The British Committee of the Indian National Congress,1889-1921

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

This book is about an important aspect of the Indian national movement on which not much has been written so far. How and when did the Indian people realize the need to conduct a parallel constitutional agitation in Britain for the redress of their grievances? How did the British Committee of the Indian National Congress come to be established? What were its objects and methods of work? What kind of a relationship did it have with the national organization in India? How did the Moderates and the Extremists view the British Committee? When and why was the Committee disbanded? Was Mahatma Gandhi's non- co-operation movement responsible for the demise of the British Committee? What was the British Committee's contribution to the Indian struggle for Swaraj?

Answers to these and similar other questions have been attempted by Dr Prabha Ravi Shankar in this book which is the first comprehensive and definitive history of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress.

Dr Prabha Ravi Shankar, M.Phil., Ph.D. (University of Mumbai), is Associate Professor at the Post-Graduate Studies and Research Department of History, S.N.D.T. Women's University, Mumbai. She has published a number of research papers on the political and social history of modern India in reputable journals.

Dr Prabha Ravi Shankar is currently engaged in writing a biography of G.A. Natesan (1873- 1949), a noted politician and publisher of Madras.

Though a great deal has been written on the Indian nationalist movement' and the Indian National Congress, sufficient attention has not been paid to the British Committee of the Congress which was an auxiliary in England of the national organization in India from 1889 to 1921. This has been mainly due to the fact that the records of the Committee were until recently not available. These records came to India only after 1921, when the Committee was dissolved, and were deposited in the office of the All-India Congress Committee at Allahabad. Later, when the office of the A.I.C.C. was shifted to New Delhi, they came to 7 Jantar Mantar Road in the national capital.

William Wedderburn in his biography of Allan Octavian Hume dealt briefly with the propaganda activities of the British Committee, but his work was more in the nature of a tribute to Hume. Margot Morrow, who did a London University Ph.D. thesis on the British Committee in 1977, was not aware of the records of the Committee. Harish Kaushik, who did use the records of the Committee, could not do full justice to them. S.R. Mehrotra, was the first historian who dealt ably and critically with these records in the first volume of his history of the Indian National Congress. But as that volume stopped at 1918, he did not cover the last three crucial years of the existence of the Committee.