(a) Do you think that the Indian National Movement was a 'multi class movement' which represented the anti-imperialist interests…

The Indian national movement was an evolving anti-colonial coalition that progressively brought diverse social strata into political consciousness, though this integration remained structured by distinct class contradictions and programmatic limitations.

Multi-Class Character and Class Contradictions in the National Movement

The national movement evolved from a narrow, middle-class platform into an all-India mass movement. In its early Moderate phase, the Indian National Congress (INC) primarily represented the western-educated urban intelligentsia and professional elites. Under Gandhi’s leadership post-1919, the social base widened significantly. The peasantry was mobilized through localized struggles such as Champaran (1917) and Kheda (1918), leading to massive rural participation in the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements. The urban working class entered the political sphere through the Ahmedabad strike (1918) and trade union mobilizations under the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC). Concurrently, national capitalists coordinated through the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) provided financial backing, viewing the INC as a bulwark against colonial economic discrimination.

However, evaluating the movement as a fully representative multi-class front reveals significant limitations. As historians like Sumit Sarkar and Ranajit Guha argue, the leadership maintained a bourgeois hegemony that constrained autonomous subaltern radicalism. During the Civil Disobedience and Quit India Movements, the Congress leadership consistently discouraged radical agrarian agendas—such as 'no-rent' campaigns against native zamindars—to preserve multi-class unity and retain landlord-capitalist support. Consequently, while the anti-imperialist umbrella accommodated diverse classes against British rule, subaltern class interests were frequently subordinated to the overarching national-bourgeois consensus.

Differential Impact of Colonialism and Divergent Responses to 1857

Colonial policies produced asymmetric disruptions across Indian society. British tariff structures and cheap imports caused severe deindustrialization, devastating traditional weavers and artisans. Heavy revenue demands, the commercialization of agriculture, and the summary resumption of estates through instruments like the Inam Commission disenfranchised peasants and landed elites alike. Conversely, western education created an emergent middle class that initially viewed British rule as a modernizing force.

These divergent realities dictated the fractured nature of the Revolt of 1857. The uprising drew fervent participation from Bengal Army sepoys, dispossessed Awadh taluqdars, ruined artisans, and displaced peasants, finding symbolic cohesion in Bahadur Shah Zafar and cross-community Hindu-Muslim unity. Forest and peasant communities, including tribal belts in Chotanagpur, joined the fray against money-lenders and colonial officials. Conversely, modern-educated elites in Bengal and Bombay actively opposed the rebellion, viewing it as feudal restorationism. Key princely states, including Scindia, Holkar, and the Nizam, as well as the Punjab chiefs and the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, remained neutral or aided the Company. The post-revolt British administration subsequently institutionalized these fractures through martial and non-martial race categorizations and aggressive divide-and-rule communal policies.

Revolutionary Movement: Instilling Self-Confidence and Expanding Social Base

Revolutionary nationalism fundamentally transformed the psychological landscape of the freedom struggle. Moving beyond the petitioning methods of early moderates, revolutionaries deployed individual heroism and propaganda by deed—such as the Kakori train action (1925), the assassination of Saunders (1928), and the Central Legislative Assembly bombing (1929)—to demystify British administrative invulnerability.

Organizations like the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), later transformed by Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad into the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), expanded the movement's social base. They systematically recruited from lower-middle-class youth, students, and urban workers, shifting the ideological orientation from pure armed action to mass-oriented scientific socialism. In Bengal, groups like Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti, alongside Surya Sen’s Indian Republican Army in Chittagong, mobilized radical youth and women revolutionaries like Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta. By converting colonial courtrooms into platforms for political propaganda and courting martyrdom through extended hunger strikes, the revolutionaries fostered fearless national self-confidence and galvanized popular anti-colonial sentiment across India.

The Indian freedom movement ultimately functioned as a multi-class anti-imperialist front, whose ideological breadth was continually expanded by mass mobilizations, internal class contestations, and the radicalizing impact of revolutionary actions.