The Road to 15 August 1947: A Timeline of India's Freedom Struggle

India did not win its independence in a single stroke. It was won over ninety years, through armed revolt, petitions, boycotts, strikes, courts, newspapers, prisons and, above all, the patience of millions who were willing to be arrested rather than obey. This timeline follows the main line of that story.

1857: The first war of independence

On 10 May 1857 sepoys of the Bengal Army rose at Meerut, killed their officers and marched to Delhi, where they proclaimed the ageing Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar their leader. The revolt spread across the Gangetic plain. Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Tatya Tope, Nana Sahib, Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh and Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur led forces against the East India Company.

The rising was put down by 1858, with great brutality. Its political result was lasting: the Government of India Act 1858 ended Company rule and placed India directly under the British Crown. A Viceroy now governed in the Queen's name.

1885: A national platform

The Indian National Congress held its first session in Bombay in December 1885. Seventy-two delegates attended. Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee presided, and the retired civil servant Allan Octavian Hume had helped to organise it. For its first twenty years the Congress was a body of lawyers, teachers and journalists who petitioned for reform: more Indians in the civil service, lower taxes, a voice in the legislative councils.

Dadabhai Naoroji gave the movement its economic argument. His "drain theory" showed how wealth flowed out of India to Britain through salaries, pensions and home charges.

1905: Partition of Bengal and Swadeshi

In 1905 the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, divided Bengal. The official reason was administrative convenience. Indians read it as an attempt to divide Hindus and Muslims and to weaken the most politically active province. The response was the Swadeshi movement: a boycott of British cloth and goods, bonfires of foreign textiles, and new Indian schools, banks and mills. Rabindranath Tagore wrote songs for it, including "Amar Sonar Bangla".

The All-India Muslim League was founded at Dhaka in 1906. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 introduced separate electorates for Muslims, a decision that shaped the politics of the next four decades. The partition of Bengal was reversed in 1911, and the capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi.

1915 to 1919: Gandhi returns; Amritsar

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned from South Africa in January 1915 with a method he called satyagraha, the force of truth expressed through non-violent refusal. He tested it in India at Champaran in Bihar in 1917, on behalf of indigo cultivators, then at Kheda and Ahmedabad in 1918.

In 1916 the Congress and the Muslim League agreed a common programme in the Lucknow Pact. Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant ran Home Rule Leagues that carried the demand for self-government into small towns.

In March 1919 the Rowlatt Act allowed detention without trial. Gandhi called a nationwide hartal. On 13 April 1919, at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on an unarmed crowd in an enclosed garden. Official figures put the dead at 379; Indian estimates were far higher. Tagore returned his knighthood.

1920 to 1922: Non-Cooperation

The Non-Cooperation movement asked Indians to withdraw from the institutions of British rule: to leave government schools and courts, return titles, and boycott foreign cloth. It was joined to the Khilafat movement, bringing Hindus and Muslims into a common campaign on a scale not seen before. Tens of thousands were jailed.

In February 1922 a crowd at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces set fire to a police station, killing twenty-two policemen. Gandhi called the movement off. Many colleagues thought him wrong. He held that a movement which could not stay non-violent was not ready to win.

1928 to 1931: Simon Commission, Purna Swaraj, the Salt March

The Simon Commission of 1928, sent to review India's constitution, had no Indian member. It was met everywhere with black flags and the slogan "Simon, go back". Lala Lajpat Rai died after being struck by police during a protest at Lahore.

At its Lahore session in December 1929, with Jawaharlal Nehru as president, the Congress declared Purna Swaraj, complete independence, as its goal. On 26 January 1930 Indians across the country took a pledge of independence. Twenty years later that date was chosen for the Constitution to come into force.

On 12 March 1930 Gandhi left Sabarmati Ashram with seventy-eight companions and walked about 385 kilometres to Dandi on the Gujarat coast. On 6 April he picked up a lump of natural salt, breaking the law that made salt a government monopoly. The Salt March began the Civil Disobedience movement. Sarojini Naidu led the raid on the Dharasana salt works. Around sixty thousand people were imprisoned.

Revolutionaries followed a different road. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged at Lahore on 23 March 1931. Chandrashekhar Azad died in a gunfight at Allahabad the same year. Their courage made them heroes to a generation.

1935 to 1942: Provincial power and Quit India

The Government of India Act 1935 gave elected Indian ministries power in the provinces. Congress governments took office in most of them in 1937, the first practical experience of self-government for many Indian leaders. Much of the 1935 Act's structure would later pass into the Constitution.

When Britain declared India at war in 1939 without consulting Indian leaders, the Congress ministries resigned. The Cripps Mission of 1942 offered dominion status after the war; it was rejected. On 8 August 1942, at the Gowalia Tank maidan in Bombay, the Congress passed the Quit India resolution. Gandhi's message was "Do or Die". The entire leadership was arrested within hours, and the movement passed into the hands of students, workers, peasants and underground organisers such as Aruna Asaf Ali, Ram Manohar Lohia and Usha Mehta, who ran a secret Congress radio.

1943 to 1946: The INA and the final push

Subhas Chandra Bose, twice Congress president, escaped house arrest in 1941 and reached Germany, then South-East Asia. In October 1943 he proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India at Singapore and led the Indian National Army, which fought alongside Japanese forces in Burma and on the Manipur front. The public trials of INA officers at the Red Fort in 1945 and 1946 caused a wave of sympathy across India.

In February 1946 ratings of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay and other ports. For the British, it was a signal that the loyalty of the armed forces could no longer be assumed.

1946 to 1947: Independence and Partition

The Cabinet Mission of 1946 proposed a united India with strong provinces and a Constituent Assembly. The plan broke down amid growing conflict between the Congress and the Muslim League. The League's call for Direct Action in August 1946 was followed by terrible violence in Calcutta, then in Noakhali and Bihar.

On 3 June 1947 the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, announced that Britain would transfer power to two dominions, India and Pakistan. The Indian Independence Act received royal assent on 18 July 1947. At midnight on 14 to 15 August 1947 India became free. Nehru told the Constituent Assembly that India had made a "tryst with destiny".

Freedom came with Partition. Some twelve to fifteen million people were displaced, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million, were killed. Gandhi spent independence day in Calcutta, fasting and working for peace. He was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948.

Why it matters now

The freedom movement did not only remove a foreign government. It built the habits a democracy needs: mass participation, argument in public, respect for law even while breaking an unjust one, and the idea that every Indian, whatever their caste, creed or sex, was a citizen. The Constitution that followed wrote those habits into law. You can read it in full on our Constitution pages.