MAHATMA AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES

Verma offers an in-depth look at India’s revolutionary decade of the 1920s.

Although most popular narratives position Mahatma Gandhi as the singular leader of India’s mass movement toward independence, the author aims to remind readers of the many other revolutionary figures who took part in India’s anticolonial debates alongside Gandhi. Indeed, in this book’s telling of the country’s colonial history, Gandhi was an exception among revolutionaries, as a string of more violent figures, including Prafulla Chandra Chaki and Khudiram Bose, were active in the British Raj. Verma makes a compelling case that the 1920s, in particular, were defined by a two-pronged approach to revolution in which Gandhi’s growing pacifist movement was counterbalanced by others who embraced more violent tactics. These approaches, which ranged from robberies to assassinations, sought to intensify mass disorder in the hope of making British rule untenable. However, poor farmers and workers who bore the brunt of British repression increasingly turned to Gandhi’s approach, which blended nonviolence (ahimsa) with staunchly anticolonial rhetoric that drew heavily on Indian national pride. Gandhi’s adoption of modest clothing, an austere lifestyle, and his rejection of the English language in his public remarks similarly broadened his support throughout the decade. Ultimately, though, Verma convincingly argues that both nonviolent and violent revolutionaries “could claim that they’d had a hand” in India’s independence, since part of Britain’s response to the violent tactics was to give Gandhi a seat at the negotiating table. Although the book’s historical details will be familiar to most readers, the author more than succeeds in his mission to challenge popular narratives of Indian independence, which focus almost exclusively on Gandhi while minimizing other figures’ work. The book’s solidly cited research is accompanied by an accessible writing style that avoids academic jargon while embracing Hindi terminology (a lengthy glossary is included).

An impressively researched, nuanced, and engaging survey of a key era in India’s history.