Breaking down the question
The phrase social background is a direct echo of A. R. Desai's classic study, Social Background of Indian Nationalism, and the examiner expects you to recognise it. The task is to explain the social and material conditions out of which Indian nationalism arose, rather than to narrate the events of the freedom struggle.
Discuss invites analysis and appraisal, not mere description. A strong answer treats nationalism not as a spiritual awakening or the achievement of great men, but as a modern social formation produced by the transformations colonialism wrought on Indian society — and then weighs the strengths and limits of that reading.
The organising framework is the Marxist approach associated with Desai. The note on Marxist sociology and A. R. Desai supplies the conceptual scaffolding.
How to approach it
Open by establishing the premise that nationalism was a modern phenomenon with definite social roots, not an eternal essence of a timeless nation. Then set out Desai's central argument that British colonialism dissolved the old order and created the material conditions — economic unification, new institutions and new classes — that made national consciousness possible.
Trace the new social forces colonialism produced and the leadership they supplied, bring in Rajni Palme Dutt's account of the movement's internal contradictions, and close with a balanced appraisal that credits the explanatory power of the approach while noting what a purely class reading tends to miss.
Model answer
Indian nationalism has been explained in many idioms — as a religious revival, a clash of elites, or the work of a modernising intelligentsia. The most systematic sociological account, given by A. R. Desai in Social Background of Indian Nationalism, treats it instead as a modern social formation produced by the material transformations of the colonial era.
Nationalism as a modern phenomenon. Desai's starting point, following Marx, is that social and political movements must be explained through the material conditions and class forces that produce them, not through ideas alone. The nation, on this view, is not an ancient essence but a modern formation, and Indian nationalism is the political expression of new class interests thrown up by a particular stage of economic development under British rule.
The dissolution of the old order. Colonialism broke up the relatively self-sufficient village economy that had rested on the union of agriculture and handicraft. The introduction of private property in land, the commercialisation of agriculture, the decline of traditional handicrafts and the integration of India into the world capitalist market destroyed the old social equilibrium and created the conditions for new social relations.
Economic and administrative unification. British rule, in pursuit of its own interests, welded a fragmented subcontinent into a single economic and political unit. Railways, the telegraph, a unified currency and market, a modern bureaucracy, a common legal system and English-language education created for the first time the material and cultural infrastructure of a nation. These same instruments, built for colonial exploitation, supplied the objective basis for a shared national consciousness.
The new social classes. On this transformed base arose classes that had not existed before — a modern bourgeoisie of merchants and industrialists, a Western-educated middle-class intelligentsia, a class of professionals and clerks, an industrial working class and a transformed peasantry burdened by revenue and debt. The Western-educated intelligentsia, exposed to liberal and nationalist ideas yet blocked by racial discrimination and limited opportunity, became the earliest carriers of nationalist sentiment. The economic drain of wealth, discriminatory tariffs and the subordination of Indian capital furnished the grievances around which these classes cohered.
Phases and leadership. Desai traces nationalism through successive phases, each led by different strata as the new classes matured and their conflict with colonial interests sharpened — from the restrained constitutionalism of the early educated elite to the mass mobilisation of peasants and workers under Gandhian leadership. Throughout, the decisive leadership remained principally bourgeois, and its dominant goals — political freedom, a protected home market and control of the state — served the development of Indian capitalism.
Internal contradictions. Because the movement gathered classes with divergent interests under a single banner, it contained a contradiction at its heart. Rajni Palme Dutt captured this in his account of its twin tendencies — a genuinely anti-imperialist thrust drawing on mass militancy, coupled with a concern on the part of the bourgeois leadership to keep that militancy within safe bounds so that it did not turn against indigenous propertied classes. The peasants and workers who supplied the mass base were mobilised against colonialism but not permitted to convert the struggle into one against domestic exploitation.
Appraisal. The strength of this account is that it roots nationalism in concrete social change, explains its timing and its class composition, and exposes the interests concealed beneath the rhetoric of national unity — while also explaining why political independence did not automatically bring social and economic emancipation for the labouring masses. Its limitation is that by privileging class it can underplay the autonomous force of religion, caste, region and culture, and the genuine cross-class solidarity the freedom struggle at times achieved. Subaltern historians later argued that the framework underestimated the independent agency of peasants and the poor.
On balance, Desai's account of the social background remains among the most powerful explanations of Indian nationalism, precisely because it asks not merely what the movement proclaimed but which social forces produced it and whose interests it advanced — though a complete picture must supplement its class analysis with the cultural and subaltern dimensions it tends to neglect.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner rewards candidates who recognise that the question is lifted from Desai and who present nationalism as a socially produced modern formation rather than narrating the independence movement. Naming Social Background of Indian Nationalism and setting out the sequence — dissolution of the old economy, colonial unification, the rise of new classes — is essential to the top band.
The strongest scripts identify the class forces precisely, explain the leadership of the bourgeoisie, and invoke Rajni Palme Dutt's twin-tendency thesis to show the movement's internal contradiction. A balanced close that credits the approach's explanatory power while noting its neglect of religion, culture and subaltern agency signals the maturity that separates a first-class answer from a merely competent one.