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Indian Freedom Struggle: Timeline, Movements and Leaders
On the night of 14 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru told the Constituent Assembly in Delhi that India was about to “awake to life and freedom”. That moment closed the Indian freedom struggle, a resistance to British rule in India that had run, in one form or another, for close to two hundred years. It involved sepoys and peasants, lawyers and students, tribal communities and princely families, and it changed shape many times along the way.
Below, the struggle is followed in order, from the early revolts to 1947. It is one of the main chapters of modern Indian history and a regular in school and UPSC exams.
Timeline of the Indian freedom struggle
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1757 | Battle of Plassey gives the East India Company political control of Bengal |
| 1857 | Revolt of 1857, called the First War of Independence |
| 1885 | Indian National Congress founded in Bombay |
| 1905 | Partition of Bengal and the Swadeshi movement |
| 1917 | Champaran Satyagraha |
| 1919 | Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre |
| 1920-22 | Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements |
| 1929 | Lahore Congress adopts Purna Swaraj (complete independence) |
| 1930 | Dandi March and the Civil Disobedience Movement |
| 1931 | Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru hanged; Gandhi-Irwin Pact |
| 1942 | Quit India Movement |
| 1943 | Subhas Chandra Bose forms the Azad Hind government in Singapore |
| 1947 | Partition and independence on 15 August |
Early resistance before 1857
Resistance began soon after the East India Company won at Plassey in 1757. The Sannyasi and Fakir rebellions in Bengal, the Polygar wars in Tamil country and Kittur Chennamma’s revolt in Karnataka in 1824 were local fights against Company power, and in 1806 sepoys at Vellore mutinied over new dress rules. Tribal communities rose too, most famously in the Santhal Hul of 1855-56, led by the brothers Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu.
The Revolt of 1857
The revolt began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, when sepoys rose against their officers and marched to Delhi, where they declared the aged Bahadur Shah Zafar their emperor. The spark was a cartridge believed to be greased with cow and pig fat, but behind it lay years of anger over annexations and high land revenue.
The fighting spread across north and central India. Rani Lakshmibai held Jhansi, Nana Sahib and Tantia Tope fought around Kanpur, Begum Hazrat Mahal led the resistance in Lucknow, and Kunwar Singh fought in Bihar. Read more in our biography of Rani Lakshmibai and the Revolt of 1857.
The British crushed the revolt by 1858. Company rule ended and the Crown took direct control under the Government of India Act of 1858. Later nationalists drew on its memory, and V.D. Savarkar’s 1909 book named it the “First War of Indian Independence”.
The Congress, moderates and extremists (1885-1915)
The Indian National Congress held its first session in Bombay in December 1885, with W.C. Bonnerjee as president and the retired British official A.O. Hume as one of its organisers. Its early leaders, the moderates, included Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. They worked through petitions and speeches, and Naoroji’s “drain theory” showed how Britain drew wealth out of India.
In 1905 Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal. The protest that followed, the Swadeshi movement, asked people to boycott British cloth and buy Indian goods, and it brought a more assertive group of leaders to the front: Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, known as Lal-Bal-Pal. The Congress split at Surat in 1907, the All-India Muslim League was founded at Dhaka in 1906, and the partition of Bengal was reversed in 1911.
Gandhi and the mass movements (1915-1934)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 with a method he called satyagraha, non-violent resistance based on truth. He tried it first on local issues: indigo farmers at Champaran in 1917, then Kheda and the Ahmedabad mill workers in 1918.
In 1919 the Rowlatt Act allowed detention without trial. On 13 April 1919, troops under General Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds. The massacre turned many moderate Indians against British rule for good.
Non-Cooperation and Khilafat (1920-22)
Gandhi joined hands with the Khilafat movement, led by the Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali, in one of the high points of Hindu-Muslim cooperation. Indians were asked to give up British titles and boycott government schools, courts and foreign cloth. When a crowd burned a police station at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, killing more than twenty policemen, Gandhi called the movement off.
Purna Swaraj and Civil Disobedience (1929-34)
At its Lahore session in December 1929, under Jawaharlal Nehru as president, the Congress declared Purna Swaraj, complete independence, as its goal, and 26 January 1930 was celebrated as Independence Day. On 12 March 1930 Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram with 78 followers and walked to Dandi on the Gujarat coast, where on 6 April he picked up salt in defiance of the salt law. The movement spread from Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars in the northwest to Sarojini Naidu’s march on the Dharasana salt works. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1931 paused it, and it was finally withdrawn in 1934.
Revolutionaries and armed resistance
Alongside the non-violent movements, revolutionaries believed that only force would drive the British out. Khudiram Bose was hanged in 1908 at the age of eighteen, and groups like the Anushilan Samiti in Bengal and the Ghadar Party abroad planned armed risings.
In north India, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association drew in Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Sukhdev and Rajguru. After Lala Lajpat Rai died following a police lathi charge during the Simon Commission protests in 1928, Bhagat Singh and his comrades shot the police officer Saunders in Lahore. In April 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw harmless bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly and courted arrest. Azad died in a shoot-out at Alfred Park in Allahabad in February 1931, and Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged on 23 March 1931.
Subhas Chandra Bose, twice Congress president, broke with Gandhi’s methods and escaped from India in 1941. In 1943 he took charge of the Indian National Army in Southeast Asia and formed the Azad Hind government in Singapore. The INA did not win its campaign, but the 1945-46 trials of its officers at the Red Fort caused a wave of public anger. These are only some of the Indian freedom fighters who gave their lives or careers to the cause.
Quit India and the road to 1947
When the Second World War began in 1939, the Viceroy declared India at war without consulting Indian leaders, and the Congress ministries elected in 1937 resigned. After the Cripps Mission failed in 1942, the Congress passed the Quit India resolution in Bombay on 8 August 1942, and Gandhi told the country to “do or die”. Almost the entire leadership was arrested the next morning. Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the flag at Gowalia Tank, Usha Mehta ran a secret Congress radio, and Ballia, Satara and Midnapore set up parallel governments.
By 1946 Britain was exhausted by the war, and the naval mutiny in Bombay that February showed that it could no longer count on Indian forces. The Cabinet Mission failed to agree a plan for a united India, and communal violence followed Direct Action Day in August 1946. Lord Mountbatten’s plan of 3 June 1947 proposed partition, and the Indian Independence Act was passed by the British Parliament in July.
Independence and Partition (1947)
India became independent on 15 August 1947, and Pakistan a day earlier. Partition displaced somewhere between ten and fifteen million people and killed somewhere between a few hundred thousand and two million people by different estimates, mostly in Punjab and Bengal. The work of uniting more than five hundred princely states then fell largely to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V.P. Menon.
If you want a single place to see this history in objects, the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad and the Cellular Jail in Port Blair, where many revolutionaries were imprisoned, are two of the most affecting sites to visit.
Read Next
- Bhagat Singh: The Life, Beliefs, and Legacy of a Young Revolutionary
- Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel: The Iron Man Who Held India Together
- Mohammad Ali Jauhar: The Freedom Fighter Who Fought With a Pen
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is called the Father of the Nation?
Mahatma Gandhi is widely called the Father of the Nation. Subhas Chandra Bose is often credited with first addressing him that way in a 1944 radio broadcast from Singapore.
Why did Gandhi call off the Non-Cooperation Movement?
He withdrew it after the violence at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, because he felt the movement had abandoned non-violence and the country was not yet ready for mass civil disobedience.
