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This chapter discusses the anti-Simon agitation; the Nehru Report; Jinnah and the Fourteen Points; the Lahore Congress and Independence Day; the first two phases of the Civil Disobedience Movement; the Round Table Conferences; the problem of untouchability; and militant revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. The agitation against the Simon Commission was a turning point in India’s struggle for freedom. It led to a second great mass movement that demonstrated the country’s fixed determination to be free from foreign rule. This showing of strength compelled the British government to deal with Indian leaders as equals. Negotiations begun during this period laid the constitutional foundations of independent India. In 1934, a hush seemed again to have fallen over the country. The Civil Disobedience police repression had silenced the physical-force movement.

This chapter describes the situation after the Civil Disobedience Movement; the Government of India Act; Indian reactions to the new Act; provincial elections and the formation of ministries; the Muslims and the new ministries; the work of the Congress ministries; the rise of the Congress Left Wing; and the struggle in the states. The Civil Disobedience Movement demonstrated that the Indian people were willing to struggle and suffer to reach their goal of independence. But the British still held power, and they were determined to keep it as long as they could. The Government of India Act was the longest piece of legislation ever passed by the British Parliament. It was intended to be the basis of an enduring Anglo-Indian Raj; but in the event only part of it was put into effect, and that part lasted only two years.

In this chapter, Harless asks about the feasibility of continuing, year in and year out, to participate in the kind of public actions of resistance that the Berrigan brothers have become well known for through the years. What good does it do? Do not such actions fall on deaf ears, and has not the American empire just grown stronger since the Vietnam War? Harless’ answer to this question lies in seeing civil disobedience not just as a tactic for achieving political goals but as flowing from one’s spiritual calling. Rather, the goal of non-violent direct action has as much to do with the change it brings about in the protestor or resistor as it does with the change it produces in society. Civil disobedience seeks to be a path towards being human, to “being a man,” or “being a woman.”

This chapter explores the work of Henry David Thoreau, a figure who celebrates the benefits of extracting oneself from political life. It argues that Thoreau’s writings about exit reveal the possibility of a expressive exit, that is, a departure that is political in and of itself. For Thoreau, leaving a political community had the potential to illuminate the iniquitous, evil political agreements and institutions at its core. Thoreau was centrally concerned with the American institution of slavery; therefore, he frequently linked leaving with abolitionism in his writings. But his writings provide a more general understanding of the potentially disruptive effects of leaving in an expressive and ostentatious way, one that draws public attention to the exit itself and its connection with moral injustice.

This chapter describes Margaret Fuller and the issue of women's rights in her work, although she did not complain directly of slave power censorship, but she was consumed by the question of language's efficacy and sought a renovated tongue on behalf of her sex. “Her acts are bookish,” Poe says, “and her books are less thoughts than acts.” Fuller's writings have been portrayed as anything but dense and often knotted in their constructions, allusive, crammed with quotations, many in foreign tongues, and concluding with not one but eight arcane appendices. How could such an irremediably “bookish” piece of writing be construed as an action? The description may seem mocking, but Poe expresses respect for his subject—a figure of “high genius,” he calls her—and if we read his words sympathetically, they contain some important insights about the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Fuller possesses a polemical strain, and her feminist classic, which helped catalyze the women's rights movement that gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848, had a greater influence on antebellum culture than the unread “Civil Disobedience.” This chapter looks at Fuller's commitment to scholarship or literary criticism as a mode of communication that, far from being an encumbrance on the present.

Pro-life and animal rights activists may have reasons of principle to oppose all uses of violence to advance their respective causes, but it is not immediately clear why, if abortion is murder and animal exploitation is slavery and murder, violent opposition cannot be justified. Nevertheless, violence will generally be counterproductive and given the arbitrariness of its choice of targets, cannot even be justified as a theoretical matter for either movement.

The chapter demonstrates the intellectual sources from which Gandhi and King drew their inspiration; besides the external sources, both of them seem to have drawn more on the indigenous intellectual sources: for Gandhi, it was the Indian religious and other classical texts while King focused more on the New Testament. Furthermore, in formulating their political strategies, they depended a great deal on their colleagues who held similar ideological predisposition: The chapter thus argues that without their equally committed partners it would not have been possible for them to achieve what they sought to achieve. What was unique in their endeavour was a very creative blending of religion with non-violence which acted most effectively in non-violent civil disobedience against racial atrocities and colonial exploitation in the US and India respectively.

This chapter studies the organization of Congress politics in Orissa during the Gandhian movements of the 1920–40s. It argues that these movements fed upon mainly local social and economic issues, and that Oriya nationalism had a limited popular appeal in the local-level political context. Through an analysis of the reasons for Congress’ success in peasant mobilization as well as in the elections of 1937, and its track record of governance during 1937–9 and also in the aftermath of World War II this chapter shows how the Congress achieved a broad measure of popular support in these decades by opposing the rentier interest that had championed Oriya nationalism. It also challenges the picture of an unqualified Congress ascendancy and critiques the record of the party’s peasant populism by showing how the class interests of Orissa’s Congressmen compromised their anti-landlord stance at crucial moments, and how the experience of governance bred factionalism within Congress itself.

This chapter considers Gandhian politics in the era of non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements, 1920–35. The first section examines the impact of Gandhi and the politics and the effort of C.R. Das to devise an alternative strategy in the freedom movement, such as the Swaraj Party. The second section is on biplabi activities, which began long before Gandhism came on the scene and continued till the late 1930s. The revolutionary nationalists’ conflict with Gandhi’s non-violence was obvious. However, in course of the 1920s and 1930s many biplabis began to eschew terrorism and some joined the Congress and some others, the Left. The last section looks at Communism or variants of Socialism that begins to be influential in Bengal after the Russian Revolution. However, the Left was quite marginal at this time, and the movement is of interest chiefly because of its importance in future history.

The arrests of the nationalist leaders and other repressive measures intended to suppress the Non-cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements made the political situation bitter and tense. The internment of the Ali Brothers added to the sore of the Treaty of Sevres. At the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress at Nagpur in 1920 a resolution was moved, which defined the goal of the Congress as ‘the attainment of Swarajya’. Gandhi toured the country for months at the time to engage with the country’s populace and to educate the public about the absolute necessity of preserving an atmosphere of non-violence in the country.

This essay examines the interaction between different sections of Bombay’s working population and the Indian National Congress during the first two years of the Civil Disobedience movement. It looks at this engagement primarily through the vernacular archives, and explores the divergent, sometimes conflicting, trends in the articulations of nationalism in the Civil Disobedience movement and the Congress. This essay draws upon Masselos’ work and focuses on the spatial templates of the Civil Disobedience movement. It maps the relationship between the functioning of the local units of the Congress and the political infrastructure of the city’s mill districts. It argues that there was a co-relation between their mobilization practices in the city’s working-class neighborhoods and their attempt to appropriate social spaces.

Spaces of dissent explores the rapidly evolving space of digital activism, or hacktivism, through the example of a group of hackers called Telecomix, who served as a form of tech support for the Arab Spring. Such cyber activists have taken on a role of social and cultural provocateurs; they are dissenting actors in a culture that is increasingly hostile to protest. What’s more, they see, observe, and quickly react in ways that boggle the state and corporations—all of this instrumentalized by digital technology. This argument is grounded in an exploration of hactivism as a form of civil disobedience, though one that looks markedly different, and is potential more powerful, than the placards and megaphones of old. The chapter details how the state has responded to the perceived threat of online civil disobedience through its prosecutions against Chelsea Manning and Anonymous, and argues that their excessiveness stems form a paranoia over losing control. Finally, it explores the costs to society when we eliminate social deviancy.

This chapter is concerned with the period of the Civil Disobedience campaign following Gandhi’s march to Dandi. During this period, Kumarappa is thrown into the centre of the political storm. This chapter details his critical role as editor of Gandhi’s weekly Young India during a crucial juncture in Indian history. Kumarappa’s emergence as a thinker in his own right is seen in this chapter. Additionally, this chapter details Kumarappa’s contributions to the Congress position on the future of financial obligations between Britain and India, which had a great bearing on the economics of the transfer of power in 1947. Finally, Kumarappa’s key role as the chief accountant for Congress relief efforts in Bihar following the 1934 earthquake is described. It is also during this period that Kumarappa’s position as a freedom fighter is sealed with jail terms.