Passage I

The adoption of the Non-Cooperation Movement by the Congress gave it a new energy and from January 1921 it began to register considerable success all over the country. Gandhiji undertook a nation-wide tour during which he addressed hundreds of meetings and met a large number of political workers. In the first month, thousands of students left their educational institutions and joined more than 800 national schools and colleges that had sprung up all over the country. Gandhiji had promised Swaraj within a year, if his programme was adopted. The Non-Cooperation Movement demonstrated that it commanded the support and sympathy of vast sections of the Indian people. Its reach among many sections of Indian peasants, workers, artisans etc, had been demonstrated. The spatial spread of the movement was also nation-wide. Some areas were more active than others, but there were few that showed no signs of activity at all.

The capacity of the ’poor dumb millions’ of India to take part in modern nationalist politics was also demonstrated. This was the first time that nationalists from the towns, students from schools and colleges or even the educated and politically aware in the villages had made a serious attempt to bring the ideology and the movement into their midst.

The tremendous participation of different communities in the movement, and the maintenance of communal unity, despite the Malabar developments, was in itself no mean achievement. There is hardly any doubt that it was minority participation that gave the movement its truly mass character in many areas. And it was, indeed, unfortunate that this most positive feature of the movement was not to be repeated in later years once communalism began to take its toll. [324 words]

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from India’s Struggle for Independence1857-1947, by Bipin Chandra and Others, Penguin Books, 1989.]

The term ”poor dumb millions” refer to-