The many voices of the Quit India Movement

The Quit India Movement, launched on August 8, 1942, stands out in the metanarratives of the Indian Freedom Struggle. It was the last of the major anti-colonial agitations launched under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. The extent of spontaneous public mobilisation, the severity of the government crackdown, and the high level of violence that accompanied the agitation, all make it distinctive in the history of nationalist politics in India.
The larger geopolitics in which the agitation was embedded is important. Its launch is inseparable from the decisive setback European imperialism encountered at the hands of the Japanese military, with the collapse of the French in Indochina, the Dutch in what is now Indonesia, and the British in Malaya and Burma. To many, this heralded a major political change in India. Certainly, both panic and a sense of doom that Britain’s back was to the wall explain the ferocity of the colonial government’s repressive measures after August 1942.
For the nationalist leadership, a long hibernation followed. Mahatma Gandhi was jailed in the Aga Khan’s palace on the outskirts of Poona and freed only in May 1944. The Indian National Congress leaders and activists also faced extended jail terms across the country. Its principal leaders — the dozen-strong Congress Working Committee (CWC) — were jailed in the Ahmednagar Fort, a medieval structure housing a military garrison (which it still does). Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, AK Azad, JB Kripalani and others would spend, in all, some 32 months here with only each other for company.
This was a like-minded group in its broad thinking, in that they had been in the Congress for many years, and the circumstances of their confinement made for strengthening this sense of camaraderie. It was a stressful time in personal terms. Mahadev Desai, Mahatma Gandhi’s much-loved secretary, died on August 15, 1942, within a week of their arrival at the Aga Khan’s palace. Kasturba Gandhi would also die there. Maulana Azad’s wife died in April 1943; he learned of it only sometime later. Many detainees were in bad health, and nursing each other, supporting each other to overcome loneliness and depression, and, finally, just being together in a closed space for so long, cut off from all outside contact, further enhanced their sense of fraternity.
Yet, inevitably, they would get on each other’s nerves. Personal differences were further exacerbated, and pre-existing factions on political issues were further consolidated. How far should they have gone to defy the colonial State? Some felt that going all out on an agitational mode in the midst of a war creeping ever closer to India was a wrong judgement call and a costly mistake. This moderate voice was in the minority in the Congress High Command. There may have been other takers, but in the inner dynamics of the Congress in 1940-42, there was also a general inclination to go along with whatever the Mahatma decided.
Maulana Azad and Asaf Ali were amongst this moderate group — insufficiently powerful to influence events and always vulnerable to the charge that they were only the Muslim shopfront for the Congress. Their concern also was that by isolating itself in an oppositional mode, the Congress was allowing the Muslim League to demonstrate its value as a loyal British ally and thereby establish itself as politically strong. Underwriting this was the larger question of how the Congress should approach the Muslim League, and whether a different kind of federal thinking could accommodate the Muslim League’s aspirations.
Ahmednagar Fort, a Nizam Shahi structure, was, therefore, the venue of many acrimonious, but ultimately inconclusive, discussions between 1942 and 1945. A record survives in the form of the prisoners’ diaries, recollections and memoirs. Reading them decades later, it is possible to see it as an ensemble of how conflicted and different ideas of India could exist even within a largely like-minded group.
Apart from the geopolitics, the high politics, and the internal dynamics within the Congress, there are other voices and stories that emerged from August 1942. To Asaf Ali, incarceration for such a long time during a critical period was the result of wrong tactics. He was essentially a constitutionalist and an incrementalist and had been so from the early 1920s. To him, the way forward on the Hindu-Muslim issue was negotiating with Jinnah and the Muslim League, since choosing from a menu of bad options was preferable to being left later with no choices or being overwhelmed by events. That he was married to a Hindu — Aruna Asaf Ali — marked him out as being a Muslim Congressman with a difference.
In Ahmednagar Fort, apart from all the political issues and disputes, what weighed on him the most was the welfare of his wife. Aruna Asaf Ali nee Ganguly had defied custom and family in September 1928 by marrying at 19, a Muslim lawyer 20 years her senior. Since then, she followed the well-trodden path of being a supportive wife. She had been jailed multiple times while not showing any sign that she would move beyond the Congress toolkit of peaceful non-cooperation.
In August 1942, all this changed. Aruna went underground even as her husband and other CWC members were being arrested. Thereafter, for almost three years, she remained a wanted figure by the police and was charged as being responsible for various acts of violence against the State. Appeals to her by her husband and other Congress leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, to surrender were to no avail. In brief, she had changed.
If, to Asaf Ali, the Quit India Agitation was an extreme posture that should have been avoided, to Aruna, it was the opposite. August 1942 was that pure moment, she wrote, when “the Indian came nearest to perfection”. Hers was a radically different vision of how the nation should be constituted. To Aruna, this was the time when a hitherto unacknowledged mass of people had seized the initiative into their own hands, “a day on which our passion for freedom burnt at its whitest”. There was little prospect of these conflicting views being reconciled, and amongst the many things that irreversibly changed from August 1942 onward, was Asaf Ali’s marriage.
From late 1945 onwards, a new trajectory emerged in the national movement that ended finally with freedom, and Partition, in 1947. If both these end-states had a long prehistory and gestation, it was, to a very great extent, in the crucial period since August 1942 that the new architecture for South Asia was, in fact, forged.
TCA Raghavan’s latest book is Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle (Juggernaut, 2024). The views expressed are personal