In this talk Dr Anwesha Roy will discuss one of the chapters of her forthcoming book, and examine in three important, yet hitherto overlooked textual sources on the Quit India Movement. She will explore pushes and pulls on ideas of responsibility between officials in the Indian government, the British government in England, and M.K. Gandhi. Running the show of empire in the historical conjuncture of a global war, attained different and complex connotations, especially when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 that renewed America’s interest in the political stalemate in India. The response of the Govt. of India and of Britain, captured in the vignettes presented in her book, reveal for historians of empire, a complex terrain of anxiety and struggles, with political and moral legitimacy. The intellectual and political language of ‘responsibility’ took on new tones, where the use of excessive violence to crush the movement fit within the language of necessity, not only because a full blown rebellion in the midst of a global war would be disastrous for Britain and her allies, but also because responsibility was cloaked in colonial paternalism, infantilising general ‘masses’ as capable only of nationalist (and elite) ‘manipulation’. Gandhi offered a different, moral version of responsibility (as indeed, of politics itself), simultaneously distancing himself, and the larger Congress leadership from the violence of the movement, but also, in doing so, weaving a narrative where the general ‘masses’ could be taught ‘responsible’ non-violence, one that could only come at the heavy expense of violence.

Anwesha Roy is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the socio-political histories of the British Empire in India, more specifically, social and emotional histories of World War II, identity formation(s), mass mobilizations and processes of decolonization. She is the Author of Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-47 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Imagining Quit India: War, Politics and the Making of a Mass Movement, 1940-45 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2025). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society.