Few independence movements ran as long, or mobilised as many people, as the campaign that ended British rule in India. It was not a single uprising but a decades-long political struggle that changed methods and leadership several times before it succeeded.
The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, provided the movement's organisational backbone for most of its history, but its character shifted decisively after 1915 when Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa and began building mass campaigns of nonviolent noncooperation and civil disobedience, including the Non-Cooperation Movement of the early 1920s and the Salt March of 1930. Alongside Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns, more militant currents pursued independence by other means, and the movement as a whole employed both approaches without ever fully reconciling them. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become independent India's first prime minister, led the Congress through much of the final push toward independence in the 1940s.
Independence arrived on 15 August 1947, but it arrived alongside partition: British India was divided into the separate states of India and Pakistan, a division driven by the Muslim League's demand for a separate Muslim-majority state and accompanied by mass displacement and violence on both sides of the new border. India's own constitutional government took another two and a half years to complete, becoming a sovereign republic only when its constitution came into force on 26 January 1950, a gap this atlas's entry on India narrates in the same way it narrates the comparable gap between the United States' 1776 declaration and its 1789 constitutional government.