Discuss the revolutionary movement in Bengal
Answers
Explanation:
Political violence has always been an integral part of Bengal’s history. The forms of such violence – over time – have mutated and transformed themselves. In the series Bengal: Genealogies of Violence, The Wire attempts to capture some of the milestones that mark the narratives of political bloodshed spanning more than eight decades. Read the first part here.
Revolutionary nationalism, or the “terrorist movement” as it was once known, was of one of the several political strands that went into the making of the Indian national movement. Maharashtra, Bengal and the Punjab were the nerve centres of a pan-Indian network of revolutionary societies that, emerging independently in the early 20th century, often collaborated with one another in the cause of Indian independence.
Revolutionary nationalism emerged as a potent political force in Bengal in the wake of the Swadeshi Movement in the first decade of the 20th century and thereafter it worked alongside mainstream nationalism that was represented by the Congress party, sometimes in cooperation, at other times along parallel tracks. The Swadeshi Movement was the expression of the outrage triggered in Bengal by the partition of the province of Bengal in 1905. Though the colonial masters cited administrative reasons, the Bengalis were convinced that the Partition was a Machiavellian move to destroy the unity of the Bengali people, whose political activism the government had come to fear.
There was now an increasing sense of impatience among sections of Bengalis, including some politicians within the Congress, because they felt that the official Congress policy of pleading with and petitioning the government for reforms, which was rejected as “mendicancy”, had proven to be completely ineffective. The Swadeshi movement, which swept up the people of Bengal, especially the educated and the politically conscious, in a tide of nationalist emotion, is today remembered as the first mass movement, a forerunner to Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of mass involvement that altered the structure, form and tone of Indian nationalist politics
From Bengal??