Breaking down the question
The command word is examine, which asks you to investigate and appraise the conditions that gave rise to Indian nationalism rather than merely to narrate its history. The pivotal phrase is social background — the examiner wants a sociological account of the structural, economic and cultural transformations under colonial rule that made a nationalist consciousness possible.
The framing is important. Nationalism is treated here not as the achievement of great leaders but as a social product — the outcome of new classes, new institutions and new ideas generated, often unintentionally, by colonial rule itself. Your task is to lay bare that background and show how it fed into an organised national movement.
How to approach it
Open by defining nationalism as a modern social consciousness of shared political community, and signal that its Indian variant grew out of the contradictions of colonial rule. Organise the body around distinct but connected strands — economic transformation and the drain of wealth, the rise of a Western-educated middle class, the unifying effects of administration, transport and print, the social reform movements, and the reactive impact of racial exclusion. A. R. Desai's classic materialist reading should anchor the answer, supported by Benedict Anderson on imagined communities and Bipan Chandra on economic nationalism. Conclude by noting that these forces were uneven and that nationalism carried internal tensions of class, region and community.
Model answer
Indian nationalism was a distinctively modern phenomenon, and its roots lay in the very social order that colonial rule created. The most systematic sociological account is that of A. R. Desai, whose Social Background of Indian Nationalism argued that nationalism was the product of the material and social conditions generated by British rule — a new economy, new classes and a new intelligentsia.
The first strand was economic transformation. Colonial policy dismantled the older handicraft economy, commercialised agriculture and integrated India into a world capitalist market on subordinate terms. The resulting impoverishment, together with the drain of wealth documented by Dadabhai Naoroji and later elaborated by Bipan Chandra, produced a shared grievance that cut across regions. Economic nationalism — the critique of deindustrialisation, high land revenue and unfavourable trade — supplied nationalism with its earliest and most unifying content.
The second strand was the rise of a Western-educated middle class. English education, introduced to staff the administration, unintentionally created an intelligentsia acquainted with liberal, democratic and nationalist ideas from Europe. This class — lawyers, teachers, journalists and clerks — provided the leadership, the vocabulary and the organisational energy of the movement, and it was this stratum that founded the Indian National Congress in 1885.
The third strand was the unification of social space. Railways, the telegraph, a common administrative and legal framework, and above all the growth of the printing press knit together previously separated regions. Following Benedict Anderson, the spread of print capitalism — newspapers, journals and vernacular literature — allowed dispersed readers to imagine themselves as members of a single national community. A common language of protest and a shared public sphere became possible for the first time.
The fourth strand was the ferment of social and religious reform. Movements led by Rammohan Roy, the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj and others attacked social evils, revalued indigenous traditions and generated self-respect and confidence. While some reform currents were regionally or communally bounded, they nurtured a sense of cultural worth that nationalism could draw upon, even as revivalist strands sowed seeds of later communal tension.
A fifth strand was the reactive experience of racial subordination. Discriminatory laws, exclusion from higher services, and the everyday humiliations of colonial racism sharpened the contradiction between liberal promise and colonial practice. Events such as the agitation over the Ilbert Bill crystallised the sense that Indians were treated as a subject people, converting educated discontent into political mobilisation.
These forces did not operate evenly. The early movement was dominated by upper-caste, urban, professional groups, and the mass phase under Gandhi later drew in peasants, workers and women. Nationalism also carried internal fault lines — of class, region, caste and religious community — that would shape its trajectory and its eventual partition. For a fuller treatment, see the note on the social background of Indian nationalism.
Taken together, the growth of Indian nationalism illustrates a sociological paradox — colonial rule forged the very instruments, classes and consciousness that would ultimately contest it. Nationalism was less a gift of ideology than a social formation thrown up by the transformations of the colonial era.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for candidates who treat nationalism sociologically — as a product of social structure rather than a chronicle of leaders and sessions. The strongest scripts foreground A. R. Desai's materialist framework and then layer in the middle class, print and public sphere, reform movements and racial exclusion as distinct causal strands. Citing Anderson on imagined communities and Bipan Chandra on the economic critique signals theoretical range. Weaker answers slide into narrative history or hero-worship. A top-band response also notes the unevenness of the process — that nationalism began as an elite project, later broadened into a mass movement, and carried within it the tensions of class, caste and community that colonial society had bequeathed.