moderate goal of self-governance within the British Empire.
The declaration that 26 January 1930 would be Independence Day established a new political calendar, signalling that the Congress was no longer negotiating for concessions but demanding full sovereignty.
Nehru's leadership marked the ascendancy of a radical vision within the Congress, setting the context for Gandhi's Civil Disobedience Movement and shifting the centre of gravity from constitutional reform to mass mobilisation for complete independence.

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Chapter 2: Nationalism in India | Long Questions

Analyse how the First World War created conditions that made mass nationalism possible in India. How did Gandhi channel these conditions into the Non-Cooperation Movement?

Compare and contrast how different social groups — peasants, tribal communities, and plantation workers — interpreted swaraj during the Non-Cooperation Movement. How did their visions differ from the Congress programme?

Examine the Salt March of 1930 as a political strategy. Why was it effective, and how did the Civil Disobedience Movement that followed differ from the Non-Cooperation Movement?

Critically examine the participation of women in the Civil Disobedience Movement. Did this participation lead to meaningful changes in their social and political status?

Analyse the tensions between Mahatma Gandhi and Dr B. R. Ambedkar over the question of dalit political representation. How was the conflict resolved and what were the implications?

Explain how cultural processes — folklore revival, national symbols, and the concept of Bharat Mata — contributed to the development of a sense of collective belonging in India.

Examine the reasons for the growing estrangement between the Congress and Muslim political organisations in the 1920s. How did this affect the Civil Disobedience Movement?

Discuss how the worldwide economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s shaped the political landscape in India and contributed to the launch of the Civil Disobedience Movement.

Analyse why the Non-Cooperation Movement faded in cities while growing in the countryside. What does this reveal about the social basis of Indian nationalism in the early 1920s?

Examine the role of Jawaharlal Nehru in shaping the direction of the national movement in the late 1920s. How did his leadership at the Lahore Congress differ from that of moderate leaders?

Unlock all Long Questions