(a) "During the Carnatic Wars, the French position, which at one time dazzled the Indian world by its political successes, was…

(a) The French in the Carnatic Wars

The French rise was dazzling. In the First Carnatic War (1746–48) La Bourdonnais took Madras, and at Adyar (1746) a small French force routed the Nawab of Arcot's army, showing that disciplined European infantry could defeat much larger Indian armies. Dupleix turned this lesson into policy: in the Second Carnatic War (1749–54) he backed Chanda Sahib in the Carnatic and Muzaffar Jang in Hyderabad, and Bussy's presence at the Nizam's court from 1751 gave the French the Northern Sarkars and a decisive voice in the Deccan. For a moment the French seemed the arbiters of south Indian politics. The collapse had structural causes. The French Company was a state-controlled body dependent on royal subsidies, while the English Company was a richer private corporation backed by Parliament and London finance. Paris was preoccupied with continental wars and recalled Dupleix in 1754; the Godeheu treaty gave up his gains. Clive's defence of Arcot (1751) and relief of Trichinopoly showed that the British could play the same game with their own client, Muhammad Ali. The capture of Bengal after Plassey (1757) gave the British a revenue base to fund the southern war, while the French had nothing comparable. In the Third Carnatic War (1756–63) Lally's quarrels with colleagues and his recall of Bussy from Hyderabad (1758) threw away French influence there; British naval power forced d'Aché's squadron to withdraw (1759); Eyre Coote won at Wandiwash (1760), and Pondicherry fell in 1761. The Treaty of Paris (1763) returned Pondicherry and other posts only as unfortified trading stations. The early brilliance rested on the personal skill of Dupleix and Bussy and on alliances with Indian claimants, not on resources, sea power or home support, so humiliation followed once the British matched French methods and exceeded French means (S.P. Sen).

(b) The safety-valve theory

The theory traces the founding of the Congress (1885) to A.O. Hume, acting with Viceroy Dufferin's approval to create an outlet for discontent that might otherwise explode. It rests on William Wedderburn's biography of Hume (1913), which said Hume had seen seven volumes of secret reports of impending unrest. Lala Lajpat Rai used it in Young India (1916) to attack the Moderates, and R. Palme Dutt's India Today (1940) gave it a Marxist form. Research since the 1950s has discredited it. The "seven volumes" have never been found in any archive, and the report-writers Hume described had no place in the Home Department's intelligence system. Dufferin's private papers show that he distrusted Hume and the Congress; by 1888 he was ridiculing it as a "microscopic minority". The Congress grew out of a decade of Indian political organisation: the Indian Association (1876), the Madras Mahajana Sabha (1884), the Bombay Presidency Association (1885), the Indian National Conference (1883, 1885) and the Ilbert Bill agitation. Bipan Chandra reversed the argument: Indian leaders used Hume as a "lightning conductor" so that an all-India body would not be suppressed at birth, as Gokhale remarked. S.R. Mehrotra and Briton Martin show that its founders pursued their own agenda of political rights, economic critique (Naoroji's drain theory) and national unity. The theory is therefore discredited because its evidence is missing, the official record contradicts it, and it ignores the Indian initiative behind the Congress.

(c) Gandhi and the Indianisation of the national movement, 1917–22

Gandhi's early campaigns changed the idiom, methods and social base of nationalism. At Champaran (1917) he took up the grievances of indigo cultivators under the tinkathia system; at Ahmedabad (1918) he led mill workers in a strike for higher wages and fasted until the owners agreed to arbitration, which gave a 35% increase; at Kheda (1918) he backed peasants seeking remission of revenue after crop failure. These showed that ordinary peasants and workers could be organised through local grievances in their own language. The Rowlatt Satyagraha (1919) was the first all-India mass protest; after Jallianwala Bagh, the alliance with the Khilafat movement and Non-Cooperation (1920–22) brought hartals, boycott of councils, courts, schools and foreign cloth, khadi, national schools and Hindu-Muslim unity. The Nagpur Congress (1920) reorganised the party on linguistic provinces with a four-anna membership, taking it into the countryside. Indianisation lay in the idiom as much as the numbers: swaraj, satyagraha, ahimsa, Ramrajya, the spinning wheel and a simple peasant-like dress replaced the Moderates' petitions in English. There are qualifications. Tilak's festivals and the Swadeshi movement had already used Indian symbols; Judith Brown shows that Gandhi relied on regional "sub-contractors" and local leaders; religious idiom and the Khilafat alliance carried communal risks; and the withdrawal after Chauri Chaura (February 1922) showed his insistence on control. Even so, 1917–22 turned Congress from an elite forum into a mass movement rooted in Indian life.