Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c5.30

c5.30

Overall, the civil disobedience campaigns against the new British rulers, including the one documented in this volume, did not succeed. The reasons for this must be manifold. Partly, the effectiveness of such protests was dependent upon there being a commonality of values between the rulers and the ruled. With the replacement of the indigenous rulers by the British (whether *de jure* or *de facto* is hardly material) such commonality of values disappeared. The British rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century did not at all share the same moral and psychological world as their subjects. Over time, what James Mill termed the ‘general practice’ of ‘insurrection against oppression’²¹ which had prevailed up to the period of British rule, was gradually replaced by ‘unconditional submission to public authority.’ In the early 1900s, it seemed to Gopal Krishna Gokhale ‘as though the people existed simply to obey.’²²