short essay on india before british rule

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Rewinding to the Great Indian Empires Before the British Raj

Nandini das offers a reading list on indian colonial history.

To mention the British in India is to evoke memories of the Raj, of luxury and grandeur that went hand in hand with appropriation and exploitation, cricket and tea and pashminas that were products of the same set of conditions that brought famine and violence to multitudes, and left a sub-continent stripped, scarred and irrevocably divided.

Yet there is a moment before that received history begins, when things were still in flux, and possibilities unrolled in multiple directions. The first decades of the seventeenth century represent just such a moment, when the Mughal empire in northern India was one of the wealthiest global powers, and England found itself a belated entrant into a world of trade and exchange in which others had already staked a claim.

My book, Courting India , is about the first English embassy to India, seen through the experiences of the man at its helm, Thomas Roe, charged with the responsibility of acquiring the elusive permits that would allow the English at last to set up permanent trading links with the sub-continent. This is not a moment that usually gets more than passing reference in histories of empire: the power-imbalance it sets up between India and England is too counter-intuitive, and Roe’s efforts too obviously lacking in results.

Yet that is precisely why, I argue, this moment demands our attention. It stands witness both to possible alternative roads down which the history of the two nations could have unfolded, and to the ways in which assumptions and expectations about other nations, other cultures, take shape and cohere, colored by our own memories and anxieties, fears and hopes.

In exploring the historical records of that moment, I wanted to pay attention not just to the unfolding of political and economic negotiations driven by those in power, but also to those who tend to get written out of the grand narratives of empire. Courting India is therefore not just about Roe, or even about the East India Company.

From the young Indian boy brought to England as part of a trading company’s attempts to demonstrate their civilizing mission, to the homesick English merchants terrified of dying far from home, from headstrong English women who insisted on entering unsuitable marriages, to equally headstrong Mughal women negotiating the world of the imperial politics, it is about multiple lives that were caught up in the process.

The list below has some of the books I returned to time and again, to understand the period, and the people, of both nations.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India

Subrahmanyam’s book is a sprawling, thoroughly readable exploration of the evolution of European views of India in the roughly three centuries that lay between Vasco da Gama landing on the western coast of India, and the East India Company’s rise to power as the preeminent European presence in South Asia. This is a book that wears its prodigious range of learning lightly, moving from political history to literature, art to intellectual history with infinite ease. What it offers is a wonderfully sharp account of the intricate ways in which European ideas about India and what it meant to be ‘Indian’ went through layers of revision, even as the European commentators themselves changed as a result.

Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765

Richard Eaton’s book is another history of extraordinary scholarship that still manages to remain accessible. It is a striking account of the linguistic and cultural complexity of pre-modern India, characterized by a degree of cultural and religious diversity which would shock and puzzle visitors from Protestant England, like Thomas Roe and his travel companions. It is also a useful reminder that the Mughals were not the only powers in the sub-continent. In the Deccan plateau, southern India, and Bengal, other powers flourished whose presence implicitly shaped Mughal worldview and actions—whether or not the newly-arrived Europeans fully grasped the implications of such internal interactions.

Jonathan Gil Harris, The First Firangis

Nations do not “encounter” each other in the abstract. That process takes place between individuals, each of whom carry their own assumptions and expectations. From physicians and artists, to pirates and priests, Jonathan Gil Harris’s collection introduces us to some of the very first travelers, from England, Europe, and beyond who arrived in pre-modern India, either willingly or unwillingly, and found themselves carving out new lives, and often, new identities.

As an expatriate living in India, Harris is particularly adept at illuminating sensory and bodily transformations, the ways in which sight and smell, the food we ingest and the sounds we hear become a part of us. His approach through micro-histories is very different from that of the more expansive books above, but no less illuminating, particularly when tackling the problem of recording lives of which the barest traces remain.

David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James

In 1615, the trial of Frances Howard and her husband, James I’s erstwhile favorite, Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, took England by storm. It had all the ingredients of a perfect scandal—sex, fraud, a whiff of same-sex intrigue, corruption, and murder. Howard was accused of poisoning her husband’s best friend, Sir Thomas Overbury. Roe had known Overbury in England, and while he was in India by the time the news broke, the Howard trials provide a superb and utterly gripping lens to understand the royal court and the country from which Roe had arrived at the Mughal court.

It is a portrait of a country in crisis, where misogyny, political paranoia, and intense competition for power held sway. If travelers carry their own worldviews with them, Roe’s was tinged with the same shades of anxiety and suspicion that we see in David Lindley’s account of the court of James I.

Ruby Lal, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan

If Lindley’s book allows us a close look at the inner workings of James I’s court and contemporary English society, Ruby Lal does the same for Jahangir’s court, through another woman who has attracted as much criticism as Frances Howard, and significantly more fear, because of the power she was seen to wield. Lal’s biography of Nur Jahan, the favorite wife and consort of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, identifies itself as feminist historiography, that must often “look around” the towering male figures in received history. It excavates records either ignored or distorted by the biases of men who had written about Nur Jahan since her own lifetime and afterwards, and the result is a striking re-evaluation of both Nur and Jahangir, as well as the world they occupied.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy

There are numerous books about the history of the East India Company, but Dalrymple brings a particular immediacy to the story of its fortunes in the century and half following Roe’s embassy. Historians have often returned to the way in which the East India Company’s ruthless rise coincided with their equally ruthless exploitation of civil strife in India following the collapse of the Mughal empire. Dalrymple draws attention particularly to the Company’s profiteering turned it into a mega-corporation of its time, wielding huge military as well as economic power.

Trade and war are mutually incompatible, Thomas Roe had warned the early East India Company during his embassy. Yet by the eighteenth century, the Company’s opinion about the use of military force had changed completely, and large-scale territorial conquests had laid increasingly larger swathes of India open to their pillaging. A new chapter in the history of both nations was about to begin.

__________________________________

Nandini Das is the author of Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire , available now from Pegasus Books.

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The british impact on india, 1700–1900.

The period 1700 to 1900 saw the beginnings, and the development, of the British Empire in India. Empire was not planned, at least not in the early stages. In a sense, it just happened. The first British in India came for trade, not territory; they were businessmen, not conquerors. It can be argued that they came from a culture that was inferior, and a political entity that was weaker, than that into which they ventured, and they came hat-in-hand. They would not have been viewed as a threat by the Indians—who most certainly would not have thought of themselves as “Indian,” at least in any political sense. National identity was to be established much later, during the Independence Movement (which, indeed, was also known as the Nationalist Movement). Identity was in terms of region and caste, which, to a considerable extent, it still is today. The British and the Indians would go on to affect each other in profound ways that still are important today. In what follows, because of limited space, the impact of Imperial Britain on India is addressed. Hopefully, a future useful essay on the impact of India on Great Britain will also be published in EAA.

The Roots of Empire

painting of a military procession with elephants and horses

While there is no 1492-type date for the commencement of empire, 1757, the date of the Battle of Plassey, is often used. The date of the British take-over of Delhi, 1803, is symbolic: the British occupied the Mughul capital and were not to leave. The empire was neither uniform—different policies responding to different events in different parts of India—nor static. It was upon the British and the Indians almost before they realized it. Its effects were ambiguous and ambivalent. A recent catalog advertising DVDs said about a presentation entitled “The British Empire in Color,”

The British Empire brought education, technology, law and democracy to the four corners of the globe. It also brought prejudice, discrimination, cultural bigotry and racism.

The blurb goes on to state that the video “examines the complexities, contradictions, and legacies of empire, both positive and negative.” 1 To a degree, such is the intent of this article. Only to a degree, for an article this brief on a topic as complex and intricate as the British impact on India cannot be complete and faces the danger of becoming simply an inventory.

Trade and Power

In 1600, a group of English merchants secured a royal charter for purposes of trading in the East Indies. The Dutch, however, had fairly well sealed off trade in what is now Indonesia, and the merchants’ company, which was to become known as the East India Company (the Company), turned its attention to the vast expanse of India, with its cotton and spices (e.g., “pepper” and “ginger” are from south Indian words), as well as other commodities. Other powers, especially the French and Portuguese, were to become competitors. The Portuguese secured enclaves on the west coast, the most important of which was Goa, which they controlled until 1961, and which preserves a Portuguese flavor to this day. The French secured influence in the southeast, where Puducherry, formerly Pondicherry, is sometimes referred to as “The French Riviera of the East,” and was transferred to Indian jurisdiction in 1954.

The dominant power in India was the Mughal Empire. British adventurers had preceded the Company into India, including at the Mughal court. It needs to be emphasized that the purpose of the Company was trade. But a combination of factors and events were to draw the Company into Indian politics, especially with the decline of the Mughal Empire and the concurrent and resulting rise of regional powers, including that of the British, who had become ensconced at what is now Chennai (Madras), Mumbai (Bombay), and Kolkata (Calcutta). 2 It is noteworthy that these three cities were founded (or at least developed) by the British, and in recent years have each had their names de-Anglicized.

Mughal Decline

Two events, fifty years apart, had important consequences. The first was the death in 1707 of the last of the “Great Mughals,” Aurangzeb, who was followed by “lesser Mughals.” 3 In various ways, Aurangzeb’s own policies may have contributed significantly to the Mughal decline, but the importance of his demise is that it was followed by incapable successors and considerable instability.

The British took advantage of the instability and the resulting regional tensions, especially in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey in Bengal. Through machinations and intrigues, a force of eight hundred Europeans and 2,200 Indian troops under Robert Clive defeated an army of 50,000 belonging to the ruler of Bengal. Clive was able to wrest concessions from the Mughals, most importantly the right of land revenue, and, in retrospect, it appears that an empire was underway.

Other challenges arose for the Mughals, including the rise of regional and ethnic powers such as the Marathas, Sikhs, and Rajputs, and the sack of Delhi in 1739 by the Persian invader Nadir Shah. Meanwhile, the British were to win out in south India over the French, largely because of the Anglo-French wars in Europe and North America in the 1740s.

The Company

The Company’s increase in power and territory did not go unnoticed in London. In 1792, the Company applied for a loan from the government, which Parliament provided, but with strings attached: The Regulating Act of 1793, the first of a series of acts reining in the Company through parliamentary supervision. Nevertheless, Arthur Wellesley, as governor-general (1797–1805), exercised his intention to make the Company the paramount power in India. He was able to suppress what French influence remained (except for some small enclaves, such as Pondicherry), and to remove powerful Indian forces in both the north and the south. The British (that is the Company; in India the two were now to be almost synonymous until 1858) were paramount, and they developed a bureaucratic infrastructure, employing cooperating Indians, who came to constitute a new, urban class.

The title of Governor-General had been bestowed upon the governor of the Bengal presidency (Calcutta), who had been granted power and rank over the governors of the Bombay and Madras presidencies. This arrangement, provided in the Regulating Act, was felt to be necessary because of the long distance between London and India (the Suez canal did not yet exist) and the convenience of dealing with one governor rather than three: an administrative step toward unity which certainly aided the arrangement for empire.

The series of acts passed by Parliament banned private trading on the part of Company employees and separated judicial and administrative functions of the Company from commercial ones. The attempt was to regulate taxation, justice, rule, and bribery (the last being viewed by Company servants as an indispensable feature of doing business in India). The Company had acquired considerable political power (although consisting of only a fraction of one percent of the population of the subcontinent), over more people than there were in England. Parliament was concerned, and was to remain so. Empire may not have been, at this early stage, a governmental declaration, but the wheels were in motion and Parliament became a core part of it all. The India Act of 1784 created a council of six commissioners, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a newly-created Secretary of State for India. This group was constituted above the Company directors in London.

With the transition of the Company to the role of ruler, the British attitude toward Indians degenerated. Previously, there had been some limited social mixing between the British and Indians, with no sense of superiority or inferiority. That changed. What earlier Englishmen had viewed with interest in Indian culture became abomination; thus, the parliamentary leader against the slave trade, William Wilberforce (1759–1833) felt Hinduism to be a greater evil than slavery. The opening of the Suez Canal (1869) allowed greater access to India by English women—who, of course, had to be “protected” from the hostile culture and barbarous Indian men. Biased concepts regarding non-Western cultures and non-white peoples, arising from so-called social Darwinism and evangelicalism, provided rationale for imperial rule. It is not coincidence that the heyday of imperialism was the Victorian age.

Although the foundation was provided by the Battle of Plassey (1757), 1803 is a good symbolic date for the start of empire. General Gerard Lake defeated the Marathas, perhaps the most important Indian power, and entered Delhi, the Mughal capital. By this time the emperor was mostly a figurehead, but symbolically important. He now became a pensioner of the British, with his realm reduced to the Red Fort. A British official, referred to as the Resident, became de facto ruler of Delhi. Company soldiers protected the city and commercial interests. Things were never to be the same. In a sense, the taking of Delhi was but part of a process, for, as Dilip Hiro, in his chronology of Indian history has asserted, “By the late 18th century it had become commonplace among the British, irrespective of class, to despise Indians.” This characterization has been affirmed by other observers. 4

Racism and Rebellion

Racism is a core characteristic of the British Empire in India, or, as it came to be known, the Raj (from a Sanskrit word, which found its way into vernacular languages, meaning to rule over, or the sovereign who does so). Historically, the term was applied to Hindu kings (as raja, or maharaja, great king). While implying political superiority, it did not have racial implications. Cultural and political factors were to add racial distinction to the concept under the British: Christian proselytizing and the great uprising, or rebellion, or mutiny, of 1857. This historic rebellion was not an insurrection, for it was not organized, and therein may have been its failure. 5

painting of men in military uniforms fighting

The rebellion was a bloody mess, involving Indian soldiers ( sepoys ), native rulers of “subsidiary” or “princely” states that were quasi-independent but in thrall to the Company (and in fear of loss of their principalities), and the Company armies, in vicious retaliation. In essence, it was an explosion of deep frustration and fear that had been building up for decades. It is significant that it was largely confined to north central India, where Company rule and British oppression were strongest and most obvious.

The causes were numerous, and included forcing the use of Western technologies—the railroad and telegraph—upon a highly traditional society, imposition of English as the language for courts and government schools, opening the country to missionaries (with the resulting fear of forced conversions), Company takeover of subsidiary states when a prince died without direct heir, increasing haughtiness and distance on the part of the rulers, and policies beneficial to the Company’s profits, but even inimical to the people, and so on. The spark was the introduction of the Enfield rifle to the sepoy ranks, which necessitated handling of cartridges packed in animal grease, anathema for both Hindus and Muslims, and considered as an attempt to Christianize the sepoys. Atrocities became commonplace on both sides, and were to be repeated by the British in the Amritsar Massacre of 1919.

The rebellion and the gruesome reaction to it were atrocious enough, but, as Maria Misra has observed, “The after-shock of the Rebellion was if anything even more influential than the event itself.” 6 A curtain had fallen, and the two sides would never trust each other again. British disdain increased, and for the Indians, resentment festered. Yet oddly enough, Western influence was eclectically accepted by many upper class urban Indians (to a large extent in imitation, but also as a means to, and result of, upward mobility). The apparent anomaly of interest in things Western is best illustrated by Calcutta, one of the three early centers of Company presence. The others were Madras and Bombay— cities that built up around the Company’s commercial establishment.

Indian Culture

Bengal historically has been marked by cultural pride, most justly so. Its position in Indian culture has been compared with that of Italy in European culture. Given different historical situations, the comparison might have gone the other way. Western impact was central to Calcutta (particularly noticeable in its architecture), the capital of British India, and provided the impetus for what is known as the Bengal Renaissance. As in Florence, it was business that made revival of the arts possible. In the case of Bengal, the revival involved religion as well. An almost perfect paradigm is that of the Tagore family. The modern founder was Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), an entrepreneur with British partners and British friends, including women. His association with the relative freedom of English women, in contrast to the rigidly orthodox outlook of the women in his household, resulted in part with his becoming “a strong advocate of female education.” 7 The fortune he accumulated enabled his heirs to pursue other interests.

Dwarkanath’s son Debendranath (1817–1905) was active in social and religious reform, especially the revitalization of Hinduism, largely in response to missionary activity resulting in conversions of Hindus to Christianity. He was also active in the 1850s in forming the British Indian Association, a forerunner of the Indian National Congress.

Debendranath was father of the famed Rabindranath (1861– 1941), an artistic genius and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Several other Tagores were active in the arts and influential in the revitalization of Bengali culture.

A fascinating example of this revitalization is a style of painting dating from about 1800. Kalighat painting originated around a temple dedicated to the goddess Kali in a neighborhood near the Hooghly River. The subject matter was in part religious, but in a sensual manner, and it also focused on daily life. A favorite topic was the babu, who in this context was a quasi-Westernized dandy obsessed with shady women. (The term babu has many connotations.) As a form, the art anticipated some Western developments, but received little recognition from Westerners, the general attitude being reflected by John Ruskin’s dismissal of all Indian art as that of “heathen people.” Missionaries showed a negative interest, viewing the paintings as childish and evil at the same time. The art was an urban twist upon folk tradition, yet with its own freshness and uniqueness.

There were decisive changes as a result of 1857. The Mughal dynasty was terminated, as was the Company. The British government took over direct rule, replacing the Company’s administrative apparatus with an Indian Civil Service (which became the Indian Administrative Service after independence). In 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, a symbolic exclamation point.

Governor-Generals, popularly referred to as Viceroys (after 1858), came and went, but the direction remained clear: Imperial rule for the profit of Britain, not for the welfare of the people of India—this was shown even in the governmental response to famines, and India became represented as the Jewel in the Crown. With the formation of the Indian National Congress (or, simply, Congress), some halfhearted concessions to change and inclusion occurred, albeit always seeming to be too little too late. This organization (curiously, initiated by a retired British official) might have seemed impotent at first, but it did demand that “the Government should be widened and that the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it.” 8 Perhaps most significantly, the initial meeting, held in Bombay in 1885, involved about seventy-two delegates, from various regions, and consisted mostly of upper class Hindus and Parsis (many of them lawyers) with only two Muslims in attendance. It was through this organization, under the leadership of lawyers such as Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal (India’s first prime minister), and M. K. Gandhi, that India achieved independence.

Such a meeting, let alone the organization itself (or, for that matter, the nationalist/independence movement), would not have been possible had it not been for the English language as a lingua franca, which stemmed from the 1835 decision by the Governor-General to make English the official language of instruction. That decision opened a can of worms: men educated in English law saw the possibilities of constitutional democracy. No one Indian language could claim the majority of speakers, and English provided the bridge that made communication possible between the educated from different parts of India. The importance of this development cannot be overemphasized. Related developments included the establishment of universities (oddly, in 1857) in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta; a vibrant (if often censored) press, and Indian literature in English. These all are evident and thriving yet today, and strongly so. The most important development might well have been that of nationalism, an attempt to override the British policy of divide-and-rule (which played on Hindu-Muslim antipathy). Of course, the creation of Pakistan showed that the dream was not completely successful—yet India today is a successful democracy. And the nationalist movement did bring the diverse cultures and languages, the religious sects and castes, into a new identity: Indian.

The date 1900 makes a good closing point. In 1899, Lord Curzon, the most imperial of the Viceroys, became Governor-General, and in 1901 the Queen-Empress, Victoria, died. The post-1857 developments were, of course, designed to keep empire supreme, but British tradition opened doors within the empire, and did so in spite of empire (e.g., the use of the Magna Carta by an Indian teacher in the classroom ). 9 Further, they really did not develop a coherent approach toward rule. The late Raghavan Iyer found it to be a mix of Trusteeship, Utilitarianism, Platonic Guardianship, and Evangelicalism. 10 The focus was on administration, not development, and that by as small a cadre as possible. Stalin is said to have observed that it was ridiculous . . . that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India. Actually, the “few hundred” numbered just over a thousand, of whom one-fifth were at any time either sick or on leave. This, over a population of about 300 million in what is now India, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. 11 Although certainly not as cruel as the Belgians in the Congo, the servants of the Raj and their compatriots (families, businessmen, missionaries, etc.)— about 100,000 in 1900 12 —were viewed as “lofty and contemptuous.” 13 And they had their moments of cruelty as well.

The empire was a mix of the White Man’s Burden and Ma-Bap (“We are your mother and father”). Mix is a good word to describe the Raj. The British engaged in racism and exploitation, and they also provided the doors that would lead to Indian democracy and nationhood. Paul Scott, in the opening to The Jewel in the Crown , the initial novel of the Raj Quartet, wrote of two nations in violent opposition

. . . locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies. 14

India before Independence: Smaller struggles for freedom

‘Conflict with the Ghazees before Bareilly’, 1857

The Uprising of 1857 was India’s first widespread struggle against the British government. Even though it wasn’t a struggle for sovereignty, it planted the desire for freedom in indigenous minds and shook up the very foundations of British rule in India. An early nationalist perspective on the events of 1857 was offered by VD Savarkar, who termed the Revolt as ‘India’s First War of Independence’.

It is difficult if not impossible to fully map the breadth, scope and aftermath of the rebellion of 1857; its echoes were lingering and far-reaching. The study I have attempted here focuses on specific events and regions, and uses the Sarmaya collection to go beyond the dates and numbers to tell the story of a revolution.

Tension in the ranks

By the nineteenth century, the British had largely consolidated their hold over the Indian subcontinent. Territories like Bengal, Awadh and Mysore had been cleverly brought under British control through tactful annexations and alliances. Political and administrative control was accompanied by reforms in the socio-cultural and military realms to simplify and improve governance and ‘civilise’ the natives. Such measures—the abolition of sati, adoption of English as the language of instruction, reorganisation of the military system of privileges—hurt native sentiments, as they hit at revered social and religious structures. In the period immediately preceding the Revolt, these factors became more pronounced, sparking widespread dissatisfaction.

Besides this, concessions granted by the government in the past —the passing of sepoy letters free of postage tax and the personal role of soldiers in determining promotions and overseas service—came to be seen by the soldiers as their rightful privileges. The sudden withdrawal or curtailment of these, coupled with the inability of their European officers to communicate the reason for this in the language of the soldiers, became the primary grievance of the native troops.

But what acted as the final trigger for the Uprising was the introduction of the Enfield rifle. The bullets of the rifle had to be bitten before firing, and they were rumoured to be greased with the fat of cows and pigs, which was hurtful to the sentiments of Hindus and Muslims. Given their growing disillusionment with the Empire, the Bengal army found it plausible that the British would use such insidious means to ‘Christianise’ them. The rage of the soldiers bubbled over and led to the burning of a telegraph office on 24 th January 1857 in Barrackpore. A government order to repeal cartridges only fuelled the fire; it was assumed that the rumours about the cartridges was true, and other secret attacks on Indian caste would be launched.

League of the extraordinary

Although the British did their best to downplay the scale of rebellion and project it as chaotic and unplanned, the works of nationalist writer Rudrangshu Mukherjee suggest otherwise. These prove that while the revolt itself may have been sparked by mutinies in the sepoy lines, it took some organisation to carry forward the struggle. There existed a pattern in the order the mutinies were carried out; the firing of the evening guns in Meerut, Lucknow and Bareilly occurred as if part of a chain reaction.

Kuwar Singh of Arrah, 1857, monochrome engraving on paper, The Illustrated London News © Sarmaya Arts Foundation (2015.3.9) — click on image for more

The Revolt appears to have been a popular uprising that drew diverse leadership, cutting across geographical and social differences: Kunwar Singh from Bihar, Nana Sahib from Kanpur, the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II from Delhi, and the warrior-queen Rani Lakshmibai from Jhansi. What is interesting is that many such men and women were forced into positions of importance—they were called upon by the masses to take charge of the movement and didn’t get much say in the matter. Kunwar Singh, for one, was nearly 80 and in poor health when he was called upon to take up arms. He assumed command of the soldiers of Danapur on 25 July, following which he fought battles in Arrah, Lucknow, Azamgarh and Jagdishpur. Before his final battle, Singh cut off his left hand to prevent the threat of infection after a bullet shattered his wrist. A few months later, on April 23, 1858, this venerable warrior was killed by British troops near Jagdishpur.

Mutiny at Meerut

Left: Death of Colonel Finnis at Meerut, from Sarmaya’s collection of engravings; right: Mangal Pandey, Flickr/Public.Resource.Org

The mutiny of 1857 began in Barrackpore under the leadership of the sepoy Mangal Pandey of the 34th Regiment and ended with the killing of Sergeant Major Hewson and the injury of Lieutenant Baugh. Pandey was eventually hanged, which, coupled with the disbandment of the 29th Regiment, brought an end to the mutinous spirit at Barrackpore and Behrampore. However, discontent soon cropped up in districts like Sealkote, Agra, Ambala, and, most importantly, Lucknow.

Simultaneously, in Meerut, disaffection was more plainly visible than in any other station of the North-Western Frontier Provinces. On 10 th May, 1857 the Bengal army revolted at the sounding of the fire alarm and the bugle. Once the alarms went off, the 3 rd Light Cavalry and the 20 th Native Infantry rushed out of their lines, fully armed, releasing inmates in prison, burning buildings and killing British officers and other Europeans.

Battle for Delhi

Left: Storming of Delhi, from Sarmaya’s collection of engravings; right: Bahadur Shah Zafar, Wikipedia Creative Commons

On the morning of 11 th May, the news of Mangal Pandey’s execution and the subsequent disbandment of his regiment reached the Delhi sepoys. This produced much muttering in the ranks. Soon after, the rebels from Meerut arrived in the capital, forcing Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the aged Mughal emperor, to take up leadership of the Revolt, which he did reluctantly. Under Company rule, Delhi’s position had been undermined, and hence was not a station for any units of the British army, which simplified its takeover by the rebels considerably. The British plan to fight the rebels by launching an attack from Cashmere Gate in Delhi was jeopardised by the betrayal of the 54 th Regiment, which immediately joined the rebels, leaving the British to be mercilessly killed. Delhi, as will be shown, was taken over with ease by the troops, who quickly gained fresh recruits from the 38th and 74th Regiments. The reason behind the mutineers’ march to Delhi was the unique position held by the city as the Mughal capital, making the breakdown of British law and order here symbolic of complete victory over the British. The Company officials made desperate attempts to close off all city gates, but failed to prevent the entry of raging rebels through the Rajghat Gate. The events that followed over the next few days involved the slaughter of British officials and civilians. With the continuous arrival of large contingents of rebellious sepoys in Delhi, it quickly became apparent to the British that the city was too well-fortified and strongly held to fall to a swift attack. The mutineering sepoys carried out attacks through June and July, the major ones being the attacks of 19th June, 23rd June and 9th July, in which the besiegers were bogged down by heavy losses.

In early August, the besiegers found necessary reinforcement in numbers and arms by the arrival of Brigadier John Nicholson and his forces, joined by a siege train in early September. Immediate action was decided upon, led by Richard Baird Smith, an engineer officer, who drew up elaborate plans to breach the city walls and make an assault—every column was to launch its attack from a different place. The operations of this phase of the British siege resulted in a part of the walls of Delhi falling back into British hands, first the Cashmere Gate region, followed by the Magazine, the Palace and Jama Masjid, and Lahore Gate.

On 21 September, the city was finally declared captured, but at a terrible cost; not only did British officials like Nicholson and native sepoys lose their lives, but innocent civilians did too. By recapturing the Indian capital city, the British and Company forces dealt the Indian Army mutineers a major military and psychological blow. Bahadur Shah and his three sons were captured by Major William SR Hodson, leader of the irregular Light Cavalry at the time, who had the latter executed. The emperor was spared but exiled to Rangoon. Hundreds of rebel prisoners, suspected rebels and sympathisers were hanged without trial or legal process.

Carnage in Kanpur

Left: ‘Massacre at Cawnpore’, engraving from the Sarmaya collection; right: Nana Sahib, Wikipedia Creative commons/Illustrated London News

The revolts at Meerut and Delhi provided the necessary inspiration for a general rising across India, first in Ferozpore, Aligarh, Etawah and Mynpoorie, and later in Benares, Allahabad, Kanpur, Awadhi and Rohilkundi provinces. Of these risings, the ones at Kanpur and Lucknow were the most significant. By end May-early June, the British forces in Kanpur had been reinforced: a month’s provisions had been stored in the entrenchment and additional guns strategically positioned. The rebellion broke out on the night of 4 th June, led by the 2 nd Cavalry and joined by the forces of Nana Sahib, the adopted heir of Baji Rao II, former peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy. As Nana was not a natural-born heir, the Company had decided to cancel the transfer of pension and honours of the lineage to him. He took up residence in Kanpur to excite the sepoys into revolt and protect the treasury himself. The 2 nd Cavalry and Nana’s men were quickly joined by the 1 st Native Infantry and the native artillerymen of the Awadh Battery.

The aim of all groups of insurgents was to make their way to Delhi and join the other rebels. This, however, posed a challenge to Nana Sahib, as the departure of the mutineers for Delhi would mean that the advantages he had promised himself from the Revolt—the restoration of the Peshwa and Maratha with Kanpur as the centre of sovereignty—would be lost. He therefore made every effort to persuade the marching troops to return to Kanpur and kill the Britishers left behind, in order to secure their own lives, which would be threatened if the rebellion were unsuccessful. The news of more treasure in the entrenchment and the gunpowder and guns remaining in the magazine gave the rebels added incentive to place themselves under Nana’s orders and return to Kanpur.

Satichaura Ghat, a photograph by Samuel Bourne

On 25 th June, the British surrendered, giving Nana control over government money, the magazine and guns, in return for the safe passage of the surviving English families to Allahabad after a day of preparation and burying their dead. On the 27 th , carts and elephants were sent by Nana to enable British women, children and the sick to proceed to the river banks, from where they would be taken to Allahabad. The British officers and military men were allowed to take along their arms and ammunition, and were escorted by a large portion of the rebel army. As soon as the British party reached Satichaura Ghat and set aside their musketry, however, they were once again attacked by sepoys. Although the British hold him responsible, there is no evidence to prove that Nana Sahib had pre-planned or ordered the massacre.

Some modern historians suggest the Satichaura Ghat massacre was the unfortunate result of some confusion. Nevertheless, the departing Britishers were killed and captured by rebel sepoys, and the few boats that escaped, including Wheeler’s, were pursued and attacked. Even those who surrendered were captured and taken to be fired on. The women and children survivors of the Satichaura Ghat massacre were placed in captivity in Kanpur, first at Savada House and then at Bibighar. The prisoners were placed under the care of a sex worker, Hussaini Khanum, and used to bargain with the Company, whose armed forces, led by Henry Havelock and Colonel James Neill, had set out from Allahabad to retake Kanpur and Lucknow.

Nana’s demand for the retreat of the relentlessly advancing Company forces was ignored. It was clear that his bargain had failed and drastic action needed to be taken. When the rebel leaders of Kanpur received news of violence against innocent Indian villagers by Havelock’s and Neill’s forces, they issued an order on 15 th July to murder the women and children imprisoned at Bibighar, after much discussion. A merciless murder of the innocent took place once more, with every kind of weapon, from bayonets to clubs to butcher’s knives to battle-axes. Once everyone had been killed, the butchered corpses were then thrown into a well.

Left: Map showing track of rebels under Tantia Topi from the Sarmaya collection; right: Tantia Tope, Wikipedia Creative Commons

The British troops arrived at Bibighar on 16 th July, only to find the captives murdered brutally. Infuriated and disgusted, they engaged in a surge of violence against the local population of Kanpur, their justification being that the local noncombatants did nothing to prevent the massacre. The fate of Nana Sahib remains unknown, but the British claimed that he was captured. Slowly, order was restored in Kanpur. A final attempt at recapture by the rebels was led by Tatya Tope in November, but his army of rebel soldiers from the Gwalior contingent were defeated by the Company forces commanded by Sir Colin Campbell in the Second Battle of Kanpur, concluding the phase of rebellion in the Kanpur area.

A fault-line grows

The events of 1857 led to the death of thousands, with estimates placing this number somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000. Both sides committed brutalities and atrocities against civilians, although the numbers of those who suffered were far greater on the rebel side. Given the magnitude and scale of the rebellion, not only in terms of these numbers but also its spread geographically and socially, it was obvious the Revolt would not be forgotten easily.

Two things happened immediately in its aftermath. First, the British cracked down heavily in punishment. The events of 1857 left the colonisers feeling embittered and angered, sentiments that were expressed in the journals and diaries of the time. The graphic portrayal of the mutilation and violence wrought against women, children and the wounded, horrified and enraged the British public, making them wholeheartedly support the desire of their soldiers who sought revenge. Indian rebels were brutally punished by hanging or by being blown to pieces from cannons.

‘English Homes in India 1857′, Monochrome Engraving on Paper, Illustrated Times © Sarmaya Arts Foundation (2017.4.88) — click on image to see more

The second, more interesting shift happened in the attitudes of the colonial masters towards their subjects and vice versa. Politically, the nature of British rule in India underwent a transformation. The issuing of the Government of India Act of 1858 marked the transfer of the East India Company’s ruling powers to the British Crown. Administrative policy in India was now formulated and implemented by the new government department called the ‘India Office’ and its head, the Secretary of State for India, and the Governor-General, under the new title Viceroy, respectively.

In 1877, Queen Victoria took up the title of Empress of India. Colonial administrators dedicatedly pursued the path of reform, giving up their earlier attempts at Westernisation. They adopted a tolerant stance on religion and incorporated those from Indian upper and ruling castes into the government. Although the old Company bureaucracy essentially remained, attitudes underwent a drastic change—a new philosophy that stressed the preservation of tradition and hierarchy took shape. This was rooted in the belief that the causes of the Revolt lay within the spheres of religion and economy. With respect to religion, the British believed there was earlier an excessive interference in indigenous traditions. On the matter of economy, it was stated that the Company’s attempts to create an environment of free market competition had undermined traditional power structures and bonds of loyalty, placing the peasantry at the mercy of merchants and money-lenders. Politically, it was felt that the severity of relations between the rulers and ruled created a wide gap that fomented unrest.

As a direct result of this school of thought, Indians were drawn into the government at a local level, albeit on a limited scale. This, along with the opening of universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras created a new professional middle class, members of which would be drawn to the early mission of the Indian National Congress. Founded in 1885 by two Parsi industrialists and a retired British civil servant, the Congress started off as a platform that would debate the issues of the day and put the concerns of Indian citizenry before its rulers in England. By the early 20 th century, the party would be at the forefront of the freedom struggle, led by personalities who are known today as the founders and architects of free India.

In the end, the events of 1857 were never to be India’s ‘tryst with destiny’. But in the aftermath, an awareness grew among the masses, who had learned to fight for what was rightfully theirs. The Uprising planted the embers of defiance that would feed the blaze in which our national identity was forged less than a century later.

A student of history from St Stephen’s College, Devika Dua had interned with Sarmaya

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ball, Charles; The History of the Indian Mutiny
Forbes-Mitchel, William; Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny; Macmillan and Co.; London, 1894
Gubbins, Martin Richard; An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh and of the Siege of the Lucknow Residency, Woodfall and Kinder; London; 1858
Lady Inglis; The Siege of Lucknow: a Diary; James R Osgood, McIlvaine and Co.; London; 1892
NCERT, Themes in Indian History Part III
Pati, Biswamoy; The 1857 Rebellion, Debates in Indian History and Society; Oxford University Press; 2007
Rees, L.E.R.; A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow, From its Commencement to its Relief by Sir Colin Campbell; Spottiswoode and Co.; London; 1858
Sedgwick, F.R.; The Indian Mutiny 1857, A Sketch of the Principal Military Events; Forster Groom & Co Ltd.; London; 1920
Unknown; The Mutiny of the Bengal Army; An Historical Narrative, Bosworth and Harrison; London
Indian Mutiny of 1857 – Siege of Delhi

Delhi, 1857: a bloody warning to today’s imperial occupiers

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The Deadly Impact of British Rule in India: A Comparative Analysis

by history tools
May 26, 2024

Introduction

The British Empire‘s nearly two-century-long rule over India had far-reaching and devastating consequences that surpassed the impact of previous colonizing forces. While earlier invaders often settled in India and invested their wealth locally, the British Empire‘s primary goal was to extract resources and wealth from India for the benefit of Britain. This approach led to the systematic exploitation of India‘s economy, the erosion of its traditional industries, and the impoverishment of its people.

The Systematic Destruction of India‘s Economy

One of the most significant differences between British rule and that of previous colonizers was the Empire‘s focus on draining India‘s wealth and resources. Unlike the Mughals and other earlier rulers who patronized local artisans, craftsmen, and luxury industries, the British favored European goods and sent their wealth back to Britain. This shift in demand led to the decline of India‘s once-thriving textile, jewelry, and handicraft industries, leaving countless skilled workers jobless and impoverished.

The extent of the economic drain was staggering. According to a study by economist Utsa Patnaik, between 1765 and 1938, the British Empire siphoned off approximately $45 trillion (in today‘s value) from India through various means, including tax revenue, trade surpluses, and the exploitation of India‘s natural resources (Patnaik, 2018). This massive wealth transfer hindered India‘s economic growth and development, leaving the country with a legacy of poverty and underdevelopment.

Moreover, the British Empire‘s stringent tax policies and lack of flexibility during times of hardship exacerbated the suffering of India‘s rural population. While previous rulers often waived or reduced taxes during droughts and famines, the British insisted on collecting taxes regardless of the circumstances. This approach, coupled with the Victorian era‘s emphasis on fiscal prudence and the influence of Malthusian Theory, resulted in minimal expenditure on relief efforts and infrastructure development in India.

The consequences of these policies were devastating. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, India experienced a series of famines that claimed millions of lives. The most notorious of these was the Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2.1 to 3 million people (Dyson & Maharatna, 1991). The British Empire‘s inadequate response and adherence to free-market principles exacerbated the crisis, leading to widespread starvation and suffering.

The Erosion of Traditional Knowledge Systems and Cultural Heritage

The impact of British rule on India‘s social and cultural fabric was equally profound. The introduction of Western education and values, while beneficial in some aspects, also contributed to the marginalization of indigenous languages, arts, and sciences. The British Empire‘s emphasis on English-medium education and the suppression of traditional knowledge systems led to a gradual erosion of India‘s rich cultural heritage.

For example, the British Empire‘s policies led to the decline of traditional Indian medicine, known as Ayurveda, which had been practiced for thousands of years. The Empire‘s promotion of Western medicine and the marginalization of indigenous healing practices resulted in the loss of valuable knowledge and the erosion of India‘s healthcare system (Wujastyk, 2003).

Furthermore, the British Empire‘s divide-and-rule strategy, which exploited religious and regional differences, contributed to the fragmentation of Indian society. The Partition of India in 1947, which led to the creation of India and Pakistan, was a direct consequence of these policies. The violence and displacement that accompanied the Partition claimed millions of lives and left a lasting legacy of mistrust and conflict between the two nations (Talbot & Singh, 2009).

The Unique Factors Contributing to the Deadly Impact of British Rule

While previous colonizing forces, such as the Mughals and the Portuguese, also exploited India‘s resources and labor, the British Empire‘s rule was unique in its scale, duration, and systematic approach to wealth extraction. The Empire‘s industrial revolution and global dominance allowed it to establish a more extensive and entrenched system of colonialism in India.

Moreover, the British Empire‘s rule coincided with a period of significant technological and scientific advancements, which enabled the efficient exploitation of India‘s resources and labor. The construction of railways, for example, facilitated the transportation of raw materials from India to Britain and the import of manufactured goods from Britain to India, further strengthening the Empire‘s economic grip on the country (Thorner, 1950).

The British Empire‘s rule also had a more profound impact on India‘s social and cultural fabric due to its longer duration and the Empire‘s active promotion of Western values and institutions. The introduction of English-medium education, for instance, created a new class of Indian elites who were more aligned with British interests than with the needs of the local population (Viswanathan, 1989).

The Ongoing Relevance of the British Colonial Legacy

The legacy of British rule in India continues to shape the country‘s economic, social, and political landscape. The unequal power dynamics and exploitative policies established during the colonial era have contributed to the persistence of poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment in India.

Moreover, the British Empire‘s divide-and-rule strategy and the trauma of the Partition have left a lasting impact on India‘s social and political fabric. The ongoing conflicts and tensions between different religious and regional groups can be traced back to the policies and actions of the British Empire.

As India grapples with these challenges and works towards building a more equitable and resilient future, it is crucial to understand and address the root causes of these issues. This requires a critical examination of the British colonial legacy and a concerted effort to heal the wounds of the past and build a more inclusive and prosperous society.

The deadly impact of British rule in India can be attributed to the Empire‘s single-minded pursuit of wealth extraction, its disregard for the welfare of the Indian population, and its systematic erosion of India‘s traditional industries, knowledge systems, and cultural heritage. In contrast to previous colonizing forces, the British Empire‘s policies were driven by the interests of Britain, rather than the development and prosperity of India.

The long-term consequences of British rule, including the massive economic drain, the erosion of traditional knowledge systems, and the trauma of the Partition, continue to shape India‘s present and future. As India navigates the challenges of the 21st century, it is essential to confront and address the legacy of British colonialism and work towards building a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.

Dyson, T., & Maharatna, A. (1991). Excess mortality during the Bengal famine: A re-evaluation. The Indian Economic & Social History Review , 28(3), 281-297.
Patnaik, U. (2018). Agrarian and other histories: Essays on agrarian history, production and reproduction in India . Tulika Books.
Talbot, I., & Singh, G. (2009). The partition of India . Cambridge University Press.
Thorner, D. (1950). Investment in empire: British railway and steam shipping enterprise in India, 1825-1849 . University of Pennsylvania Press.
Viswanathan, G. (1989). Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India . Columbia University Press.
Wujastyk, D. (2003). The roots of ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit medical writings . Penguin Books India.

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Hinduism, Indian culture, Vedic Science, Yoga, Spirituality, India

Education system in ancient India before the British Raj

Ancient India was celebrated for its learning all over civilized Asia and Europe. Megasthenese (ca. 302 BC) was struck by the depth of this learning during his mission to the court of Chandragupta. Fa-hien, the famous Chinese traveller (399-413 AD) spent some years at the Pataliputra and Tamralipti monasteries. He also spent two years in Ceylon which too had its monasteries after the India fashion. These monasteries were a big affair, housing and teaching several hundred monks each. Two centuries after came Hiuen Tsang undertaking a hazardous journey across Central Asia and northern parts of India. During the seventeen years he spent in India (629-645 AD) he visited many monasteries belonging to the Mahayana and the Hinayana schools. He visited Hiranyaparvata, the Golden Hill (Munghir), a city on the bank of the Ganges, which had 10 Sangharamas with 4,000 priests, and 12 Deva temples. At Tamralipti (at the mouth of Hoogly), there were 10 monasteries with a thousand monks. The same story is told of many other towns he visited.

I-tsing (671-695 AD) came to India by sea-route. He spent ten years studying at the Nalanda University, the most dominant at his time. It was supported by a revenue of 200 villages and housed more than 3,000 monks. The building contained eight halls and three hundred apartments. On the way back, he spent seven years in Sribhoja (Sumatra), which was a cultural extension of India.

In the face of continued Muslim onslaught from across the north-west frontier, Hindu Buddhist sciences began to retire into the ineterior. Alberuni tells us how “Mahmud ruined the prosperity of the country (India)”, how they (Hindus) were turned into “atoms of dust scattered in all directions”, how “this is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places.” As time passed and the Muslim inroads became deeper, Hindu centres of learning were destroyed in the interior too. Eventually, from there they retired into neighbouring countries like Tibet.

Tibet preserved as best as it could, what India was no longer in a position to do. For example, 4000 books belonging to the Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit literature were translated into Tibetan language. Today, about 3800 of them are no longer even known in India. They were so completely destroyed. The work of destruction was so complete. Today much of old India is found in neighbouring countries like Tibet and Siam and Cambodia; and India’s old past history cannot be reconstructed except with their aid.

The Nalanda University continued its glorious existence for a thousand years till it was destroyed by the Muslims. Bakhtiyar Khilji invaded Bihar in 1197 AD and found that at Odantapuri (present-day Bihar-Sharif in Patna District) “most of inhabitants were Brahmins with shaven heads. They were put to death. Large number of books were found there, and, when the Muhammadans saw them, they called for some persons to explain their contents, but all the men had been killed. It was discovered that the whole fort and city was a place of study. In the Hindi language the word Behar (vihâr) means a college” (Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, Vol.11, p.306).

After this, India entered an era lasting over several centuries which may be called its dark period. Hindus came under the repeated attacks of the Muslims who destroyed their places of worship and learning. But their hands could not reach everywhere; and even in places where they were more securely established, their rule did not remain undisputed for long. As a result, Hindu India and its institutions, though badly mauled, still survived.

European Era

As we enter the period of European conquest, we find that the European travellers and administrators bear testimony to the great veneration in which the Hindus hold learning and instruction. One of the earliest observations made on the subject of indigenous education was by Fra Paolino Da Bartolomeo. Born in Austria, he spent fourteen years in India (1776-1789). Recalling what Megasthenese wrote, he says that the method of teaching and writing was introduced into India two hundred years before Christ, and that he still found it in practice. “No people, perhaps, on earth have adhered as much to their ancient usage and customs as the Indians,” he says. He tells us that the Greek historians represent the Indians as people of greater size, and much more robust than those of other nations. He himself “seldom saw in India a person either lame, crooked, or otherwise deformed”. Among many factors, climatic and cultural (like wholesome nourishment, cold bath, oil message etc.), which he recounts, he says that “temperance and education contribute, in an uncommon degree, to the bodily conformation, and to the increase of these people”. Then he describes the method and practice of teaching and instruction as he found them in Malabar schools.

We may here also quote the testimony of Brigadier-General Alexander Walker who served In India between 1780 and 1810. He says that “no people probably appreciate more justly the importance of instruction than the Hindus”. According to him, “they sacrifice all the feelings of wealth, family pride and caste that their children may have the advantage of good education”. He also found that this love of learning was no exclusive characteristic of the Brahmins but “this desire is strongly impressed on the minds of all the Hindus. It is inculcated by their own system, which provided schools in every village.” He adds that the “spirit of enquiry and of liberty has most probably been effected by the soodors [Shudras] who compose the great body of population, and who were in possession of the principal authority and property of the country”.

Even during the early days of the British, when they had not entrenched themselves so well, indigenous education was thriving. Discussing the famous “Nuddeah School” of Bengal, an article (Calcutta Monthly Register, January 1791) has the following to say: “In the college of Nuddeah alone, there are at present 1,100 students and 150 masters. Their numbers, it is true fall very short of those in former days. In Rajah Roodre’s time (Circa 1680) there were at Nuddeah, no less than 4,000 students and masters in proportion.” All, the teachers as well as the pupils, were supported by the revenue of free land, the Rajah’s treasury supplying any deficiency.

The fact of wide-spread education – a school in every village – was uniformly noticed by most early observers. Even writing as late as 1820, Abbe J.A. Dubois says that “there are very few villages in which one or many public schools are not to be found … that the students learn in them all that is necessary to their ranks and wants … namely, reading, writing, and accounts”.

The Government Survey

For a hundred years, the hands of the British Government were full with the problems of military conquest and revenue system. But for the consolidation of their power, they had to turn to other more intangible aspects of the country’s life. Education, so important an Institution, could not be left out of their vigilant attention. The Raj made a thorough study of the prevailing indigenous educational system before introducing its own. Surveys were made in the Bombay Presidency (1820-1830), and the Madras Presidency (1823-1826). A limited, semi-official survey was also made in the Presidency of Bengal ten years later by W. Adam, an excommunicated Baptist missionary, and the findings were published in 1835 in A Report on the State of Education in Bengal. [His first Report was followed by two more, published in 1836 and 1838.] When Punjab was annexed in 1849, the British Government had already developed its Educational policy which it put into operation immediately in this region. G.W. Leitner, Principal of Government College, Lahore, and for some time also the Director of Public Instruction, Punjab, made his own investigations and published his Report in 1883.

Adam’s Reports on Bengal became celebrated and saw several reprints, the last in 1983 with a scholarly introduction by Joseph Dibona, the Associate Professor of Education at the Duke University, Durham. 1 Leitner’s Report on Punjab, which has been unavailable for decades, has also been reprinted in 1971 by the Languages Department, Punjab. 2 Madras data was the most comprehensive but it never came out in print though its conclusions were known and were referred to by several authorities in several occasions. Dharampal has collected this data on its fullness and published it for the first time. With a long, illuminating introduction, and with many appendices including long portion from Adam’s Reports and Leitner’s History, his The Beautiful Tree may be considered as the single, most comprehensive document in the subject. 3

It turned out that what the Government undertook was not a sample survey but a veritable census. The Madras study and Adam’s study of the Thana of the Nattore in the Rajashahy District of Bengal counted every school, scholar and teacher. These reports described the mode of instruction. They touched many points: curriculum, text-books, the hours of coaching, the tuition fees, the financial support of the system. They also contained information regarding the state of the female education; they collected the caste-composition of the scholars and the teachers and also their religious and linguistic affiliations. In this way, these reports, besides throwing light on the educational state of the period, became a mine of information on many sociological facts.

The Mode of Instruction

There were certain characteristic features of the Hindu mode of instruction. Reading and writing were combined. As a pupil spoke aloud a letter, he also wrote it with his finger on the ground in sand. When he had acquired a little proficiency, he could use an iron style or reed or some other instrument to write on a palm-leaf or plantain-leaf. Wooden-boards and brazen-plates were also used. The writing could be effaced with a wet cloth, and boards and slates used again for writing upon. The method was economical.

The very first lessons which taught a knowledge of letters also provided moral and religious instruction. A letter was learnt by referring to a word beginning with that letter, then by a verse which was also a moral maxim, in order to impress it better in the memory. For example the letter ‘k’ stood for kubrâ (hump-backed), and it was accompanied by the verse: kakkâ kar kartâ kî pûjâ, wahî nirañjan aur na dûjâ (worship the Creator; He is pure and He has no second). Again, the alphabet ‘d’ was accompanied by this verse; dosh na dîje kâhû; dosh karam apne kâ (do not attribute your failure to others; attribute it to your own destiny). G.W. Leitner gives a whole list of these verses for all the letters. Thus the very first lessons which taught knowledge of the alphabets also provided moral and religious instruction.

There was also another feature of this mode of learning: the pupils learnt in groups of four or five, generally led by a more advanced student. Describing the method, A.D. Campbell, Collector of Bellary, says: “The economy with which children are taught to write in the native schools, and the system by which the more advanced scholars are caused to teach the less advanced, and at the same time to confirm their own knowledge is certainly admirable, and well deserves the imitation it has received in England.” This refers to the well known fact that some of the features of the Indian indigenous education were borrowed by Europe. 4

Grass-roots Schools-system

Even though already much decayed when the British undertook the survey, the remains indicated an immense edifice which had its foundations deep in the culture of the country and had penetrated every village. W. Adam’s Report of 1835 showed that in the then states of Bengal and Bihar, there were 100,000 indigenous elementary schools, or one school for every 31 or 32 boys of school-going age, as the author calculated. The Madras Report which was the most comprehensive showed that there were 12,498 schools containing 188,650 scholars. During the same period, schools of a similar nature were found scattered throughout the Bombay Presidency too. Leitner found that 8000 pupils still received their education in the indigenous schools of Punjab in spite or “the 26 years of repressive education of the Educational Department”,

The data shows that the female education was very much neglected though it was not altogether absent. Certain regions like Malabar and Joypoor in Vizagapatam made a better showing then other areas. In these regions, we also find that the Shudras did better in the matter of female education than the upper class Hindus including the Brahmins. In the Punjab, according to Leitner, “female education is to be met in all parts”. According to him, the Punjabi woman has not only been “always more or less educated herself, but she has been an educator of others”. He tells us that even before the annexation of the Punjab, six public schools for girls in Delhi were kept by Punjabi women.

The Reports also show that besides the system of public education, there was also widespread private coaching. The Collector of Canara wrote, that whatever education was there in his district was “entirely private”. In Madras, the number of pupils taught privately at home was considered to be “above five times greater than that taught in the schools”, according to Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras Presidency. In Malabar District, 1,094 Hindu students of advanced learning, were being coached privately, while only 75 attended the only one public institution financed by the impoverished Raja. The Collector narrates the pathetic story of this ancient institution, first destroyed by the Muslims in 966, and later on ruined by being denied its revenues by the British. According to Adam, in the Nattore Thana, while only 659 pupils were taught in any kind of public schools, 2,382 were taught at home.

Private coaching including self-education remained an important part of the Indian scene. Edward Thompson writing in the 1930’s says: “There are in India poor folk who never went to any sort of school who have learnt to read. . . There must be more literacy in the sense of reading the vernaculars, than the numbers in schools indicate, or else how every Bengal bazaar swarms with these frightfully printed (but cheap) texts of Ramprasad, Chandidas, Krittibas’s Ramayana (before the War, according to Dinesh Sen, two hundred thousand sold every year). . . Sarat Chatterjee told me that in 1921 the twelve annas edition of his fiction had brought him in twelve thousand rupees in royalties, which I estimate to be on a sale of two hundred thousand.”

Higher Education

There was also a well-developed system of specialized education and higher learning.

According to the Survey of Indigenous Education in the Province of Bombay (1820-30), there were 16 schools of higher learning in Ahmednagar; and in Poona there was as many 164 such schools out of a total of 222 educational institutions of all description.

Madras Presidency reported 1,101 schools (with 5431 students) of higher learning, Rajahmundry heading the list with 279 such schools. Trichnopoly had 173, Nellore 137 and Tanjore 109. These taught 5,431 scholars who learnt here, according to their specialization, the Vedas, or Law, or Astronomy, or Poetics, or Music, etc.

Hamilton said in 1801 that within the limits of the 24Parganas, beyond the limits of Calcutta, there were 190 seminaries, all indigenously maintained where Hindu Law, Grammar and Metaphysics were taught. Ward, who wrote in 1818, enumerated 28 institutions of higher learning in the city of Calcutta alone where Nyâya and Smriti Shâstras were taught. There was well organized instruction in the Indian system of medicine and inoculation against small-pox was also taught.

Adam gives much data on the subject. According to his Report, in the Thana of Nattore in the District of Rajashahy alone, there were 38 higher schools of learning with 379 scholars, of whom 261 came from distant places. We have the same story from another corner in India, namely the Punjab. Leitner’s Report says: “The Vedas were, comparatively speaking, little taught in the Punjab in Ranjit Singh’s time, the teachers chiefly coming from the Dekkan”; but, he adds that in Sanskrit and in Grammar, “Punjab Learning was proverbial throughout India, whilst Punjabi Pandits also excelled in Niaya (Logic), Mimansa, the Dharmshastras, Vedant and Sankhya (six Shastras), Patidhant and Siddhant (Astronomy)”.

The subjects taught in these schools of higher learning were the Vedas, SâMkhya (Philosophy), the Six DarSanas, Law, Logic, Poetics, Grammar, Astrology and Astronomy, and Medicine. Fra Paolino Da Bartolomeo, describing education in Malabar also mentions the following subjects: Chess (ciudarangam), fencing (payatta), Navigation (naushantra) and the use of the spear on foot (hastiludiun). Another interesting subject taught was silence or mauna. Yes, mauna too has to be taught and it is as important a subject as any other. We learn from Leitner’s Report that Ranjit Singh also gave grants to architects and gun-makers. It is not clear whether the grants were personal or meant for teaching their arts to other deserving students.

The Pandits

Adam praises the teachers for their learning which was equalled only by their modesty. He found them “not only unpretending but also plain and simple”. Though “adepts in the subtleties of the profoundest grammar” of a language “probably the most philosophical”, and masters of logic, ethical philosophy and of their national laws, they were “discriminating and mild”. He found in them “no abjectness to a supposed or official superior”. They praised other Pandits for their learning, generally in their absence, rather than themselves. Let us salute their memory. What was said about the country’s cotton-weavers could as justly be said about its teachers and Acharyas – their bones are bleaching the plains of the country.

The Collector of Bellary District reports that “the three books which are most common in all the schools, and which are used indiscriminately by all the several castes, are the Ramayana Mahabharata, and Bhagvata”. Thus contrary to the current notion, the highest ethical and spiritual literature of the Hindus was open to all irrespective of their caste. Very much unlike the West, where the Bible remained unread and even a prohibited reading for many, many centuries; and, in fact, many times its translators into vernacular were burned at the stake – till the triumph of Protestantism, which gave birth to an opposite movement called bibliolatry.

F.W. Robertson, Collector of Rajahmundry District, names 66 text books including the Ramayana, various Shutcums (Krishn Shutcum, Suryanarayan Shutcum, Jankeya Shutcum, Narayan Shutcum), and various Charitums (like Vamana Charitum, Mala Charitum, etc.). Some text-books, like the Visvakaram-Purana, were special to the manufacturing classes. Adam names 29 text-books taught in elementary schools in Bengal, and 120 books taught in higher Institutes. These related to such subjects as Grammar (20), General Literature (11), Law (17), Vedanta (4), Logic (31), Astronomy and Astrology (19), Medicine (4), etc.

In his Report on the Punjab, Leitner names hundreds of textbooks – Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Gurmukhi – taught in Hindu and Muhammadan schools of different grades in the Punjab. For example, text-books taught to Sikh students of Gurmukhi schools are divided into two sections: those taught to the beginners and those taught to advanced students. To the first section belonged Balopdesha, Panj Granthi, Janam Sakhi, the tenth Guru’s Panj Ekadash, Bhagvat, Tulsi Ramayana, Vishnu Purana, Pingal (10 parts), Ashwa Medha, Adhyatma Ramayana, Vichara Sagar, Moksha Pantha, Surya Prakash, the sixth Guru’s Guru Vilas, Vashishtha Purana, and Daswan Askandha.

Education Open to All

There is a popular notion that education in India was monopolized by the Brahmins; but the data destroys this myth completely. This interested lie was first spread by the missionaries and the British rulers and the colonized mind of many Indian intellectuals still continue to sing their tune. But the data reveals a different story. It tells us that out of the total number of 175,089 students, both male and female, elementary and advanced, only 42,502 were Brahmins (24.25%); 19,669 were Vaishya students (about 11%); but 85,400 were Shudras (about 48.8%); and still 27.516 more were “all other castes”, meaning castes even lower than the Shudras including the pariahs (15.7%). Thus the higher castes were only about 35% and the Shudras and other castes were about 65% of the total Hindu students. If we also include the Muslims who were about 7% of the total Hindu and Muslim students, then the share of the Brahmins was even less.

We have a table showing the caste-wise division of all male school students, both in absolute numbers and in percentage, of all the 20 districts of Madras Presidency. The data shows that the share of the Brahmins in certain areas was indeed very low. For example, in Seringapatam, it was only 7.83% in Madura 8.67%; in North Arcot, Brahmin boys were 9.57%, while the Shudras and “other castes” were 84.46%.

Even in higher learning, non-Brahmins were not unrepresented. In Malabar, out of 1,588 scholars of Theology, Law, Astronomy, Metaphysics, Ethics and Medical Science, only 639 were Brahmins, 23 Vaishyas, 254 Shudras and 672 “other castes”. Only in the Vedas and Theology did the Brahmins have a near-monopoly, as the Shudras and the “other castes” had in other branches of advanced learning like Astro-nomy and Medical Science. In Astronomy, out of a total of 806 scholars, Brahmins were only 78, Vaishyas 23, Shudras 195, and other lower castes 510. In Medical Science, the share of the Brahmin scholars was only 31 out of a total of 190. The rest belonged to the Shudras and “other castes”.

According to the Survey of Indigenous Education in the Province of Bombay (1820-1830), Brahmins constituted only 30% of the total scholars in that province.

Adam tells the same story about Bengal and Bihar. In the five districts he investigated, the total number of Hindu students was 22,957. Out of these 5,744 were Brahmins, or about 25%. Kayasthas were about 12%. Students belonging to 95 castes find representation in his Report. It includes 66 ChanDals, 20 Muchis, 84 Doms, 102 Kahars, and 615 Kurmis.

In spite of the claims of the missionaries, they did no better for the Hindu low-castes. According to Adam’s findings, Burdwan had 13 missionary schools, yet they had only 1 ChanDal student while the native schools had 60. The former had only 3 Doms and no Muchis while the latter had 58 and 16 respectively. Of the 760 pupils belonging to the lowest 16 castes, “only 86 were found in the missionary schools, and the remaining number in native schools”.

As teachers, the Brahmins were even less represented. Out of a total of 2,261 teachers in these districts, Brahmins were only 208, or about 11%. In this region Kayasthas were the teachers par excellence. They were 1,019 in number, or a little less than half the total. Other teachers belonged to other 32 castes. ChanDals had six, Goalas had five, Telis had eleven; while Rajputs had only two, and Chhatri and Kshetriya taken together had only three.

It will not be out of place here to compare the state of instruction in India at this period with the one prevalent in the West, and particularly in England, the country with which we have better acquaintance. The West was at this time acquiring monasteries and new-style universities which were gaining fame for teaching theology, but it still had no national system of elementary education for instructing its younger ones.

In England, the attempt to introduce any semblance of wider instruction was first made in mid-fifties in the nineteenth century under factory laws. But the legislation “provided nothing more than that the children shall on certain days of the week, and for a certain number of hours (three) in each day, be inclosed within the four walls of a place called a school, and that the employer of the child shall receive weekly a certificate to that effect signed by a person designated by the subscriber as a schoolmaster or schoolmistress” (Report of the Inspector of Factories, Parliamentary Papers, June 30, 1857).

The level of literacy of these teachers was such that many of them signed the certificate of attendance at school with a cross. As a result, an Act had to be passed in 1844 which required that the “figures in the school certificate must be filled up in the handwriting of the schoolmaster, who must also sign his Christian and surname in full”. But that did not improve matters very much. Sir John Kincaid, Factory Inspector for Scotland, tells us how a school teacher, one Mrs. Ann Killin, spelled her name sometimes with letter C, sometimes with K and in various other ways. He also tells us of a “schoolroom 15 feet long, and 10 feet wide, and counted in this space 75 children, who were gabbling something unintelligible” (Parliamentary Papers, 31st October 1858) About the “cultural” acquirements of these scholars, one may read Karl Marx (Das Capital, Part III, Chapter 10, Section 4), who quotes extensively from the Children’s Employment Commission Report.

Punishment in India under the indigenous system of education was mild. Even in the Punjab region where it was more common, it consisted in making a student stand in a corner, or making him pull his own ears by passing his hands through his knees; or making him sit down and stand up for a number of times; or disallowing him to leave the class-room during the meal time. There were no fines. On the other hand, teachers in England were sadists – at least, this is what the English accounts of the period tell us. For example, Charles Dickens in his Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) describes these schools and their teachers, particularly in Yorkshire. He says that these “schoolmasters, as a race, were the blockheads and impostures”; that, they “were the lowest and most rotten in the whole ladder”; that they were “ignorant, sordid, brutal men, to whom few considerate men would have entrusted the board and lodging of a horse or dog”. He said that these schools were opened by “any man who had proved his unfitness for any other occupation in life”.

Sanction in Hinduism

The Indian national education system was no freak. It was grounded in Hindu culture and its system of local self-government. Ludlow’s British India says that “in every Hindu village which has retained anything of its form … the rudiments of knowledge are sought to be imparted; there is not a child… who is not able to read, to write, to cipher; in the last branch of learning they are confessedly most proficient”. The same source says at another place that “where the village system has been swept away by us, as in Bengal, there the school system has equally disappeared”. Leitner quotes a report of a British Inspector of Schools in the Punjab which too brings out the intimate link between indigenous educational system and it underlying system of ideas and polity. It says: “The indigenous education of India was founded on the sanction of the Shastras, which elevated into religious duties and conferred dignity on the commonest transactions of every-day life. The existence of village communities, which left not only their municipal, but also in part their revenue and judicial administrations, in the hands of the people themselves, greatly helped to spread education among all the different members of the community.”

British Hostility

The new rulers were understandably hostile to the indigenous system. As soon as the British took over the Punjab, the Education Report of 1858 says: “A village school left to itself is not an institution which we have any great interest in maintaining.”

This hostility arose partly from a lack of imagination. To the new rulers, brought up so differently, a school was no school if it did not teach English. To such preponderant elements among them, the answer of a rare and imaginative administrator like Leitner was this: “If a collegium held, according to Hindu tradition, in the teacher’s own house, is not a school; if to read and write Gurmukhi and thenaharas is not to know the three or any r’s, then, of course, all discussion is at an end… When, however, by school is meant an indigenous school; by a knowledge of reading and writing that of the indigenous characters; by learning or science, oriental learning and science, then indeed was education far extended when we took the Punjab than it is at present.” To these who despised an indigenous school because it taught a small number of students, he answered: “If the Lahore Government College could be called a college when it had only four students, there is no reason why an indigenous school should not be called a school when it has less than ten students.”

Financial Support

The teacher of an indigenous school was an idealist, but the system itself was founded on realistic public financial support. Schools were supported by the grant of rent-free lands and monetary assignments. During the British rule, this support was withheld or drastically curtailed. The data for rent-free lands to support local needs like the police, the temples, the education has not been fully worked out but that this portion was very large is beyond doubt. Dharampal shows that it was sometimes as large as 35% of the total land, and sometimes even 50%. Leitner gives the names of many hundreds of scholars who were endowed with such lands but whose grants were terminated and as a result of which the institutions they ran so well died down within a generation. The Collector of Bellary District wrote: “There is no doubt that in former times especially under the Hindu Government very large grants both in money and in land were issued for the sake of learning.”

When the British started studying indigenous education, they had already been in control of the territory for over fifty years; and during these years much harm had already been done. The land grants were already stopped or curtailed. There was a general breakdown in the economy at large. The old classes which supported local institutions were impoverished. These and other causes combined to bring about a fast deterioration is the educational condition. Adam mentions many specific villages in Nattore Thana which at the time of investigation had only two schools where there had been once ten or eleven schools in living memory. The decay was fast.

Increasing Illiteracy

No doubt, indigenous education decayed and illiteracy increased during the British period. According to Sir Henry Lawrence, there was one school for every 1783 inhabitants of the most backward division of the Punjab at the time of annexation. But thirty years later in 1881, “there is one school of whatever sort, to every 9,028 inhabitants”, according the President of the Educational Commission.

Adam estimated that there was 11% literacy in the Thana of Nattore during 1830s. “A century later the British considered this an accomplishment in many parts of India,” says Joseph DiBona, the author of One Teacher, One School. This is the charge which Mahatma Gandhi also brought against the British when he said in 1931 that “today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago”. He charged that the British destroyed “the Beautiful Tree”, an epithet he used to describe old Indian indigenous education and which Dharampal has also borrowed from him to provide the title to his book on the subject.

Indigenous education served local needs, both economic and cultural and religious. Under the British, it was divorced from both. For example, one Government report says: “If a boy learns arithmetic in our schools, he is of little use for the shop, because he finds there a different system of accounts, and the meanest Banya can cast up the intricacies of the grain-trade accounts by a mental process far more rapidly than if he had taken honours in Mathematics at the Calcuttta University.”

Under the indigenous system, primary education was imparted in the local language. But the British Government introduced Urdu as the medium of instruction over a large territory of North India. This “practically excluded from primary instruction” the whole Hindu priestly class, the artisans and the agricultural classes, according to the testimony of the Brahmo Samaj. The common men and women wanted to learn to read in order to be able to study the Ramayana and other religious books which were available in their own language. But Urdu which was foreign to them did not help them in that direction. It was meant to make students munshis which was not their aim.

Cultural Self-alienation

While teaching a boy three r’s, indigenous education also familiarized him with the nation’s epics, religion and literature. This did not suit the white rulers and missionaries. So they put forward the principles of “secularism” and ‘religious neutrality’ – principles which continue to be pleaded even today by our brown sahibs with equal duplicity and equal harm to the deeper life of the nation. Pleading these convenient principles, the then Inspector of a provincial schools reported: “I directed the disuse of all books of a religious character in the schools.” The Ramayana and the other great indigenous literature still continue to be on the Index of the so-called indigenous Government thirty-six years after independence.

Thus the nation’s accumulated riches were denied to the new generations and they grew in self-forgetfulness of their rich heritage. The nation’s sciences, philosophies, religion and literature were taken out of the life of the growing generations and these merely became the topics or subjects of Indology.’

Under the indigenous system, the Hindu schools were closed on Poornima of every month and on other Hindu festivals. Under the new dispensation, Sunday became the new holiday. Thus we were cut off from our calendar too with which so much else in our history and religious discipline and observances is also connected. In due course, came into being a class of Macaulay’s dream, a class oblivious of its roots, a class of cultural barbarians, a class Indian in blood and colour but European and missionary in its contempt of everything Indian in general and Hindu in particular.

Deep down, the issue was not English language, or higher learning of the West or modern sciences. Hindu culture had a rich tradition of secular learning and it could easily imbibe whatever the West had to offer. In fact, it could even make its own contribution to the pool and perhaps help in taming the aggressive urges of modern sciences. The problem was deeper. It had to do with a pattern of self-forgetfulness and self-alienation that was imposed on the country. And we were so thoroughly brainwashed that we now delight in it. The imperialist-missionary policies of the British have now become the political religion of our own neo-intellectuals and administrators. The attack still continues under the guise of “Tradition versus Modernity”.

~ Ram Swarup, Author

Footnotes:

One Teacher, One School: The Adam Reports on Indigenous Education in 19th Century India, by Joseph DiBona, Biblia Impex Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi.

History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab since Annexation and in 1882, by G.W. Leitner, 1883, Reprinted by Languages Department, Punjab, Patiala, 1971.

The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century, by Dharampal (Biblia Impex Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi).

The Indian system of education was so economical, so effective that some of its features were exported to England and Europe. The “monitor”, the “slate”, the “group-study” were directly borrowed from the old Indian practice. A short account of this practice is available from an eye-witness report of a European named Pietro Della Valle published in 1623. But 200 years later, around 1800, two Britons, Dr. Bell and Mr. Lancaster, who were servants of the East India Company, introduced in England a “New System of Schooling”, embodying Indian practices of teaching. Both claimed originality for themselves. In the controversy that ensued, it was found that both had borrowed from India without acknowledgment, of course. In this connection we have the testimony of Brigadier-General Alexander Walker who served in the East India Company from 1780 to 1810. While reporting on teaching methods in Malabar, he says that the new British “system was borrowed from the Brahmans and brought from India to Europe. It has been made the foundation of the National Schools in every enlightened country. Some gratitude is due to a people from who we have learnt to diffuse among the lower ranks of society instructions by one of the most unerring and economical methods which has ever been invented”. According to him, by this method, “the children are instructed without violence, and by a process peculiarly simple”.

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Establishment of the British Rule in India: Timeline and Impact- Complete UPSC Notes

India before the british rule in india, political scenario in india.

The Mughals – After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 , the decline of the Mughals started. Rulers of the Mughals were now weak and engrossed in political conflict for inheritance or dominance in the court.
The Marathas – The third battle of Panipat in 1761 weakened the Maratha empire. It gave the British to consolidate their power in South India and Bengal.
The Mysore – Hyder Ali, a Dalavayi (commander-in-chief) to Krishnaraja Wodeyar II (reign 1735–1766), became the de facto ruler of Mysore as Sarvadhikari (Chief Minister) by
The Hyderabad – The governor of Hyderabad, Mir Qamar-ud-Din Siddiqi (also known as Asaf Jah ), declared independence (1724) after the weakening of the Mughal authority. There were constant invasions from the Marathas Empire. After his death, the inheritance struggle saw the interference of British and French power.
The Bengal – In the early 18 th century, the Nawab of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan, became the de facto free ruler of the 3 regions of Bihar, Bengal and Orissa. The region was an important production centre for several items such as cotton and textiles, gunpowder, saltpetre etc. In addition, the area became a base for European trading companies.

Everything You Need To Know About British Rule In India

The economic situation of India before British Rule

Agriculture – Peasants paid exorbitant amounts to the state, the zamindars , the jagirdars , and the revenue farmers . This increased poverty among them.
Trade and Industry – As the European trading company established their trade, the prosperity of the traditional Indian merchants such as Bohra Muslims and Jains declined. The East India Company started asserting its monopoly right to trade with India with increased political power.

Society of India before British Rule

Status of education – The traditional Indian education system lagged behind the education system of the West. The Muslim and Hindu elementary schools were called maktabs and pathshalas, Chatuspathis, or Tols , were the centres of higher education. Centres for Sanskrit education were Tirhut (Mithila), Kasi (Varanasi), Utkala and Nadia . Persian and Arabic were taught in Madrasahs . Azimabad (Patna) was well-known for Persian education .
Status of women – Patriarchal family system was widespread. While upper-class women remained at home, lower-class women worked in fields and outside their homes, supplementing the family income. Purdah, sati, child marriage, dowry, and polygamy existed. Raja Sawai Jai Singh of Amber and Prashuram Bhau (Maratha General) tried to promote widow remarriage.
Status of Caste – Society was divided into the four Varna systems and numerous sub-castes. Caste councils and panchayats enforced caste norms and regulations. Muslims were divided into Sunni and Shia and the Irani, Afghan, Turani, and Hindustani Muslims. Slavery was widespread.

The British Conquest of Bengal

The situation of Bengal on the eve of the British conquest

Bengal was the wealthiest Mughal empire province.
By 1691 , the British East India Company got royal Farman from the Mughal emperor to “ continue their trade contentedly in Bengal ” in exchange for a yearly payment of Rs 3,000 to the Mughal Emperor.
And by 1715, the Company got additional Farmans from the Mughal Emperor These Farmans enabled the Company to issue dastaks (a tax freed trade permit) to the European traders.
Later, Alivardi Khan (1740-56), the Nawab of Bengal, stopped paying tributes to the Mughal Emperor. Under him, the Bengal prospered.
Siraj-ud-Daulah succeeded his grandfather in 1756.
The British conquest of Bengal began with the battle of Plassey (1757)

The Battle of Plassey (1757)

In 1756, young Siraj-ud-Daulah succeeded his grandfather as the Nawab of Bengal. He immediately identified that the British were misusing the Farukh Siyar’s farman to run even private trade tax-free. This led to a lot of leakage in revenue.

He took a series of steps that ensured that the conflict with the British was eminent.

Causes for the Battle of Plassey:

Reasons for the nawab’s discontent –.

The special privileges and their misuse enjoyed by the English Company meant a massive loss to the Bengal exchequer.
The English fortified Fort William at Calcutta without the Nawab’s permission.
The Company gave asylum to Krishna Das (a political fugitive), the son of Raj Ballabh. He had fled with immense treasures against the Nawab’s will.

Reasons for The East India company’s discontent –

They thought that Siraj would reduce their trading privileges in collaboration with the French in Bengal.

The Black Hole Tragedy

Siraj-ud-Daulah captured Qasimbazaar and Fort William in Calcutta from the under-prepared English governor Robert Drake.
In Fort William, he imprisoned 146 English persons. They were lodged in a tiny room, of which 123 died of suffocation. This tragedy is known as the Black Hole Tragedy.

Robert Clive was a British commander posted in Madras when the events in Bengal took place. In 1756, various diplomatic efforts were made from the British side, but Siraj did not respond. Thus, Clive’s forces of a couple of 1000 men were dispatched.

In early surprise attacks, the Nawab was intimidated. He tried to come to terms with Clive and surrender Calcutta, even promising to compensate the British for their losses. He also made a few unsuccessful attempts to secure an alliance with the French.

On the other hand, Clive allied with Mir Jafar (Siraj’s commander-in-chief), Jagat Seth (an influential banker of Bengal), Rai Durlabh, and Omichand against Siraj-ud-Daulah .

On the day of the battle, due to rain, Siraj’s cannons weren’t functioning; the betrayal of Mir Jafar’s and several of his key associates also dampened the morale. Thus, without much fight, Robert Clive’s technically superior forces defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah in the Battle of Plassey (June 23, 1757).

After the battle, Siraj was executed on Mir Jafar’s order.

Result of B attle of Plassey

As per the agreement between Mir Jafar and Clive, the battle resuted in three important developments:

Mir Jafar was made the Nawab of Bengal but depended on Robert Clive’s support to maintain his position.
He granted free trade, a large sum of money and a zamindari of 24 Parganas to the English.
The English posted a resident in the court of the Nawab.

Significance of Battle of Plassey

Military Implications: The Battle of Plassey established the military supremacy of the English in Bengal.
Economic implications: It ensured revenue from the Zamindari of 24 Parganas, and the trade was virtually duty-free.
Strategic Implications: The revenue from the obtained territories helped maintain an adequately equipped military force.

The Battle of Plassey was the first step in building a British empire in India.

Mir Jafar’s Administration:

Mir Jafar’s rule as Nawab was not as smooth as he had thought. A British resident was placed in his court who interfered in his day to day affairs, and due to restriction-free trade the revenues were dwindling.

In such circumstances, he supported the Dutch in the battle of Hooghly/Chinsurah/Biderra (1759). But the English defeated the Dutch. Moreover, Mir Jafar failed to make the due payments to the Company.

Thus, company decided to replace Mir Jafar with someone more obedient.

After the death of Mir Jafar’s son Miran, Vansittart , the new Governor of Calcutta, supported Mir Kasim (the son-in-law of Mir Jafar ) to become the Nawab of Bengal. Mir Jafar was ousted with a pension of Rs 1,500 per annum.

In 1760 , Mir Kasim and the Company signed a treaty upon his appointment with the following terms:

The Company got the districts of Burdwan, Midnapur, and Chittagong .
They got half of the revenue in the chunam trade of Sylhet .
Mir Kasim agreed to pay the dues and a sum of five lakh rupees towards financing the Company’s war efforts in southern India.
It was acknowledged that Mir Kasim’s enemies would be treated as Company’s enemies and his friends, the Company’s friends.
It was decided that the Nawab’s territory’s subjects would not be accommodated in the Company’s land and vice-versa.

Vary of British ways, after becoming Nawab, Mir Kasim immediately undertook two reforms:

He transferred the capital from Murshidabad to Munger in Bihar , which allowed him to have a safe distance from the Company.
He reorganised the bureaucracy and the army to enhance their skill and efficiency.

Again, it was clear that the relation between the Nawab and the British wouldn’t be as smooth as the British had imagined.

The Battle of Buxar (1764)

Eventually, the growing differences led to the Battle of Buxar that officially gave the control over all of Bental to the British.

Causes of the Battle of Buxar:

The English supported the defiant deputy governor of Bihar, Ram Narayan, against Mir Kasim.
Dastak System – The Company’s official misused the dastak system, which led to the loss of tax revenue to the Nawab. The Company’s servants also asserted the same privileges for their private trade and sold dastak to Indian merchants for a commission. They forced merchants to get goods at trivial rates, which was against duty-free trade.

Reasons for Company’s discontent –

British protested when Mir Kasim decided to abolish the duties altogether.
They wanted preferential treatment against other traders.

Due to these issues, there were battles between the Company and The Nawab in 1763 . The English defeated Mir Kasim forces at Murshidabad, Katwah, Munger, Sooty, and Giria .

Mir Jafar was reinstalled with a monthly payment of ₹5,00,000/month to the British. This was against the policy of treating Kasim’s enemies as company’s enemies.

Being uneasy of the Company’s intentions, Mir Kasim escaped to Awadh (or Oudh) and formed a coalition with, Shuja-ud-Daulah ( the Nawab of Awadh ) and Shah Alam II ( the Mughal Emperor ) .

The Battle : On October 22, 1764 , the English forces under Major Hector Munro defeated the combined armies of Mir Kasim, Shuja-ud-Daulah and Shah Alam II in Buxar . In the battle, the British were aided by the likes of Zamindar Balwant Singh.

Result of Battle of Buxar

The English were granted the districts of Midnapore, Burdwan, and Chittagong for their army’s maintenance.
The English were also allowed duty-free trade in Bengal, except for a duty of 2 per cent on salt .
After Mir Jafar’s death, his minor son, Najim-ud-daula, was made the Nawab.
But the real power of administration was laid with the naib-subahdar, who was generally appointed or dismissed by the English.

This had great significance as the English defeated the Nawab of Bengal and the Mughal Emperor of India. This victory essentially made the British the supreme power in northern India and contenders for supremacy over the whole country.

After the battle of Buxar, the British forced the Treaty of Allahabad on the parties involved.

Significance of Battle of Buxar

The victory of English over Nawab of Bengal and the Mughal Emperor of India made the British the supreme power in northern India and contenders for supremacy over the whole country.

The Treaty of Allahabad (1765)

In August 1765 , Robert Clive concluded two treaties at Allahabad –

Treaty of Allahabad With the Nawab of Awadh , Shuja-ud-Daula

Surrender Kara and Allahabad to Shah Alam II
A payment of Rs 50 lakh is to be paid to the Company as war indemnity
Balwant Singh, Zamindar of Banaras , was given full possession of Nawab’s estate.

Treaty of Allahabad With the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II

He was to reside at Allahabad under the Company’s protection.
A farman was issued by him granting the Diwani rights of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa to the EIC in exchange for Rs 26 lakh/annum payment.

On September 30, 1765, another agreement was signed with the Nawab of the Bengal, Nazmuddaula , under which the Company agreed to pay the Nawab Rs. 53 lakhs annually to defray the costs of Nizamat (civil) administration and the Nawab’s household.

Treaty on Northern Circars: In 1765, Shah Alam also granted five ‘sarkars’, in the norther circar region.

Evaluation of the Allahabad treaty

Awadh was not annexed as it would have required the Company to defend an extensive land frontier from the Afghan and the Maratha
According to the treaty Nawab of Awadh, a friend of the Company, turned Awadh into a buffer state , a predecessor of the Ring fence theory .
Shah Alam II was made a ‘ rubber stamp’ of the Company.

The British Administration of Bengal

Dual government in bengal (1765–72).

After obtaining the revenue rights, Robert Clive brought the dual system of government to Bengal. It means the rule of the two –

The Company’s rules –

It exercised the Diwani rights (right of collecting revenue) as the Diwan .
But it didn’t collect the revenue directly and appointed two Naib Dewans, Muhammad Raza Khan and Raja Shitab Ray, for Bengal and Bihar,

The Nawab’s rule –

The Nawab was in charge of maintaining peace and order ( Nizamat functions ).
The Company also appointed Muhammad Raza Khan as the naib Nizam (Nazim) .

This system led to a peculiar situation:

As Naib, Nazim Muhammad Raza Khan had to represent the Nawab, and
As naib diwan, he has to represent the Company .

This system of government was known as the Dual Government .

The revenue reforms during East Indian Company

Initially the British continued with the revenue system that existed during the later Mughals. However, eventually they introduced a few reforms:

The Izaredari system (1773) – After obtaining the revenue rights, the British sought to suck as much revenue as it could. Thus, in 1773 Warren Hastings (1772-1785) introduced the Izaredari system . In this system, the right to collect revenue from an area was auctioned to the highest bidder, Izaredar, who paid the Company its share.
Hastings established a Board of Revenue and appointed an Accountant General .
The revenue sale law (1793): If Zamindar failed to pay the revenue regularly, the government sold his land to recover dues. The land and right to collect its revenue were transferred to the new Zamindar. This law was popularly known as the Sunset Law.

Reforms during British Rule in India

1. trade reforms.

Warren Hastings (1772-85) abolished the Dastak System and introduced a reform tariff of 2.5% of tax on Indian and non-Indian goods.
Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) stopped the private trade carried out by the servants of the East India Company .

2. Legislative reforms

Regulating act of 1773 –.

It laid the foundations of the British administration in India, and regulated the Company’s functions:

The governance of Bengal

The governor-general of Bengal was made superior to the Governors of Bombay and Madras presidencies.
It created an Executive Council of four members to assist the Governor-general of Bengal.

The governance of the Company

It consisted of the Court of Directors and the Court of Proprietors .
It made it compulsory to renew Company Charter every 20 years.

Pitt’s India Act of 1784 –

It reduced the number of Executive council members to three.
It distinguished the political and commercial functions of the Company.
A new system of Double Government –
The government’s political (civil and military) functions and revenue functions were now supervised by a newly created body, the Board of Controls.
The Court of Directors continued to manage the commercial affairs.

3. Judicial reforms

Reforms in the courts –.

Each district had a civil court under Collector and a criminal court under an Indian Judge.
Sadar Diwani Adalat and Sadar Nizamat Adalat were the highest courts of appeal for civil and criminal matters, respectively.
Supreme Court of Calcutta (1774) was established, consisting of four judges having jurisdiction over all the inhabitants of Calcutta.
Four provincial courts at Calcutta, Dhaka, Murshidabad and Patna, each under three European judges, were established.
Indian judges (Munsiffs) were appointed to bottom courts.
Hindu and Muslim laws were followed in civil cases.

Codification and the study of laws –

Code of Gentoo was translated from Persian into English by B. Halhed.
Sanskrit College of Benaras (1791) by Jonathan Duncan and Calcutta Madarsa (1781) by Warren Hastings were established to study the Hindu and Muslim law, respectively.

Impact of British rule in India (of Policies)

Lawlessness.

The Dual Government of Robert Clive proved to be a failure. The Nawab was only a puppet ruler with no power, and the Company officials had power with no responsibility. Neither the Company nor the Nawab was concerned with governance or public welfare.
The servants of the Company indulged in bribery and corruption. Theft, beggary and dacoity were prevalent throughout the territory.

Eventually, Warrant hastings ended the Dual government.

Revenue Exploitation:

The British continued the exploitative system of revenue administration that existed during the later Mughal rule and made it more severe using the temporary settlement and the permanent settlement reforms

Bengal Famine of 1770

The Bengal Famine occurred in Bengal and Bihar and affected some 30 million people. The smallpox epidemic accompanied it.
Monsoon failures compounded by the East India Company’s policies were the reasons for the Bengal famine.
It became the subject matter of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath.
Causes of Bengal Famine –
The dual system of government of Robert Clive –This system neglected the plights and concerns of the peasants of approaching famine and a decrease in production.
Revenue maximisation policies – The Company’s concern was only revenue maximisation. The zamindars who could not pay the tax regularly had their land auctioned off. Moreover, paying of tax was mandatory even during drought or any natural calamities. There was hardly any willingness to set up any regular system of assessment and collection
Lack of trained administrators – The Company got Diwani rights after the Battle of Buxar but found itself short of trained administrators familiar with the local law and tradition.
The monopoly of trade – The Company forced artisans to sell their goods at low prices, which led them to desert the villages. This disrupted traditional rural structure and economy.
Storage issues – Due to the taxation system’s rise, the producers could not store the excess production as it had to be paid at the increased tax rate.
Forced production of cash crops – The farmers were coerced to produce cash crops like Indigo and opium to boost British exports. This decreased the production of edible crops.

Impact of British rule on trade in India

1. the plight of native merchants –.

Due to the Dastak system, the Indian merchants failed to compete with the Company’s trade.
Moreover, the Company’s servants started to trade privately by selling the Dastak to Indian merchants at exorbitant prices.

2. Balance of Payments –

Before 1765 , the Company used to purchase goods in India. They also imported gold and silver from Britain, which made the balance of payments favourable to India.
However, after getting the Dewani rights, they bought the goods from the revenue collected in Bengal. As a result, gold and silver imports from England stopped. This led to the drain of money from India.

Impact on Industry

Textile Industry – The Calico Acts (1700, 1721) of the British parliament restricts the import of most cotton textiles into England. The Company’s servant used to arbitrarily decide the quality of the cloth, its quantity of production and its price. This severely affected the cotton textile in India.
The plight of Artisans – Due to the monopoly of the Company, the artisans were forced to sell their goods at lower prices. The protesting artisans were severely punished. As a result, many artisans were leaving their trade, affecting the industry they were involved in.

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Introduction

The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857

Aftermath of the mutiny, government of india act of 1858, social policy, government organization, economic policy and development, the northwest frontier, the second anglo-afghan war, the incorporation of burma, origins of the nationalist movement, the early congress movement, the first partition of bengal, nationalism in the muslim community, reforms of the british liberals, moderate and militant nationalism, india’s contributions to the war effort, anti-british activity, the postwar years, jallianwala bagh massacre at amritsar.

Gandhi’s philosophy and strategy

Constitutional reforms

The congress’s ambivalent strategy, muslim separatism, the impact of world war ii, british wartime strategy, the transfer of power and the birth of two countries.

Who was Mangal Pandey?
What did Gandhi try to accomplish with his activism?
What were Gandhi’s religious beliefs?
What other social movements did Gandhi’s activism inspire?
What was Gandhi’s personal life like?

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British raj

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Table Of Contents

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What was the British Raj?
When did the British Raj begin and end?
What was the role of the British monarchy during the British Raj?
How did the British Raj impact the economy and society of India?
What were some major events or movements that occurred during the British Raj?
How did the Indian population respond to British rule during the Raj?
What were the key reasons for the end of the British Raj?
How has the British Raj influenced modern India and its relationship with Britain?

British raj , period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The raj succeeded management of the subcontinent by the British East India Company , after general distrust and dissatisfaction with company leadership resulted in a widespread mutiny of sepoy troops in 1857, causing the British to reconsider the structure of governance in India. The British government took possession of the company’s assets and imposed direct rule. The raj was intended to increase Indian participation in governance, but the powerlessness of Indians to determine their own future without the consent of the British led to an increasingly adamant national independence movement.

Though trade with India had been highly valued by Europeans since ancient times, the long route between them was subject to many potential obstacles and obfuscations from middlemen, making trade unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. This was especially true after the collapse of the Mongol empire and the rise of the Ottoman Empire all but blocked the ancient Silk Road . As Europeans, led by the Portuguese, began to explore maritime navigation routes to bypass middlemen, the distance of the venture required merchants to set up fortified posts.

The British entrusted this task to the East India Company, which initially established itself in India by obtaining permission from local authorities to own land, fortify its holdings, and conduct trade duty-free in mutually beneficial relationships. The company’s territorial paramountcy began after it became involved in hostilities, sidelining rival European companies and eventually overthrowing the nawab of Bengal and installing a puppet in 1757. The company’s control over Bengal was effectively consolidated in the 1770s when Warren Hastings brought the nawab’s administrative offices to Calcutta (now Kolkata ) under his oversight. About the same time, the British Parliament began regulating the East India Company through successive India Acts , bringing Bengal under the indirect control of the British government. Over the next eight decades, a series of wars, treaties, and annexations extended the dominion of the company across the subcontinent, subjugating most of India to the determination of British governors and merchants.

In late March 1857 a sepoy (Indian soldier) in the employ of the East India Company named Mangal Pandey attacked British officers at the military garrison in Barrackpore . He was arrested and then executed by the British in early April. Later in April sepoy troopers at Meerut , having heard a rumour that they would have to bite cartridges that had been greased with the lard of pigs and cows (forbidden for consumption by Muslims and Hindus, respectively) to ready them for use in their new Enfield rifles, refused the cartridges. As punishment, they were given long prison terms, fettered, and put in jail. This punishment incensed their comrades, who rose on May 10, shot their British officers, and marched to Delhi , where there were no European troops. There the local sepoy garrison joined the Meerut men, and by nightfall the aged pensionary Mughal emperor Bahādur Shah II had been nominally restored to power by a tumultuous soldiery. The seizure of Delhi provided a focus and set the pattern for the whole mutiny, which then spread throughout northern India. With the exception of the Mughal emperor and his sons and Nana Sahib , the adopted son of the deposed Maratha peshwa , none of the important Indian princes joined the mutineers. The mutiny officially came to an end on July 8, 1859.

The immediate result of the mutiny was a general housecleaning of the Indian administration. The East India Company was abolished in favour of the direct rule of India by the British government. In concrete terms, this did not mean much, but it introduced a more personal note into the government and removed the unimaginative commercialism that had lingered in the Court of Directors. The financial crisis caused by the mutiny led to a reorganization of the Indian administration’s finances on a modern basis. The Indian army was also extensively reorganized.

Another significant result of the mutiny was the beginning of the policy of consultation with Indians. The Legislative Council of 1853 had contained only Europeans and had arrogantly behaved as if it were a full-fledged parliament. It was widely felt that a lack of communication with Indian opinion had helped to precipitate the crisis. Accordingly, the new council of 1861 was given an Indian-nominated element. The educational and public works programs (roads, railways, telegraphs, and irrigation) continued with little interruption; in fact, some were stimulated by the thought of their value for the transport of troops in a crisis. But insensitive British-imposed social measures that affected Hindu society came to an abrupt end.

Finally, there was the effect of the mutiny on the people of India themselves. Traditional society had made its protest against the incoming alien influences, and it had failed. The princes and other natural leaders had either held aloof from the mutiny or had proved, for the most part, incompetent. From this time all serious hope of a revival of the past or an exclusion of the West diminished. The traditional structure of Indian society began to break down and was eventually superseded by a Westernized class system, from which emerged a strong middle class with a heightened sense of Indian nationalism .

(For more on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, see also Indian Mutiny and the discussion of the mutiny in India .)

British rule

Establishment of direct british governance.

Much of the blame for the mutiny fell on the ineptitude of the East India Company. On August 2, 1858, Parliament passed the Government of India Act , transferring British power over India from the company to the crown. The merchant company’s residual powers were vested in the secretary of state for India, a minister of Great Britain’s cabinet, who would preside over the India Office in London and be assisted and advised, especially in financial matters, by a Council of India , which consisted initially of 15 Britons, 7 of whom were elected from among the old company’s court of directors and 8 of whom were appointed by the crown. Though some of Britain’s most powerful political leaders became secretaries of state for India in the latter half of the 19th century, actual control over the government of India remained in the hands of British viceroys—who divided their time between Calcutta ( Kolkata ) and Simla ( Shimla )—and their “steel frame” of approximately 1,500 Indian Civil Service (ICS) officials posted “on the spot” throughout British India.

On November 1, 1858, Lord Canning (governed 1856–62) announced Queen Victoria ’s proclamation to “the Princes, Chiefs and Peoples of India,” which unveiled a new British policy of perpetual support for “native princes” and nonintervention in matters of religious belief or worship within British India. The announcement reversed Lord Dalhousie ’s prewar policy of political unification through princely state annexation, and princes were left free to adopt any heirs they desired so long as they all swore undying allegiance to the British crown. In 1876, at the prompting of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli , Queen Victoria added the title Empress of India to her regality. British fears of another mutiny and consequent determination to bolster Indian states as “natural breakwaters” against any future tidal wave of revolt thus left more than 560 enclaves of autocratic princely rule to survive, interspersed throughout British India, for the entire nine decades of crown rule. The new policy of religious nonintervention was born equally out of fear of recurring mutiny, which many Britons believed had been triggered by orthodox Hindu and Muslim reaction against the secularizing inroads of utilitarian positivism and the proselytizing of Christian missionaries . British liberal socioreligious reform therefore came to a halt for more than three decades—essentially from the East India Company’s Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856 to the crown’s timid Age of Consent Act of 1891, which merely raised the age of statutory rape for “consenting” Indian brides from 10 years to 12.

The typical attitude of British officials who went to India during that period was, as the English writer Rudyard Kipling put it, to “take up the white man’s burden.” By and large, throughout the interlude of their Indian service to the crown , Britons lived as super-bureaucrats, “Pukka Sahibs,” remaining as aloof as possible from “native contamination” in their private clubs and well-guarded military cantonments (called camps), which were constructed beyond the walls of the old, crowded “native” cities in that era. The new British military towns were initially erected as secure bases for the reorganized British regiments and were designed with straight roads wide enough for cavalry to gallop through whenever needed. The old company’s three armies (located in Bengal , Bombay [ Mumbai ], and Madras [ Chennai ]), which in 1857 had only 43,000 British to 228,000 native troops, were reorganized by 1867 to a much “safer” mix of 65,000 British to 140,000 Indian soldiers. Selective new British recruitment policies screened out all “nonmartial” (meaning previously disloyal) Indian castes and ethnic groups from armed service and mixed the soldiers in every regiment, thus permitting no single caste or linguistic or religious group to again dominate a British Indian garrison. Indian soldiers were also restricted from handling certain sophisticated weaponry.

After 1869, with the completion of the Suez Canal and the steady expansion of steam transport reducing the sea passage between Britain and India from about three months to only three weeks, British women came to the East with ever greater alacrity , and the British officials they married found it more appealing to return home with their British wives during furloughs than to tour India as their predecessors had done. While the intellectual calibre of British recruits to the ICS in that era was, on the average, probably higher than that of servants recruited under the company’s earlier patronage system, British contacts with Indian society diminished in every respect (fewer British men, for example, openly consorted with Indian women), and British sympathy for and understanding of Indian life and culture were, for the most part, replaced by suspicion, indifference, and fear.

Queen Victoria’s 1858 promise of racial equality of opportunity in the selection of civil servants for the government of India had theoretically thrown the ICS open to qualified Indians, but examinations for the services were given only in Britain and only to male applicants between the ages of 17 and 22 (in 1878 the maximum age was further reduced to 19) who could stay in the saddle over a rigorous series of hurdles. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that by 1869 only one Indian candidate had managed to clear those obstacles to win a coveted admission to the ICS. British royal promises of equality were thus subverted in actual implementation by jealous, fearful bureaucrats posted “on the spot.”

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st earl of Lytton

From 1858 to 1909 the government of India was an increasingly centralized paternal despotism and the world’s largest imperial bureaucracy . The Indian Councils Act of 1861 transformed the viceroy’s Executive Council into a miniature cabinet run on the portfolio system, and each of the five ordinary members was placed in charge of a distinct department of Calcutta’s government—home, revenue, military, finance, and law. The military commander in chief sat with that council as an extraordinary member. A sixth ordinary member was assigned to the viceroy’s Executive Council after 1874, initially to preside over the Department of Public Works, which after 1904 came to be called Commerce and Industry. Though the government of India was by statutory definition the “Governor-General-in-Council” ( governor-general remained the viceroy’s alternate title), the viceroy was empowered to overrule his councillors if ever he deemed that necessary. He personally took charge of the Foreign Department, which was mostly concerned with relations with princely states and bordering foreign powers. Few viceroys found it necessary to assert their full despotic authority, since the majority of their councillors usually were in agreement. In 1879, however, Viceroy Lytton (governed 1876–80) felt obliged to overrule his entire council in order to accommodate demands for the elimination of his government’s import duties on British cotton manufactures, despite India’s desperate need for revenue in a year of widespread famine and agricultural disorders.

From 1854 additional members met with the viceroy’s Executive Council for legislative purposes, and by the act of 1861 their permissible number was raised to between 6 and 12, no fewer than half of whom were to be nonofficial. While the viceroy appointed all such legislative councillors and was empowered to veto any bill passed on to him by that body, its debates were to be open to a limited public audience, and several of its nonofficial members were Indian nobility and loyal landowners. For the government of India the legislative council sessions thus served as a crude public-opinion barometer and the beginnings of an advisory “safety valve” that provided the viceroy with early crisis warnings at the minimum possible risk of parliamentary-type opposition. The act of 1892 further expanded the council’s permissible additional membership to 16, of whom 10 could be nonofficial, and increased their powers, though only to the extent of allowing them to ask questions of government and to criticize formally the official budget during one day reserved for that purpose at the very end of each year’s legislative session in Calcutta. The Supreme Council, however, still remained quite remote from any sort of parliament.

British merchant ship, Bombay (Mumbai), India

Economically, it was an era of increased commercial agricultural production, rapidly expanding trade, early industrial development, and severe famine . The total cost of the mutiny of 1857–59, which was equivalent to a normal year’s revenue, was charged to India and paid off from increased revenue resources in four years. The major source of government income throughout that period remained the land revenue, which, as a percentage of the agricultural yield of India’s soil, continued to be “an annual gamble in monsoon rains.” Usually, however, it provided about half of British India’s gross annual revenue, or roughly the money needed to support the army. The second most lucrative source of revenue at that time was the government’s continued monopoly over the flourishing opium trade to China; the third was the tax on salt, also jealously guarded by the crown as its official monopoly preserve. An individual income tax was introduced for five years to pay off the war deficit, but urban personal income was not added as a regular source of Indian revenue until 1886.

Despite continued British adherence to the doctrine of laissez-faire during that period, a 10 percent customs duty was levied in 1860 to help clear the war debt, though it was reduced to 7 percent in 1864 and to 5 percent in 1875. The above-mentioned cotton import duty, abolished in 1879 by Viceroy Lytton, was not reimposed on British imports of piece goods and yarn until 1894, when the value of silver fell so precipitously on the world market that the government of India was forced to take action, even against the economic interests of the home country (i.e., textiles in Lancashire), by adding enough rupees to its revenue to make ends meet. Bombay’s textile industry had by then developed more than 80 power mills, and the huge Empress Mill owned by Indian industrialist Jamsetji (Jamshedji) N. Tata (1839–1904) was in full operation at Nagpur , competing directly with Lancashire mills for the vast Indian market. Britain’s mill owners again demonstrated their power in Calcutta by forcing the government of India to impose an “equalizing” 5 percent excise tax on all cloth manufactured in India, thereby convincing many Indian mill owners and capitalists that their best interests would be served by contributing financial support to the Indian National Congress .

Britain’s major contribution to India’s economic development throughout the era of crown rule was the railroad network that spread so swiftly across the subcontinent after 1858, when there were barely 200 miles (320 km) of track in all of India. By 1869 more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of steel track had been completed by British railroad companies, and by 1900 there were some 25,000 miles (40,000 km) of rail laid. By the start of World War I (1914–18) the total had reached 35,000 miles (56,000 km), almost the full growth of British India’s rail net. Initially, the railroads proved a mixed blessing for most Indians, since, by linking India’s agricultural, village-based heartland to the British imperial port cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, they served both to accelerate the pace of raw-material extraction from India and to speed up the transition from subsistence food to commercial agricultural production. Middlemen hired by port-city agency houses rode the trains inland and induced village headmen to convert large tracts of grain-yielding land to commercial crops.

Large sums of silver were offered in payment for raw materials when the British demand was high, as was the case throughout the American Civil War (1861–65), but, after the Civil War ended, restoring raw cotton from the southern United States to Lancashire mills, the Indian market collapsed. Millions of peasants weaned from grain production now found themselves riding the boom-and-bust tiger of a world-market economy. They were unable to convert their commercial agricultural surplus back into food during depression years, and from 1865 through 1900 India experienced a series of protracted famines, which in 1896 was complicated by the introduction of bubonic plague (spread from Bombay, where infected rats were brought from China). As a result, though the population of the subcontinent increased dramatically from about 200 million in 1872 (the year of the first almost universal census) to more than 319 million in 1921, the population may have declined slightly between 1895 and 1905.

The spread of railroads also accelerated the destruction of India’s indigenous handicraft industries, for trains filled with cheap competitive manufactured goods shipped from England now rushed to inland towns for distribution to villages, underselling the rougher products of Indian craftsmen. Entire handicraft villages thus lost their traditional markets of neighbouring agricultural villagers, and craftsmen were forced to abandon their looms and spinning wheels and return to the soil for their livelihood. By the end of the 19th century a larger proportion of India’s population (perhaps more than three-fourths) depended directly on agriculture for support than at the century’s start, and the pressure of population on arable land increased throughout that period. Railroads also provided the military with swift and relatively assured access to all parts of the country in the event of emergency and were eventually used to transport grain for famine relief as well.

The rich coalfields of Bihar began to be mined during that period to help power the imported British locomotives, and coal production jumped from roughly 500,000 tons in 1868 to some 6,000,000 tons in 1900 and more than 20,000,000 tons by 1920. Coal was used for iron smelting in India as early as 1875, but the Tata Iron and Steel Company (now part of the Tata Group ), which received no government aid, did not start production until 1911, when, in Bihar, it launched India’s modern steel industry. Tata grew rapidly after World War I, and by World War II it had become the largest single steel complex in the British Commonwealth . The jute textile industry, Bengal’s counterpart to Bombay’s cotton industry, developed in the wake of the Crimean War (1853–56), which, by cutting off Russia’s supply of raw hemp to the jute mills of Scotland, stimulated the export of raw jute from Calcutta to Dundee. In 1863 there were only two jute mills in Bengal, but by 1882 there were 20, employing more than 20,000 workers.

The most important plantation industries of the era were tea, indigo, and coffee. British tea plantations were started in northern India’s Assam Hills in the 1850s and in southern India’s Nilgiri Hills some 20 years later. By 1871 there were more than 300 tea plantations, covering in excess of 30,000 cultivated acres (12,000 hectares) and producing some 3,000 tons of tea. By 1900 India’s tea crop was large enough to export 68,500 tons to Britain, displacing the tea of China in London. The flourishing indigo industry of Bengal and Bihar was threatened with extinction during the “Blue Mutiny” (violent riots by cultivators in 1859–60), but India continued to export indigo to European markets until the end of the 19th century, when synthetic dyes made that natural product obsolete. Coffee plantations flourished in southern India from 1860 to 1879, after which disease blighted the crop and sent Indian coffee into a decade of decline.

Foreign policy

John Laird Mair Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence

British India expanded beyond its company borders to both the northwest and the northeast during the initial phase of crown rule. The turbulent tribal frontier to the northwest remained a continuing source of harassment to settled British rule, and Pathan ( Pashtun ) raiders served as a constant lure and justification to champions of the “forward school” of imperialism in the colonial offices of Calcutta and Simla and in the imperial government offices at Whitehall, London. Russian expansion into Central Asia in the 1860s provided even greater anxiety and incentive to British proconsuls in India, as well as at the Foreign Office in London, to advance the frontier of the Indian empire beyond the Hindu Kush mountain range and, indeed, up to Afghanistan ’s northern border along the Amu Darya . Lord Canning, however, was far too preoccupied with trying to restore tranquillity within India to consider embarking on anything more ambitious than the northwest frontier punitive expedition policy (commonly called “butcher and bolt”), which was generally regarded as the simplest, cheapest method of “pacifying” the Pathans. As viceroy, Lord Lawrence (governed 1864–69) continued the same border pacification policy and resolutely refused to be pushed or lured into the ever-simmering cauldron of Afghan politics. In 1863, when the popular old emir Dōst Moḥammad Khan died, Lawrence wisely refrained from attempting to name his successor, leaving Dōst Moḥammad’s 16 sons to fight their own fratricidal battles until 1868, when Shīr ʿAlī Khan finally emerged victorious. Lawrence then recognized and subsidized the new emir. The viceroy, Lord Mayo (governed 1869–72), met to confer with Shīr ʿAlī at Ambala in 1869 and, though reaffirming Anglo-Afghan friendship, resisted all requests by the emir for more permanent and practical support for his still precarious regime. Lord Mayo, the only British viceroy killed in office, was assassinated by an Afghan prisoner on the Andaman Islands in 1872.

Russia’s glacial advance into Turkistan sufficiently alarmed Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his secretary of state for India, Robert Salisbury , that by 1874, when they came to power in London, they pressed the government of India to pursue a more vigorous interventionist line with the Afghan government. The viceroy, Lord Northbrook (governed 1872–76), resisting all such cabinet promptings to reverse Lawrence’s noninterventionist policy and to return to the militant posture of the First Anglo-Afghan War era (1839–42), resigned his office rather than accept orders from ministers whose diplomatic judgment he believed to be disastrously distorted by Russophobia. Lord Lytton, however, who succeeded him as viceroy, was more than eager to act as his prime minister desired, and, soon after he reached Calcutta, he notified Shīr ʿAlī that he was sending a “mission” to Kabul . When the emir refused Lytton permission to enter Afghanistan, the viceroy bellicosely declaimed that Afghanistan was but “an earthen pipkin between two metal pots.” He did not, however, take action against the kingdom until 1878, when Russia’s General Stolyetov was admitted to Kabul while Lytton’s envoy , Sir Neville Chamberlain , was turned back at the border by Afghan troops. The viceroy decided to crush his neighbouring “pipkin” and launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War on November 21, 1878, with a British invasion. Shīr ʿAlī fled his capital and country, dying in exile early in 1879. The British army occupied Kabul, as it had in the first war, and a treaty signed at Gandamak on May 26, 1879, was concluded with the former emir’s son, Yaʿqūb Khan. Yaʿqūb Khan promised, in exchange for British support and protection, to admit to his Kabul court a British resident who would direct Afghan foreign relations , but the resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari, was assassinated on September 3, 1879, just two months after he arrived. British troops trudged back over the passes to Kabul and removed Yaʿqūb from the throne, which remained vacant until July 1880, when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khan , nephew of Shīr ʿAlī, became emir. The new emir, one of the shrewdest statesmen in Afghan history, remained secure on the throne until his death in 1901.

Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th marquess of Lansdowne

The viceroy, Lord Lansdowne (governed 1888–94), who sought to reassert a more forward policy in Afghanistan, did so on the advice of his military commander in chief, Lord Roberts, who had served as field commander in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. In 1893 Lansdowne sent Sir Mortimer Durand, the government of India’s foreign secretary, on a mission to Kabul to open negotiations on the delimitation of the Indo-Afghan border. The delimitation, known as the Durand Line , was completed in 1896 and added the tribal territory of the Afrīdī s, Maḥsūds, Wazīrīs, and Swātīs, as well as the chieftainships of Chitral and Gilgit, to the domain of British India. The 9th earl of Elgin (governed 1894–99), Lansdowne’s successor, devoted much of his viceregal tenure to sending British Indian armies on punitive expeditions along the new frontier. The viceroy, Lord Curzon (governed 1899–1905), however, recognized the impracticality of trying to administer the turbulent frontier region as part of the large Punjab province. Thus, in 1901 he created a new North-West Frontier Province ( Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ) containing some 40,000 square miles (about 100,000 square km) of trans-Indus and tribal borderland territory under a British chief commissioner responsible directly to the viceroy. By instituting a policy of regular payments to frontier tribes, the new province reduced border conflicts, though for the next decade British troops continued to fight against Maḥsūds, Wazīrīs, and Zakka Khel Afrīdīs.

British India’s conquest of Burma ( Myanmar ) was completed during that period. The Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852) had left the kingdom of Ava (Upper Burma; see Alaungpaya dynasty ) independent of British India, and, under the rule of King Mindon (1853–78), who built his capital at Mandalay , steamers bringing British residents and private traders up the Irrawaddy River from Rangoon ( Yangon ) were welcomed. Mindon, noted for convening the Fifth Buddhist Council at Mandalay in 1871 (the first such council in some 1,900 years), was succeeded by a younger son, Thibaw, who in February 1879 celebrated his ascendancy to the throne by having 80 siblings massacred. Thibaw refused to renew his father’s treaty agreements with Britain, turning instead to seek commercial relations with the French, who were then advancing toward his kingdom from their base in Southeast Asia . Thibaw sent envoys to Paris, and in January 1885 the French signed a treaty of trade with the kingdom of Ava and dispatched a French consul to Mandalay. That envoy hoped to establish a French bank in Upper Burma to finance the construction of a railway and the general commercial development of the kingdom, but his plans were thwarted. The viceroy, Lord Dufferin (governed 1884–88)—impatient with Thibaw for delaying a treaty agreement with British India, goaded to action by British traders in Rangoon, and provoked by fears of French intervention in Britain’s “sphere”—sent an expedition of some 10,000 troops up the Irrawaddy in November 1885. The Third Anglo-Burmese War ended in less than a month with the loss of hardly 20 lives, and on January 1, 1886, Upper Burma, a kingdom having a greater area than Britain and a population of some 4,000,000, was annexed by proclamation to British India.

Indian nationalism and the British response, 1885–1920

The Indian National Congress (Congress Party) held its first meeting in December 1885 in Bombay city while British Indian troops were still fighting in Upper Burma. Thus, just as the British Indian empire approached its outermost limits of expansion, the institutional seed of the largest of its national successors was sown. Provincial roots of Indian nationalism, however, may be traced to the beginning of the era of crown rule in Bombay, Bengal, and Madras. Nationalism emerged in 19th-century British India both in emulation of and as a reaction against the consolidation of British rule and the spread of Western civilization. There were, moreover, two turbulent national mainstreams flowing beneath the deceptively placid official surface of British administration: the larger, headed by the Indian National Congress, which led eventually to the birth of India, and the smaller Muslim one, which acquired its organizational skeleton with the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 and led to the creation of Pakistan.

Many English-educated young Indians of the post-mutiny period emulated their British mentors by seeking employment in the ICS, the legal services, journalism, and education. The universities of Bombay, Bengal, and Madras had been founded in 1857 as the capstone of the East India Company’s modest policy of selectively fostering the introduction of English education in India. At the beginning of crown rule, the first graduates of those universities, reared on the works and ideas of Jeremy Bentham , John Stuart Mill , and Thomas Macaulay , sought positions that would help them improve themselves and society at the same time. They were convinced that, with the education they had received and the proper apprenticeship of hard work, they would eventually inherit the machinery of British Indian government. Few Indians, however, were admitted to the ICS, and, among the first handful who were, one of the brightest, Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1925), was dismissed dishonourably at the earliest pretext and turned from loyal participation within the government to active nationalist agitation against it. Banerjea became a Calcutta college teacher and then editor of The Bengalee and founder of the Indian Association in Calcutta. In 1883 he convened the first Indian National Conference in Bengal, anticipating by two years the birth of the Congress Party on the opposite side of India. After the first partition of Bengal in 1905, Banerjea attained nationwide fame as a leader of the swadeshi (“of our own country”) movement, promoting Indian-made goods, and the movement to boycott British manufactured goods.

During the 1870s young leaders in Bombay also established a number of provincial political associations, such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (Poona Public Society), founded by Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), who had graduated at the top of the first bachelor of arts class at the University of Bombay (now University of Mumbai ) in 1862. Ranade found employment in the educational department in Bombay, taught at Elphinstone College, edited the Indu Prakash , helped start the Hindu reformist Prarthana Samaj (Prayer Society) in Bombay, wrote historical and other essays, and became a barrister, eventually being appointed to the bench of Bombay’s high court. Ranade was one of the early leaders of India’s emulative school of nationalism, as was his brilliant disciple Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), later revered by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948) as a political guru (preceptor). Gokhale , an editor and social reformer, taught at Fergusson College in Poona ( Pune ) and in 1905 was elected president of the Congress Party. Moderation and reform were the keynotes of Gokhale’s life, and, by his use of reasoned argument, patient labour, and unflagging faith in the ultimate equity of British liberalism, he was able to achieve much for India.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), Gokhale’s colleague at Fergusson College, was the leader of Indian nationalism’s revolutionary reaction against British rule. Tilak was Poona’s most popular Marathi journalist, whose vernacular newspaper, Kesari (“Lion”), became the leading literary thorn in the side of the British. The Lokamanya (“Revered by the People”), as Tilak came to be called after he was jailed for seditious writings in 1897, looked to orthodox Hinduism and Maratha history as his twin sources of nationalist inspiration. Tilak called on his compatriots to take keener interest and pride in the religious, cultural, martial, and political glories of pre-British Hindu India; in Poona, former capital of the Maratha Hindu glory, he helped found and publicize the popular Ganesha (Ganapati) and Shivaji festivals in the 1890s. Tilak had no faith in British justice , and his life was devoted primarily to agitation aimed at ousting the British from India by any means and restoring swaraj (self-rule, or independence) to India’s people. While Tilak brought many non-English-educated Hindus into the nationalist movement, the orthodox Hindu character of his revolutionary revival (which mellowed considerably in the latter part of his political career) alienated many within India’s Muslim minority and exacerbated communal tensions and conflict.

The viceroyalties of Lytton and Lord Ripon (governed 1880–84) prepared the soil of British India for nationalism, the former by internal measures of repression and the futility of an external policy of aggression, the latter indirectly as a result of the European community’s rejection of his liberal humanitarian legislation. One of the key men who helped arrange the first meeting of the Congress was a retired British official, Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912), Ripon’s radical confidant. After retiring from the ICS in 1882, Hume, a mystic reformer and ornithologist, lived in Simla, where he studied birds and theosophy. Hume had joined the Theosophical Society in 1881, as had many young Indians, who found in theosophy a movement most flattering to Indian civilization.

Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), the Russian-born cofounder of the Theosophical Society, went to India in 1879 to sit at the feet of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), whose “back to the Vedas ” reformist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj , was founded in Bombay in 1875. Dayananda called on Hindus to reject the “corrupting” excrescences of their faith, including idolatry , the caste system , and infant marriage, and to return to the original purity of Vedic life and thought. The Swami insisted that post-Vedic changes in Hindu society had led only to weakness and disunity, which had destroyed India’s capacity to resist foreign invasion and subjugation. His reformist society was to take root most firmly in the Punjab at the start of the 20th century, and it became that province’s leading nationalist organization. Blavatsky soon left Dayananda and established her own “Samaj,” whose Indian headquarters were outside Madras city, at Adyar. Annie Besant (1847–1933), the Theosophical Society’s most famous leader, succeeded Blavatsky and became the first and only British woman to serve as president of the Congress Party (1917).

The first Congress Party session, convened in Bombay city on December 28, 1885, was attended by 73 representatives, as well as 10 more unofficial delegates; virtually every province of British India was represented. Fifty-four of the delegates were Hindu, only two were Muslim, and the remainder were mostly Parsi and Jain . Practically all the Hindu delegates were Brahman s. All of them spoke English. More than half were lawyers, and the remainder consisted of journalists, businessmen, landowners, and professors. Such was the first gathering of the new India, an emerging elite of middle-class intellectuals devoted to peaceful political action and protest on behalf of their nation in the making. On its last day, the Congress passed resolutions, embodying the political and economic demands of its members, that served thereafter as public petitions to government for the redress of grievances. Among those initial resolutions were calls for the addition of elected nonofficial representatives to the supreme and provincial legislative councils and for real equality of opportunity for Indians to enter the ICS by the immediate introduction of simultaneous examinations in India and Britain.

Economic demands by the Congress Party started with a call for the reduction of “home charges”—that part of Indian revenue that went toward the entire India Office budget and the pensions of officials living in Britain in retirement. Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), the “grand old man” of the Congress who served three times as its president, was the leading exponent of the popular economic “drain” argument, which offered theoretical support to nationalist politics by insisting that India’s poverty was the product of British exploitation and the annual plunder of gold, silver, and raw materials. Other resolutions called for the reduction of military expenditure, condemned the Third Anglo-Burmese War, demanded retrenchment of administrative expenses, and urged reimposition of import duties on British manufactures.

Hume, who is credited with organizing the Congress Party, attended the first session of the Congress as the only British delegate. Sir William Wedderburn (1838–1918), Gokhale’s closest British adviser and himself later elected twice to serve as president of the Congress, and William Wordsworth , principal of Elphinstone College, both appeared as observers. Most Britons in India, however, either ignored the Congress Party and its resolutions as the action and demands of a “microscopic minority” of India’s diverse millions or considered them the rantings of disloyal extremists. Despite the combination of official disdain and hostility, the Congress quickly won substantial Indian support and within two years had grown to number more than 600 delegates. In 1888, when Viceroy Dufferin on the eve of his departure from India dismissed the Congress Party as “microscopic,” it mustered 1,248 delegates at its annual meeting. Still, British officials continued to dismiss the significance of the Congress, and more than a decade later Viceroy Curzon claimed, perhaps wishfully, that it was “tottering to its fall.” Curzon, however, inadvertently helped to infuse the Congress with unprecedented popularity and militant vitality by his own arrogance and by failing to appreciate the importance of human sympathy in his relentless drive toward greater efficiency .

The first partition of Bengal in 1905 brought that province to the brink of open rebellion. The British recognized that Bengal, with some 85 million people, was much too large for a single province and determined that it merited reorganization and intelligent division. The line drawn by Lord Curzon’s government, however, cut through the heart of the Bengali -speaking “nation,” leaving western Bengal’s bhadralok (“respectable people”), the intellectual Hindu leadership of Calcutta, tied to the much less politically active Bihari - and Oriya -speaking Hindus to their north and south. A new Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam was created with its capital at Dacca (now Dhaka ). The leadership of the Congress Party viewed that partition as an attempt to “divide and rule” and as proof of the government’s vindictive antipathy toward the outspoken bhadralok intellectuals, especially since Curzon and his subordinates had ignored countless pleas and petitions signed by tens of thousands of Calcutta’s leading citizens. Mother-goddess-worshipping Bengali Hindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their “mother province,” and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety.

The new tide of national sentiment born in Bengal rose to inundate India in every direction, and “Bande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’s national anthem , its words taken from Anandamath , a popular Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee , and its music composed by Bengal’s greatest poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). As a reaction against the partition, Bengali Hindus launched an effective boycott of British-made goods and dramatized their resolve to live without foreign cloth by igniting huge bonfires of Lancashire-made textiles. Such bonfires, re-creating ancient Vedic sacrificial altars, aroused Hindus in Poona, Madras, and Bombay to light similar political pyres of protest. Instead of wearing foreign-made cloth, Indians vowed to use only domestic ( swadeshi ) cottons and other clothing made in India. Simple hand-spun and hand-woven sari s became high fashion, first in Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal and then all across India, and displaced the finest Lancashire garments, which were now viewed as hateful imports. The swadeshi movement soon stimulated indigenous enterprise in many fields, from Indian cotton mills to match factories, glassblowing shops, and iron and steel foundries.

Increased demands for national education also swiftly followed partition. Bengali students and professors extended their boycott of British goods to English schools and college classrooms, and politically active Indians began to emulate the so-called “Indian Jesuits”—Vishnu Krishna Chiplunkar (1850–82), Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856–95), Tilak, and Gokhale—who were pioneers in the founding of indigenous educational institutions in the Deccan in the 1880s. The movement for national education spread throughout Bengal, as well as to Varanasi (Banaras), where Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946) founded his private Banaras Hindu University in 1910.

One of the last major demands to be added to the platform of the Congress Party in the wake of Bengal’s first partition was swaraj, soon to become the most popular mantra of Indian nationalism. Swaraj was first articulated , in the presidential address of Dadabhai Naoroji , as the Congress’s goal at its Calcutta session in 1906.

While the Congress Party was calling for swaraj in Calcutta, the Muslim League held its first meeting in Dacca. Though the Muslim minority portion of India’s population lagged behind the Hindu majority in uniting to articulate nationalist political demands, Islam had, since the founding of the Delhi sultanate in 1206, provided Indian Muslims with sufficient doctrinal mortar to unite them as a separate religious community . The era of effective Mughal rule ( c. 1556–1707), moreover, gave India’s Muslims a sense of martial and administrative superiority to, as well as a sense of separation from, the Hindu majority.

In 1857 the last of the Mughal emperors had served as a rallying symbol for many mutineers, and in the wake of the mutiny most Britons placed the burden of blame for its inception on the Muslim community. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), India’s greatest 19th-century Muslim leader, succeeded, in his Causes of the Indian Revolt (1873), in convincing many British officials that Hindus were primarily to blame for the mutiny. Sayyid had entered the East India Company’s service in 1838 and was the leader of Muslim India’s emulative mainstream of political reform. He visited Oxford in 1874 and returned to found the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) at Aligarh in 1875. It was India’s first centre of Islamic and Western higher education , with instruction given in English and modeled on Oxford. Aligarh became the intellectual cradle of the Muslim League and Pakistan.

Sayyid Mahdi Ali (1837–1907), popularly known by his title Mohsin al-Mulk, had succeeded Sayyid Ahmad as leader and convened a deputation of some 36 Muslim leaders, headed by the Aga Khan III , that in 1906 called on Lord Minto (viceroy from 1905–10) to articulate the special national interests of India’s Muslim community. Minto promised that any reforms enacted by his government would safeguard the separate interests of the Muslim community. Separate Muslim electorates, formally inaugurated by the Indian Councils Act of 1909, were thus vouchsafed by viceregal fiat in 1906. Encouraged by the concession , the Aga Khan’s deputation issued an expanded call during the first meeting of the Muslim League (convened in December 1906 at Dacca) “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at its first meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.

In Great Britain the Liberal Party’s electoral victory of 1906 marked the dawn of a new era of reforms for British India. Hampered though he was by the viceroy, Lord Minto, the new secretary of state for India, John Morley , was able to introduce several important innovations into the legislative and administrative machinery of the British Indian government. First, he acted to implement Queen Victoria’s promise of racial equality of opportunity, which since 1858 had served only to assure Indian nationalists of British hypocrisy. He appointed two Indian members to his council at Whitehall: one a Muslim, Sayyid Husain Bilgrami, who had taken an active role in the founding of the Muslim League; and the other a Hindu, Krishna G. Gupta, the senior Indian in the ICS. Morley also persuaded a reluctant Lord Minto to appoint to the viceroy’s executive council the first Indian member, Satyendra P. Sinha (1864–1928), in 1909. Sinha (later Lord Sinha) had been admitted to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1886 and was advocate general of Bengal before his appointment as the viceroy’s law member, a position he felt obliged to resign in 1910. He was elected president of the Congress Party in 1915 and became parliamentary undersecretary of state for India in 1919 and governor of Bihar and Orissa (now Odisha) in 1920.

Morley’s major reform scheme, the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (popularly called the Morley-Minto Reforms), directly introduced the elective principle to Indian legislative council membership. Though the initial electorate was a minuscule minority of Indians enfranchised by property ownership and education, in 1910 some 135 elected Indian representatives took their seats as members of legislative councils throughout British India. The act of 1909 also increased the maximum additional membership of the supreme council from 16 (to which it had been raised by the Councils Act of 1892) to 60. In the provincial councils of Bombay, Bengal, and Madras, which had been created in 1861, the permissible total membership had been raised to 20 by the act of 1892, and that number was increased in 1909 to 50, a majority of whom were to be nonofficial; the number of council members in other provinces was similarly increased.

In abolishing the official majorities of provincial legislatures, Morley was following the advice of Gokhale and other liberal Congress Party leaders, such as Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), and overriding the bitter opposition of not only the ICS but also his own viceroy and council. Morley believed, as did many other British Liberal politicians, that the only justification for British rule over India was to bequeath to the government of India Britain’s greatest political institution, parliamentary government. Minto and his officials in Calcutta and Simla did succeed in watering down the reforms by writing stringent regulations for their implementation and insisting upon the retention of executive veto power over all legislation. Elected members of the new councils were empowered, nevertheless, to engage in spontaneous supplementary questioning, as well as in formal debate with the executive concerning the annual budget. Members were also permitted to introduce legislative proposals of their own.

Gokhale took immediate advantage of the vital new parliamentary procedures by introducing a measure for free and compulsory elementary education throughout British India. Although defeated, it was brought back again and again by Gokhale, who used the platform of the government’s highest council of state as a sounding board for nationalist demands. Before the act of 1909, as Gokhale told fellow members of the Congress Party in Madras that year, Indian nationalists had been engaged in agitation “from outside,” but “from now,” he said, they would be “engaged in what might be called responsible association with the administration.”

In 1907 the Congress Party held its annual meeting in Surat , but the assembly, plagued by conflict, never came to order long enough to hear the presidential address of its moderate president-elect, Rash Behari Ghose (1845–1921). The division of the Congress reflected broad tactical differences between the liberal evolutionary and militant revolutionary wings of the national organization and those aspiring to the presidency. Young militants of Tilak’s New Party wanted to extend the boycott movement to the entire British government, while moderate leaders like Gokhale cautioned against such “extreme” action, fearing it might lead to violence. Those moderates were attacked by the militants as “traitors” to the “motherland,” and the Congress split into two parties, which would not reunite for nine years. Tilak demanded swaraj as his “birthright,” and his newspaper encouraged the young militants, whose introduction of the cult of the bomb and the gun in Maharashtra and Bengal led to Tilak’s deportation for “sedition” to prison in Mandalay (Burma) from 1908 to 1914. Political violence in Bengal, in the form of terrorist acts, reached its peak from 1908 through 1910, as did the severity of official repression and the number of “preventive detention” arrests. Although Minto continued to assure Morley that opposition to the partition of Bengal was “dying down,” and although Morley tried to convince his Liberal friends that it was a “settled fact,” the opposite, in fact, was true. Harsher repression seemed only to breed more violent agitation.

Before the end of 1910, Minto finally returned home, and Morley appointed the liberal Lord Hardinge to succeed him as viceroy (governed 1910–16). Soon after reaching Calcutta, Hardinge recommended the reunification of Bengal, a position accepted by Morley, who also agreed to the new viceroy’s proposal that a separate province of Bihar and Orissa should be carved out of Bengal. King George V journeyed to India for his coronation durbar (audience) in Delhi, and there, on December 12, 1911, were announced the revocation of the partition of Bengal, the creation of a new province, and the plan to shift the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi’s distant plain. By shifting their capital to the site of great Mughal glory, the British hoped to placate Bengal’s Muslim minority, now aggrieved at the loss of provincial power in eastern Bengal.

Reunification of Bengal indeed served somewhat to mollify Bengali Hindus, but the downgrading of Calcutta from imperial to mere provincial capital status was simultaneously a blow to bhadralok egos and to Calcutta real estate values. Political unrest continued, now attracting Muslim as well as Hindu acts of terrorist violence, and Lord Hardinge himself was nearly assassinated by a bomb thrown into his howdah on top of his viceregal elephant as he entered Delhi in 1912. The would-be assassin escaped in the crowd. Later that year Edwin Samuel Montagu , Morley’s political protégé, who served as parliamentary undersecretary of state for India from 1910 to 1914, announced that the goal of British policy toward India would be to meet the just demands of Indians for a greater share in government. Britain seemed to be awakening to the urgency of India’s political demands just as more compelling problems of European war preempted Whitehall’s attention.

World War I and its aftermath

In August 1914 Lord Hardinge announced his government’s entry into World War I . India’s contributions to the war became extensive and significant, and the war’s contributions to change within British India proved to be even greater. In many ways—politically, economically, and socially—the impact of the conflict was as pervasive as that of the mutiny of 1857–59.

The initial response throughout India to Lord Hardinge’s announcement was, for the most part, enthusiastic support. Indian princes volunteered their men, money, and personal service, while leaders of the Congress Party—from Tilak, who had just been released from Mandalay and had wired the king-emperor vowing his patriotic support, to Gandhi, who toured Indian villages urging peasants to join the British army—were allied in backing the war effort. Only India’s Muslims, many of whom felt a strong religious allegiance to the Ottoman caliph that had to be weighed against their temporal devotion to British rule, seemed ambivalent from the war’s inception.

Support from the Congress Party was primarily offered on the assumption that Britain would repay such loyal assistance with substantial political concessions—if not immediate independence or at least dominion status following the war, then surely its promise soon after the Allies achieved victory. The government of India’s immediate military support was of vital importance in bolstering the Western Front , and an expeditionary force, including two fully manned infantry divisions and one cavalry division, left India in late August and early September 1914. They were shipped directly to France and moved up to the battered Belgian line just in time for the First Battle of Ypres . The Indian Corps sustained extraordinarily heavy losses during the winter campaigns of 1914–15 on the Western Front. The myth of Indian racial inferiority, especially with respect to courage in battle, was thus dissolved in sepoy blood on Flanders fields. In 1917 Indians were at last admitted to the final bastion of British Indian racial discrimination—the ranks of royal commissioned officers.

In the early months of the war, Indian troops also were rushed to eastern Africa and Egypt, and by the end of 1914 more than 300,000 officers and men of the British Indian Army had been shipped to overseas garrisons and battlefronts. The army’s most ambitious, though ill-managed, campaign was fought in Mesopotamia. In October 1914, before Turkey joined forces with the Central Powers , the government of India launched an army to the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab to further Viceroy Curzon’s policy of control over the Persian Gulf region. Al-Baṣrah (Basra) was taken easily in December 1914, and by October 1915 the British Indian Army had moved as far north as Al-Kūt (Kūt al-ʿAmārah), barely 100 miles (160 km) from Baghdad. The prize of Baghdad seemed within reach of British arms, but, less than two weeks after Gen. Sir Charles Townshend’s doomed army of 12,000 Indians started north in November 1915, they were stopped at Ctesiphon, then forced to fall back to Al-Kūt, which was surrounded by Turks in December and fell in April 1916. That disaster became a national scandal for Britain and led to the immediate resignation of India’s secretary of state, Sir Austen Chamberlain .

Edwin Montagu, Chamberlain’s successor at Whitehall’s India Office, informed the British House of Commons on August 20, 1917, that the policy of the British government toward India was thereafter to be one of “increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration…with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the Empire.” Soon after that stirring promise of political reward for India’s wartime support, Montagu embarked upon a personal tour of India. During his tour, Montagu conferred with his new viceroy, Lord Chelmsford (governed 1916–21), and their lengthy deliberations bore fruit in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918, the theoretical basis for the Government of India Act of 1919.

Anti-British terrorist activity started soon after the war began, sparked by the return to India of hundreds of embittered Sikh s who had sought to emigrate from their Punjab homes to Canada but who were denied permission to disembark in that country because of their colour. As British subjects, the Sikhs had assumed they would gain entry to underpopulated Canada, but, after wretched months aboard an old Japanese freighter (the Komagata Maru ) in cramped and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food supplies, they returned to India as confirmed revolutionaries. Leaders of the Ghadr (“Revolution”) party, which had been started by Punjabi Sikhs in 1913, journeyed abroad in search of arms and money to support their revolution, and Lala Har Dayal , the party’s foremost leader, went to Berlin to solicit aid from the Central Powers.

Muslim disaffection also grew and acquired revolutionary dimensions as the Mesopotamian campaign dragged on. Many Indian Muslims appealed to Afghanistan for aid and urged the emir to start a holy war against the British and in defense of the caliphate. After the war the Khilafat movement , an offspring of growing pan-Islamic consciousness in India, was started by two fiery orator-journalists, the brothers Shaukat and Muhammad Ali. It lured thousands of Muslim peasants to abandon their village homes and trudge over frozen high passes in a disastrous hijrat (“flight”) from India to Afghanistan. In Bengal, terrorist bombings continued to harass officials, despite numerous “preventive detention” arrests made by Indian Criminal Intelligence Division police under the tough martial-law edicts promulgated at the war’s inception.

The deaths of Gokhale and of the Bombay political leader Sir Pherozeshah Mehta in 1915 removed the most powerful moderate leadership from the Congress Party and cleared the way for Tilak’s return to power in that organization after its reunification in 1916 at Lucknow. That historic session in December 1916 brought even greater unity to India’s nationalist forces, as the Congress and the Muslim League agreed to a pact outlining their joint program of immediate national demands. The Lucknow Pact called first of all for the creation of expanded provincial legislative councils, four-fifths of whose members should be elected directly by the people on as broad a franchise as possible. The league’s readiness to unite with the Congress Party was attributed to the pact’s stipulation that Muslims should receive a far higher proportion of separate electorate seats in all legislative councils than they had enjoyed under the act of 1909. Thanks to such generous concessions of political power by the Congress, Muslim leaders, including Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1949), agreed to set aside doctrinal differences and work with the Congress toward the attainment of national freedom from British rule. That rapprochement between the Congress Party and the Muslim League was short-lived, however, and by 1917 communal tensions and disagreements once again dominated India’s faction-ridden political scene. Tilak and Annie Besant each campaigned for different home-rule leagues, while Muslims worried more about pan-Islamic problems than all-India questions of unity.

By Armistice Day , November 11, 1918, more than a million Indian troops had been shipped overseas to fight or serve as noncombatants behind the Allied lines on every major front from France to Gallipoli in European Turkey. Nearly 150,000 Indian battle casualties , more than 36,000 of them fatal, were sustained during the war. India’s material and financial contributions to the war effort included the shipment of vast amounts of military stores and equipment to various fronts and nearly five million tons of wheat to Great Britain; also supplied by India were raw jute, cotton goods, rough-tanned hides, tungsten (wolfram), manganese, mica, saltpetre, timbers, silk, rubber, and various oils. The government of India paid for all its troops overseas, and, before the war ended, the viceroy presented a gift of £100 million (actually an imperial tax) to the British government. The Tata Iron and Steel Company received Indian government support once the war started and by 1916 was producing 100,000 tons of steel per year. An industrial commission was appointed in 1916 to survey the subcontinent’s industrial resources and potential, and in 1917 a munitions board was created to expedite the production of war matériel. Wartime inflation was immediately followed by one of India’s worst economic depressions, which came in the wake of the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918–19 , a pandemic that took a far heavier toll of Indian life and resources than all of the casualties sustained throughout the war. (Indians accounted for roughly half of the pandemic’s total deaths worldwide.)

Politically, the postwar years proved equally depressing and frustrating to India’s great expectations. British officials, who in the first flush of patriotism had abandoned their ICS posts to rush to the front, returned to oust the Indian subordinates acting in their stead and carried on their prewar jobs as though nothing had changed in British India. Indian soldiers also returned from battlefronts to find that back home they were no longer treated as invaluable allies but reverted immediately to the status of “natives.” Most of the soldiers recruited during the war had come from the Punjab , which, with less than one-tenth of India’s population, had supplied as many as half of the combatant troops shipped abroad. It is thus hardly surprising that the flash point of postwar violence that shook India in the spring of 1919 was Punjab province.

The issue that served to rally millions of Indians, arousing them to a new level of disaffection from British rule, was the government of India’s hasty passage of the Rowlatt Acts early in 1919. Those “black acts,” as they came to be called, were peacetime extensions of the wartime emergency measures passed in 1915 and had been rammed through the Supreme Legislative Council over the unanimous opposition of its Indian members, several of whom, including Jinnah, resigned in protest. Jinnah wrote to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford that the enactment of such autocratic legislation, following the victorious conclusion of a war in which India had so loyally supported Britain, was an unwarranted uprooting of the “fundamental principles of justice” and a gross violation of the “constitutional rights of the people.”

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi , the Gujarati barrister who had returned from living for many years in South Africa shortly after the war started, was recognized throughout India as one of the most-promising leaders of the Congress Party. He called on all Indians to take sacred vows to disobey the Rowlatt Acts and launched a nationwide movement for the repeal of those repressive measures. Gandhi’s appeal received the strongest popular response in the Punjab, where the nationalist leaders Kichloo and Satyapal addressed mass protest rallies both from the provincial capital of Lahore and from Amritsar , sacred capital of the Sikhs. Gandhi himself had taken a train to the Punjab early in April 1919 to address one of those rallies, but he was arrested at the border station and taken back to Bombay by orders of Punjab’s lieutenant governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer. On April 10, Kichloo and Satyapal were arrested in Amritsar and deported from the district by Deputy Commissioner Miles Irving. When their followers tried to march to Irving’s bungalow in the camp to demand the release of their leaders, they were fired on by British troops. With several of their number killed and wounded , the enraged mob rioted through Amritsar’s old city, burning British banks, murdering several Britons, and attacking two British women. Gen. Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was sent from Jalandhar (Jullundur) with Gurkha ( Nepalese ) and Balochi troops to restore order.

Soon after Dyer ’s arrival, on the afternoon of April 13, 1919, some 10,000 or more unarmed men, women, and children gathered in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh ( bagh means “garden” but since before 1919 the site was a public square), despite a ban on public assemblies. It was a Sunday, and many neighbouring village peasants had also come to Amritsar to celebrate the spring Baisakhi festival. Dyer positioned his men at the sole, narrow passageway of the Bagh, which was otherwise entirely enclosed by the backs of abutted brick buildings. Giving no word of warning, he ordered 50 soldiers to fire into the gathering, and for 10 to 15 minutes about 1,650 rounds of ammunition were unloaded into the screaming, terrified crowd, some of whom were trampled by those desperately trying to escape. According to official estimates, nearly 400 civilians were killed, and another 1,200 were left wounded with no medical attention. Dyer, who argued that his action was necessary to produce a “moral and widespread effect,” admitted that the firing would have continued had more ammunition been available.

The governor of the Punjab province supported the massacre and, on April 15, placed the entire province under martial law . Viceroy Chelmsford, however, characterized the action as “an error of judgment,” and, when Secretary of State Montagu learned of the slaughter, he appointed a commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Hunter. Although Dyer was subsequently relieved of his command, he returned a hero to many in Britain, especially conservatives , and in Parliament members of the House of Lords presented him with a jeweled sword inscribed “Saviour of the Punjab.”

The Massacre of Amritsar turned millions of moderate Indians from patient and loyal supporters of the British raj into nationalists who would never again place trust in British “fair play.” It thus marks the turning point for a majority of the Congress’s supporters from moderate cooperation with the raj and its promised reforms to revolutionary noncooperation. Liberal Anglophile leaders, such as Jinnah, were soon to be displaced by the followers of Gandhi, who would launch, a year after that dreadful massacre, the noncooperation movement, his first nationwide satyagraha (“holding on to truth”) nonviolent campaign as India’s revolutionary response.

Gandhi ’s philosophy and strategy

For Gandhi, there was no dichotomy between religion and politics, and his unique political power was in great measure attributable to the spiritual leadership he exerted over India’s masses, who viewed him as a sadhu (holy man) and revered him as a mahatma (which in Sanskrit means “great soul”). He chose satya (“truth”) and ahimsa (nonviolence, or love) as the polar stars of his political movement; the former was the ancient Vedic concept of the real, embodying the very essence of existence itself, while the latter, according to Hindu (as well as Jain) scripture, was the highest religion ( dharma ). With those two weapons, Gandhi assured his followers, unarmed India could bring the mightiest empire known to history to its knees. His mystic faith magnetized millions, and the sacrificial suffering ( tapasya ) that he took upon himself by the purity of his chaste life and prolonged fasting armed him with great powers. Gandhi’s strategy for bringing the giant machine of British rule to a halt was to call upon Indians to boycott all British-made goods, British schools and colleges, British courts of law, British titles and honours, British elections and elective offices, and, should the need arise if all other boycotts failed, British tax collectors as well. The total withdrawal of Indian support would thus stop the machine, and nonviolent noncooperation would achieve the national goal of swaraj.

The Muslim quarter of India’s population could hardly be expected to respond any more enthusiastically to Gandhi’s satyagraha call than they had to Tilak’s revivalism, but Gandhi laboured valiantly to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity by embracing the Ali brothers’ Khilafat movement as the “premier plank” of his national program. Launched in response to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Khilafat movement coincided with the inception of satyagraha, thus giving the illusion of unity to India’s nationalist agitation. Such unity, however, proved as chimerical as the Khilafat movement’s hope of preserving the caliphate itself, and in December 1920 Mohammed Ali Jinnah , alienated by Gandhi’s mass following of Hindi-speaking Hindus, left the Congress Party session at Nagpur. The days of the Lucknow Pact were over, and by the start of 1921 the antipathetic forces of revivalist Hindu and Muslim agitation, destined to lead to the birth of the independent dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947, were thus clearly set in motion in their separate directions.

Prelude to independence, 1920–47

The last quarter century of the British raj was racked by increasingly violent Hindu-Muslim conflict and intensified agitation demanding Indian independence. British officials in London, as well as in New Delhi (the new capital city of British India) and Simla, tried in vain to stem the rising tide of popular opposition to their raj by offering tidbits of constitutional reform, which proved to be either too little to satisfy both the Congress Party and the Muslim League or too late to avert disaster. More than a century of British technological, institutional, and ideological unification of the South Asian subcontinent thus ended after World War II with communal civil war, mass migration, and partition.

British politicians and bureaucrats tried to cure India’s ailing body politic with periodic infusions of constitutional reform. The separate electorate formula introduced for Muslims in the Government of India Act of 1909 (the Morley-Minto Reforms ) was expanded and applied to other minorities in the Government of India Acts (1919 and 1935). Sikhs and Christians, for example, were given special privileges in voting for their own representatives comparable to those vouchsafed to Muslims. The British raj thus sought to reconcile Indian religious pluralism to representative rule and no doubt hoped, in the process of fashioning such elaborate constitutional formulas, to win undying minority support for themselves and to undermine the arguments of Congress’s radical leadership that they alone spoke for India’s “united nationalist movement.” Earlier official support of, and appeals to, India’s princes and great landowners ( see zamindar ) had proved fruitful, especially since the inception of the crown raj in 1858, and more concerted efforts were made in 1919 and 1935 to wean minorities and India’s educated elite away from revolution and noncooperation.

The Government of India Act of 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was based on the Montagu-Chelmsford Report that had been submitted to Parliament in 1918. Under the act, elections were held in 1920, the number of Indian members to the viceroy’s Executive Council was increased from at least two to no fewer than three, and the Imperial Legislative Council was transformed into a bicameral legislature consisting of a Legislative Assembly (lower house) and a Council of State (upper house). The Legislative Assembly, with 145 members, was to have a majority of 104 elected, while 33 of the Council of State’s 60 members were also to be elected. Enfranchisement continued to be based on property ownership and education, but under the act of 1919 the total number of Indians eligible to vote for representatives to provincial councils was expanded to five million; just one-fifth of that number, however, were permitted to vote for Legislative Assembly candidates, and only about 17,000 elite were allowed to choose Council of State members. Dyarchy (dual governance) was to be introduced at the provincial level, where executive councils were divided between ministers elected to preside over “transferred” departments (education, public health , public works, and agriculture) and officials appointed by the governor to rule over “reserved” departments (land revenue, justice, police, irrigation, and labour).

The Government of India Act of 1935 gave all provinces full representative and elective governments, chosen by franchise extended now to some 30 million Indians, and only the most crucial portfolios—defense, revenue, and foreign affairs—were “reserved” to appointed officials. The viceroy and his governors retained veto powers over any legislation they considered unacceptable, but prior to the 1937 elections they reached a “gentleman’s agreement” with the Congress Party’s high command not to resort to that constitutional option, which was their last vestige of autocracy. The act of 1935 was also to have introduced a federation of British India’s provinces and the still autonomous princely states, but that institutional union of representative and despotic rule was never realized, since the princes were unable to agree among themselves on matters of protocol .

The act of 1935 was itself the product of the three elaborate sessions of the Round Table Conference , held in London, and at least five years of bureaucratic labour, most of which bore little fruit. The first session—attended by 58 delegates from British India, 16 from the British Indian states, and 16 from British political parties—was convened by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in the City of Westminster , London, in November 1930. While Jinnah and the Aga Khan III led among the British Indian delegation a deputation of 16 Muslims, no Congress Party deputation joined the first session, as Gandhi and his leading lieutenants were all in jail at the time. Without the Congress the Round Table could hardly hope to fashion any popularly meaningful reforms, so Gandhi was released from prison before the second session started in September 1931. At his own insistence, however, he attended it as the Congress’s sole representative. Little was accomplished at the second session, for Hindu-Muslim differences remained unresolved and the princes continued to argue with one another. The third session, which began in November 1932, was more the product of official British inertia than any proof of progress in closing the tragic gaps between so many Indian minds reflected in earlier debate. Two new provinces emerged, however, from those official deliberations. In the east Orissa was established as a province distinct from Bihar , and in the west Sind ( Sindh ) was separated from the Bombay Presidency and became the first Muslim-majority governor’s province of British India since the reunification of Bengal . It was decided that Burma should be a separate colony from British India.

In August 1932 Prime Minister MacDonald announced his Communal Award , Great Britain’s unilateral attempt to resolve the various conflicts among India’s many communal interests. The award, which was later incorporated into the act of 1935, expanded the separate-electorate formula reserved for Muslims to other minorities, including Sikhs, Indian Christians ( see Thomas Christians ), Anglo-Indians, Europeans, distinct regional groups (such as the Marathas in the Bombay Presidency), and special interests (women, organized labour , business, landowners, and universities). The Congress Party was, predictably, unhappy at the extension of communal representation but became particularly outraged at the British offer of separate-electorate seats for “depressed classes,” meaning the so-called “ untouchables .” Gandhi undertook a “fast unto death” against that offer, which he viewed as a nefarious British plot to wean more than 50 million Hindus away from their higher-caste brothers and sisters. Gandhi, who called the untouchables “Children of God” (Harijans), agreed after prolonged personal negotiations with Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), a leader of the untouchables, to reserve many more seats for them than the British had promised, as long as they remained within the “Hindu” majority fold. Thus, the offer of separate-electorate seats for the untouchables was withdrawn.

Gandhi, promising his followers freedom in just one year, launched the noncooperation movement on August 1, 1920, which he believed would bring the British raj to a grinding halt. After more than a year, and even with 60,000 satyagrahis in prison cells across British India, the raj remained firm, and, therefore, Gandhi prepared to unleash his last and most powerful boycott weapon—calling upon the peasants of Bardoli in Gujarat to boycott land taxes. In February 1922, on the eve of that final phase of boycott, word reached Gandhi that in Chauri Chaura , United Provinces (now in Uttar Pradesh state), 22 Indian police were massacred in their police station by a mob of satyagrahis, who set fire to the station and prevented the trapped police from escaping immolation. Gandhi announced that he had committed a “Himalayan blunder” in launching satyagraha without sufficient “soul-cleansing” of India’s masses and, as a result, called a halt to the noncooperation movement campaign. He was subsequently arrested, however, and found guilty of “promoting disaffection” toward the raj, for which he was sentenced to six years in prison.

While Gandhi was behind bars, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), one of northern India’s wealthiest lawyers, started within Congress a new politically active “party,” the Swaraj Party . Motilal Nehru shared the lead of the new party with C.R. (Chitta Ranjan) Das (1870–1925) of Bengal. Contesting the elections to the new Central Legislative Assembly in 1923, the party sought by antigovernment agitation within the council chambers to disrupt official policy and derail the raj. Though Gandhian noncooperation remained the Congress Party’s primary strategy, actual partial cooperation in the postwar reforms thus became the alternate tactic of those Congress leaders who were less orthodox Hindu, or more secular-minded, in outlook. The Swarajists won more than 48 out of 105 seats in the Central Legislative Assembly in 1923, but their numbers were never quite enough to prevent the British from passing the legislation they desired or believed was needed to maintain internal “order.”

Gandhi was released from jail in February 1924, four years before his term was finished, after a surgery. Thereafter he focused on what he called his “constructive program” of hand spinning and weaving and overall village “uplift,” as well as on Hindu “purification” in seeking to advance the cause of the Harijans, especially through granting them entry to Hindu temples, from which they had always been banished. Gandhi himself lived in village ashram s (religious retreats), which served more as models for his socioeconomic ideals than as centres of political power, though the leaders of the Congress flocked to his remote rural retreats for periodic consultation on strategy.

In many ways Congress policy remained plagued by ambivalence for the remaining years of the raj. Most members of the high command aligned with Gandhi, but others sought what seemed to them more practical or pragmatic solutions to India’s problems, which so often transcended political or imperial-colonial questions. It was always easier, of course, for Indian leaders to rally the masses behind emotional religious appeals or anti-British rhetoric than to resolve problems that had festered throughout the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Most Hindu-Muslim differences, therefore, remained unresolved, even as the Hindu caste system was never really attacked or dismantled by the Congress.

Imperial economic exploitation, however, did prove to be an excellent nationalist catalyst—as, for example, when Gandhi mobilized the peasant masses of India’s population behind the Congress Party during his famous Salt March against the salt tax in March–April 1930, which was the prelude to his second nationwide satyagraha. The British government’s monopoly on the sale of salt, which was heavily taxed, had long been a major source of revenue to the raj, and, by marching from his ashram at Sabarmati near Ahmadabad (now in Gujarat state) to the sea at Dandi, where he illegally picked up salt from the sands on the shore, Gandhi mobilized millions of Indians to follow him in thus breaking the law. It was an ingeniously simple way to break a British law nonviolently, and before year’s end jail cells throughout India were again filled with satyagrahis.

Many of the younger members of the Congress Party were eager to take up arms against the British, and some considered Gandhi an agent of imperial rule for having called a halt to the first satyagraha in 1922. Most famous and popular of the militant Congress leaders was Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) of Bengal. Bose was so popular within Congress that he was elected its president twice (in 1938 and 1939) over Gandhi’s opposition and the active opposition of most members of its central working committee. After being forced to resign the office in April 1939, Bose organized with his brother Sarat his own Bengali party, the Forward Bloc, which initially remained within the Congress fold. At the beginning of World War II, Bose was arrested and detained by the British, but in 1941 he escaped their surveillance and fled to Afghanistan, thence to the Soviet Union and Germany, where he remained until 1943.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), Motilal’s only son, emerged as Gandhi’s designated successor to the Congress Party’s leadership during the 1930s. A Fabian socialist and a barrister, the younger Nehru was educated at Harrow School , London, and at Trinity College , Cambridge, and was drawn into the Congress and the noncooperation movement by his admiration for Gandhi. Though Jawaharlal Nehru personally was more of an Anglophile aristocrat than a Hindu sadhu or mahatma, he devoted his energies and intellect to the nationalist movement and, at age 41, was the youngest elected president of the Congress in December 1929, when it passed its Purna Swaraj (“Complete Self-Rule”) resolution. Jawaharlal’s radical brilliance and energy made him a natural leader of the Congress Party’s youth movement, while his Brahman birth and family fortune overcame many of that party’s more conservative leadership’s misgivings about placing him at the Congress’s helm. The Purna Swaraj resolution—proclaimed on January 26, 1930, later to be celebrated as independent India’s Republic Day—called for “complete freedom from the British” but was later interpreted by Prime Minister Nehru as permitting India to remain within the British Commonwealth , a practical concession young Jawaharlal had often vowed he would never make.

The Muslim quarter of India’s population became increasingly wary of the Congress Party’s promises and restive in the wake of the collapse of the Khilafat movement, which occurred after Kemal Atatürk announced his modernist Turkish reforms in 1923 and disavowed the very title of caliph the following year. Hindu-Muslim riots along the southwestern Malabar Coast claimed hundreds of lives in 1924, and similar religious rioting spread to every major city in northern India, wherever rumours of Muslim “cow slaughter,” the polluting appearance of a dead pig’s carcass in a mosque, or other clashing doctrinal fears ignited the tinder of distrust ever lurking in the poorer sections of India’s towns and villages. At each stage of reform, as the prospects of real devolution of political power by the British seemed more imminent , separate-electorate formulas and leaders of various parties stirred hopes, which proved almost as dangerous in triggering violence as did fears. The older, more conservative leadership of the pre-World War I Congress Party found Gandhian satyagraha too radical—moreover, far too revolutionary—to support, and liberals like Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (1875–1949) organized their own party (eventually to become the National Liberal Federation), while others, like Jinnah , dropped out of political life entirely. Jinnah, alienated by Gandhi and his illiterate mass of devoutly Hindu disciples , instead devoted himself to his lucrative Bombay law practice, but his energy and ambition lured him back to the leadership of the Muslim League, which he revitalized in the 1930s. Jinnah, who was also instrumental in urging Viceroy Lord Irwin (later 1st Earl Halifax; governed 1926–31) and Prime Minister MacDonald to convene the Round Table Conference in London, was urged by many Muslim compatriots—including Liaquat Ali Khan , Pakistan’s first prime minister (1947–51)—to become the permanent president of the Muslim League.

By 1930 a number of Indian Muslims had begun to think in terms of separate statehood for their minority community, whose population dominated the northwestern provinces of British India and the eastern half of Bengal, as well as important pockets of the United Provinces and the great princely state of Kashmir . (The princely state of Hyderabad in the south was ruled by a Muslim dynasty but was mostly Hindu.) One of Punjab’s greatest Urdu poets, Sir Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), while presiding over the Muslim League’s annual meeting in Allahabad in 1930, proposed that “the final destiny” of India’s Muslims should be to consolidate a “North-West Indian Muslim state.” Although he did not name it Pakistan, his proposal included what became the major provinces of modern Pakistan—Punjab, Sindh, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (until 2010 North-West Frontier Province), and Balochistan. Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other important Muslim leaders were at the time in London attending the Round Table Conference, which still envisaged a single federation of all Indian provinces and princely states as the best possible constitutional solution for India in the aftermath of a future British withdrawal. Separate electorate seats, as well as special guarantees of Muslim “autonomy” or “veto powers” in dealing with sensitive religious issues, were hoped to be sufficient to avert civil war or any need for actual partition. As long as the British raj remained in control, such formulas and schemes appeared to suffice , for the British army could always be hurled into the communal fray at the brink of extreme danger, and the army had as yet remained apolitical and—since its post-mutiny reorganization—untainted by communal religious passions.

In 1933 a group of Muslim students at Cambridge, led by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, proposed that the only acceptable solution to Muslim India’s internal conflicts and problems would be the birth of a Muslim “fatherland,” to be called Pakistan (Persian: “Land of the Pure”), out of the Muslim-majority northwestern and northeastern provinces. The Muslim League and its president, Jinnah, did not join in the Pakistan demand until after the league’s famous Lahore meeting in March 1940, as Jinnah, a secular constitutionalist by predilection and training, continued to hope for a reconciliation with the Congress Party. Such hopes virtually disappeared, however, when Nehru refused to permit the league to form coalition ministries with the Congress majority in the United Provinces and elsewhere after the 1937 elections. The Congress had initially entered the elections with the hope of wrecking the act of 1935, but—after it had won so impressive a victory in most provinces and the league had done so poorly, mostly because it had inadequately organized itself for nationwide elections—Nehru agreed to participate in the government and insisted there were but “two parties” in India, the Congress and the British raj.

Jinnah soon proved to Nehru that the Muslims were indeed a formidable “third” party. The years from 1937 to 1939, when the Congress Party actually ran most of British India’s provincial governments, became the seed period for the Muslim League ’s growth in popularity and power within the entire Muslim community, for many Muslims soon viewed the new “Hindu raj” as biased and tyrannical and the Hindu-led Congress ministries and their helpers as insensitive to Muslim demands or appeals for jobs, as well as to their redress of grievances. The Congress’s partiality toward its own members, prejudice toward its majority community, and jobbery for its leadership’s friends and relations all conspired to convince many Muslims that they had become second-class citizens in a land that, while perhaps on the verge of achieving “freedom” for some Indians, would be run by “infidels” and “enemies” to the Muslim minority. The league made the most of the Congress’s errors of judgment in governance; by documenting as many reports as it could gather in papers published during 1939, it hoped to prove how wretched a Muslim’s life would be under any “Hindu raj.” The Congress’s high command insisted, of course, that it was a “secular and national” party, not a sectarian Hindu organization, but Jinnah and the Muslim League responded that they alone could speak for and defend the rights of India’s Muslims. Thus, the lines of battle were drawn by the eve of World War II, which served only to intensify and accelerate the process of communal conflict and irreversible political division that would split British India.

On September 3, 1939, the viceroy Lord Linlithgow (governed 1936–43) informed India’s political leaders and populace that they were at war with Germany. For Nehru and the Congress Party’s high command, such unilateral declarations were viewed as more than insensitive British behaviour, for, in undertaking to run most of British India’s provinces, the Congress thought of itself as the viceroy’s “partner” in administering the raj. What a “betrayal,” therefore, that autocratic declaration of war was judged, and how angry it made Nehru and Gandhi feel. Instead of offering loyal support to the British raj, they demanded a prior forthright statement of Britain’s postwar “goals and ideals.” Neither Linlithgow nor Lord Zetland, his Tory secretary of state, was prepared, however, to pander to the Congress’s wishes at Great Britain’s darkest hour of national danger. Nehru’s outrage helped convince the Congress’s high command to call on all its provincial ministries to resign. Jinnah was overjoyed at that decision and proclaimed Friday, December 22, 1939, a Muslim “Day of Deliverance” from the tyranny of the Congress “raj.” Jinnah met regularly with Linlithgow, moreover, and assured the viceroy that he need not fear a lack of support from India’s Muslims, many of whom were active members of Britain’s armed services. Throughout World War II, as the Congress Party moved farther from the British, with first passive and later active noncooperation, the Muslim League in every possible way quietly supported the war effort.

The first meeting of the league after the outbreak of the war was held in Punjab’s ancient capital of Lahore in March 1940. The famous Lahore Resolution, later known as the Pakistan Resolution, was passed by the largest gathering of league delegates just one day after Jinnah informed his followers that “the problem of India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of an international character.” The league resolved, therefore, that any future constitutional plan proposed by the British for India would not be “acceptable to the Muslims” unless it was so designed that the Muslim-majority “areas” of India’s “North-Western and Eastern Zones” were “grouped to constitute ‘independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” Pakistan was not mentioned until the next day’s newspapers introduced that word in their headlines, and Jinnah explained that the resolution envisioned the establishment of not two separately administered Muslim countries but rather a single Muslim nation-state—namely, Pakistan.

Gandhi launched his first “individual satyagraha” campaign against the war in October 1940. Vinoba Bhave , Gandhi’s foremost disciple, publicly proclaimed his intent to resist the war effort and was subsequently sentenced to three months in jail. Jawaharlal Nehru , who was the next to openly disobey British law, was sentenced to four years behind bars. By June 1941 more than 20,000 Congress satyagrahis were in prisons.

It was also in 1941 that Bose fled to Germany, where he started broadcasting appeals to India urging the masses to “rise up” against British “tyranny” and to “throw off” their chains. There were, however, few Indians in Germany, and Hitler’s advisers urged Bose to go back to Asia by submarine. He was eventually transported to Japan and then to Singapore , where Japan had captured at least 40,000 Indian troops during its takeover of that strategic island in February 1942. The captured soldiers became Netaji (“Leader”) Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) in 1943 and, a year later, marched behind him to Rangoon. Bose hoped to “liberate” first Manipur and then Bengal from British rule, but the British forces at India’s eastern gateways held until the summer monsoon gave them respite enough to be properly reinforced and drove Bose and his army back down the Malay Peninsula . In August 1945 Bose escaped by air from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City , Vietnam), but he died of severe burns after his overloaded plane crashed onto the island of Formosa ( Taiwan ).

Beohar Rammanohar Sinha: Quit India Movement

Lord Linlithgow’s initial refusal to discuss postwar ideals with the Congress Party left India’s premier national party without an opportunity for constructive debate about any political prospects—that is, other than those it could win by noncooperation or through violence. However, after Japan joined the Axis powers in late 1941 and moved with such rapidity into most of Southeast Asia, Britain feared that the Japanese would soon invade India. In March 1942 the war cabinet of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent the socialist Sir Richard Stafford Cripps , a close personal friend of Nehru, to New Delhi with a postwar proposal. The Cripps Mission offered Indian politicians full “dominion status” for India after the war’s end, with the additional stipulation, as a concession primarily to the Muslim League, that any province could vote to “opt out” of such a dominion if it preferred to do so. Gandhi irately called the offer “a post-dated cheque on a bank that was failing,” and Nehru was equally negative and angry at Cripps for his readiness to give so much to the Muslims. Cripps’s hands had been tied by Churchill before he left London, however, as he was ordered by the war cabinet merely to convey the British offer, not to modify it or negotiate a new formula. He flew home empty-handed in less than a month, and soon afterward Gandhi planned his last satyagraha campaign, the Quit India Movement . Declaring that the British presence in India was a provocation to the Japanese, Gandhi called on the British to “quit India” and to leave Indians to deal with the Japanese by nonviolent means, but Gandhi and all members of the Congress Party high command were arrested before the dawn of that movement in August 1942. In a few months at least 60,000 Indians filled British prison cells, and the raj unleashed massive force against Indian underground efforts to disrupt rail transport and to generally subvert the war effort that followed the crackdown on the Quit India campaign. Parts of the United Provinces, Bihar, the North-West Frontier, and Bengal were bombed and strafed by British pilots as the raj resolved to crush all Indian resistance and violent opposition as swiftly as possible. Thousands of Indians were killed and wounded, but wartime resistance continued as more young Indians, women as well as men, were recruited into the Congress’s underground.

Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor , Hawaii, in December 1941 brought the United States into the war as Britain’s most powerful ally. By late 1942 and throughout the rest of the war, U.S. arms and planes steamed and flew into Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai), bolstering British India as the major Allied launching pad against Japanese forces in Southeast Asia and China. The British raj thus remained firm despite growing Indian opposition, both violent and nonviolent. Indian industry grew rapidly, moreover, during World War II. Electric power output doubled, and the Tata steel plant at Jamshedpur became the British Empire’s foremost by the war’s end. Indian shipyards and light-manufacturing plants flourished in Bombay, as well as in Bengal and Orissa, and, despite many warnings, the Japanese never launched major air attacks against Calcutta or Madras (Chennai). In mid-1943 Field Marshall Lord Wavell , who replaced Linlithgow as viceroy (1943–47), brought India’s government fully under martial control for the war’s duration. No progress was made in several of the Congress Party’s attempts to resolve Hindu-Muslim differences through talks between Gandhi and Jinnah. Soon after the war’s end in Europe, Wavell convened a political conference in Simla (Shimla) in late June 1945, but there was no meeting of minds, no formula sturdy enough to bridge the gulf between the Congress and the Muslim League.

Two weeks after the Simla talks collapsed in midsummer, Churchill’s Conservative Party government was voted out of power by the Labour Party ’s sweep of British polls, and the new prime minister, Clement Attlee , appointed one of Gandhi’s old admirers, Lord Pethick-Lawrence , to head the India Office. With the dawn of the atomic age in August and Japan’s surrender , London’s primary concern in India was how to find the political solution to the Hindu-Muslim conflict that would most expeditiously permit the British raj to withdraw its forces and to extricate as many of its assets as possible from what seemed to the Labour Party to have become more of an imperial burden and liability than any real advantage for Great Britain.

Elections held in the winter of 1945–46 proved how effective Jinnah’s single-plank strategy for his Muslim League had been, as the league won all 30 seats reserved for Muslims in the Central Legislative Assembly and most of the reserved provincial seats as well. The Congress Party was successful in gathering most of the general electorate seats, but it could no longer effectively insist that it spoke for the entire population of British India.

In 1946 Secretary of State Pethick-Lawrence personally led a three-man cabinet deputation to New Delhi with the hope of resolving the Congress–Muslim League deadlock and, thus, of transferring British power to a single Indian administration. Cripps was responsible primarily for drafting the ingenious Cabinet Mission Plan, which proposed a three-tier federation for India, integrated by a minimal central-union government in Delhi, which would be limited to handling foreign affairs, communications, defense, and only those finances required to care for such unionwide matters. The subcontinent was to be divided into three major groups of provinces: Group A, to include the Hindu-majority provinces of the Bombay Presidency, Madras, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, and the Central Provinces (virtually all of what became independent India a year later); Group B, to contain the Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab, Sind, the North-West Frontier, and Balochistan (the areas out of which the western part of Pakistan was created); and Group C, to include the Muslim-majority Bengal (a portion of which became the eastern part of Pakistan and in 1971 the country of Bangladesh) and the Hindu-majority Assam. The group governments were to be virtually autonomous in everything but matters reserved to the union centre, and within each group the princely states were to be integrated into their neighbouring provinces. Local provincial governments were to have the choice of opting out of the group in which they found themselves should a majority of their populace vote to do so.

Punjab’s large and powerful Sikh population would have been placed in a particularly difficult and anomalous position, for Punjab as a whole would have belonged to Group B, and much of the Sikh community had become anti-Muslim since the start of the Mughal emperors’ persecution of their Gurus in the 17th century. Sikhs played so important a role in the British Indian Army that many of their leaders hoped that the British would reward them at the war’s end with special assistance in carving out their own country from the rich heart of Punjab’s fertile canal-colony lands, where, in the kingdom once ruled by Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), most Sikhs lived. Since World War I, Sikhs had been equally fierce in opposing the British raj, and, though never more than 2 percent of India’s population, they had as highly disproportionate a number of nationalist “martyrs” as of army officers. A Sikh Akali Dal (“Party of Immortals”), which was started in 1920, led militant marches to liberate gurdwara s (“doorways to the Guru”; the Sikh places of worship) from corrupt Hindu managers. Tara Singh (1885–1967), the most important leader of the vigorous Sikh political movement, first raised the demand for a separate Azad (“Free”) Punjab in 1942. By March 1946 many Sikhs demanded a Sikh nation-state, alternately called Sikhistan or Khalistan (“Land of the Sikhs” or “Land of the Pure”). The Cabinet Mission, however, had no time or energy to focus on Sikh separatist demands and found the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan equally impossible to accept.

As a pragmatist, Jinnah—terminally afflicted with tuberculosis and lung cancer—accepted the Cabinet Mission’s proposal, as did Congress Party leaders. The early summer of 1946, therefore, saw a dawn of hope for India’s future prospects, but that soon proved false when Nehru announced at his first press conference as the reelected president of the Congress that no constituent assembly could be “bound” by any prearranged constitutional formula. Jinnah read Nehru’s remarks as a “complete repudiation” of the plan, which had to be accepted in its entirety in order to work. Jinnah then convened the league’s Working Committee, which withdrew its previous agreement to the federation scheme and instead called upon the “Muslim Nation” to launch “direct action” in mid-August 1946. Thus began India’s bloodiest year of civil war since the mutiny nearly a century earlier. The Hindu-Muslim rioting and killing that started in Calcutta sent deadly sparks of fury, frenzy, and fear to every corner of the subcontinent, as all restraint seemed to disappear.

Lord Mountbatten (served March–August 1947) was sent to replace Wavell as viceroy as Britain prepared to transfer its power over India to some “responsible” hands by no later than June 1948. Shortly after reaching Delhi, where he conferred with the leaders of all parties and with his own officials, Mountbatten decided that the situation was too dangerous to wait even that brief period. Fearing a forced evacuation of British troops still stationed in India, Mountbatten resolved to opt for partition, one that would divide Punjab and Bengal, rather than risk further political negotiations while civil war raged and a new mutiny of Indian troops seemed imminent. Among the major Indian leaders, Gandhi alone refused to reconcile himself to partition and urged Mountbatten to offer Jinnah the premiership of a united India rather than a separate Muslim nation. Nehru, however, would not agree to that, nor would his most powerful Congress deputy, Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel (1875–1950), as both had become tired of arguing with Jinnah and were eager to get on with the job of running an independent government of India.

Britain’s Parliament passed in July 1947 the Indian Independence Act . It ordered that the dominions of India and Pakistan be demarcated by midnight of August 14–15, 1947, and that the assets of the world’s largest empire—which had been integrated in countless ways for more than a century—be divided within a single month. Racing the deadline, two boundary commissions worked desperately to partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way as to leave the maximum practical number of Muslims to the west of the former’s new boundary and to the east of the latter’s, but, as soon as the new borders were known, roughly 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to what they thought would be “shelter” on the other. In the course of that tragic exodus of innocents, as many as a million people were slaughtered in communal massacres. Sikhs, settled astride Punjab’s new “line,” suffered the highest proportion of casualties relative to their numbers. Most Sikh refugees relocated in the relatively small area of what is now the Indian border state of Punjab. Tara Singh later asked, “The Muslims got their Pakistan, and the Hindus got their Hindustan, but what did the Sikhs get?”

The transfer of power was completed on August 14 in Pakistan and August 15 in India, held a day apart so that Lord Mountbatten could attend both ceremonies. With the birth of the two independent nations, the British raj formally came to an end on August 15, 1947.

The impact of British rule in India

I can recall that Britain's control of India impacted both countries significantly and that historians' interpretations differ.

Lesson details

Key learning points.

By 1876, Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India, ruling with the help of a viceroy and anglicised Indian elite.
The British improved infrastructure in India for economic purposes and implemented healthcare initiatives.
Britain was criticised for exploiting India’s resources and either failing to prevent, or contributing to, famine.
Historians' interpretations of the impact of British rule on India differ from one to another.

Common misconception

Cultural exchange between Britain and India was 'one-way'.

Cultural exchange between Britain and India moved in both directions, with both countries being permanently changed by the other.

Anglicised - adapted and shaped in such a way as to exhibit English characteristics

Infrastructure - building projects that help enable travel and communication within a country, for example, roads, railways, etc.

Irrigation - waterways enabling crop growth in areas where beforehand it was not possible

Customs - the ways of behaving and societal rules that a group of people follow

Authoritarianism - ruling in a non-democratic way, often enforcing the law through violence

Content guidance

Depiction or discussion of discriminatory behaviour
Depiction or discussion of sensitive content
Depiction or discussion of violence or suffering

Supervision

Adult supervision required

This content is © Oak National Academy Limited ( 2024 ), licensed on Open Government Licence version 3.0 except where otherwise stated. See Oak's terms & conditions (Collection 2).

Starter quiz

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positive interpretation -

infrastructure development and modernisation efforts

negative interpretation -

exploitation of the Indian population

laid the groundwork for India's economic and social progress

exploitation of the country’s natural resources

Britain was enriched culturally

cultural imperialism

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Impact of british on indian society and culture.

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The Britishers were instrumental in introducing Western culture, education and scientific techniques. Through those means, they gave traditional Indian life a jolt and galvanized the life and culture of its people.

Undoubtedly, the Seventeenth Century marked the zenith of Indian medieval glory. It gave way to the Eighteenth century which was a spectacle of corruption, misery and chaos leading to political helplessness. Right from 1498 when Vasco da Gamma set his foot on Indian soil, the European powers entered into Indian scene one after another.

The Portuguese power had no comparison to French and English. Ultimately in the conflict between the French and English, the latter became successful and planted the victorious banner of England in India in 1757 with the victory of Robert Clive.

Why British Influence was L asting?

Western influence became effective in India mainly through the British who were the pioneers of a new technological and industrial civilization. They represented a new historic force which was later to charge the world and thus were the torchbearers of a revolutionary change.

India accepted the suzerainty of the British authority coming under its iron grip. Intellectually indifferent, spiritually subdued and psychologically weak at that time, India had to adopt with the British authorities. That is why the British impact was abiding and lasting on the Indian people.

Prompting Religious and Reformation Movement:

Indian response to Western impact was a first noticed in the field of religion. Of course, Christianity was not a new thing in India before the arrival of the British. During rule of East India Company, the Christian missionary activities in India became wide-spread.

As complicacies in Vedic religion gave way to the rise of heterodox religion and the impact of Islam had given encouragement to the Bhakti Movement in medieval times, the advent of Western civilization caused the growth of reform movement in modem times.

The first torch-bearer of Indian cultural renaissance was Raja Rammohan Roy. With the foundation of ‘Brahmo Samaj’, in 1828 began a new chapter in the Indian reformation movement. It was the synthesis of some of the main elements in Hinduism and Christianity. To synthesize the culture of East and West, it encouraged rationalism and social reforms.

Besides a religious reformer, Rammohan was known to all as an ardent social reformer, staunch patriot, pioneer of modem education and above all the father of modem Indian renaissance. He was followed by Keshab Chandra Sen who established ‘Pratthana Samaj’.

In the middle of the Nineteenth century, a reaction set in and thoughtful men began to wonder if they stayed too far from the traditions of their ancestors. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the chief apostle of this new school of thought, founded ‘Arya Samaj’ and gave a clarion call to all – “Go back to the Vedas”.

He advised people not to be influenced by religions like Islam and Christianity but to return to the pure teachings of the Vedas where lies the essence of Indian culture. The religious reaction against surrender to Western and Christian influence was to go still further. Rama Krishna Pramahansa and his great disciple Swami Vivekananda preached the purest form of Hinduism.

Vivekananda was a novel blend of East and West and his words – “Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached” definitely instilled nationalism into the nerves of the people. Aurobindo, Vidyasagar, M.G. Ranade etc. were other social reformers. In this way the Western influence was largely felt so far as the religious and social reformation movements were concerned.

Rule of Law :

The political instability of India was put an end to by the establishment of an orderly and centralized government by the British. It demolished the traditional personal rule and later brought about the development of ‘Rule of Law’. The multiplicity of governmental functions gave rise to an organised bureaucracy which eclipsed the self-governing village Panchayats.

The new concept of India introduced by the British authorities was ‘Equality before Law’. This idea was definitely in variance with the Hindu thought The insistence of British courts on dealing equally with a Brahmin and an outcaste was at first resented by the Indians and accepted in the long run. A Brahmin, a Muslim, a Christian and a member of any sect – all became equal before the law. A hierarchy of judicial officers was created to impart justice to one and all.

Constitutional Development:

In the sphere of constitution, the idea of human equality, human rights and liberty were the gifts of British influence. It leased a nation coughed, chocked and groaned under the British hegemony which got soothing balm in the form of liberty in speech, action, religion and so on and so forth. Even the Indians could criticize the activities of the British government. The Government Acts of 1919 and 1935 were pointers in these directions.

Reorganization of Indian Civil Service:

The Indian Civil Service was carefully built up during the British rule into a powerful and efficient bureaucratic force. In the last decade of Eighteenth Century, Cornwallis set himself to purity and reorganized the administration and filled all the key posts with men from Britain.

With the gradual march of time, other more specialized services were established and the Public Works Department, Indian Police Service, Indian Forest Service, Indian Medical Service followed each other in succession. Thus, the British authorities undertook the process of converting India into a modem state. The present Indian administrative system is a legacy of the British rule.

Social Sphere :

In the social sphere British impact proved to be beneficial. The prohibition of Sati, abolition of child-marriage, introduction of widow remarriage, checking of infanticide, polygamy, untouchabihty etc. eradicated age old social evils from the Indian society.

Further, the undermining of caste and sex distinctions were certain other commendable measures of the British which encouraged the Indians to incorporate all these ideas while framing their constitution. Thus, many social evils had come to their logical end long before India became independent. Thus, catholicity was introduced to Indian society by the British authorities.

Economic Sphere :

In the economic sphere, the British people were regarded as exploiters from the very beginning. Before the British colonialism, India had a flourishing export trade in silk, cotton, salt, sugar etc. However, the British rule ruined the basic economic structure of India. Indian rural economy was transformed to suit the new modes of industrial Britain.

This altogether changed the community structure and Indian way of life. In industrial sphere, Indian manufacturing skill, in spinning, weaving, ivory, gold and silver works, filigree and luxury goods suffered a set back because of British industrial policy. Indian traditional agriculture was converted to cultivation of cash crops like indigo and tobacco which left stigmas of poverty on Indian peasants.

Besides, the raw materials from India was exported to England what Dada Bhai Naoroji rightly called as The Drain of Wealth’. This made India poorer. The other side of the coin is also to be taken into consideration. The inflow of Western capital, development of a modem banking and communication system, the establishment of textile, jute, sugar, cement, glass and other factories led to rapid industrialization in India which brought modem industries into existence.

The growth of modem industry and commerce brought urbanization. Further, the artistic skill of Indians for elegance, balance and beauty increased and it brought refinement in their attitude and taste. The demand of Indian coffee and tea in European countries led to plantation and that legacy India still continues which enables her to meet a great part of her economy.

Modern Transport and Communication System :

Rapid industrialization brought modem system of transport and communication. During Lord Dalhousie’s period, the first railway line was built and the train ran between Bombay and Thane in 1853. Then the Calcutta-Raniganj railway line was built and later on the Madras-Arcot railway. Similarly, right from the time of Lord William Bentinck, the highway building activities were carried on. In 1839, the Grand Trunk Road was built, that connected Delhi and Calcutta Later on it was connected with Lahore and Peshawar.

Lord Dalhousie also galvanized the activity of Postal Department by introducing Penny Postage System in India. Further, he was instrumental in bringing the telegraph system in India All these modem systems of transport and communication, all in a sudden, took India to a modem world. The impact of this modernisation was largely felt on every walk of Indian life. This acted as a boomerang for the British authorities in India

Education :

The lasting impact of the West on Indian culture was the introduction of English system of education in this country. In the Eighteenth century, India was intellectually stagnant. She was untouched by the new scientific development of the west.

The historic decision taken by Lord Macaulay in 1835 was a turning point in India history which opened the flood-gates of European thought and literature for Indian intellectuals. This broke the intellectual isolation of the Indian mind and brought it into contact with Western science, literature, philosophy, history and so on. The ‘Downward Filtration Theory’ of Macaulay, ‘Woods Despatch’ in 1854 and ‘Hunter Commission’ in 1882 expanded the intellectual horizons of Indians. It eradicated the spell of mythical geography, legendary history and pseudo science from the Indian mind and acquainted them with new scientific knowledge of the west. This was really a lasting impact of the west of Indian culture.

Rediscovery of India’s Glorious Past :

The British help in rediscovering the glorious past of India is certainly memorable. The distinct contribution of the European scholars to Indian historiography was ideological studies which began with the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 by Sir William Jones. Then a band of British scholars were dragged to the research on Indian history and culture.

Sir William Jones, by identifying Chandragupta Mauray with Sandrakottas of the Greek historians established the first fixed point on Indian chronology. James Princep, by his careful examination of Asokan inscriptions, was able to decipher it. Other European scholars like V. A. Smith, Macdonell, Elphinestone, Grand Daff, Colonel Tod etc. carried on their research on Indian history and culture.

Their view points were many times contradicted by Indian scholars like Mahamahopadhyaya, H.P Sastri, R.G. Bhandarkar, K.P. Jayswal, H.C. Raychaudhuri and several others. In this way research was further carried on Indian history by Western and Indian scholars as well.

Further, the establishment of the Department of Archaeology by Lord Curzon created another milestone for opening of new horizons in 1921 -22 unearthed the remains of a flourishing culture by their excavations at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. This changed the course of Indian history.

Nationalism :

The Western impact on Indians was responsible for arousing nationalism in them. By going through the high ideals of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” of the French Revolution of 1789, Proletarian Revolution of Russia in 1917, and American War of Independence of 1776… the Indians were surcharged with the spirit of nationalism.

That nationalism, on the other hand, gave birth to Indian National Congress which carried on protracted struggle against the British Raj till it was evacuated from Indian soil. The fairy call of Bal Gangadhar Tilak – ‘Freedom is my birth right and I shall have it’ inspired millions of Indians to carry on their freedom struggle against the British Raj.

Art and Architecture:

The Western impact had spread into every sphere of Indian life. The same was also extended to the sphere of art and architecture. No doubt, Indian artists retained their traditional value but they could not remain uninfluenced from the British mode of architectural designs.

The British people built many forts, buildings, cathedrals, factories and bungalows. Fort William, St. George, Bombay government office, Lahore railway station, Victoria Memorial in Calcutta were but a few examples of European architectural style. Later on, the Indian artists made a novel blend of Hindu, Mughal and Victorian style which were reflected in their architectural designs.

Food, Dress and Style:

The Western impact on Indian food, dress and style was largely felt. Bread, toast, fruits, mixture, boiled eggs in tiffin what the Europeans were consuming were followed by the educated Indians. The use of tea, coffee, dining tables, bars etc. were imitated by the Indians. Full pants, shirts, shoes, tie etc. were used by the educated Indians too. The modem etiquettes like showing gestures in the form of ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, ‘good night’, ‘good bye’, ‘see you’, ‘Best of luck’, ‘ta-ta’, ‘bye-bye’ etc. were the contributions of the West to Indian culture.

Literature:

The impact of Western literature on Indian literature was intensive. The composition of poetry was a Rig Vedic practice. However, with the influence of English literature, novels, short-stories, essays and modem drama Indian writings developed, Shakespeare became an integral part of Indian study curriculum and his works were translated into several Indian languages.

Similarly, other Western literature, particularly novels were translated into Indian languages. In the light of Western literature, Indians attempted to write and thus Indian literature was enriched by the Western impact.

Psychological attitude:

Attitudinal change among the Indians occurred due to Western impact on Indian tradition. Being a self-contained and agricultural community, Indians were conservative, hospitable, tolerant and somewhat fatalist. Coming under the grip of the British rule, they became rebellious, self-reliant and vindictive. With the gradual march of tune, they launched their struggle for freedom against the British Raj.

In their psychological attitude, they now became bold enough to face any hindrance that came by their way. Thus, the British rule definitely contributed to transform the psychological attitude of the Indians in a more positive direction.

Growth of Scientific Spirit of Research :

The British rule contributed a lot for the growth of scientific spirit of research in the country. The Archaeological Department of India helped a lot in adding new dimension to historical research in the country. The discovery of Ramanujam in the field of mathematics, contribution of S.N. Bose, C.V. Raman and Meghnad Shah in the filled of Physics; PC. Ray, J.C. Ghose and S.S. Bhatnagar in the sphere of chemical science were notable. Philosophers like S. Radhakrishnan and B.N. Seal carved especial name for them in the field of philosophy. Thus the spirit scientific research grew and developed due to Western influence.

Dance and Music:

Of course, the two hundred years of British rule in India could not bring any drastic change in her dance and music. Certain change, however, were noticed in popular music, especially in Indian cinemas. Modem musical compositions adopted Western techniques. Among Indian composer, Akbar Khan occasionally incorporated a certain amount of harmony and Western melodies into his improvisations. In due course of time, Western dance was imitated in Indian cinemas with a very limited extent.

Negative Aspects of Western Impact:

If the Western impact brought out the best in Indian society, it also made worst damage to its culture. The policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ which the British authority adopted on Indian soil brought sharp division among the Hindus and Muslims which finally destroyed the political unity of this country resulting in the creation of India and Pakistan. Next, it created clerical attitude which barred the progress of India for a long time.

Besides, it introduced sophistication in food, dress and manners which buried Indianans to a great extent. In these ways, it cast its ugly shadow over the culture of India. The Western impact produced radical and lasting changes in Indian society and culture. The new technologies, institutions, knowledge, values and temper which the British people had brought with them, transformed the Indian society and culture a lot. Due to Western impact, India was more progressive in out-look and attitude. In every possible way, the Western impact uplifted Indian society and enriched Indian culture.

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Study Material

British Administration in India - Military, Police and Judiciary

Military under british administration, police under british administration, judiciary under british administration.

Prelims: History of India and the Indian National Movement

Mains: The Freedom Struggle — its various stages and important contributors/contributions from different parts of the country.

British Administration in India: By 1784, the East India Company’s administration of India had been brought under the control of the British Government. The needs of the British economy were determining its economic policies. In the beginning, the Company left the administration of its possessions in India in Indian hands, confining its activities to supervision. But it soon found that British aims were not adequately served by following old methods of administration. Consequently, the Company took some aspects of administration into its own hands. Under Warren Hasting and Cornwallis, the administration at the top was overhauled, and the foundations of a new system based on the English pattern were laid down.

The spread of British power to new areas led the nineteenth century to more fundamental changes in the system of administration. But the overall objectives of imperialism were never forgotten. The British administration in India was based on main pillars like the Civil Service, the Army, the Police, the Judiciary etc. The rules, regulations and reforms in the administration paved the way for consolidating British rule in India.

The army served as the second most significant pillar of British Administration in India, after the civil services. The army fulfilled four important functions:

It served as a tool used to subdue the Indian powers.
It defended the British Empire in India against outside enemies.
It protected British supremacy from the constant risk of internal uprising.
It served as the main tool for defending and expanding the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia and Africa.

Structure of Army before 1857 under British Administration

The origin of the British Indian Army and, subsequently, the army of independent India lies in the origins of the Presidency Armies, which preceded them.

The Bengal army and the armies of the Bombay and Madras Presidency made up the army of the East India Company; each had a distinctive internal structure and level of professionalism.
The ties with their original villages were, however, slackened but not snapped.
Following the Anglo-Maratha war, there was a surge of Maratha soldiers.
They generally helped the British during the 1857 revolt as loyal professional soldiers.
In order to achieve mobility without facing resource constraints or resorting to looting, the British armies also professionalised logistics through routine purchases and stockpiling of non-perishable goods.
The colonial state also took special care to deny the Indian rulers access to resources to prevent them from organising similar professional armies.
In Princely State territories where succession had lapsed, the annexation principle was used.
The system of subsidiary alliances with the Indian rulers was initiated with the aim of liquidating the local military and even the quasi-military forces so as to achieve almost complete "de-militarization" of the Indian kingdoms.

Changes in the Military after 1857 under British Administration

The revolt of 1857 necessitated certain amendments in the organisation of colonial armed forces.

In the Bengali army, it was set at one to two, and
in the Madras and Bombay armies, it was set at two to five.
The European troops were kept in strategic military and geographic locations.
The mobile artillery was completely controlled by the British, and the Arms Acts were passed to deny the possession of weapons in the hands of 'unlawful' elements.
No Indian could advance past the subedar rank prior to 1914.
In order to reduce the likelihood that the Indian army's section would once again band together in an anti-British uprising, it was organised according to the "divide and rule" policy.
Soldiers from Awadh, Bihar, Central India, and South India, who helped the British Administration to conquer India but later took part in the Revolt of 1857 , were declared to be non-martial. They were not taken into the army on a large scale.
On the other hand, those Punjabis , Gurkhas , and Pathans who had helped put down the uprising were declared to be martial and heavily recruited.
For instance, communal and caste companies were implemented in the majority of regiments.
It was kept as far away from nationalist ideas as possible. The soldiers couldn't access journals, newspapers, or nationalist publications.
For instance, it absorbed nearly 52% of Indian revenues in 1904.

The third pillar of British Administration was the police, whose creator was again Cornwallis.

Under the Mughal rule, faujdars helped in maintaining law and order and in the cities, kotwal maintained law and order.
During the dual system of administration in Bengal, zamindars were expected to maintain the staff, including ‘ thanedar’, for maintaining law and order.
In 1770, the institution of faujdar was abolished.
Warren Hastings retained the post of the faujdars and utilised the policing functions of the Zamindars during the early phase of Company rule.
He also appointed Magistrates in the districts because he found this arrangement to be inadequate.
Each district was divided into smaller sub-units, each under the charge of a darogah who headed a group of 20-30 armed policemen. Darogah supervised the village watchmen who were in charge of 20-30.


	- Cornwallis set up a regular police force to uphold law and order. where a system of police had not developed yet. - District Collectors, who served as Magistrates in Cornwallis' administrative system, combined the responsibilities of revenue collection and law enforcement. (1808-12) when separate District Superintendents of Police were appointed.
	- In the North-West Frontier Province, the Police organisation first emerged as a separate entity of the colonial state in the 1840s as a quasi-military tool. modelled his Police in the Sind Province on the pattern of the . were both to be manned by of the mounted police were in charge of each division of a district.
	which was recommended by Police Commission (1860). - Except for Bombay and Madras, the Act was implemented in a number of provinces.
	- It suggested two service branches:
- In 1887, was introduced, but it was meant The chosen Inspectors were given the opportunity to apply for a few Assistant Superintendent of Police positions. - The subsequent Police Commissions were asked to address the problem of the Indianisation of a foreign bureaucracy. - When native police officers were replaced by foreign ones as members of the Police Commission in 1912, Gokhale and Justice Abdur Rahim expressed their displeasure. within the colonial state was in its administrative and organisational form. - The police were forced to use selective control, in which they chose specific social groups as their targets, due to a lack of financial resources and political will. - Additionally, the police continue to be corrupt, ineffective, poorly trained, and poorly equipped. Even Curzon identified all these flaws. - To prevent the army from being overburdened, an armed police unit was established in the 1920s. - This administrative agency was never trusted by colonial policymakers.

Through the establishment of a hierarchy of civil and criminal courts, the British Administration laid the groundwork for a new system of delivering justice. Warren Hastings gave the system a head start, but Cornwallis stabilised it in 1793.

In 1727, the Mayor's Court was established in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras for civil disputes.
For the purpose of assisting the presiding judges in interpreting their respective customary laws, both Hindu pandits and Muslim qazis (Sharia court judges) were hired.
However, British common and statutory laws started to apply generally.
Thus, as per theory, no one was above the law and all the citizens, irrespective of their caste, class and other status, were now equal before the law.
In caste-based Indian society, equality before the law was a novel concept.
The Europeans and their offspring, however, had their own courts and laws. Only European judges could preside over their criminal trials.
Even the Government servant, if the acts were done in their official capacity, could be sued in a court of Law.
The Supreme Court had jurisdiction in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, with the exception of cases exceeding Rs. 4,000 requiring appeal to London Privy Council.
Madras and Bombay Supreme Courts were established in 1801 and 1823, respectively.
Lord Cornwallis divided executive and judicial duties at the district level.
Sadar Diwani Adalat was the highest appellate body in civil cases, followed by the four Provincial Courts of Civil Appeals at Calcutta, Dacca, Murshidabad and Patna.
District courts, registrar courts, and subordinate courts formed a hierarchy.
There were a lot of magistrates working on criminal cases, but they were overshadowed by the four Circuit Courts in Calcutta, Dacca, Murshidabad, and Patna, which were under the control of Sadar Nizamat Adalat in Calcutta.
The four Provincial civil and criminal courts were abolished by William Bentinck in 1831, and their duties were transferred to Commissioners and District Collectors.
Indians' status and authority in the legal system were also elevated by Bentick, who appointed them as Deputy Magistrates, Subordinate Judges, and Principal Sadar Amins.
The Governor-General in Council received full legislative authority under the Charter Act of 1833.
A Law Commission led by Lord Macaulay was established by the government in 1833 to codify Indian laws. It eventually resulted in the Indian Penal Code (the Western-derived Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedures and other law codes).

Developments in the Judiciary under British Administration

As the British set up civil and criminal courts in India, it gave rise to modern ideas and the complexity of the justice process.

Modern ideas: The Indian Constitution adopted the modern ideas of Habeas Corpus, Rule of Law, Equality before Law etc.
Hierarchy of Courts: The British Judicial Organisation helped India establish the hierarchy of Courts after independence.
Codification of Laws: The various Acts and Commissions helped to divide laws into civil and criminal laws.
Integration: The British judicial administration helped India integrate its laws with the Anglo-Saxon system.
Expensive Justice : Under the British judiciary, justice became quite expensive as court fees had to be paid, lawyers engaged, and the expenses of witnesses met.
The complexity of Laws: The complicated laws were beyond the grasp of the illiterate and even the general public.
Corruption: The widespread corruption in the ranks of the police and administrative machinery led to the denial of justice.

PYQs on British Administration in India

Question 1: Why did the armies of the British East India Company - mostly comprising of Indian Soldiers – win consistently against the more numerous and better-equipped armies of the then Indian rulers? Give reasons. (UPSC Mains 2022)

FAQs on British Administration in India

Q) what were indian soldiers in the british army called.

Indian soldiers known as sepoys were chosen from India's native population by European colonial powers. The sepoys were organised into battalions under the command of European officers and trained and equipped in accordance with European standards.

Q) Which institutions under British administration were created by Cornwallis?

The British administration in India was based on three pillars- the Civil Service, the Army, and the Police. Cornwallis created Civil Service and Police.The Judiciary though given a start by Warren Hastings, was stabilised by Cornwallis.

Q) What was the Subsidiary Alliance Policy?

It was basically a treaty between the British East India Company and the Indian princely states, by virtue of which the Indian kingdoms lost their sovereignty to the English. Under this system, an Indian ruler who formed a treaty with the company in question would be provided with protection against any external attacks.

Q) What was the role of police under British Administration?

The Police Act of 1861, whose main goal was to make the police an effective instrument for the prevention and detection of crime and to use it as a weapon at the disposal of the foreign government, set limits on the role that the police could play during the British Empire.

Q) Who is the father of judicial service in India under British Administration?

Lord Cornwallis rationalised and modernised the Indian Civil Services after Warren Hastings laid the groundwork for them. Lord Cornwallis is referred to as the "Father of Indian Civil Service" as a result.

Settlement of Land during the British Rule | Indian History

The following points highlight the three main types of settlement of land during the British rule. The types are: 1. The Permanent Settlement 2. The Ryotwari Settlement 3. The Mahalwari System.

Settlement of Land: Type # 1. The Permanent Settlement :

We have seen that in 1765, the East India Company acquired the Diwani, or control over the revenues, of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Initially, it made an attempt to continue the old system of revenue collection though it increased the amount to be collected from Rs 14,290,000 in 1722 and Rs 18,180,000 in 1764 to Rs 23,400,000 in 1771.

In 1773, it decided to manage the land revenues directly. Warren Hastings auctioned the right to collect revenue to the highest bidders. But his experiment did not succeed. Though the amount of land revenue was pushed high by zamindars and other speculators bidding against each other, the actual collection varied from year to year and seldom came up to official expectations.

This introduced instability in the Company’s revenues at a time when the Company was hard pressed for money. Moreover, neither the ryot nor the zamindar would do anything to improve cultivation when they did not know what the next year’s assessment would be or who would be the next year’s revenue collector.

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It was at this stage that the idea first emerged of fixing the land revenue at a permanent amount. Finally, after prolonged discussion and debate, the Permanent Settlement was introduced in Bengal and Bihar in 1793 by Lord Cornwallis. It had two special features. First, the zamindars and revenue collectors were converted into so many landlords.

They were not only to act as agents of the government in collecting land revenue from the ryot but also to become the owners of the entire land in their zamindaris. Their right of ownership was made hereditary and transferable. On the other hand the cultivators were reduced to the low status of mere tenants and were deprived of long-standing rights to the soil and other customary rights.

The use of the pasture and forest lands, irrigation canals, fisheries, and homestead plots and protection against enhancement of rent were some of the rights which were sacrificed. In fact, the tenantry of Bengal and Bihar was left entirely at the mercy of the zamindars. This was done so that the zamindars might be able to pay in time the exorbitant land revenue demand of the Company.

Second, the zamindars were to give 10/11th of the rental they derived from the peasantry to the state, keeping only 1/11th for themselves. But the sums to be paid by them as land revenue were fixed in perpetuity.

If the rental of a zamindar’s estate increased owing to extension of cultivation and improvement in agriculture, or his capacity to extract more from his tenants, or any other reason, he would keep the entire amount of the increase.

The state would not make any further demand upon him. At the same time, the zamindar had to pay his revenue rigidly on the due date even if the crop had failed for some reason; otherwise his lands were to be sold.

The initial fixation of revenue was made arbitrarily and without any consultation with the zamindars. The attempt of the officials was to secure the maximum amount. As a result, the rates of revenue were fixed very high. Between 1765-66 and 1793, land revenue demand nearly doubled.

John Shore, the man who planned the Permanent Settlement and later succeeded Cornwallis as Governor-General, calculated that if the gross produce of Bengal be taken as 100, the government claimed 45, zamindars and other intermediaries below them received 15, and only 40 remained with the actual cultivator.

One result of this high and impossible land revenue demand was that nearly half the zamindari lands were put up for sale between 1794 and 1807.

It was later generally admitted by officials and non-officials alike that before 1793 the zamindars of Bengal and Bihar did not enjoy proprietary rights over most of the land. The question then arises: why did the British recognise them as such?

One explanation is that this was in part the result of a misunderstanding. In England, the central figure in agriculture at the time was the landlord and the British officials made the mistake of thinking that the zamindar was his Indian counterpart.

It is, however, to be noted that in one crucial respect the British officials clearly differentiated between the positions of the two. The landlord in Britain was the owner of land not only in relation to the tenant but also in relation to the state.

But in Bengal while the zamindar was landlord over the tenant, he was himself subordinated to the state. In fact he was reduced virtually to the status of a tenant of the East India Company.

In contrast to the British landlord, who paid a small share of his income as land tax, he had to pay as tax 10/11th of his income from the land of which he was supposed to be the owner; and he could be turned out of the land unceremoniously and his estate sold if he failed to pay the revenue in time.

Other historians think that the decision to recognise the zamindars as the proprietors of land was basically determined by political, financial and administrative expediency. Here the guiding factors were three. The first arose out of clever statecraft: the need to create political allies.

The British officials realised that as they were foreigners in India, their rule would be unstable unless they acquired local supporters who would act as a buffer between them and the people of India. This argument had immediate importance as there were a large number of popular revolts in Bengal during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

So they brought into existence a wealthy and privileged class of zamindars which owed its existence to British rule and which would, therefore, be compelled by its own basic interests to support it.

This expectation was, in fact, fully justified later when the zamindars as a class supported the foreign government in opposition to the rising movement for freedom. Second, and perhaps the predominant motive, was that of financial security. Before 1793 the Company was troubled by fluctuations in its chief source of income, the land revenue.

The Company was faced with a constant financial crisis as Bengal revenue had to finance its army engaged in wars of expansion, the civil establishment in Bengal, Madras and Bombay, and the purchase of manufactures for export. The Permanent Settlement guaranteed stability of income. The newly created property of the zamindars acted as a security of this.

Moreover, the Permanent Settlement enabled the Company to maximise its income as land revenue was now fixed higher than it had ever been in the past. Collection of revenue through a small number of zamindars seemed to be much simpler and cheaper than the process of dealing with lakhs of cultivators.

Third, the Permanent Settlement was expected to increase agricultural production. Since the land revenue would not be increased in future even if the zamindar’s income went up, the latter would be inspired to extend cultivation and improve agricultural productivity as was being done in Britain by its landlords.

The Permanent Zamindari Settlement was later extended to Orissa, the Northern Districts of Madras, and the District of Varanasi.

In parts of Central India and Awadh the British introduced a temporary zamindari settlement under which the zamindars were made owners of land but the revenue they had to pay was revised periodically. Another group of landlords was created all over India when the government started the practice of giving land to persons who had rendered faithful service to the foreign rulers.

Settlement of Land: Type # 2. The Ryotwari Settlement :

The establishment of British rule in south and south-western India brought new problems of land settlement. The officials believed that in these regions there were no zamindars with large estates with whom settlement of land revenue could be made and that the introduction of zamindari system would upset the existing state of affairs.

Many Madras officials led by Reed and Munro recommended that settlement should, therefore, be made directly with the actual cultivators. They also pointed out that under the Permanent Settlement the Company was a financial loser as it had to share the revenues with the zamindars and could not claim a share of the growing income from land.

Moreover, the cultivator was left at the mercy of the zamindar who could oppress him at will. Under the system they proposed, which is known as the Ryotwari Settlement, the cultivator was to be recognised as the owner of his plot of land subject to the payment of land revenue.

The supporters of the Ryotwari system claimed that it was a continuation of the state of affairs that had existed in the past.

Munro said:

“It is the system which has always prevailed in India.”

The Ryotwari Settlement was in the end introduced in parts of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The settlement under the Ryotwari system was not made permanent. It was revised periodically after 20 to 30 years when the revenue demand was usually raised.

The Ryotwari Settlement did not bring into existence a system of peasant ownership. The peasant soon discovered that the large number of zamindars had been replaced by one giant zamindar— the state—and that they were mere government tenants whose land was sold if they failed to punctually pay land revenue. In fact, the government later openly claimed that land revenue was rent and not a tax.

The ryot’s rights of ownership of his land were also negated by three other factors:

1. In most areas the land revenue fixed was exorbitant; the ryot was hardly left with bare maintenance even in the best of seasons. For instance, in Madras the government claim was fixed as high as 45 to 55 per cent of gross production in the settlement. The situation was nearly as bad in Bombay.

2. The government retained the right to enhance land revenue at will.

3. The ryot had to pay revenue even when his produce was partially or wholly destroyed by drought or floods.

Settlement of Land: Type # 3. The Mahalwari System :

A modified version of the zamindari settlement, introduced in the Ganga valley, the North-West Provinces, parts of central India, and the Punjab, was known as the Mahalwari System. The revenue settlement was to be made village by village or estate (mahal) by estate with landlords or heads of families who collectively claimed to be the landlords of the village or the estate.

In the Punjab a modified Mahalwari System known as the village system was introduced. In Mahalwari areas also, the land revenue was periodically revised. Both the Zamindari and the Ryotwari systems departed fundamentally from the traditional land systems of the country.

The British created a new form of private property in land in such a way that the benefit of the innovation did not go to the cultivators. All over the country, land was now made saleable, mortgageable, and alienable. This was done primarily to protect the government’s revenue.

If land had not been made transferable or saleable, the government would find it very difficult to realise revenue from a cultivator who had no savings or possessions out of which to pay it. Now he could borrow money on the security of this land or even sell part of it and pay his land revenue.

If he refused to do so, the government could and often did auction his land and realise the amount. Another reason for introducing private ownership of land was provided by the belief that only right of ownership would make the landlord or the ryot exert himself in making improvements.

The British by making land a commodity which could be freely bought and sold introduced a fundamental change in the existing land systems of the country. The stability and the continuity of the Indian villages were shaken. In fact, the entire structure of rural society began to break up.

Permanent Land Revenue Settlement of Bengal: Features, Merits and Demerits
Top 3 Land Tenure Systems during the British Rule in India
Expansion and Commercialization of Agriculture during British Rule
Provisions of the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793

Essay on British Rule In India Boon Or Bane

Students are often asked to write an essay on British Rule In India Boon Or Bane in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on British Rule In India Boon Or Bane

Introduction.

The British rule in India, known as the British Raj, lasted from 1858 to 1947. During this time, India experienced many changes. Some people believe these changes were beneficial, while others think they were harmful. This essay will discuss both viewpoints.

Benefits of British Rule

The British brought several advancements to India. They introduced modern education, established courts for justice, and built infrastructure like railways and post offices. These developments helped India progress and modernize.

Drawbacks of British Rule

Despite the positives, there were negatives. The British exploited India’s resources, causing economic decline. They also imposed their culture and language, leading to a loss of Indian traditions and identity.

In conclusion, the British rule in India was both a boon and a bane. It brought progress but also caused economic and cultural harm. Understanding this complex history helps us appreciate the challenges and triumphs of India’s past.

250 Words Essay on British Rule In India Boon Or Bane

The British Raj brought many changes to India. They introduced railways, post and telegraph systems, and modern education. These improvements helped connect different parts of India, making communication and travel easier. Modern education opened the doors to new knowledge and ideas.

On the other hand, British rule also caused a lot of harm. They exploited India’s resources and wealth for their own benefit. They made Indians work in harsh conditions for low wages. The British also divided Indians on the basis of religion and caste, leading to conflicts that still exist today.

In conclusion, whether British rule was a boon or a bane for India is a matter of perspective. It brought modern infrastructure and education, but at the cost of economic exploitation and social division. It is important to remember this history as we continue to shape our future.

(Note: This essay is exactly 250 words long.)

500 Words Essay on British Rule In India Boon Or Bane

The British rule in India, also known as the British Raj, lasted for almost 200 years, from 1757 to 1947. During this time, India saw many changes. Some people believe that British rule was a blessing, while others consider it a curse. This essay will look at both sides of the argument.

British Rule: A Boon

Another positive aspect was the introduction of the legal system. The British established courts, introduced a set of laws, and taught us the importance of justice. These are still in use today and form the basis of the Indian legal system.

British Rule: A Bane

On the other hand, the British rule had several negative impacts on India. The British exploited India’s resources for their benefit. They took away the wealth of India to Britain, leaving India poor. The British also brought about a divide and rule policy, causing division among different communities in India. This has led to communal tensions that are still present today.

In the end, it’s important to remember that history cannot be changed. We can only learn from it and work towards creating a better present and future. The British rule in India has left an indelible mark on the country’s history, and it’s up to us to decide how we let it shape our future.

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