Indian nationalism was not a sudden awakening of a slumbering people but the outcome of concrete social and economic transformations engineered by colonial rule. To understand it sociologically we must move beyond the biographies of great leaders and ask which classes emerged, whose interests were injured or advanced, and how a subcontinent of diverse regions came to imagine itself as a single nation. The most influential materialist account is that of A.R. Desai, whose Social Background of Indian Nationalism treats the movement as a product of the forces that British capitalism itself unleashed on Indian society.
The colonial political economy
British rule reorganised the Indian economy to serve metropolitan interests. The old handicraft economy was undermined by machine-made imports, the deindustrialisation of weaving and artisanal trades displaced millions, and India was recast as a supplier of raw materials and a market for British manufactures. New land-revenue systems — the Permanent Settlement, the ryotwari and mahalwari arrangements — converted land into a commodity, created new proprietary classes, and fastened a heavy revenue burden on the cultivator. Railways, the telegraph, a uniform currency, a codified legal system and English-language administration knit together previously separated regions into a single administrative and economic space. These very instruments of exploitation, paradoxically, forged the material unity on which a national consciousness could later be built.
New social classes
Colonialism dissolved older social groupings and generated wholly new ones. A modern bourgeoisie of merchants, financiers and, in time, industrialists emerged, alongside a working class in the mills, mines and plantations. In the countryside a stratum of landlords and intermediaries stood over an increasingly indebted peasantry. Above all there arose an educated middle class — lawyers, teachers, journalists, clerks and administrators — the direct offspring of the colonial education system. For a materialist reading in the tradition of Karl Marx, these classes carried distinct interests, and the trajectory of nationalism reflected the shifting balance among them rather than a single undifferentiated national will.
The English-educated middle class
The new intelligentsia occupied a pivotal role. Educated in Western liberal ideas of liberty, representative government and nationality, it found its aspirations blocked by racial discrimination, limited employment and political subordination. This contradiction — between the values Britain professed and the subjection it imposed — turned the educated class into the earliest and most articulate carrier of nationalist ideas. It founded associations, newspapers and eventually the Indian National Congress, giving the movement its leadership, vocabulary and organisational form. Its ambivalence, however, was real: dependent on colonial employment yet resentful of colonial limits, it long oscillated between petitioning and confrontation.
The material forces behind nationalism
Desai insists that nationalism grew out of measurable grievances, not merely ideas. The drain of wealth, recurring famines, discriminatory tariffs that protected British goods, and the ruin of indigenous industry supplied economic nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt with their central critique. As distinct classes matured, the social base of the movement widened — from the narrow constitutionalism of the early Congress to the mass mobilisations that later drew in peasants, workers and the lower middle class. The character of nationalism at each stage, in this analysis, expressed the changing composition and confidence of the classes leading it.
Assessment and critique
Desai's framework remains valuable for grounding nationalism in political economy and for treating it as a historical process with a class content. Critics note, however, that a strictly economic reading can underplay religion, caste, region and the autonomous force of ideas and culture. The insights of Max Weber on the independent power of ideas, and later work on communalism and cultural identity, caution against reducing a complex movement to class interest alone. A rounded answer holds the material and the cultural together.
How to use this in the exam
Open with the claim that nationalism was socially produced by colonial transformation, then structure the answer around political economy, the new classes and the educated middle class. Name A.R. Desai as your anchor and cite the drain theory, deindustrialisation and land settlements as concrete forces. Show analytical maturity by adding the critique — that class analysis alone cannot capture religion, caste and culture — so that you present a balanced, layered argument rather than a one-dimensional one.