Home Rule League, either of two short-lived organizations of the same name in India established in April and September 1916, respectively, by Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak and British social reformer and Indian independence leader Annie Besant. The term, borrowed from a similar movement in Ireland, referred to the efforts of Indian nationalists to achieve self-rule from the British Indian government.
The Government of India Act 1909 was dissatisfactory to the aspirations of Indians. The Congress Party’s split in 1907 and fiery leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s imprisonment from 1908 to 1914 meant that there was a lull in the national movement. But Tilak’s release and the advent of Annie Besant brought about a revival of the national movement. Annie Besant was an Irish socialist, writer and orator who supported the Irish and Indian home rule movements. She arrived in India in 1893.
The leaders in India were divided on whether to support Britain in the war or not. Annie Besant, however, declared, “England’s need is India’s opportunity”. Having returned from exile in Mandalay, Tilak understood the need for a revival of the nationalist movement in the country. He also understood the growing importance of the Congress Party in India’s political scene. So, his first task was to get readmitted into the party. In the Congress session of December 1915, it was decided to let the extremists re-join the party largely due to Annie Besant’s persuasion. Besant had also recognised the need for Congress approval and the active participation of the extremists in the national struggle. However, Besant and Tilak were not able to convince Congress to support their decision to set up home rule leagues. Besant managed to convince the Congress to pledge to educative propaganda and the establishing of local-level committees. It was also agreed upon that if these conditions were not satisfied by September 1916, she would be free to set up a home rule league. Accordingly, she set up her Home Rule League in September 1916. Tilak, however, was not bound by any such condition and so had set up his league in April 1916.
There were two home rule leagues launched. Tilak launched the Indian Home Rule League in April 1916 at Belgaum. Annie Besant launched the Home Rule League in September 1916 at Madras. They had the common objective of achieving self-government in India. There was an informal understanding between both the leagues wherein Tilak’s league worked in Maharashtra (except Bombay), Karnataka, Berar and the Central Provinces. Besant’s league worked in the rest of the country. Tilak’s league had its headquarters in Delhi. It had 6 branches. Besant’s league had 200 branches and was a looser organisation compared to Tilak’s. The two leagues worked closely with one another. However, they did not merge to avoid friction between both the leaders.
Tilak’s group, founded at Poona concentrated its efforts mostly in western India, and that of Besant, set up at Madras, had more of an all-India scope. Both, however, worked toward the same objective of mobilizing Indian public opinion—largely by peaceful means—in favour of self-government, and from the start each worked closely with the other. Pressure by Home Rulers on the British contributed to the drafting of the Montagu Declaration in 1917 by Edwin Samuel Montagu, secretary of state for India, which in turn laid the groundwork for political reforms in India instituted by Britain after World War I. By then, however, the influence of the Home Rule organizations had diminished. Although their role in the Indian independence movement had been modest, they did succeed in helping to sustain the movement’s impetus during the war years—as manifested in the signing of the Lucknow Pact in December 1916.
Annie Besant went on to establish the All India Home Rule League, which was a political organization which aimed at self-government, termed as “Home Rule”. The league wanted to secure for India the statue of a dominion within the British Empire, such as countries like Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Newfoundland then.
Besan’t league had an All India character, but was founded on Besant’s Theosophical contacts; it was set up in 1916 and reached its zenith in 1917 with 27,000 members. The Home Rule League organized discussions and lectures and set up reading rooms, also distributing pamphlets educating people of what they sought to achieve through this movement. Members of the league were powerful orators and petitions of thousands of Indians were submitted to the British authorities.
The Home Rule League got a lot of support from the Tamil Brahmin community of Chennai and also communities like the Kayasthas of Uttar Pradesh, Kashmiri Brahmins, some Muslims, Hindu Tamil minority, young Gujarati industrialists and traders and lawyers in Mumbai and Gujarat. The philosophy of the league was a combination of theosophy, social reform, ancient Hindu wisdom and the claims of achievement of the West which had already been anticipated by Hindu Rishis many years before they happened. The league influenced a lot of people by its philosophy, primarily because the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj had not reached the majority by then. A lot of young men groomed by the home rule movement went on to become future leaders in Indian politics, namely Satyamuri of Chennai, Jitendralal Banerji of Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru and Khaliquzzaman of Allahabad, Jamunadas Dwarkadas and Indulal Yajnik, among others.
The Home Rule League had 2600 members in Mumbai and held meetings attended by 10,000 to 12,000 people at the Shantaram Chawl area, comprising of government employees and industrial workers. The league was also responsible for creating a political awareness in areas like Sindh, Gujarat, United Provinces, Bihar an Orissa. In 1917, following the arrest of Annie Besant, the movement gained strength and made its presence felt in India’s rural areas. By late 1917 Annie Besant was highly influenced by Montagu’s promise of a “responsible government” and it wasn’t long before she became his loyal follower.
The popularity of the Home Rule League also began declining with the coming of the Satyagraha Movement by Mahatma Gandhi. The Mahatma’s mantra of non-violence and large scale civil disobedience appealed to India’s common people, including his lifestyle, respect for Indian culture and love for the common people of the country. Gandhi led Bihar, Kheda and Gujarat up in a successful revolt against the government, which eventually rose him to the position of a national hero. By 1920 the Home Rule League elected Gandhi as its President and within a year from then it would merge into the Indian National Congress forming a united political front.
The movement was not a mass movement. It was restricted to educated people and college students. The leagues did not find a lot of support among Muslims, Anglo-Indians and non-Brahmins from Southern India as they thought home rule would mean a rule of the upper caste Hindu majority. Many of the moderates were satisfied with the government’s assurance of reforms (as preluded in the Montague Declaration). They did not take the movement further. Annie Besant kept oscillating between being satisfied with the government talk of reforms and pushing the home rule movement forward. She was not able to provide firm leadership to her followers.
In September 1918, Tilak went to England to pursue a libel case against Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, British journalist and author of the book ‘Indian Unrest’. The book contained deprecatory comments and had called Tilak the ‘Father of Indian Unrest.’ Tilak’s absence and Besant’s inability to lead the people led to the movement’s fizzing out. After the war, Mahatma Gandhi gained prominence as a leader of the masses and the Home Rule Leagues merged with the Congress Party in 1920.
