Introduction

The Indian National Congress was known to have been the logical national expression of modern political organization in colonial India. Those who supported the Congress in its first thirty or forty years were the Westernized, English-educated middle class. Gandhi remade the Indian National Congress into a khadi-wearing, Hindustani-speaking embodiment of the national political will. Karen Ray describes Gandhi's ideological modification when he desperately needed the support of Indian labourers in South Africa and had to adjust his political programme to take account of their motivations and the realities of their lives. Gandhi viewed the first battle as a part of anti-imperialism and the second as essential for Hindu-Muslim coexistence. Celebration of the centenary of the Indian National Congress has prompted scholarly re-examination of that organization in the midst of an active international discussion about the nature of Indian society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.