Basically, modern Indian nationalism arose to meet the challenge of foreign domination. The very conditions of British rule helped the growth of national sentiment among the Indian people.

It was British rule and its direct and indirect consequences which provided the material, and the moral and intellectual conditions for the development of a national movement in India.

The root of the matter lay in the clash of interests of the Indian people with British interests in India. The British had conquered India to promote their own interests and they ruled it primarily with that purpose in view, often subordinating Indian welfare to British gain.

The Indians gradually realised that their interests were being sacrificed to those of Lancashire manufacturers and other dominant British interests.

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The foundations of the Indian nationalist movement lay in the fact that increasingly British rule had become the major cause of India’s economic backwardness.

It became the major barrier to India’s further economic, social, cultural, intellectual and political development. Moreover, this fact began to be recognised by an increasingly larger number of Indians.

Every class, every section of Indian society, gradually discovered that its interests were suffering at the hands of the foreign rulers.

The peasant saw that the government took away a large part of his produce as land revenue; that the government and its machinery the police, the courts, the officials favored and protected the zamindars and landlords.

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Who rack-rented him, and the merchants and moneylenders, who cheated and exploited him in diverse ways and who took his land away from him.

Whenever the peasant struggled against landlord and moneylender oppression, the police and the army suppressed him in the name of law and order.

The artisan or the handicraftsman saw that the foreign regime had helped foreign competition ruin him and had done nothing to rehabilitate him.

Later, in the twentieth century, the worker in modern factories mines, and plantations found that, in spite of lip sympathy, the government sided with the capitalists, especially the foreign capitalists.

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Whenever he tried to organise trade unions to improve his lot through strikes, demonstrations, and other struggles, government machinery was freely used against him.

Moreover, he soon realised that the growing unemployment could be checked only by rapid industrialisation which only an independent government could bring about.

Other sections of Indian societies were no less dissatisfied. The rising intelligentsia the educated Indians used their newly acquired modern knowledge to understand the sad economic and political condition of their country.

Those who had earlier, as in 1857, supported British rule in the hope that, though alien, it would modernise and industrialise the country were gradually disappointed.

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Economically, they had hoped that British capitalism would help develop India’s productive forces as it had done at home.

Instead, they found that British policies in India, guided by British capitalists at home, were keeping the country economically backward or underdeveloped and checking the development of its productive forces.

Politically, educated Indians found that the British had abandoned all previous pretensions of guiding India towards self-government. Most of the British officials and political leaders openly declared that the British were in India to stay.

Moreover, instead of increasing the freedom of speech, of the press, and of the individual, the government increasingly restricted them. British officials and writers declared Indians unfit for democracy or self-government.

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In the field of culture, the rulers were increasingly taking a negative and even hostile attitude towards higher education and the spread of modern ideas.

The rising Indian capitalist class was slow in developing a national political consciousness. But it too gradually saw that it was suffering at the hands of imperialism. Its growth was severely checked by the trade, tariff, taxation, and transport policies of the government.

As a new and weak class, it needed active government help to counterbalance many of its weaknesses. But no such help was given.

Instead, the government and its bureaucracy favoured foreign capitalists who came to India with their vast resources and appropriated the limited industrial field.

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Indian capitalists were particularly opposed to the strong competition from foreign capitalists. The Indian capitalists also, therefore, realised that there existed a contradiction between imperialism and their own independent growth, and that only a national government would create conditions for the rapid development of Indian trade and industries.

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the zamindars, the landlords, and the princes were the only section of Indian society whose interests coincided with those of the foreign rulers and who, therefore, on the whole supported foreign rule until the end. But even from these classes, many individuals joined the national movement.

In the prevailing nationalist atmosphere, patriotism appealed to many. Further, the policies of racial dominance and discrimination appalled and aroused every thinking and self-respecting Indian, to whichever class he might belong.

Most of all, the foreign character of the British regime in itself produced a nationalist reaction, since foreign domination invariably generates patriotic sentiments in the hearts of a subject people.

To sum up, it was as a result of the intrinsic nature of foreign ‘imperialism and its harmful impact on the lives of the Indian people that a powerful anti-imperialist movement gradually arose and developed in India.

This movement was a national movement because it united people from different classes and sections of society, who sank their mutual differences to unite against the common enemy.

Nationalist sentiments grew easily among the people because India was unified and welded into a nation during the nineteenth and twentieth century’s.

The British had gradually introduced a uniform and modern system of government throughout the country and thus unified it administratively.

The destruction of the rural and local self-sufficient economy and the introduction of modern trade and industries on an all-India scale had increasingly made India’s economic life a single whole and interlinked the economic fate of people living in different parts of the country.

For example, if famine or scarcity occurred in one part of India, prices and availability of foodstuffs were affected in all other parts of the country too.

Furthermore, the introduction of the railways, telegraph and a unified postal system had brought the different parts of the country together and promoted mutual contact among the people, especially among the leaders.

Here again, the very existence of foreign rule that oppressed all the Indian people irrespective of their social class, caste, religion or region acted as a unifying factor.

All over the country people saw that they were suffering at the hands of a common enemy British rule. On the one hand, the emergence of the Indian nation was a major factor in the rise of nationalism; on the other hand, the anti- imperialist struggle and the feeling of solidarity born in its course contributed powerfully to the making of the Indian nation.