Place · Congress meeting ground · India

Gowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan

Also known as Gowalia Tank — August Kranti Maidan, Bombay

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

18.963, 72.810

Worth knowing

What followed was the largest uprising since 1857 and the least led: with every senior figure in jail, students, peasants and railway workers ran it themselves for months, and parallel governments held out in Satara, Ballia and Midnapore. Over a thousand were killed and around a hundred thousand arrested.

Connections (3)

• PrecursorBhagat Singh

  Bhagat Singh's execution in March 1931 came a few weeks after the Gandhi-Irwin pact, and the Congress's failure to get the sentences commuted cost it a great deal among young people in Punjab and the United Provinces. The argument between the two methods was never settled: Quit India in 1942, once the entire leadership was arrested, was far closer to the revolutionaries' expectations of what a rising would look like than to anything Gandhi had planned.

• CampaignMaulana Abul Kalam Azad

  Azad was Congress president through the whole of the war and the Quit India years, which means the resolution passed at Gowalia Tank on 8 August 1942 was moved under his presidency and he was arrested with the rest before dawn the next morning. He spent the following three years in Ahmednagar Fort with Nehru and the working committee, which is where Nehru wrote The Discovery of India.

• Site withinMumbai

  Gowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan lies within Mumbai — the two sites sit about 4 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Gowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan is one of the specific sites that give Mumbai its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.

On these journeys

• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
• The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Gowalia Tank”. All India Congress Committee proceedings, 8 August 1942; Francis Hutchins, India’s Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement.

• Wikipedia — Gowalia Tank