(Published in Mint Lounge, October 17 2026)
By 1896, B.G. Tilak was an impatient man. The Indian National Congress, of which he was a leading figure, had for over 10 years been appealing to the better angels of the British. Its dominant faction was moderate to a fault, periodically singing praises of Queen Victoria to avoid the charge of sedition. Indeed, one elder statesman advised Indians to be “forbearing” and to approach the Raj with “diffidence”, like good, unthreatening children. But for Tilak—bolder, more direct, less afraid—this would not do, especially when the aforementioned better angels were nowhere in sight. All this polite beseeching, he held, was in British eyes akin to the “sound of a gnat”, sneeringly waved away. What was needed was “to force our grievances into (the ruling power’s) ears by strong constitutional means.” In other words, mass agitation. And that is exactly what Tilak would champion, in the process changing the course of the freedom struggle.
Protest has been a part of human society for as long as societies have existed. Not everyone likes it, nor do its methods attract universal approval. The hunger strike, for instance, is one of its more controversial modes. Some see it as a legitimate technique, others as blackmail. Sometimes the same person could view it as both. Gandhi, for instance, took the idea of fasting-unto-death to towering new heights vis-à-vis the British. Yet when a Congressman, Manchersha Avari, went on a hunger strike for an “improper cause”, the Mahatma wrote, “let him die”. In that sense, hunger strikes depend on how far its designated targets care. In 1603, priests in Kerala’s Trikkandiyur prevailed in a dispute with a ruler after an eight-day pattini (literally, “starving”)—to the Hindu rajah, the death of Brahmins was a sin. But when Brahmins in 14th century Delhi paused their eating to resist Firuz Shah Tughluq’s levy of the jizya (tax) on them, the sultan snorted with indifference.
Of course, a protest of the few is typically less powerful than large-scale collective action—as we see to this day, strength in numbers matters when confronting injustice. In 1830-31, peasants in South Canara faced a double whammy: economic depression and high taxes. Their appeals to the British went nowhere. Until, that is, they began to converge in koots (grand assemblies) to launch a programme of civil disobedience. There was some violence, and there was a measure of clamping down by the area’s colonial authorities. But in the end, it was the officialdom that blinked. To be clear, the peasants were not unreasonable: they paid through the nose, sold valuables, and did their best to meet the state’s revenue demands. Only when the government shut its ears and eyes to their grievances altogether, pushing them to the wall, did they pick the nuclear option of the koots.
But if this here was a suspension of the political contract between the rulers and the ruled, there were also cases where government was boycotted altogether. For instance, faced with bad terms and working conditions in and around British Madras in 1778, weavers not only prevented the sale of yarn to the East India Company for seven months but actually departed the company’s territorial jurisdiction. In 18th century Rajasthan, artisans, potters, and craftsmen not only threatened local feudal lords with flight but indeed migrated elsewhere when not treated with dignity. In most such cases, it was the high-handedness of those in power that provoked trouble. To quote the scholar Jon Wilson, “stable authority depended on give and take”. Most protests exploded because rulers “thought they were the sole judges of what was just and good, and tried, catastrophically, to impose their will without talking to those they ruled”.
Central also to the act of protest is its moral validity. Those Madras weavers, for example, had their demands inscribed on cadjans, and referred to these in negotiations with the British. Those pieces of dried leaf drew force from the fact that they embodied a combined voice. The koots in South Canara attracted thousands of peasants; but they congregated around temples, banking on religious legitimacy in standing up to overwhelming political might. Even the Congress’s moderates—much criticised for their gentlemanly expostulations against the Raj—derived strength from a lofty document. Queen Victoria after the Great Rebellion of 1857 had issued a proclamation with many guarantees; Indians protested everything from income tax to imperial hubris by quoting her words back to the Raj. It was somewhat like saying, “You might have the power, but I am in the right”—a principle protestors brandishing the Indian Constitution today also assert.
That said, protest and defiance of authority always come at a cost. Facing the wrath of the state is never easy; leaving a place you called home to start anew elsewhere is full of uncertainties. Historian Nandita Prasad Sahai, for instance, records a late 18th-century Rajasthan case where construction workers facing coercion abandoned their village in protest. But fearing violence and punishment, it was done in haste. In the panic an infant died, and a woman suffered a miscarriage. In the British period, Tilak agitated on the ground against the Raj; he thundered in his speeches and used his newspapers to rouse up people against the fundamental injustice of the existing political arrangement. For this he would wind up in jail for years. Yet in the end, it must be said, he scored a victory—by suffering for his people, Tilak went from a regional politician to, as a colonial official grudgingly put it, “little less than the reincarnation of a deity.”
Tellingly, because protests are also often a threat to the status quo, they must tackle naysayers, critics, and sniggers in addition to their chief opponents. The moderate Congress, even with its tenderest propositions on democracy, faced an avalanche of criticism from fellow Indians invested in the existing way of things. One group styling itself the United Indian Patriotic Association accused the nascent body of trying to seed “misrule and anarchy”. When Tilak centred street agitation, moderate Congressmen in turn accused him of inaugurating dangerous experiments for which India was not prepared. And when Gandhi thereafter turned Indians’ shared powerlessness into a source of invigoration, his methods invited criticism from white men and brown both. Hefty prices were paid and these figures faced all kinds of challenges—but in the end, we all know from history books which side prevailed.
