NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 9 The Nationalist Agenda (the Bande Mataram daily) — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 50 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Why do you think the Bande Mataram daily avoided using the word ‘independence’?

Answer

Because the word was dangerous in law, and because a vaguer word was more useful in politics. Two reasons, and the chapter gives the evidence for both.

1. Sedition. Under colonial law it was a crime to write anything “promoting sedition or rebellion against the authority of a state or monarch” (the chapter’s own margin note, p. 46). The chapter shows exactly how that worked: Tilak was first prosecuted in 1897 for articles “which incited violence”, “although there was no evidence”; he was jailed again in 1908 for sedition because of his articles in Kesari, in a trial the chapter calls “rushed and unfair”; and Bande Mataram itself “was suppressed while the Alipore trial went on”. A newspaper that printed the word ‘independence’ in plain type would have been shut down and its editors jailed within weeks — and then it could not spread the idea at all.

2. Reach. In 1906 the Congress had just adopted Swaraj, and the chapter tells us it “was not defined — it was understood to have a range of meanings, from self-rule within the British Empire to full independence.” That vagueness was not an accident. A paper arguing for ‘absolute national autonomy’ could be read approvingly by a Moderate who wanted dominion-style self-government and by a Nationalist who wanted the British gone. ‘Independence’ would have split the readership on day one.

The technique: Say the strongest possible thing in words the law finds hard to prosecute. ‘Autonomy’ sounds like an administrative arrangement; ‘absolute’ and ‘national’ quietly remove every British role from it. The meaning is complete independence; the vocabulary is respectable.

Note: This is our reading of the chapter’s evidence, not a statement the newspaper made about itself. The chapter invites you to think it out, and the sedition prosecutions are the strongest clue it gives you.

Q2.

Comment on the phrase ‘absolute national autonomy’ in the above quotation from a Bande Mataram article.

Answer

Read the three words separately and the phrase turns out to mean complete independence, with nothing left over for Britain.

Autonomy — self-government; the power to make your own decisions.
National — belonging to the whole nation, not to a province or a community. It is a claim on behalf of India as one people.
Absolute — the decisive word. Autonomy can be partial: a legislative council with limited powers, provincial self-government, dominion status with Britain still holding defence and foreign policy. Absolute autonomy leaves no British share at all.

Now look at where the phrase sits in the sentence: “This agitation is not an agitation merely against Partition … The attainment of absolute national autonomy—it is this alone that will settle down this movement.” The paper is telling both the government and its own readers that the Bengal agitation cannot be bought off. Annulling the partition — which the British finally did in 1911 — would not end anything, because the demand had already moved past it.

Why the phrase is so carefully built: Compare it with what the Moderates were asking for at the same moment — “a gradual shift to self-government within the British Empire” — and with the Home Rule Movement of 1916, which asked for “self-government for India within the British Empire… no longer the full independence that the earlier Nationalists had demanded”. Absolute national autonomy is the maximum demand, phrased so that it is still difficult to prosecute for sedition. Compare it also with Sri Aurobindo’s words at the head of the chapter (1909): “Our ideal is that of Swaraj or absolute autonomy free from foreign control.” The same idea, now stated openly — because by then he was writing in a different situation.

Q3.

Looking at the two boxes on either side of the daily’s title in Fig. 2.12, what do you observe?

Answer

The paper advertises its politics in its masthead — it is not hidden inside the paper, it flanks the title. Each box has a registration-number line at the top, a bold declaration in the middle and a price line at the foot (the small print of the registration and price lines is too faint to read in the reproduction).

Box	What it says	What it is doing
Left of the title	“Swadeshi PAPER of India.”	Declares the paper itself to be a Swadeshi product — Indian-owned, Indian-run, Indian-financed. The boycott is not just something it reports on; the newspaper is an example of it
Right of the title	“Our Policy: INDIA for Indians.”	States the editorial line in four words. Not a request for reforms, not a petition — a claim about who India belongs to
Under the title	“A Daily Organ of Indian Nationalism.”	Names the movement it belongs to. It is a party organ, and says so

What this tells you about the Nationalist press: A moderate paper would put news on the front page and opinion inside. Bande Mataram puts its programme where the name goes, so that a reader — or a policeman — sees the politics before reading a single line. Notice also that the two boxes are the two halves of the 1906 Calcutta programme in miniature: Swadeshi on the left, Swaraj (‘India for Indians’) on the right. The rest of the page is dense small type in many columns, with a column headed ‘Prosecution of Babu Arabinda Ghosh’ — a reminder of what running such a paper cost.

Did you know? The same newspaper added National Education to Swadeshi and boycott, and spelt out a ‘doctrine of passive resistance’. The Bengal National College it supported was later integrated into Jadavpur University.

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