National politics in India were the creation of the later nineteenth century. Not until then did the government begin to function effectively at an all-India level, nor did Indians themselves organise nation-wide political associations. The roving commissions of enquiry in the 1880s, and the prodigious development of governmental institutions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, introduced a new style of politics. Under pressure from the government in England to become more efficient for imperial purposes, and forced to assume wider responsibilities by change in India itself, the government ushered in a host of new legislative, consultative and administrative procedures. As the government impinged more on Indian society so it brought more Indians into the business of making and implementing policies. Increasingly, as the years went by, general principles were formulated on a national basis before being adapted to, and imposed on, the various provinces and regions of the subcontinent. Indians not only seized the opportunities afforded by constitutional change to influence government decisions, but they had also to devise new methods of making themselves heard from outside the framework of the raj.

The development of political responses to the growing effectiveness of imperial rule in India was an extremely complicated affair. The sheer size of the country and the intricacy of its government meant that there was no uniform progress. The different regions and the many local social, economic, and political structures were not affected in the same way or at the same time.