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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?

British raj

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Humanities LibreTexts - British Raj
• Association for Asian Studies - Education About Asia: Online Archives - The British Impact on India, 1700–1900
• Georgetown University - Berkley Center - The British Raj and the Present
• GlobalSecurity.org - 1858-1947 - British Raj
• Table Of Contents

• What was the British raj?
• Why did Britain take over from the East India Company in 1858?
• What sparked the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857?
• What did the Government of India Act of 1858 do?
• How did the 1905 partition of Bengal affect Indian nationalism?
• Why was the Indian National Congress's first meeting in 1885 important?
• Who was Gandhi, and what was his plan for independence?
• Why did the Muslim League want a separate state?
• What led to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947?

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.”

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.

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

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.

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 ).

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.

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.

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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

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

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

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• Video Collectables: The Very Best of British Entertainment , Summer 2008, 30. Web site: www.collectablesdirect.com.
• The favored concept of the decay of the Mughal Empire as resulting in anarchy and a power vacuum that the British stepped into and righted with stability is not without challenge; e.g., Archie Baron, An Indian Affair (London: Channel 4 Books, 2001), 19. Be that as it may, Mughal power withered and British power grew, although not necessarily by design, even though regional or local economies may have prospered.
• A very useful annotated chronology, to which I am indebted, is Dilip Hiro’s The Rough Guide Chronicle: India (London: Rough Guides Ltd, 2002).
• Hiro, 227–233; quote from 227. This attitude is reflected in other works (e.g., Zareer Masani, Tales of the Raj —see notes 9 and 12 below—and Paul Scott’s “The Raj Quartet”) far too numerous to list.
• There are problems with what to call this event—or series of events. Originally, the British referred to it as the Sepoy Mutiny. A sepoy, from the Hindi sipahi , or soldier, was an Indian, Hindu or Muslim, serving in the East India Company army. After independence, nationalists began to refer to it as the First War of Independence. Variations abound, trying to avoid either extreme. Perhaps the best is that of “the Great Rebellion,” as in the subtitle of an outstanding new study by Maria Misra, Vishnu’s Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
• Misra, page 7; see 6–17 for an account.
• Blair B. King, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 183. An informative article, “Jorasanko and the Thakur Family,” by Chitra Deb, appears in a rich collection of articles on historical Calcutta edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I: The Past (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990/1995), 64– 67. Jorsanko is the particular branch of the Tagore family, and Thakur is the literal transliteration of Tagore from Bengali.
• As quoted by Hiro, 259.
• Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj (London: BBC Books, 1987), 90. This a remarkable book for insight into the nationalist-independence struggle beyond the political level. The author is the son of nationalist leaders, who were neither Hindu nor Muslim, but Parsi. In his introduction, he provides a very apt observation: “the Indians who have been the most enduring legacy of the Raj—the Western-educated middle class whom the British fostered to serve their interests, but which eventually threw them out. ” (5)
• Raghavan Iyer, Utilitarianism and All That: The Political Theory of British Imperialism (Santa Barbara: Concord Press, 1983).
• David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), xiii.
• Maria Misra, “The New Statesman Essay—Before the Pith Helmets,” published 8 October 2001, available at www.newstatemen.com/200110080018. This small, concise article is highly worthwhile.
• The Raj Quartet has gone through several publishings. The quote appears on page nine (the initial page of the work) of The Jewel in the Crown , Avon paperback edition of 1970 (first published 1966).
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Blighted by Empire: What the British Did to India

Omer aziz indicts the western amnesia around colonialism., by omer aziz september 1, 2018.

Around the World

ON THE EVENING of August 14, 1947, as India prepared to declare its independence, the last British Viceroy in India was sitting alone in his study, when, as he recounted later, he thought to himself: “For still a few more minutes I am the most powerful man on earth.” At the midnight hour, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, would rise and make his most celebrated speech, triumphantly announcing that after 200 years, India was reemerging on the world stage. But the Viceroy had ample reason to be glum: his empire was relinquishing its crown jewel, one that had enriched Britain for centuries. Louis Mountbatten was not exaggerating the extent of his power. Nehru had noted in his earlier writings that the power of the British Viceroy was greater than that of any British prime minister or American president. His Majesty’s deputy was India’s colonial master, ruling over 350 million bodies across a continent 20 times larger than Britain, accountable to none of the people he governed. When Nehru, writing from a prison cell in the 1940s, did search for an analogy to the Viceroy’s power, the only name he could think of was that of Adolf Hitler.

After two centuries of imperial rule, the proximate cause of India’s independence was the economic damage Britain suffered after World War II — a war, it should be remembered, in which 2.5 million Indians also fought. When the time came to pack up and return home, Britain tasked a London barrister named Sir Cyril Radcliffe with drawing the lines on the map that would partition the colony into two dominions, India and Pakistan, and settle the fate of hundreds of millions of people. Radcliffe, who had never been to India before, showed little interest in the people living there, and was given just 40 days to complete his work. In a poem titled “Partition,” W. H. Auden memorialized the image of an unprepared lawyer amputating an entire subcontinent:

In seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided A continent for better or worse divided The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

What followed this irresponsible and careless partition was murder, rape, and mob lynching on a scale never before seen in South Asia. The subcontinent had always prided itself on its syncretic traditions; certainly, there were moments of disharmony, but nothing like what would happen in 1947. Muslims killed Hindus and Sikhs, Hindus and Sikhs killed Muslims, neighbor turned on neighbor — and on their neighbors’ children. As far as the eye could see, bodies lay strewn across roads packed with refugees; pregnant women were targeted and cut open; corpses littered the roads of ancient towns and cities. Between one and two million people were killed in the span of this homicidal fury, and over 15 million people were uprooted. It was one of the most harrowing human migrations in all of recorded history. One person, at least, knew where to lay blame for this violence. Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy and first Governor-General of independent India, would later bluntly tell a BBC reporter: “I fucked it up.”

Last year marked the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India; seven decades have passed, yet the wounds remain far from healed. India and Pakistan are nuclear adversaries. Hundreds of millions of people still live in abject poverty. The intergenerational trauma suffered by the colonized and their descendants is not likely to disappear any time soon; nor, it seems, will the West recover from its amnesia about the true nature of colonialism. Niall Ferguson, the most prominent exponent of imperialism today, has written that there is a “plausible case that Empire enhanced global welfare — in other words, [that it] was a Good Thing.” Ferguson is not alone in this view. Just last year the academic journal  Third World Quarterly  was forced to pull an article entitled “The Case for Colonialism,” in which Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University argued that colonialism was “both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate,” the second claim more odious than the first. In England, Oxford professor Nigel Biggar rushed to Gilley’s defense in a piece published in The Times , chastising Brits who felt guilty about their nation’s colonial history. Backlash against Gilley’s imperialism, expressed primarily through social media protests, amounted to nothing: late last year, Oxford announced that Professor Biggar would be heading a new “Ethics and Empire” project, aiming to study a more balanced — and benign — story of colonial plunder.

Curiously, the recent revival of this imperial nostalgia comes not at a time of Western confidence and security, but rather at a time of great anxiety, of looking inward and backward, of nursing old grievances, and of scapegoating immigrants. A time when the West nervously reassures itself of its own greatness — or how it can be made “great” again. The publics for which Gilley and Biggar write, along with the great bulk of the citizenry, do not know the colonial story from the perspective of the colonized. Fifty-nine percent of Britons are proud of British colonialism. Textbooks and television shows routinely suggest that the darker-skinned masses benefited from their civilizing rulers. But this narrative of colonialism, which hinges on the gifts that the master left the colonized, and in this case, that Great Britain bestowed on India, has provoked an intellectual refutation that was long overdue.

When Will Durant, who co-authored, with his wife, Ariel,  The Story of Civilization ,   witnessed what was happening in India in the 1930s, he set aside his work of history to write a short pamphlet called  The Case for India .   In this pamphlet, the ordinarily measured historian does not mince words, lambasting the British for their ongoing actions. “The British conquest of India,” Durant writes, “was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle […] bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and legal plunder.” Britain profited enormously from what Durant calls the “rape of a continent,” so much so that on the eve of independence, the vast majority of Indians were living in poverty. It was, as Durant put it, “the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history.”

Shashi Tharoor’s compelling book  Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India  offers a modern update to Durant’s earlier pamphlet. The book originated from a 2015 speech Tharoor made at the Oxford Union, in which he argued that Britain owed India (and other colonies) reparations for the centuries of looting, violence, and depredation inflicted upon them. In this speech, Tharoor even attempted to circumvent the insoluble question of dollars and cents by arguing that if Britain paid India one pound a year for the next 200 years — a form of moral atonement for two centuries of subjugation — he would be satisfied. When Tharoor finished speaking, his opponents — all but one of them white — seemed at once amazed and repulsed. Soon after, a video of the speech went viral online, making both it and Tharoor the subject of intense discussion.

Tharoor’s biography lends special weight to his arguments. A sitting member of the Indian National Congress party in the Indian parliament, he has authored 13 previous books on India, literature, and foreign affairs. He was formerly the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, where it was widely presumed he would succeed Kofi Annan in 2006, but the United States vetoed his candidacy. In his memoir, John Bolton — the US ambassador to the United Nations at that time, and President Trump’s current national security advisor — revealed that he received instructions indicating that Washington did not want a strong secretary-general. The neoconservative faction of the Bush White House thought Tharoor would use his considerable platform and oratorical abilities to infuse the UN with a new activist spirit, and so he was promptly blocked. Tharoor subsequently withdrew his candidacy and returned to India to enter national politics.

At the outset of Inglorious Empire , Tharoor admits that he believed the arguments made in his Oxford Union speech were “so basic as to constitute Indian nationalism 101.” Those arguments, which he expands upon in the book, may be well known in India, and their local variant may be common knowledge in the entire post-colonial world, but they lack widespread recognition and understanding in the West. In the 10 years since Tharoor left New York for New Delhi, the rise of historical revisionism and the touting of empire, as well as the pervasive ignorance of the past, have only increased. Western intellectuals have constructed a fantastical balance sheet where the benefits of colonialism outweigh the costs, where some imaginary moral good ultimately exculpates theft and murder. Western publics have hypnotized themselves with historical untruths about their darkest chapters, or else reinterpreted the story as a parable of Western benevolence. That goes for both sides of the Atlantic, and both sides of the English Channel. Accordingly, Inglorious Empire  is neither an academic book, nor a comprehensive one; rather, it is a point-by-point refutation of the idea that colonialism in India was a Good Thing. Tharoor writes with the studious zeal of a prosecutor who knows that the preponderance of evidence is on his side, and he makes his case not by referencing Indian nationalists — that would be too easy — but by quoting the words of the colonizers themselves. “As India must be bled,” remarked Lord Salisbury, secretary of state for India and future prime minister, in 1875, “the lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested.”

Tharoor’s thesis is painfully simple: India was conquered by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners, its wealth and resources plundered to enrich the colonizers and not to improve the lives of Indians. Since evangelists for empire routinely use phrases like “benefit” and “welfare,” Tharoor turns to the financial particulars of how colonialism was waged. India lost its independence not even to a government but to a private company: the notorious British East India Company, which extended its control over a sizable share of the country through both manipulation and brutality — and conducted its theft by taxing the natives and forcibly extracting their resources. When the British East India Company began building the railways that are so often touted today, the Crown guaranteed a five percent return on investment. Such a handsome return could be fixed only because the railways were paid for by Indian , not British, taxes. When the Crown purchased the East India Company in 1858, following the mutiny of Indian sepoys, its purchase price was similarly added to the colony’s public debt. Britain not only plundered India, but literally handed India a bill of enforcement — at gun point. The cumulative theft was so extortionate that Edmund Burke, as early as the late 1700s, predicted the money stolen from India would eventually destroy it.

That is, in fact, exactly what happened. Before the British occupation, India was not a poor backwater, but a culturally and economically prosperous civilization that had existed for millennia. India was home to the oldest university in the world, had originated our numerical system, had produced countless thinkers, philosophers, poets, and scientists. It had given the world Buddhism and Hinduism, and had birthed a more tolerant, pluralistic version of Islam. Yoga and meditation, so common among the overworked professional classes in the West, were born in India thousands of years before there was even a West to speak of. In the 17th century, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb took in 10 times the revenue of his contemporary, Louis XIV of France. According to economist Angus Maddison, in the 18th century India accounted for 23 percent of the world’s GDP, a percentage greater than all of Europe combined. By the time the British packed up their things and sailed home in 1947, that number had fallen to under three percent.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, India was a wealthy subcontinent while Britain was a poor, feudal-ridden kingdom. By the 20th century, their fortunes had reversed: India was now one of the poorest countries in the world and Britain was the richest. In 1931, life expectancy in India stalled at just 27 years and the literacy rate was a mere 16 percent, with female literacy at a pitiable eight percent. The population was severely emaciated and diseased by the time the conquerors left. This, one can infer, did not happen by accident. Setting the economics of plunder aside, the sheer human consequence of this are such that Angus Deaton found that “the deprivation in childhood of Indians born around mid-century was as severe as any large group in history, all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution.” The deracination and deindustrialization of India was the direct consequence of British policy — duly deliberated, signed, and enacted by the most educated individuals in the world.

Indians were conquered at home but also shipped abroad as indentured servants; some three million Indians were forced to migrate to the West Indies and South Africa to work the plantations. If a parallel to the Indian experience exists, it might be found in the experience of the Africans who were transported in chains, many of them on British ships, to the New World. While indentured servitude was legally distinct from slavery, in the boats and the fields they were functionally the same. Later, the Indian independence movement would influence the American Civil Rights movement and in particular Martin Luther King Jr., who looked to Mohandas Gandhi for inspiration.

Britain got rich as a vast redistribution of the wealth that flowed westward to London, fattening the British aristocracy and even trickling down to the working classes, whose lives, however difficult in their own right, directly benefited from the brown and black bodies conquered in Africa and India. In fact, the working classes had jobs precisely because of colonialism and slavery. In the 18th century, half of all shipping in the massive Liverpool port was engaged in the African slave trade. Eric Williams, the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago, argued in his Oxford doctoral thesis, and later in a book called  Capitalism and Slavery , that the slave trade laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution, out of which came all of our economic progress in the last two centuries. To put this another way: There would have been no Industrial Revolution — and no rise of the West — without the colonial gains stolen from India and the bodies snatched from Africa. The freedom of the West was purchased by its looting of the East and South. The conquered knew that this had happened and in their diaries, journals, and memoirs, whether written by slave or subject, they documented the shame it caused them — a primordial shame followed by an equally primordial anger. If a balance sheet of the colonial record is therefore to be constructed, the bodies and wealth stolen from the colonized should be the first accounts to be settled.

Inglorious Empire  reaches its polemical peak when addressing the famines that took place while the British ran India, what Tharoor terms the British Colonial Holocaust. That label may be off-putting to some, but, considering the sheer number of preventable deaths, the term is appropriate.

Between 30 and 35 million Indians perished in these manmade atrocities. In the 1943 Bengal famine alone, over four million Indians were needlessly sacrificed while the British government shipped food to Europe to be held in reserve. Amartya Sen famously found that there had never been a famine in a democracy with a free press. Colonies may have been run by countries calling themselves democracies, but they were ruled — as Viceroy Mountbatten knew well — as dictatorships. Indians died by the millions simply because the British saw fit to keep them starving.

When Winston Churchill was presented with the evidence of mass death known as the Bengal famine, he blamed the victims for “breeding like rabbits” and scribbled “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet” on the telegram. Churchill receives particularly rough treatment in Tharoor’s book. He was not just a moderately conservative politician, but a far-right reactionary, extreme even for his time, who fervently believed in the superiority of the white race and its right to dominate others (a fact not lost upon Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who was advised by his cabinet not to appoint Churchill to any position). No one can doubt Churchill’s literary brilliance, but when it came to colonialism, the man was an out-and-out racist and extremist. “I hate Indians,” he said, “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” His own doctor noted that “Winston only thinks of the color of their skin.” Tharoor advocates a serious reappraisal of Churchill’s standing, and he indicts the conservative prime minister for having as much blood on his hands as Hitler. While the accuracy of that claim is debatable (I happen to think Hitler was worse), an Anglo-American public accustomed to seeing its own politicians quote Churchill at every turn could use a reminder about the man’s delusions on race.

There is no controversy in calling Winston Churchill a white supremacist or in noting that the British Empire was predicated on racism. Colonialism was undertaken for profit, but it was justified, legitimated, and reinforced by ideas about race and biological superiority. Churchill and his ilk had plenty of reasons to believe that their race was superior. A white Englishman in London could look out to the world — to the Indian crown jewel, to the riches extracted by his ancestors, to the lands conquered by his own generation, to the colored people his government ruled — and see all of it as the result of history’s natural and inevitable plan for the superior race. An American in Jackson, Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama, could do the same for his own country.

In turn, Indians were excluded from restaurants marked “European-only,” forced to sit in the back of the trains in their own country and were barred from all British establishments that had “Indians and dogs not allowed” signs outside. They were variously called “coolies,” and the n-word was routinely used against them. There was no legitimate government, certainly no constitution, to which they could turn for remedy. Jawaharlal Nehru writes poignantly about the shame suffered by Indians in his masterful  The Discovery of India , outlining the ideological root of the colonial enterprise:

[W]e in India have known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of the  herrenvolk  and the master race, and the structure of government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them and, generation after generation and year after year, India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to insult, humiliation and contemptuous treatment. The English were an imperial race, we were told, with the God-given right to govern us and keep us in subjection.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the crimes committed by the white dominions of Canada and Australia against their own indigenous populations were an exact replication of the crimes the British Empire committed around the world. Other European empires were no less harsh; in many cases, they were worse. But the British Empire continues to live on as a glorified fantasy, consistently beautified and embossed with the insignia of enlightened civilization, as the one empire that can be respectably defended as altruistic. And when the defense of this Good Thing is challenged, its critics are painted as hysterical.

Those who point to the good done by Britain often do so by erasing the barbarous cost at which it came. The emphasis on the “good” ends up minimizing the crimes committed in the name of racial superiority and profit, emphasizing the charity of the colonizer and deemphasizing his slaughter, and often eliding altogether the perspective of the colonized. When colonial apologists like Biggar, Gilley, Ferguson, and their intellectual kinfolk ask for a more “balanced narrative,” what they really seek is absolution — from memory, from history, from responsibility. Only by defining conquest and plunder as something moral can they reclaim their treasured past and, indeed, their own present identities.

If there really was any good that came from the British conquest, it was the emergence of a new English literature out of the former colonies, a veritable renaissance in letters that produced the most innovative and energetic writing of the postwar era. Names like Achebe, and Naipaul, and Desai, and Roy, and Rushdie, and Said; and among midnight’s grandchildren, contemporary names like Hamid, and Sharma, and Rahman, and Lahiri — not to mention countless others. This was not the intention, of course. Britain originally intended to spread English only to an elite group of native intermediaries who would, in the words of Sir Thomas Macaulay, “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.” But the colonized took the master’s language and made it their own, and then used this language to make art.

In the end, the primary reason this book matters so much today is that the British Empire has not ended. It exists in the minds of ordinary citizens, and it is not just the public in Britain that longs for empire. Today, many Americans yearn for a 1950s that may have treated their fathers exceedingly well, but that treated African Americans, and other marginalized groups, with mob justice and racist violence. Emboldened in our own time, white supremacists have also latched on to the myth of empire’s greatness. Dylann Roof, the white American terrorist who gunned down churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, three years ago, wore the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia on his jacket. Online cults continue to profit by selling merchandise with Rhodesia’s symbols. If only colonial nostalgia and its resulting vengefulness were confined to the fringes. For large swaths of the Western public, the colonies have simply been imported home, existing tenuously in the immigrant, the refugee, the nonwhite toiler. The phraseology once used to describe colonial subjects is now used to describe fellow citizens, especially those newcomers from places once plundered. As long as the West, and the Anglo-American West in particular, lacks the courage to deal honestly with the story of their past, the trumpeting of this propagandistic history and its toxic myths will continue. There appears to be a long way to go before the sun fully sets on the Empire.

Banner image published in the U.S. before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.

Omer Aziz is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , New Republic , and elsewhere.

LARB Contributor

Omer Aziz is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , New Republic , and elsewhere. He was most recently a Logan Non-Fiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, and previously worked as a policy advisor for the Foreign Minister of Canada. He was educated at Queen’s University in Canada, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Cambridge, and Yale Law School.

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The British East India Company arrived in India in the early 1600s, struggling and nearly begging for the right to trade and do business. Within 150 years the thriving firm of British merchants, backed by its own powerful private army, was essentially ruling India.

In the 1800s English power expanded in India, as it would until the mutinies of 1857-58. After those very violent spasms things would change, yet Britain was still in control. And India was very much an outpost of the mighty British Empire .

1600s: The British East India Company Arrived

After several attempts to open trade with a powerful ruler of India failed in the earliest years of the 1600s, King James I of England sent a personal envoy, Sir Thomas Roe, to the court of the Mogul emperor Jahangir in 1614.

The emperor was incredibly wealthy and lived in an opulent palace. And he was not interested in trade with Britain as he couldn't imagine the British had anything he wanted.

Roe, recognizing that other approaches had been too subservient, was deliberately difficult to deal with at first. He correctly sensed that earlier envoys, by being too accommodating, had not gained the emperor's respect. Roe's stratagem worked, and the East India Company was able to establish operations in India.

1600s: The Mogul Empire at Its Peak

The Mogul Empire had been established in India in the early 1500s, when a chieftain named Babur invaded India from Afghanistan. The Moguls (or Mughals) conquered most of northern India, and by the time the British arrived the Mogul Empire was immensely powerful.

One of the most influential Mogul emperors was Jahangir's son Shah Jahan , who ruled from 1628 to 1658. He expanded the empire and accumulated enormous treasure, and made Islam the official religion. When his wife died he had the Taj Mahal built as a tomb for her.

The Moguls took great pride in being patrons of the arts, and painting, literature, and architecture flourished under their rule.

1700s: Britain Established Dominance

The Mogul Empire was in a state of collapse by the 1720s. Other European powers were competing for control in India, and sought alliances with the shaky states that inherited the Mogul territories.

The East India Company established its own army in India, which was composed of British troops as well as native soldiers called sepoys.

The British interests in India, under the leadership of Robert Clive , gained military victories from the 1740s onward, and with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 were able to establish dominance.

The East India Company gradually strengthened its hold, even instituting a court system. British citizens began building an "Anglo-Indian" society within India, and English customs were adapted to the climate of India.

1800s: "The Raj" Entered the Language

The British rule in India became known as "The Raj," which was derived from the Sanskrit term raja meaning king. The term did not have official meaning until after 1858, but it was in popular usage many years before that.

Incidentally, a number of other terms came into English usage during The Raj: bangle, dungaree, khaki, pundit, seersucker, jodhpurs, cushy, pajamas, and many more.

British merchants could make a fortune in India and would then return home, often to be derided by those in British high society as nabobs , the title for an official under the Moguls.

Tales of life in India fascinated the British public, and exotic Indian scenes, such as a drawing of an elephant fight, appeared in books published in London in the 1820s.

1857: Resentment Toward the British Spilled Over

The Indian Rebellion of 1857, which was also called the Indian Mutiny, or the Sepoy Mutiny , was a turning point in the history of Britain in India.

The traditional story is that Indian troops, called sepoys, mutinied against their British commanders because newly issued rifle cartridges were greased with pig and cow fat, thus making them unacceptable for both Hindu and Muslim soldiers. There is some truth to that, but there were a number of other underlying causes for the rebellion.

Resentment toward the British had been building for some time, and new policies which allowed the British to annex some areas of India exacerbated tensions. By early 1857 things had reached a breaking point.

1857-58: The Indian Mutiny

The Indian Mutiny erupted in May 1857, when sepoys rose up against the British in Meerut and then massacred all the British they could find in Delhi.

Uprisings spread throughout British India. It was estimated that less than 8,000 of nearly 140,000 sepoys remained loyal to the British. The conflicts of 1857 and 1858 were brutal and bloody, and lurid reports of massacres and atrocities circulated in newspapers and illustrated magazines in Britain.

The British dispatched more troops to India and eventually succeeded in putting down the mutiny, resorting to merciless tactics to restore order. The large city of Delhi was left in ruins. And many sepoys who had surrendered were executed by British troops .

1858: Calm Was Restored

Following the Indian Mutiny, the East India Company was abolished and the British crown assumed full rule of India.

Reforms were instituted, which included tolerance of religion and the recruitment of Indians into the civil service. While the reforms sought to avoid further rebellions through conciliation, the British military in India was also strengthened.

Historians have noted that the British government never actually intended to take control of India, but when British interests were threatened the government had to step in.

The embodiment of the new British rule in India was the office of the Viceroy.

1876: Empress of India

The importance of India, and the affection the British crown felt for its colony, was emphasized in 1876 when Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared Queen Victoria to be "Empress of India."

British control of India would continue, mostly peacefully, throughout the remainder of the 19th century. It wasn't until Lord Curzon became Viceroy in 1898, and instituted some very unpopular policies, that an Indian nationalist movement began to stir.

The nationalist movement developed over decades, and, of course, India finally achieved independence in 1947.

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Article contents

Origins of british india.

• Tirthankar Roy Tirthankar Roy Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.121
• Published online: 29 March 2017

The origin of British India can be traced to warfare in 18th-century Europe and India, trade-related conflicts and disputes, and the East India Company’s business model. The state that emerged from these roots survived by reforming the institutions of capitalism, military strategy, and political strategy. As the 19th century unfolded and its power became paramount, the Company evolved from a trading firm to a protector of trade. The rapid growth of the three port cities where Indo-European trade and naval power was concentrated exemplifies that commitment. But beyond maintaining an army and protecting trade routes, the state remained limited in its reach.

• East India Company
• British Empire
• Indian Ocean
• settler colony
• institutions

British India emerged in the third quarter of the 18th century in the form of territories acquired by the British East India Company. The Company (as it was called) was established as a trading firm in 1600 , with a licensed monopoly to trade in the Indian Ocean. Negotiating rights to trade in India and staving off rivals and private traders pushed it intro playing a political role from to time. In the mid- 18th century , the Company engaged more frequently with politics in India as the Mughal Empire collapsed and rivalries and conflicts among Indian states succeeded that power. One outcome of these engagements was the acquisition by the Company of several large independent states. This is how the British rule began.

The origin of the British Empire in India can be described as a sequence of three stages. The first one of these, 1765–1784 , saw the East India Company officers acquire territories, experiment with systems of rule, and face charges of a conflict between private and public interest. In 1784 , the British Parliament began to oversee Indian administration. In the second stage, 1784–1813 , the private mercantile interest behind political decisions receded completely, and institutional and military reforms set out the framework of imperial rule. In 1813 , the charter to trade in India as a monopoly ended, and in 1857 , the Indian Mutiny broke out. During the third stage, that is, between 1813 and 1857 , the key political processes that had contributed to the origin of the British state in India were more or less over. But the Company’s legacy for the evolution of governance and society was still much in evidence. The British Indian territories were transformed into a colony of the British Crown in 1858 . Crown rule ended in August 1947 with the Partition of India into two independent nations, India and Pakistan.

The origins of British India are discussed in the context of the changing economic and political conditions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries . With reference to the most consequential political events, attention falls mainly on the first two of the three periods, that is, on 1765–1813 . With reference to the many-sided legacy of the Company on the shaping of British rule and Indian society under it, the third period ( 1813–1858 ) enters the discussion.

Formally, the British Empire in India started in 1765 , when the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam the Second ( 1728–1806 ) delivered to the East India Company the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, which formed nominal provinces of the Mughal Empire. The act entailed transfer of civil and military powers as well, but it would be decades before the process was finished. 1

The emergence of a distinctly British rule in India took shape through four subsequent processes of change that would take at least half a century to work themselves out. One of these processes was warfare. Anglo-French military competition in Europe spilled over into Indian politics. Further, the end of the Mughal Empire caused the competition for power in Europe and that in India among the successor states to become entangled. The second process consisted of administrative, institutional, and military reforms in Bengal. The third process occurred in Britain. Between 1772 and 1784 , parliamentary acts enabled the legislature to have oversight of Indian governance, creating the framework of a British Indian governmental system that would remain in place until the interwar period. The fourth and final change occurred in the identity of the East India Company, which transformed itself from a trading firm to a facilitator of trade.

A general account of the origin of British India, therefore, can be presented in four sections—the overlap between warfare in Europe and in India, institutional reform, the emergence of a governmental system with two heads (one in London and the other in Calcutta), and the mutation of the Company. The combination of these four elements distinguishes the origin of European rule in India from the emergence of European empires in the New World, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where one or the other of the elements was absent. A fifth section considers the recent scholarship that reinterprets the significance of the origin of British India in global political history and Indian history.

The geography of the Indian subcontinent accounts for the coexistence of two distinct types of political power in the region around 1700 , one operating from the interior—mainly the Indo-Gangetic Basin—and the other operating from the coasts. The former earned revenue from agricultural taxes, was “agrarian” in this sense, had extensive bureaucracy managing the fiscal system, and relied for its military enterprise on soldiers contributed by semi-independent warlords who held land grants. The Mughal Empire, which ruled the Indo-Gangetic Basin area for nearly two hundred years (from Babar’s conquest of northern India in 1526 to c. 1720 ) was the most powerful agrarian state in South Asia at the start of the 18th century . But again owing to geography, specifically the high cost of transportation and moving armies, the states located in the Indo-Gangetic Basin had limited control over the several thousand miles of the littoral that had made India a trading point in the Indian Ocean. Although the Mughal state did eventually control two ports, Surat in Gujarat and Hooghly in Bengal, it did not control the crucial trading zone in Coromandel, and its interest in the sea and maritime trade was indirect at best. The coastal world was divided into smaller states that relied on revenue from commerce and built partnerships with ocean-going merchants.

The political balance between the coasts and the interior changed in the 18th century . Two movements, which were at first independent and then reinforced each other from the second quarter of the 18th century , were responsible for this change. One was the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the interior, and the other was the ascendance of the East India Company on the coasts of Bengal and Coromandel. The two movements intersected in a series of conflicts, directly between rival powers struggling to extend their power base to the Indo-Gangetic Basin, and indirectly between the British and French forces who took opposite sides in some of these battles.

The Mughal Empire began to crumble away in the second quarter of the 18th century . The governors, or Nawabs , of three large provinces—Hyderabad, Bengal, and Awadh—became effectively independent. The west was ruled by Rajput states and the Western Deccan by the weak state of Bijapur, but in the south, the states left behind by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s unfinished conquest of South India had never been administratively or politically integrated into the empire. 2 These regions had poorer land and poorer states, but they had reorganized their military machine. Emerging stronger from the failure of the Mughal conquests, the Marathas of Western Deccan expanded into the Indo-Gangetic Basin in search of revenue, and farther south, Mysore, under the military commander Hyder Ali, expanded toward the western coast with the same purpose. None of these states was yet secure, fiscally speaking (see Map 1 ).

Map 1. India c. 1770.

Until 1740 , the ascent of the European merchant firms on the coasts was on a parallel trajectory that intersected little with state formation in the interior. But the Europeans had the resources necessary to join military campaigns on a small scale. Since its foundation in 1600 , not only had the East India Company accumulated great power and wealth in London, but it had also come to possess a large commercial infrastructure financed by the profits of overseas trade, consisting of ports, docks, warehouses, and overseas settlements. In India, the Company had managed to establish three ports where it functioned as landlords. Of these three ports, Calcutta, located in Bengal, was rapidly growing in population in the 1740s, thanks to the migration of wealthy Bengali merchants from the western borders of the state where they were targets of attacks by the Maratha force stationed in central India. The Company’s own trading operations were gravitating from western and southern India toward Bengal, thanks to an interest in cotton textiles manufactured in Bengal. 3

The firm operated under a royal charter that granted it monopoly of trade, but the monopoly was not always enforceable. Private merchants defied it and could get away with doing so because policing power was vested with the local kings, who did not see it as their duty to defend an order of the English king. Besides, private traders sometimes formed clandestine business partnerships with Company employees. The London directors knew this, but beyond occasional token penalties could do little to curb conflicts of interest. The cleavage between the head office and the branches in India thus widened. It widened further as Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta enlarged as settlements and turned the branch officers from mere employees to quasi-sovereigns.

As the backdrop to these developments, rivalries with the French East India Company broke out in the wake of the War of the Austrian Succession ( 1740–1748 ) and the Seven Years War ( 1754–1763 ). 4 The rivals joined opposite camps in a power struggle in Carnatic, a militarily weak kingdom located strategically near British Madras and French Pondicherry. The French factor as present in another theater of statemaking, Bengal, where the Company ran into a dispute with the local Nawab and allied with Indian merchants and bankers to overthrow the regime. After initial reverses against the French in the south and the Nawab of Bengal in the east, success on the battlefield and secret diplomacy led to the establishment of the Company as the ruler of Bengal ( 1757–1765 ) and as a de facto ruler of the Carnatic ( 1760 ). The transformation empowered the militaristic group among the Company’s officers who operated the branches, led by Robert Clive ( 1725–1774 ) and a small band of other officers who received generous “gifts” from the local potentates. It also helped the Company as a trading firm, which could fund its exports partly from the revenues, rather than from the silver that had to be imported from home.

The next major territorial acquisitions occurred in the south. The Nizams of Hyderabad were Mughal governors who established a virtually independent rule by the third decade of the 18th century . Having suffered Maratha raids and a series of inconclusive engagements with the Marathas, the Nizam formed an alliance with the French. When the French became friendly with the two rival powers, Mysore and Maratha, the Nizam allied with the English ( 1766 ), handing over the “Northern Circars,” a large chunk of coastal Coromandel, to the Company, ostensibly to enable the English to pay for their troops. In 1803 , districts in the west and south of the state, including the fertile Raichur Doab, were also handed over. 5

These two modes of acquisition—represented by Bengal on the one hand and Northern Circars on the other—set the pattern of territorial acquisition by the Company in India. 6 It could arm-twist weak or insecure states into delivering power, and it could take sides in local rivalries and gain from military victories. The second of the three Anglo-Maratha wars ( 1803 ) was fought on behalf of an Indian ally against a combined Indo-French rival force. The same pattern repeated in the Anglo-Mysore wars at the turn of the 19th century , and as late as 1846 in the Anglo-Sikh wars. The two earlier battles occurred during the Napoleonic wars, and although the French were not officially involved in fighting the British in India thereafter, a number of French commanders and gunners continued to work as mercenaries in India.

Between 1775 and 1818 (the year of the third Anglo-Maratha war), the Rohilla Afghans, the Marathas, and Mysore had to give up lands to the British, mainly by the second mode of acquisition. In a similar fashion, the Sikh wars in 1846 delivered Punjab to British control. These conflicts notwithstanding, the British Indian state and the Indian princes maintained a relationship of mutual regard for each other’s sovereignty between 1818 and 1848 . For a period of eight years ( 1848–1856 ), the implicit contract broke down, when British India asserted its right to annex a princely state if the ruling prince seemed to be governing badly, and worse, if he died without a male heir (“the doctrine of lapse”). The acquisition of Awadh by diktat ( 1856 ) followed much arm twisting.

By 1856 , the map of British India was firmly established. Sixty percent of the land area and a somewhat higher percentage of the population belonged in the British ruled-territory (see Map 2 ). The British controlled the coastline, possessing all consequential ports and the coastal trade routes. The remaining 40 percent of the area was governed by several hundred large and small principalities, some of which had nonaggression treaties with the British. The others were too small to matter, or so the British rulers thought—to their detriment, as we shall see.

Map 2. India c. 1900. Shaded areas represent states.

Institutional Reform

As opposed to the land-based empires, or states that depended on agricultural taxes, the British Empire, thus, was a “maritime empire,” one that emerged from Indian Ocean trade and financed its military enterprise initially by commercial income. As the Company acquired territorial states, it needed to change itself from a maritime into an agrarian state. In the process, British India followed a pathway distinct from its rival or partner Indian princely states. It created a standing army financed by the central treasury, as opposed to armies maintained by feudal land grantees. 7 This move made it militarily powerful in relation to its neighbors. To achieve this end, the Company brought land taxation under closer central control, partly by means of interventions in landed property rights. In the process of the reforms, old feudal lords and warlords either lost their hold on land or had to reinvent themselves as a demilitarized landlord class. Because of these two changes, the bureaucracy and the army expanded in scale and capability. 8

In the 1770s, reforms in civil and criminal law marked the first decisive steps with which the Company assumed control over general governance of the region, even though the process was a protracted one. Until the reform of 1772 , governance was divided between the court of the Bengal Nawab and the Company’s establishment in Calcutta. The division of authority was a convenient arrangement for the handful of the Company’s officers who led the coup in Bengal; they could extort protection money from the nobility, and recycle land tax into trading investment. But the diarchic rule cost the population dearly during a famine in 1770 , when relief was compromised by the mutual distrust in which the two heads of the government held one another.

Strengthening the institutional foundations of the state had been initiated by a new breed of governors, especially, Warren Hastings ( 1732–1818 ) and some of his associates. Hastings was governor general in India from 1773 to 1785 . His appointment by the Company’s directors to this position was a political decision, and a reaction to the scandals that had tainted the Company’s extortionate regime in the first seven years of its existence. An old India hand, Hastings was fluent in the Mughal court language, Persian, and had more friends among his former Indian associates than in the Company’s establishment in Calcutta. He set out to implement a long-held belief that British rule in India should build on Indian norms of statecraft, rather than on British norms. Law was the immediate field of application for the idea. The problem was that there was no such thing as the law of the land in India at that time. An Indianized version of sharia governed the Muslims, and a mix of unrecorded customs and precepts governed the Hindus and other communities. State courts in pre-British Bengal recorded and settled cases that belonged in the former category.

To realize his idea, then, Hastings ordained that documented religious codes would be the basis for civil law in the matter of property, succession, inheritance, testament, and contracts. Religious books did in fact contain statements that could be read as law. But these were written in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, the knowledge of which was confined to a small elite. The state, therefore, needed to establish seminaries and colleges to train legal experts. A hierarchical system of courts was established to try cases according to these laws—a rather artificial project. The law codes were written by experts on religion, with little or no input from precedence, juristic principles, and lawyers. Where Indian experts were concerned, the priestly classes had more say on law than did legal professionals. When disputes occurred between members of different religions, which was inevitable in the cosmopolitan trading ports, Hindu and Muslim law was of little use. As the 19th century rolled on, the judges and lawyers followed these codes less and less. Departures were frequent, and on a number of occasions led to legislation that created a secular system of legal reference in parallel with, and not overturning, the older religious references. The coexistence of multiple references was a major reason for an explosion of appellate cases in the 19th century , which increasingly clogged the Indian legal system and slowed it down. 9

A second area of the Company’s institutional intervention was the assignment of property rights in land. Ownership and succession broadly followed the aforementioned religious law. But to whom would agricultural property belong? In Hastings’s time, land in Bengal was cultivated by peasants but controlled by magnates known as “zamindars,” who held tax-farming contracts under the old regime. Several of the zamindars were wealthy as well as armed. The weak state of the Nawab of Bengal had tried to establish jurisdiction over them, not very successfully. The Company faced the same challenge, that of subduing the zamindar militarily and yet using the zamindar to collect taxes. The state relied on the tax-farming contracts until 1793 , when a radical new system was introduced. Known as the Permanent Settlement, the new system ended revenue farming contracts, fixed land tax in currency forever (hence, “permanent”), made the state the collector of taxes, declared the zamindars the proprietors of their estates, and gave the courts of law, rather than the government, the charge of enforcement of property rights.

A variety of motivations could have led to the move. An English belief that security of property would make efficient cultivators out of the zamindars played a role. In the process, the state would be able to collect its due, even from recalcitrant zamindars, because the zamindars in turn gained by making a potentially bigger profit margin from the difference between collection from improved land and the payment of a fixed tax to the state. The alternative, which was the delivery of a property right to the cultivating peasant, was practically impossible because the Company did not yet have much information on the identity of the peasants. Politically, a deal with the zamindars was expedient in the presence of many external threats. Big landlords enjoyed considerable political authority in their own domains, and some were still well armed.

Along with these factors, certain statements made by individual administrators suggested a hope that the move would weed out the bigger landlords who were armed and dangerous. Something like this did happen. Whether due to the high levels of taxes fixed or the landlords’ own incompetence, the Permanent Settlement resulted in large-scale sales of landed estates, as well as a rapid subdivision of property. Numerous court cases between 1793 and 1830 concerned indebted estates, division, and transfer of control of zamindari property. The Company did manage to raise its revenue significantly. The system, therefore, was extended from Bengal to the Northern Circars. 10

Still, the idea of dealing with rural magnates was not a popular one with a later generation of land administrators. By 1810 , many believed that the Permanent Settlement had done an injustice to the cultivator, who was exposed to the threat of eviction and extortion by the legal owner. Around 1800 , shortly after a large territory in south Deccan was acquired from Hyderabad and the same question of assignment of property appeared, the Scottish administrator Thomas Munro ( 1761–1821 ) decided to depart from the Bengal precedence. Unlike in Bengal, which was part of the fertile Indo-Gangetic Basin, in the dry lands and arid uplands of the peninsula, a landlord class vested with fiscal powers was rare. Land management had earlier been conducted through the agency of paid officers of the state, who were sometimes peasants themselves. Their bosses lived in hill forts and had little direct contact with land. Far from dealing with them, the Company attacked and removed as many of them as possible. In these areas, the state delivered proprietary rights to the peasants on a contractual basis. There were local records of landholding used for the purpose, but the records were far from reliable. Munro thus went beyond this brief, and also conducted surveys of the living standards of ordinary people, but as far as we know, these surveys have not yet been recovered in the archives. When the question of land reform came up again in 1818 in territories newly acquired in western India from the defeated Maratha principalities, the same principle, now known as ryotwari , or settlement with cultivators, was applied. 11

Imperialist Regulation

Mercantile interests and individual opportunism were the driving forces behind the mid- 18th-century battles that established the Company in a position of power in India. These interests caused a scandal in Britain, and helped Adam Smith make a powerful case against monopoly power in general and the East India Company in particular. By contrast with the results of the battles fought in the 1750s and 1760s, the British political interest prevailed over merchant interest in the battles that took place between the Third Anglo-Mysore war ( 1799 ) and the Third Anglo-Maratha war ( 1818 )—both imperialist wars.

The transition from merchant power to state power owed much to two related tendencies. The first was the disputed nature of the Company’s right to sovereignty in a foreign land. Who was the real ruler of the Indian territories—the king, Parliament, or a trading firm? The question had been around ever since the Company leased land to set up ports. These decisions were controversial, not only on the sovereignty issue but also because the London directors did not like the expenditure involved. 12 In the 1770s, the sovereignty issue needed an urgent resolution.

The second tendency was the controversy surrounding the conjunction of commerce and governance. The establishment of a Company state in Bengal was initially a convenience for the Company’s own transactions. The Bengal revenues partially obviated the need for silver imports to finance its exports of cotton textiles from Bengal. This arrangement, though short-lived because the Company soon reduced its trading commitments and focus on fighting, still reinforced the view in London that a coterie of merchants had created a corrupt rule in Bengal and were running it in the name of the Crown. In response to these criticisms, a weak form of parliamentary regulation was introduced in 1772 , followed by a stronger version in 1784 , which created the body (Board of Control) that would establish parliamentary oversight of the Company’s rule in India.

With these moves came the establishment of two heads of government: one located in Britain and the other in India. During the 19th century , both heads were maintained from Indian revenues; the one in London required the government of India to make a sterling remittance out of its budget. Around 1900 , Indian publicists started attacking this payment, calling it a “drain.” To this remittance were to be added other remittances on account of public debt, railway construction, military pensions, and business enterprise. This large net payment for services was balanced against a surplus of commodity exports over imports. To maintain smooth operation of the economic system, London regulated monetary and currency policy, whereas the Indian administration was in charge of fiscal policy. Both maintained a conservative stance and were averse to changing the rules of the game. As a result, the government remained small (the revenue to national-income ratio was a low 3–5 percent for almost the entire time the British ruled India). British India thus came to inherit a small if militaristic state, dangerously conservative in its outlook on spending money for public investment and social welfare, and keen to maintain flows in trade and services.

The 1784 India Act formally inaugurated this political-economic setup. What happened to the Company thereafter?

The East India Company

The Company was the wealthiest and most powerful firm of its time, but not the most loved one in its home country. A merchant firm ruling a foreign country was seen as an anachronism in Britain. The Company was intermittently in financial trouble after it became a ruler of Bengal. The renegotiation of its charter in 1793 and 1813 were occasions for fierce debates between its own directors and the large number of private merchants who wanted trade and shipping to be free of the monopoly. During the Napoleonic wars the monopoly ceased to be enforceable, and it was withdrawn in 1813 .

By the end of the wars, the Company had effectively withdrawn from trade. In the last quarter of the 18th century , the textile export business declined, and the Company’s exports narrowed to more or less one product, Dhaka muslin. In the 1810s and 1820s, it briefly tried to revive its commercial fortunes by entering the growing cotton export trade, but discovered that procuring cotton from the interior was not the government’s cup of tea.

The Company’s commercial legacy was already far-reaching. The key to that legacy was the growth of cosmopolitan trading and financial towns with access to Atlantic trade, and protected by a powerful navy. A large number of private partnership trading houses established branches in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, in collaboration with a counterpart firm in London or Liverpool, to conduct trade in opium, indigo, tea, and cotton. These European and occasionally Indo-European partnerships campaigned for the end of the Company’s monopoly, although they were also close to the government in India and occasionally advised administrators and acted as creditors to the government. Of the varieties of articles that they traded, opium and tea were special because they both brought China and India into a direct trading relationship. Opium, in effect, paid for the Company’s purchases of Chinese tea. Until 1833 , the Company retained its monopoly of China trade.

The government was deeply involved in the new trading order. Opium was cultivated under government license in Bihar (the licensing system came in to operation between 1772 and 1786 ). In central India, opium was legally grown in the territories of the princely states. In Bihar, the government collected a tax on the profits; in central India, it collected a transit tax. In China, the Company’s protection and diplomacy were crucial to the trade. In turn, the opium revenues were an important item of government income until the 1870s.

With respect to cotton, the government policy was to encourage large-scale cotton plantations on the American pattern, but these efforts did not become profitable for the entrepreneurs. A modified form of the plantation system was more successful in indigo. A number of European individuals set up indigo factories in the lower Bengal districts, leased on land from the landlords, or entered into sale contracts with the peasants; the leaves were processed in factories to produce indigo. Toward 1850 , some of the planters, as they were called, had become landlords as well. The government was less involved in the indigo trade, but did get drawn into legislation on contracts in light of the disputes that occurred in indigo sales. 13

The three ports had also started to import cotton yarn and piece goods in large quantities. The effect of these businesses upon trade volumes was not very large until 1831 , but shipping tonnage rose more than ten times, from fewer than 300,000 tons of cargo from the three leading ports in 1831 to more than three million tons in 1858 . A significant part of the gains from this trade was captured by Parsi and Gujarati merchants in Bombay, and a mix of Indian and European merchants in Madras and Calcutta. Although the Company no longer ran India directly, the lower reaches of the imperial establishment still contained people with a commercial bent. Until 1833 , some private merchants formed partnerships with servants of the Company, thus securing a degree of political and policing power in the countryside. The Company’s servants deposited their savings for remittance in the Calcutta banks. Cotton trade, likewise, was organized by Indian merchants based in Bombay.

The cosmopolitanism of the port cities was an outcome of trade, not imperialism. By the end of the 18th century , Europeans had been living and dying on Indian soil for two hundred years. The majority of European migrants to India were single, male, and outside of public administration. A small number of them lived inside the Company establishments, called factories, and a much larger number lived in urban neighborhoods, sometimes in makeshift townships that sprang up near the ports, working as traders, mercenary soldiers, artisans, shipwrights, and sailors, and marrying Indian women. The majority of the women came from families located low in the Indian caste hierarchy, thereby downgrading the social status of the Indo-European population among the European and Indian elites alike. Sometimes they came from the Company’s own establishment, being individuals whose indenture of employment had expired but who did not wish to return to Britain.

Via trade and migration, the British Indian port cities emerged as sites where European and Indian ideas came into contact. Some of the contributors to the intellectual exchange were government employees, though the knowledge they created did not necessarily serve governance, nor were they always sponsored by the state. The European administrators and military personnel included individuals like William Jones ( 1746–1794 ), H. T. Colebrooke ( 1765–1837 ), William Roxburgh ( 1751–1815 ), and Francis Buchanan ( 1762–1829 ), who gathered and analyzed information on such diverse fields as medicine, botany, chemistry, meteorology, cartography, mineralogy, and livelihoods. Merchants joined in the intellectual exchange, too. James Prinsep ( 1799–1840 ), the son of the merchant and indigo planter John Prinsep ( c . 1748–1830 ), worked on metrology, Indian history, and languages, and was a particularly active member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, started in 1772 .

For some of these individuals, indigenous law and the study of classical Indian languages formed a major pursuit because they served roles that required this knowledge. For the contemporary Indian merchants and landlords like Dwarkanath Tagore ( 1794–1846 ) and Radhakanta Deb ( 1784–1867 ), who emerged as major sponsors of intellectual exchange in the early 1800s, legal scholarship and classical languages were of little interest. They were more interested in English education and scientific education. They sponsored a number of schools, colleges, and newspapers in the cities. A rich associational culture developed through these efforts. Their enthusiastic funding for a more global and useful type of education was reinforced by the failure of the Hastings project within the courtroom and by influential writings of British publicists like Thomas Babington Macaulay ( 1800–1859 ) about the need for westernized education in India.

While law was the main field of state intervention around 1800 , by the 1840s, the rulers of India were thinking of far-reaching investment projects such as railways, the telegraph, and universities. Out of a chaotic series of local initiatives on irrigation canals, embankments, and road building, a public goods policy took shape. Unlike in the early 1800s when public works addressed mainly military issues, the discussions and campaigns for railways or education in the 1840s looked to the future and referred to the welfare of the whole population of British India. The state’s capacity to fund such initiatives was limited, and so was the scale of the effort. The railways, therefore, began as a private investment with a minimum rate of profit guaranteed by the state.

No matter which social class they inhabited, the entire population of Europeans and Indo-Europeans faced the prospect of annihilation in the summer months of 1857 . The Indian Mutiny broke out in May of that year in isolated military camps, and before it was suppressed in the monsoon months of 1858 , had developed into a broad front of armed and civilian resistance to the Company’s rule over Indian territories. The rebellion was fought mainly by professional soldiers of the Indian infantry regiments. Civilian rebellion was sporadic. Merchants and bankers rarely joined the rebellion; most appeared to subvert it. 14 Because of these differences, a single theory of the rise and fall of the rebellion is unlikely to be sufficient. There was dissatisfaction within the army. Until the final Maratha wars, the distance between the Indian soldiers and the European commanders in the Company army had been relatively close. In the thirty years of peace that followed, the hierarchy hardened. The “doctrine of lapse” (annexation of a princely state with no male heir) fed resentment toward the British, and may have made the revolt especially violent in the newly acquired territories like Awadh and Jhansi.

The rebellion led to major shifts in governance and policy. 15 Although the Company was no more than a symbolic ruler of India, it was on trial again in 1858 and accused of historic wrongs, such as neglecting diplomacy, favoring merchants at the expense of peasants, and going too far with institutional reform on occasion. In December 1857 , when the prospect of Crown rule over the Indian Empire became real, the Company commissioned its employee John Stuart Mill to write a petition in its defense. Mill’s report made the case that the Company deserved gratitude for making the Indian empire possible after the loss of the American colonies, and that it had matured enough in the previous half century to design a pragmatic institutional policy in India that no government could improve. Mill’s plea did not succeed because it left the mutiny unexplained, among other reasons.

Long before the takeover of Indian administration by the Crown ( 1858 ), the key foundations of British India had been securely laid. The Mutiny changed little of that foundation. The state that operated from the foundation was small, militarist, and conservative. It did not, and could not, do very much except maintain the revenue and the military setup, and indirectly help trade continue. Its minimalism faced criticism, but not a serious political crisis, not even during the famines of 1876 , 1896 , and 1898 , when the limits of state capacity were painfully exposed. On the other hand, by encouraging trade, industry, wealth accumulation, and in turn, the demand for political representation, the regime also weakened its moral right to maintain an elitist rule.

Discussion of the Literature

Other than a substantial volume of works dealing separately with the Company, the Indian Ocean trade, warfare in Europe, Parliamentary Acts, and Indian regimes, the scholarship on the origins of British India also explores the links among some of these elements. Although all of these works would in some fashion discuss the origins, the latter interpret it directly. Instead of conducting an all-encompassing review, this article focuses on the recent interpretive work on four questions specifically: Why did the Indian Ocean trade lead to a European empire in South Asia? If there was a causal link between trade and empire, was it to be found in the type of firm that the Company was or in the economic environment in which it operated? Did British India in its origin represent a British rule or an Indian type of rule? So far as early British India reshaped the institutions of capitalism, did the process have any implications for inequality between colonial and free nations?

A question often asked is why trade led to an empire. Was there something inherent in the business of the Company that made its mutation into a political power likely, even inevitable? By the nature of the question, the answer has to be somewhat speculative. The East India Company, of course, was a highly political entity since its inception. It operated under a royal charter, maintained a small-scale military infrastructure, and sought the help of the Royal Navy in the late 18th century . Philip Stern has shown that the Company saw itself as a political intermediary between Britain and India long before the conquest of Bengal. 16 Whereas Indian states of the past had a tenuous access to the seaboard, the Company controlled the seaboard, which made it an effective negotiator with the Mughals. But having the power to protect profits and using power for territorial acquisition are two different things.

Did the Company’s territorial acquisition happen by design or by accident? Two quite different perspectives exist on the question, depending on how we read the Company as a firm. If we see the chartered companies as a command-and-control system, the steps toward territorial expansion would seem to have been taken in full knowledge of the London directors and under their command. 17 Others, such as Holden Furber, suggest that there was a split personality within the management. 18 The London directors of the firm were merchants and bankers, and conservative in outlook. The outstation branches, by contrast, were peopled with factors or employees-cum-traders, soldiers, and sailors, men of an altogether different class of British society. They were physically as well as temperamentally closer to those Indians on whom the firm’s activities depended, and negotiated with the latter all the time. They understood political risks and opportunities better than the directors. The disintegration of the Mughal Empire and warfare in Europe changed the risks and opportunities, affecting the actions of these people. The empire, in this fashion, emerged from the limited ability of the directors to direct their employees.

Recent scholarship places more emphasis on the context of commerce in 18th-century India. As Sudipta Sen has shown, Indians and Europeans did not always share the same cultural assumptions about commodities, exchange, and markets. 19 Economic historians suggest that their interests were sometimes in conflict. The trade that the outstation officers managed could not get anywhere without the agency of a large number of Indian associates, working as bankers, subcontractors, transporters, and wage workers. These relationships were not regulated by law and broke down frequently. 20 Breach of contract was pervasive, and so was distrust between Indians and Europeans. These problems were compounded for the European private traders who took more risks and procured goods like silk or indigo from the interior of the country. They relied on the protection afforded by the Company, but this was an indirect guarantee at best. At a time when territorial powers were weaker than before, any trader would want to assume a share in power in order to protect trade.

Did the Company state in the late 18th century represent continuity with the Indian model of statecraft or discontinuity, a fundamentally European type of state? Arguments can be found on both sides. Without doubt, the Company state in its origin relied on elements of statecraft that were indigenous. It had a strong desire to make friends with, and utilize the skills of, the Indian educated and courtly elite. Its adoption of indigenous religious codes as the basis for a lex loci reinforced the desire. Its army recruited Indian soldiers in the main.

Yet in law, in the army, in political strategy, and in the revenue system, the Company made changes that cannot be easily understood as following an established precedent. Two recent works on the Company’s state in Bengal suggest that the instruments and the ideology of rule were invented, often from Indian ingredients, but that the final outcome was neither Indian nor European. Robert Travers shows that the early colonial political thought represented a field of discourse distinct from either Indian or contemporary British ones, and involved a stylized reading of Indian history. 21 Jon Wilson interprets the debates on law differently: They reflected the process of “inventing” a bureaucratic state where the model did not exist before, either in Europe or in India. 22

The military success of the Company over its Indian rivals in the 18th century must be explained with reference to decisions that had no indigenous precedent. The success was owing to a standing army, whereas the rivals relied on armies contributed by locally powerful people. In turn, whereas the latter strategy meant giving away more fiscal rights to the warlords, which weakened the state and made it ever more reliant on contributory armies, the Company gained more strength by neutralizing these armed intermediaries. 23 In negotiations with potential allies, too, the Company followed a path that was seen by its rivals as a distinct one. 24 In short, its use of military-fiscal centralization to a more effective degree than that of the indigenous states of the time represented a distinctly European strategy.

A third large question has emerged recently in global economic history in relation to a literature that draws a causal connection between colonial rule and the economic institutions of capitalism, and, in turn, between colonialism and the origin of modern world inequality. Did British India represent a distinct form of European empire when compared with, say, Spanish America, Dutch Indonesia, or colonialism in Africa and Southeast Asia?

The British Indian Empire was distinctive in relation to other European empires of its time or later. A substantial literature on the settler empires in the New World define their key characteristics with reference to “extractive” institutions, including land-grab and coercive labor regimes. 25 Extraction in this sense would have been impossible for the East India Company because it emerged in a milieu where strong states and institutions were already present. On land rights, legislation did not discriminate between people by the ethnicity of the right holder. If anything, expatriate landholding rights were weak compared with indigenous rights until well into the 19th century . Europeans could not own or purchase farmlands, for example, until the late 1830s, eighty years after colonization had begun. Agricultural land was owned by peasants and landlords, and the British legislated on these rights in such a manner that any land transfer, because it would involve a complicated legal process, became progressively rare. Only in the case of tea and coffee cultivation were forest lands leased out by the government to plantation companies, but these actions neither explicitly favored the European nor involved transfer of property rights held by Indians before the lease. In the case of labor servitude, the British imperial rule consistently legislated in favor of contractual rather than servile labor, though in practice the distinction could be hard to maintain, especially when contracts were protected by means of penal law.

By contrast with the settler economies where the extraction of natural or labor resources shaped policy and the nature of rule, empires in India and Indonesia originated in international trade. In both regions, economic policy was formed of metropolitan decision making (rather than settler agency) and commercial orientation (rather than natural resource orientation). Beneath this broad similarity, there were significant differences between these cases. Dutch colonial policy in Indonesia, as illustrated by the cultivation system, was predicated on a state that found it hard to pay for itself with local fiscal resources. British India did not have that problem. Having inherited moderately well-off agrarian states, it found itself in command of sufficient resources to pay for its own army, even though there was little left over for doing anything else. In its property laws, British India consistently maintained an attitude of regard toward the peasant. Colonial power having emerged from the bed of international trade, power was institutionalized differently in British India than it was in the settler economies. Power was institutionalized not in the form of microeconomic regulations that settler societies saw develop, but in macroeconomic management—in fiscal and monetary policy.

Primary Sources

The main repository of primary sources relevant to the subject is the India Office collections of the British Library. However, the contents and sources of the documents vary greatly, so that a description of some of the broad types of sources is in order.

A substantial part of the official documents is available in digital versions of the Parliamentary Papers (see “Links to Digital Materials” ). The relevant reports will make for a long list. The most important in information content are the two sets of Select Committee inquiry reports on the East India Company instituted in 1772 and 1782–1783, each followed by legislative intervention to regulate the Company’s governance of the Indian territories. The second set contains reports on the system of justice in Bengal, and describes the new rule of law. A similar report was prepared for Madras in 1797. In 1812, a substantial (more than a thousand pages) inquiry on land tenure was published, entitled “The Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company”; it also contains a systematic account of the emergence of British India. This was the fifth report in a series instituted to review the Company’s charter. Thereafter, large-scale inquiries on the origins of British India were rare. One exception was the Law Commission, which reviewed the progress of legislation in a series of reports, the first of which was published in 1842.

Continuing with the Parliamentary Papers, negotiations between British India and the princely states are dealt with in a set of minor reports. One example is “Copies of All Treaties, Engagements, or Correspondence, between the British Government in India and the King or Mogul at Delhi,” published in 1805. Two reports published in 1801 and 1802 concern “the Nabob of Carnatic.” Compilations of treaties with princely states were republished in 1818, 1819, 1825, and 1856.

The Company’s own correspondence and trade records (such as the Consultation Books) shed some light on frictions that arose in its economic operations, which had indirect political repercussions. But directly, these resources are not very useful on the theme of this article. Of more significance are the writings of individuals connected with the Company’s work in India. A number of books and pamphlets published between 1770 and 1820 supply accounts of battles and negotiations between the East India Company and Indian rulers, as well as the conditions of ordinary people. Some of these writings influenced generations of British administrators in India. Examples include James Macpherson, The History and Management of the East-India Company, from its Origin in 1600 to the Present Time ; Charles William Rouse Boughton, Dissertation concerning the Landed Property of Bengal ; “Observations by C. Grant on State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, 1792,” originally authored by Charles Grant; and James Mill, The History of British India . 26 Macpherson was an officer of an Indian state, Boughton an officer of the fiscal administration in Bengal in the 1760s, and later a politician. Grant was a director of the Company, a senior officer in Bengal, and in later life an evangelical reformer. Mill was a liberal intellectual, and after the book, an employee of the Company.

Indian-language sources are comparatively rare, but important exceptions exist. Perhaps the most important resource is formed of the papers of the Peshwa court, preserved in Pune, India. Other frequently consulted documents include Persian-language histories. A particularly well known example was the book authored by a political commentator, Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, called Siyar-ul-mutaakhirin , which describes the fall of the Nawabi regime in Bengal. The book has useful descriptions of battles and disputes between indigenous states and warlords, including the dispute between the Afghans and Marathas that culminated in the momentous Third Battle of Panipat (1761). Unlike British sources, these descriptions use indigenous information. An English translation of the book can be found in Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Historians . 27

Historians of the Indian Mutiny have unearthed resources that can potentially shed light on the origins of British India as seen through Indian eyes, including folklore, newspapers, private accounts, pamphlets, and proclamations issued by the princely states. A systematic exploration of these sources is awaited.

Links to Digital Materials

British Library collection of India Office Records .

Gale Eighteenth Century Collections Online .

19th Century British Pamphlets Online .

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography .

UK Parliamentary Papers .

Further Reading

• Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons . London: Blackwell, 2000.
• Klein, I. “Utilitarianism and Agrarian Progress in Western India.” Economic History Review 18.3 (1965): 576–597.
• Marshall, P. J. Bengal—The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–1828 . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Marshall, P. J. The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Roy, T. An Economic History of Early Modern India . London: Routledge, 2013.
• Stern, P. J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Travers, R. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

1. The act of grant of dewanny and the subsequent process of transfer of power are described in Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell , Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Ware: Wordsworth Reference, 1996), 5. This book was first published in 1886.

2. Aurangzeb (1618–1707), the last of the so-called great Moghals, reigned between 1658 and his death in 1707. His reign was distinguished by two things to which the rapid collapse of the empire after his death is sometimes attributed: rebellions on the fringes of the empire, and a long and debilitating campaign to bring the Deccan uplands within the empire. The latter ended with the emergence of the Marathas as a military force, and as one of the post-Mughal successor states. On this transition and the related historiography, see Seema Alavi , ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–56.

3. P. J. Marshall , The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Om Prakash , European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

4. On the role of European warfare in changing the political economy of the world, see C. A. Bayly , The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London: Blackwell, 2000).

5. On Doab, the tract between two confluent rivers, see Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson , 331. In the Indo-Gangetic Basin, Doab would often refer to the highly fertile and densely cultivate tract between the Ganges and the Jumna Rivers. In the Deccan Plateau, the rivers were smaller in the volume of water carried compared with the Himalayan snow-melt ones like the Ganges and Jumna. In the Deccan, doab carried the meaning of a fertile cultivated tract, but tended to be narrower in extent.

6. On this process, see Tirthankar Roy , An Economic History of Early Modern India (London: Routledge, 2013).

7. The standing army originated in the troops raised and maintained in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, and known as the Presidency Armies. From the mid-18th century, British regiments were sent to fight in India. Until 1784, the expense of British regiments in India was paid from British revenues; thereafter, the Board of Control (body appointed by Parliament to manage the governance of India) could hire British regiments and pay the cost with Indian revenue. Limits were set on the numbers to be hired from Britain. From the early 19th century, the cost of the army was paid mainly from the Indian revenue. For more details on the emergence of the British Indian army, see T. A. Heathcote , The Military in British India: The Development of British Land Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995).

8. On the simultaneous expansion of fiscal and military capacity, see Roy, Economic History of Early Modern India .

9. Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy , Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

10. On the evolution of the zamindari right in the 19th century, see B. B. Chaudhuri , “Agrarian Relations: Eastern India,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India , vol. 2 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Volume 2 covers the years 1757–1970.

11. Burton Stein , ed., The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and I. Klein , “Utilitarianism and Agrarian Progress in Western India,” Economic History Review 18.3 (1965): 576–597.

12. For a discussion of these debates and controversies, see Tirthankar Roy , The World’s Most Powerful Corporation: East India Company (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2012).

13. On indigo, opium, and cotton trades of the early 19th century, see Tirthankar Roy , India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On contractual disputes in these trades, see R. E. Kranton and A. V. Swamy , “Contracts, Hold-up, and Exports: Textiles and Opium in Colonial India,” American Economic Review 98.5 (2008): 967–989; and Roy and Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India .

14. On the historiography, and merchant actions, see Tirthankar Roy , “The Mutiny and the Merchant,” Historical Journal 59.2 (2016): 393–416.

15. I. Klein , “Materialism, Mutiny and Modernization in British India,” Modern Asian Studies 34.3 (2000): 545–580.

16. Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

17. Ann Carlos and S. Nicholas , “‘Giants of an Earlier Capitalism’: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals,” Business History Review 62.3 (1988): 398–419.

18. Holden Furber , “Review of A. Mervyn Davies, Clive of Plassey: A Biography , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, I939,” American Historical Review 45.3 (1940): 635–637.

19. Sudipta Sen , Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

20. Roy and Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India .

21. Robert Travers , Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

22. Jon E. Wilson , The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

23. Roy, Economic History of Early Modern India .

24. M. Oak and A. V. Swamy , “Myopia or Strategic Behavior? Indian Regimes and the East India Company in Late Eighteenth Century India,” Explorations in Economic History 49.3 (2012): 352–366.

25. C. Lloyd , J. Metzer , and R. Sutch , eds., Settler Economies in World History (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013).

26. James Macpherson , The History and Management of the East-India Company, from its Origin in 1600 to the Present Time , 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1783); Charles William Rouse Boughton , Dissertation concerning the Landed Property of Bengal (London: John Stockdale, 1791); Charles Grant, “Observations by C. Grant on State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, 1792,” published as a Parliamentary Paper in 1813; and James Mill , The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817).

27. Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson , The History of India as Told by Its Historians , vol. 8 (Lahore, 1976).

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Karl Marx in the New-York Herald Tribune 1853

The British Rule in India

Written : June 10, 1853; First published : in the New-York Daily Tribune , June 25, 1853; Proofread : by Andy Blunden in February 2005.

In writing this article, Marx made use of some of Engels’ ideas as in his letter to Marx of June 6, 1853 .

London, Friday, June 10, 1853

Telegraphic dispatches from Vienna announce that the pacific solution of the Turkish, Sardinian and Swiss questions, is regarded there as a certainty.

Last night the debate on India was continued in the House of Commons, in the usual dull manner. Mr. Blackett charged the statements of Sir Charles Wood and Sir J. Hogg with bearing the stamp of optimist falsehood. A lot of Ministerial and Directorial advocates rebuked the charge as well as they could, and the inevitable Mr. Hume summed up by calling on Ministers to withdraw their bill. Debate adjourned.

Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul [4] , or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere. [5]

I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan, without recurring, however, like Sir Charles Wood, for the confirmation of my view, to the authority of Khuli-Khan. But take, for example, the times of Aurangzeb; or the epoch, when the Mogul appeared in the North, and the Portuguese in the South; or the age of Mohammedan invasion, and of the Heptarchy in Southern India [6] ; or, if you will, go still more back to antiquity, take the mythological chronology of the Brahman himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.

There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette [7] . This is no distinctive feature of British Colonial rule, but only an imitation of the Dutch, and so much so that in order to characterise the working of the British East India Company, it is sufficient to literally repeat what Sir Stamford Raffles, the English Governor of Java, said of the old Dutch East India Company:

“The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders.”

All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.

There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India, inundations are used for fertilizing the soil in Mesopotamia, Persia, &c.; advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the Occident, drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated, in the Orient where civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing power of Government. Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and large provinces of Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.

Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works. Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, of laissez-faire and laissez-aller . But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government. There the harvests correspond to good or bad government, as they change in Europe with good or bad seasons. Thus the oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the annals of the whole Asiatic world. However changing the political aspect of India’s past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society. From immemorial times, Europe received the admirable textures of Indian labor, sending in return for them her precious metals, and furnishing thereby his material to the goldsmith, that indispensable member of Indian society, whose love of finery is so great that even the lowest class, those who go about nearly naked, have commonly a pair of golden ear-rings and a gold ornament of some kind hung round their necks. Rings on the fingers and toes have also been common. Women as well as children frequently wore massive bracelets and anklets of gold or silver, and statuettes of divinities in gold and silver were met with in the households. It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons. From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population of Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.

These two circumstances – the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits – these two circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of particular features – the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organization and distinct life. The peculiar character of this system may be judged from the following description, contained in an old official report of the British House of Commons on Indian affairs:

“A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some hundred or thousand acres of arable and waste lands; politically viewed it resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants consists of the following descriptions: The potail , or head inhabitant, who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within his village, a duty which his personal influence and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people render him the best qualified for this charge. The kurnum keeps the accounts of cultivation, and registers everything connected with it. The tallier and the totie, the duty of the former of which consists [...] in gaining information of crimes and offenses, and in escorting and protecting persons travelling from one village to another; the province of the latter appearing to be more immediately confined to the village, consisting, among other duties, in guarding the crops and assisting in measuring them. The boundary-man, who preserves the limits of the village, or gives evidence respecting them in cases of dispute. The Superintendent of Tanks and Watercourses distributes the water [...] for the purposes of agriculture. The Brahmin, who performs the village worship. The schoolmaster, who is seen teaching the children in a village to read and write in the sand. The calendar-brahmin, or astrologer, etc. These officers and servants generally constitute the establishment of a village; but in some parts of the country it is of less extent, some of the duties and functions above described being united in the same person; in others it exceeds the above-named number of individuals. [...] Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine or disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have continued for ages. The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged. The potail is still the head inhabitant, and still acts as the petty judge or magistrate, and collector or renter of the village.”

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns qu�len Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt, Hat nicht myriaden Seelen Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us Since it brings us greater pleasure? Were not through the rule of Timur Souls devoured without measure?”] [From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, West�stlicher Diwan ]

4 A reference to the rule in India, mainly in the north, of the Mohammedan invaders who came from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Persia. Early in the thirteenth century the Delhi Sultanate became the bulwark of Moslem domination but at the end of the fourteenth century it declined and was subsequently conquered by the Moguls, new invaders of Turkish descent, who came to India from the east of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century and in 1526 founded the Empire of the Great Moguls (named after the ruling dynasty of the Empire) in Northern India. Contemporaries regarded them as the direct descendants of the Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan’s time, hence the name “Moguls”. In the mid-seventeenth century the Mogul Empire included the greater part of India and part of Afghanistan. Later on, however, the Empire began to decline due to peasant rebellions, the growing resistance of the Indian people to the Mohammedan conquerors and increasing separatist tendencies. In the early half of the eighteenth century the Empire of the Great Moguls practically ceased to exist.

5 Religion of the Lingam – the cult of the God Shiva, particularly widespread among the southern Indian sect of the Lingayat (from the word “linga” - the emblem of Shiva), a Hindu sect which does not recognise distinctions of caste and rejects fasts, sacrifices and pilgrimages.

Juggernaut ( jagannath ) – a title of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. The cult of juggernaut was marked by sumptuous ritual and extreme religious fanaticism which manifested itself in the self-torture and suicide of believers. On feast days some believers threw themselves under the wheels of the chariot bearing the idol of Vishnu-juggernaut.

06 Heptarchy (government by seven rulers) – a term used by English historiographers to describe the political system in England from the sixth to eighth centuries, when the country was divided into seven highly unstable Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which, in their turn, frequently split up and reunited. Marx uses this term by analogy to describe the disunity of the Deccan (Central and South India) before its conquest by the Mohammedans at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

7 The island of Salsette, north of Bombay, was famous for its 109 Buddhist cave temples.

The First Indian War of Independence | East India Company | Future of British Rule in India 1853 Works | New York Herald-Tribune | Marx/Engels Archive

• A Passage to India

E. M. Forster

• Literature Notes
• The British Raj in India
• Book Summary
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Part I: Chapters 1-3
• Part I: Chapters 4-6
• Part I: Chapters 7-8
• Part I: Chapters 9-11
• Part II: Chapters 12-16
• Part II: Chapters 17-24
• Part II: Chapters 25-32
• Part III: Chapters 33-37
• Character Analysis
• Doctor Aziz
• Adela Quested
• Cyril Fielding
• Ronny Heaslop
• Professor Godbole
• The Turtons
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• E. M. Forster Biography
• Critical Essays
• General Meaning of A Passage to India
• Nature in A Passage to India
• Mysticism in A Passage to India
• Structure of A Passage to India
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• Full Glossary for A Passage to India
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays The British Raj in India

India was accustomed to invaders by the time the English arrived in the seventeenth century. Beginning with the great Indo-Aryan invasion (2400-1500 B.C.), the natives of the Indian subcontinent had seen parts of their land overrun by conquering armies of Huns, Arabs, Persians, Tartars, and Greeks. Buddhists, Hindus, and Moslems had ruled over parts of the vast country. None had succeeded in ruling all of India — none until Great Britain came onto the scene.

The English arrived at an opportune time, during the disintegration of the Mogul Empire, which had controlled most of India from 1526 until the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. As the empire dissolved, wars for power between Marathas, Persians, and Sikhs began. The English took advantage of these conflicts.

The English did not come as invaders or conquerors; they came as traders. When the British East India Company was formed in 1600, its agents were in competition with the French and Portuguese traders who had preceded them. Whereas the other European traders kept aloof from Indian affairs, the English became involved in them. Trade was their most important consideration, but fortifications and garrisons were necessary to insure security. Warring princes were very interested in obtaining European arms and military skills for their own purposes and willingly paid for them with cash, credit, or grants of land.

In this way power was gradually gained by the British East India Company until in 1757 Robert Clive gained control of India in the Battle of Plassey. In 1774 Warren Hastings became the first governor-general of India; during his regime the foundations of the civil service system were laid and a system of law courts was organized. The power was still in the hands of the East India Company; the company agents extended their control and obtained the right to collect taxes.

The Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 was an attempt by the Mogul emperor to regain power, and it showed a desire on the part of Indians to win back control of their own country. The rebellion, which lacked organization, support, and leadership, left widespread bitterness. In 1858 the British government took over rule of India, with power in the hands of the British Parliament. Great Britain indirectly controlled various territories, known as "Indian States," where the rulers were rewarded for support during the rebellion: titles were conferred, autonomy was granted, and protection against possible revolts was assured.

In 1885 the Indian National Congress was formed. Little more than a debating society, it did represent every geographical area and all religious groups and castes. In 1906 the Moslem League was formed to advance the cause of Mohammedanism in India.

From 1858 to 1914 England firmly established its rule over the country. English governors at the head of each province were responsible to the governor-general (or viceroy) who was appointed by the King of England and responsible to Parliament. In 1877 Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India.

In return for helping Great Britain in World War 1, Indians were promised a share in their own government. This was far from independence, for repressive measures were directed against India. More Indians, however, were elected to the legislature and Indians, for the first time, sat on the Viceroy's Council. There was a constant struggle for independence. The Amritsar Massacre in 1919 indicated the extent of unrest and trouble among the Indians.

India was guaranteed independence before it agreed to help the Allies in World War II. In 1946 Clement Atlee, Prime Minister of Great Britain, offered complete independence as soon as Indian leaders could agree on a form of government that could manage a free India. By 1947 it was clear that only partition could resolve the conflict among the Indian peoples. India and Pakistan became dominions in the British Commonwealth of Nations. In 1949, the new constitution declared the Union of India to be a sovereign democratic republic.

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Three Trains at Kasur 1947 by PINS © Bhupinder Singh, 2020

Partition of British India

Lesson at a glance, what can the national archives documents reveal about the partition of british india, teachers' notes, external links, connections to curriculum.

In the below video, Iqbal Singh, Hannah Carter and Eleanor Newbigin introduce a document relating to the partition of British India . They explore what this document ’s tone and content can tell us about British official’s attitudes to the violence that occurred after partition. Students also hear an oral testimony from Iqbal’ s aunt whose family were displaced in 1946 due to growing tensions in British India. There is an accompanying resource pack you could use to explore this topic further.   

The video and resource were launched at a plenary session at the SHP conference 2022.

• Look at the Starter Document.

Context –

The document is titled ‘communal disturbances’. ‘Communal’ is not a term we use a lot today but was used in British-India by officials to describe tensions between religious groups. It was thought that Indian people had stronger religious beliefs than British people and, as a result were more likely to resolve things through violence.

• What type of document is it?   
• When was it sent?    
• Who sent it and who to?   
• Why was this document sent?  
• What do you notice about the numbers and figures that are used?  
• What is the tone of the document?  
• How do you think British officials got the information for this document?  
• What does the title ‘communal disturbances’ reveal about how British officials viewed the violence?   
• How useful is this document for exploring what happened in the months following the Partition of British India?

2. Explore more documents relating to the partition of British India.  

1. Decision making

Context – .

1a- Photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru- the first Prime Minister of independent India (left) Lord Ismay- Chief of Staff to Lord Mountbatten (centre left) Lord Mountbatten- British Viceroy of India (centre right) Muhammed Ali Jinnah- First governor-general of Pakistan (right)

Look at Source 1a, a photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Ismay, Lord Mountbatten, and Muhammed Ali Jinnah.

• How would you describe the expressions of the leaders?
• What could you infer about relations between the different leaders?
• What can you see in the background of the room? How does this relate to the decisions being made?
• When do you think this photograph was taken in the decision-making process of partition?

Look at Source 1b, personal notes from Lord Ismay.

Lord Ismay was chief of Staff to Lord Mountbatten and therefore closely involved in negotiations.   

• What audience was intended for this document? Hint- look at the text at the top of the document.
• It is described as a ‘personal note.’ How does this affect the tone of the document?
• How does Lord Ismay describe the partition of British India and the following months? (See Section 2 and 3)
• What does he suggest about who is responsible for the way partition happened and the violent outcome?

2. Violence following the Partition of British India: Sikh case study 

Look at Source 2a, a 1947 map of the Punjab, India and Pakistan boundaries.

Lahore was a special place for the Sikhs. It was the location of many important Sikh religious and historical sites. In addition Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born in Nankana Sahib, near Lahore. However this was a Muslim majority area and was made part of Pakistan. This didn’t take into account that non-Muslim people had strong connections to this area, they had businesses and had played a large role in developing the Punjab. Before the boundary line was drawn there were appeals from many in the Sikh c ommunity t o give greater acknowledgement to Sikh history and heritage than they feared a focus on Muslim and non-Muslim populations would allow.   

• What does the red line and the red dotted line show on the map?  
• When do you think this document was made? Hint: Look at the date mentioned in the key.   
• The boundary lines for Pakistan and India were drawn mainly by looking at the percentage of Muslim people in the population. What group of people may have objected to this and why?  

Look at Source 2b, a 1946 letter from Santokh Singh.

Santokh Singh was a writer who wrote in Punjabi, with a Sikh father and a Hindu mother. He is writing to Lord Pethick Lawrence, a British politician involved in the negotiations leading to the partition of British India.   

• What is the tone of the letter? Give an example to support.   
• What does it reveal about the concerns of the Sikh population relating to the partition of British India?   

Look at Source 2c, a  report from The Times.

• What does the newspaper article suggest about the situation in Punjab by late August?  
• Why do you think the British government are collecting this newspaper article?   

Look at Source 2d, a page from 1948 report by J.S.H. Shattock.

J.S.H Shattock was based at the British High Commision at Delhi. The British High Commission reported between its offices in India and also informed bodies like the Commonwealth Relations Office in London about what was happening in India.  

• How does Shattock describe the situation in the Punjab during August and September 1947?  
• What does this document suggest was the impact of this violence?   

3. Communal tensions- British perspective

Look at Source 3, notes on British involvement in India from 1945. 

Context  –

This is a page from a set of notes made by an unknown British official. ‘Communal’ is not a term we use a lot today but was used in British-India by officials to describe tensions between religious groups. It was thought that Indian people had stronger religious beliefs than British people and, as a result were more likely to resolve things through violence.

• When was this document written?  
• How is this document written?   
• What did the author mean by the title ‘communal differences’?    
• What does the author think is causing divisions between religious groups? Hint: Look at the paragraph that begins ‘Consequently neither Hindus or Muslims are willing…’
• How effective does the author think British rule in India has been? Hint: Look at the final paragraph.

4. Forced displacement of people 

Look at Source 4, a report on refugee movements after partition.

• What type of document is this?  
• What language is used to describe displaced people?   
• It was made by the international news agency Reuters. What do you think its purpose was?  
• How do you think the author gathered their information?   
• How does the language and tone of the document compare to the Starter Source?   

5. Oral Testimony

Listen to the oral testimony from Iqbal’s aunt about partition.

These are extracts from a conversation with Iqbal’s aunt whose family were displaced prior to the partition of British India. There are themed audio clips and a typed transcript.   

• What type of document is this?   
• What challenges did Iqbal’s aunt face when her family were displaced?  
• Iqbal’s aunt shows a lot of empathy for Mr Ansari who was Muslim and recognition that he must have felt loss, like her family did. 
• How does that challenge some of the simplistic ideas about ‘non- Muslim’ and ‘Muslim’ people in the Starter Source?   
• How useful do you think oral testimony is as a source to learn about partition? Explain your answer.   

Creative activities

Here are some graphic drawings by the artist Pins inspired by Iqbal’s aunt’s testimony. These are suggestions for activities you could do.   

• Pick another scene from the testimony and create a graphic drawing of it. You can use words and captions.   
• Listen to more oral testimonies from people who lived through Partition using other archival collections. Create a graphic drawing of their story.  

Introduction to Partition   

The partition of British India occurred in August 1947 when the British government withdrew from India after almost two hundred years of British rule.  

People in British India had called for independence for decades. But, until the early 1940s, very few people–in Britain or India–would have thought that this independence would take the form of dividing up land.  

A very important reason for British rule in India was military resources, particularly soldiers. In 1942, a point of uncertainty in the war for Britain, and growing Indian opposition to colonialism , the British government announced they would leave India after the war. There were many different political leaders and groups who disagreed about how to make everyone feel represented after Britain left. Muslims only made up a quarter of the population but these communities were not spread evenly. There were a few areas where Muslims were most of the population. There were calls from some Muslim leaders for these regions to have greater independence. Divisions grew.   

By late 1946 British officials had given up on finding a solution in which many different groups could be represented within a single state. In February 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent to oversee Britain’s withdrawal. On the 3 rd June 1947 he stunned everyone by announcing with leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah that Britain would give power to not one but two new governments – the government of India and the government of Pakistan, a year earlier than previously planned.   

Officials from Britain and British India were given just 9 weeks to work out how British India would be divided . The final borders split the eastern and western areas of British India and ran through the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, important areas economically and politically with a roughly 50:50 split of Indian and Muslim populations.   

Independence was declared on 14 th and 15 th August 1947 but the borders of these two new nations were announced 2 days later on the 17 th of August. This meant that people celebrated independence without knowing for sure quite where the line between these two countries would be drawn .   

People living in the regions affected by partition felt scared and uncertain about their future – not wanting to end up on the ‘wrong side’ of the border. In the months around August 1947 over 15 million people are thought to have migrated across the new borders. In Punjab in particular this huge human migration was accompanied by brutal violence- some of which we can see as a reflection of the fear and uncertainty of what was going on, of the future. However it is important to stress that much of the violence was not random but orchestrated by militias connected to various political parties who wanted to secure the best possible outcome after the British left India.   

Communal disturbances   

Our mystery document begins with the heading ‘communal disturbances’ which is a word we do not really recognise today. But it was a term that was widely used by officials in British-India to describe tensions between different religious groups. The use of the term ‘communal’ instead of just saying ‘ religious’ showed that the British thought they were dealing with something specific to Indian society. It was thought that because of strong religious ideas Indian people were most likely to resolve things through violence. Religion was always assumed the cause, not more specific, local issues, which enabled officials to see the violence as something they were not responsible for, that it was caused by timeless differences between people.   

Documents at The National Archives  

The documents at The National Archives alongside those at the British Library India Office collection and records published in the Transfer of Power collection are some of the major collections of records in the UK about the period we are studying. While there is some duplication, the records at The National Archives are particularly strong for records of policy making at the highest level and for records of British armed forces stationed in India.   

This film and set of resources is suitable for an assembly, form time or a lesson on the history of the partition of British India. The film is around 10 minutes in length.  

There is an accompanying glossary to support students.

Class activities:  

Teachers may want to use the documents included in the resource to extend learning. It is suggested that students look at the Starter Source first. This is the same document used in the film. You might want to encourage students to come up with a question relating to the Starter Source, these questions could be returned to at the end of the lesson/series of lessons.   

Then students could work in smaller groups looking at the other documents. There are questions they can explore and they are invited to draw comparisons with the telegram.   

There is also a creative outcome that is suggested inspired by Iqbal’s aunt’s testimony.   

Starter: Telegram, September 1947. Catalogue ref: DO 142/416  .

1a. Photograph of: Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Ismay, Lord Mountbatten, and Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Dinodia Photos / Alamy Stock Photo

1b. ‘The Indian Situation’ – personal notes from Lord Ismay, 1947. Catalogue ref: D O  121/69

2a. Punjab, India and Pakistan boundaries, 1947. CO 1054/76

2b. Letter from Santokh Singh, 1 June 1946. Catalogue ref: CAB 127/106

2c. Report from  The Times, 25 th  August 1947. Catalogue ref:  DO 142/416  

2d. Page from report ‘Appreciation of the East Punjab’ by J.S.H. Shattock, 16 March 1948. Catalogue ref: DO 142/439

3. A brief survey of the work done in India by the British, October 1945. Catalogue ref:  WO 208/755

4. Report on refugees after Partition, October 1947. Catalogue ref:  DO 142/ 416

5a. Oral testimony from Iqbal’s aunt about the Partition.

5b. Dehra Dun Valley by PINS © Bhupinder Singh, 2022

5c. Mr Ansari House by PINS © Bhupinder Singh, 2022

Partition Museum- Oral History https://www.partitionmuseum.org/oral-history/    

SOAS- India: People partition oral archive https://digital.soas.ac.uk/oa3/all  

1947 Archive https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/  

The National Archives- Panjab 47 https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/panjab1947/  

• Indian independence and end of Empire
• Britain’s place in the world since 1945

Related resources

Indian independence.

What led to Partition in 1947?

Loyalty and dissent

How did Indian soldiers respond to the First World War?

Attlee’s Britain 1945-1951

Planning for the future?

• IAS Preparation
• UPSC Preparation Strategy
• Impact Of British Rule

Impact of British Rule - UPSC Modern Indian History Notes

With the advent of British rule in India, there had come several changes in the socio-economic-political spheres if the Indian society. It is important to know the impact of British Rule in India for the IAS Exam aspirants and it will help them in both Prelims (History) and Mains (GS-I, Essay.)  

Impact of British Rule in India

Economic Impact:

• India became an economic colony of industrial England.
• Indian handicrafts lost both domestic and foreign market.
• Lord Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement System
• Ryotwari & Mahalwari Systems
• This led to the birth of new money-lending class where peasants were exploited as they had to borrow money from the money-lenders

Social and Cultural Impact:

• Amid social issues like Sati, Child Marriages, Infanticides; ideas like Liberty, Equality, Freedom, and Human Rights were brought by the British.
• To improve the condition of women in society, various legal measures were introduced.
• The vernacular languages were ignored
• The British Parliament issued the Charter Act of 1813 by which a sum of Rupees One lakh was sanctioned for promoting western sciences in India.

Positive and Negative Impacts of British Rule in India

Broadly, the impact of British rule can be divided into negative and positive aspects.

Impact of British Rule – Positive Aspects

• New Job Opportunities: The British introduce new job opportunities that were especially beneficial to the members of the lower caste. With these opportunities, there was a better chance of upward social mobility for them
• Rise of the modern middle class in India: British rule led to the rise of an influential middle-class who would become pioneers of Indian industrialization in the post-independent era.
• Development of Infrastructure: The British authorities built many important infrastructures such as hospital schools and the most important of all, railways. Of course, this was done not to enhance the lives of the local Indians but rather to facilitate their exploitation. Regardless these infrastructures laid the foundation of India becoming a major economic powerhouse
• Introduction of new technology and ideas: The introduction of new technology like steamships, telegraphs and trains completely changed the economic landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Culturally, the British put an end to social evils such as Sati (with the passing of the Bengal Sati Regulation Act on  December 4 , 1829) and weakened the caste system to an extent.
• Protection from external enemies: India was known as the “jewel in the crown of the British Empire”. Thus the British provided protection against like Persia and Afghanistan. Even other western nations like France were deterred from being too involved with India. Though a boon, it turned out to be a bane in the long run as it made India too heavily dependent on the British. 

You can find out more about the Legislations in British India , by visiting the linked article.

Impact of British Rule – Negative Aspects

• Destruction of Indian Industry : When Britain took over, they forced the governments to import goods from the British Isles rather than create their own products. This led to the local cloth, metal and carpentry industries to fall into disarray. It made India a virtual hostage of Britains economic machinations which meant breaking away from it would destroy India’s economy.
• British mismanagement led to famines: The British rule placed more emphasis on the cultivation of cash crops rather than growing crops that would feed India’s huge population. They imported food from other parts of the empire to feed its citizens. This policy, combined with the unequal distribution of food, led to 24 famines killing millions between 1850 and 1899 alone. The first and if not the worst of this lot was the Bengal Famine of 1770.
• The Divide and Rule Policy: The British realised that they could never rule a vast territory like India without breaking up strong kingdoms into small easily conquerable segments. The British Empire also made it a policy to pay religious leaders to speak out against each other, slowly poisoning relations between different faiths. The hostile relationship between India and Pakistan can be attributed as a direct result of this policy.
• Britain plundered the Indian Economy: Due in no small part to the unethical business practices of the East India Company it can be estimated that trillions were siphoned off by Britain. Such practices even destroyed the Indian industries and ensured that money flowing through the Indian economy ended up in the hands of London. 

Impact of British Rule – Conclusion

On the surface, it may seem that the British rule in India that transformed its society for the better. But upon closer examination, these benefits were purely coincidental, if not self-serving. Economic improvements were only enacted in order to better plunder the Indian economy. Even societal changes would have come out on their own without the need for British intervention. In the end, the negative effects of British Imperialism far outweigh the benefits.

It is important for Civil Services aspirants to have a good understanding of the impact of British rule in India. Questions on this topic can be asked in both the Civil Services ( Prelims ) and (Mains) Examination. British rule in India had a deep imprint on India’s history, culture and people.

Impact of British Rule in India – UPSC Notes:- Download PDF Here

To practice History questions for UPSC Mains GS 1 , candidates can check the linked article.

Candidates reading the topic, ‘Impact of British Rule’ can also read about other Modern History articles linked in the table below:

Frequently Asked Questions on Impact of British Rule

Q 1. what were the positive impacts of british rule in india.

Ans. Though colonisation left a major negative impact on the country, there were a few positive outcomes also. These include:

Q 2. What was the negative impact of British Rule in India?

Ans. British rule in India left a negative impact on the people of the country:

• Famines due to British mismanagement
• Divided the country into two parts and followed the divide and rule policy
• Unfair Tax practices
• Plundered the Indian Economy
• Indian industries were impacted severely

Candidates must familiarise themselves with the exam pattern by visiting the UPSC Syllabus page. For more preparation materials and related articles refer to the links given in the table below:

UPSC Preparation:

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Essay on British India

The British entered India as traders and their primary objective was to earn profits by carrying on trade in India.

In order to earn maximum profits from Indian trade and commerce and to develop monopoly of trade and commerce they competed with other European powers.

By the beginning of the middle of the 18th century, the British crippled the French interests in India and became a dominant trading power.

Image Source: blog.findmypast.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2014/01/britindia.jpg

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The British also developed political interest to push in their monopoly of trade and commerce and initiated the process of expanding their political power in Bengal by the victory in the battle of Plassey and obtained the power of Diwani by the victory of Buxar through the treaty of Allahabad of 1765.

From then on till 1857, the British East India Company through wars, diplomacy and administrative measures made it a policy to obtain more and more of economic benefits by fleecing the Indian farmer, artisan and small and medium traders. This process is called colonialism and India became a colony of the British.

This colonialism bled the Indians and made India a de-industrialized power. In this span of seventy-five years from 1772 to 1857, the process and pattern of colonialism underwent different stages because the Charter Act of 1813 made by the British Parliament and Crown abolished the monopoly of the British East India Company and opened the gates of trade and commerce to every British citizen.

Further, by Charter Act of 1833, the Governor General of Bengal became the Governor General of India with control over the presidencies of Bombay and Madras and the British citizens were permitted to own property in India and thereby we come across British landlords and planters of tea, coffee, indigo and cotton and also British capitalists investing surplus capital in Colonial India. Both these measures hastened the process of draining of the wealth of India by the colonialists with their colonial policies.

Along with the colonialist measures, the British intro­duced ideology of mercantilism, orientalism, evangelicalism, utilitarianism and liberalism to justify their colonialist policies in India. In the name of ‘improve­ment’, ‘progress’ and ‘Whiteman’s burden’ the British administrators made it their avowed objective to introduce British laws and revenue measures into India. Added to the above ideological and philosophical tenets, the modern­ization process of Dalhousie also acted as the last straw on the camel’s back, and the substance of colonialism remained the same throughout the period of seventy-five years.

The colonial administrative apparatus from top to bottom was controlled by the Crown and Parliament through their Acts and Charter Acts. The British East India Company enjoyed a unique position at England as King George III patronized it and its friends – fought with the help of the parliament. The British decided to control the company’s Indian administration in the interest of Britain’s influential elite group as a whole. The company was allowed to have monopoly “of the trade and Directors of the company” were given the control of Indian administration.

Before we take up in detail the administrative set-up of the colonial admin­istrative apparatus, we have to bear in mind the fact that the pre-colonial India had well established administrative structure at different levels – centre, provincial and local, suited to the needs and demands of the time, relevant to the socio-economic formations. Another factor to be noted is that all the earlier invaders who established their power in India like the Indo-Greeks to Sakas, the Kushans and the Muslims added their principles of administration and modified the administrative structure and thus we notice the process of conti­nuity and change in our administration in theory and practice.

The major factor of difference to be noticed is that the British East India Company replaced the old Indian administrative policies and introduced their system of law, justice, education, revenue and intellectual and social theories, in India. All these changes created a new value system. We also notice an evolution of the colonial administrative apparatus as per the reforms introduced by the earliest regulating Act of 1773 and ending with the Government of India Act of 1858.

The regulating Act of 1773 introduced provisions for the effective super­vision of the executive of the company. It introduced changes in the constitution of the Court of directors of the company and the company affairs were put under the control of the government.

The Governor of Bengal was made the Governor General of Bengal and a council with four members was constituted. The Governor General and council was given authority to supervise the presidencies of Bombay and Madras and the presidencies were brought under the control of Governor General in the council of Bengal. This Act provided for a Supreme Court of justice at Calcutta to take care of the justice of Europeans, employees and citizens of Calcutta.

The Governor General in council was empowered to make laws for Bengal. The Pitt’s India Act established a board of control with six members of whom two were to be cabinet ministers. This board was given power over the activities of the Court of directors. This Act provided three members to the Governor General in council and the Governor General was given a casting vote.

The importance of the Pitt’s India Act lies in the fact of laying the foundation for a centralized adminis­tration, a process which reached its climax towards the end of the 19th century and it tightened the control of parliament over the company. In 1786, the Presi­dencies were divided into districts and collectors were appointed.

A revenue board was created with four members with the right to manage the treasury. The Charter Act of 1793 gave powers to the Governor General to override his council and also empowered him to exercise effective control over the Presi­dencies. Through this Act the British introduced the concept of a civil law enacted by a secular human agency, i.e., the government and applied universally in place of the personal rule of the past rulers.

It is an important change to be noticed by everyone. The Charter Act of 1813 allowed the British subjects, access to Indian shore with their ships. By now the company’s power spread over the whole of India except the Punjab, Nepal and the Sindh. To whatever political and economical philosophy the British subscribed, every Britisher was interested in the stability and security of the British territorial power in India. The most important development to be recorded is the deprival of the monopoly of trade and commerce of the British East India Company and throwing open the trade of India to all the British citizens. The East India Company was allowed to have monopoly of trade with China.

Owing to the rapid growth of industrial revolution in Great Britain, the British followed laissez-faire philosophy in India which ultimately benefited the British indus­trialists and capitalists at the cost of the Indian farmers and artisans. There was a great demand in India for the abolition of the company rule and assumption of authority by the crown.

In this backdrop the Charter Act of 1833 was passed which made the Governor General of Bengal, the Governor General of India. The president of the board of control became the minister of India and the board of control was given the power to supervise Indian affairs on behalf of the crown. Bombay, Madras and Bengal regions were placed under the direct rule of the Governor General in Council of India.

Central government was given the power to exercise full control over revenue and expenditure of the British territories in India. The Governor General in Council was given legislative powers over the rest of the Indian presidencies which are applicable to everyone in India. By this Act, a new member by name law member was added to the executive council and the strength rose to four. Lord Macaulay, the new law member played a very crucial role in influencing the educational policy of the British.

The number of members of the councils of the presidencies was reduced to two. Bombay and Madras were to keep their separate armies under the commander-in-chief and were kept under the control of the central government. The laws of India were codified by this Act through a law commission appointed by the Governor General. As a result of their effort, the Indian penal code and codes of civil and commercial law were enacted.

The most significant aspect of this Act theoretically was abolishing discrimination towards Indians in appointments to the British East India Company, and it was more violated by non-implementation and it provided for Indians a sheet anchor towards agitations for equality of treatment to Indians. In the next two decades the political consciousness of Indians increased due to the introduction of Western education and realization among the Indians.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the Bombay Association and the Madras Native Association submitted petitions to the parliamentary select committee demanding for the end of the reactionary rule of the company. By 1853 Charter Act, one more member was added to the executive council of Governor General to enact laws. The consent of the Governor General was mandatory for all legislative proposals. They added one more member from each province to the central legislative body. The Chief

Justice of the Supreme Court of Calcutta was also made the ex officio member of the legislative council. The legislative council’s membership was limited to 12 the Governor General, Commander-in-Chief, four members of Governor General’s council and six legislative members. Thus, this Act separated the legislative body from the executive body and this legislative body became an Anglo-Indian House of Commons.

The 1857 Great Revolt opened the eyes of the British and made it clear how the Indians hated the British rule for all their evil deeds and an attempt was made by the British to rectify their blunder by the Government of India Act of 1858. The Act replaced the British East India Company as ruler and transferred the powers to the crown along with the army. It abolished the Court of directors and the Board of Control. Their place was filled up by the secretary of state and the Indian council. They were given the powers to rule in the name of Her Majesty. But yet the ultimate power rested with the Parliament.

India Council should consist of 15 members and it was to be an advisory body to the secretary of state. The Governor General is desig­nated as Viceroy or Crown’s representative and the Government of India’s strings were in London.

The administrative structure that evolved in India from 1773 to 1858 was the result of the initiatives of many British administrators, thinkers and philoso­phers. As already indicated, the earliest influence on the thinking of British administrators and thinkers was their idea of improvement or progress. This process was initiated by Cornwallis by introducing the permanent land revenue settlements.

Between 1830 and 1840, when Bentinckwasthe Governor General of India the initiatives of Benthamite reforms based on utilitarianism and Charles Grant’s idea of evangelicalism and the British interests of monopoly of trade and maximum profits created the framework of administrative machinery and structure in India. Thus, the British administration in India was motivated by the maintenance of law and order and the perpetuation of the British regime.

The British depended on three pillars, of civil service, the army and the police to achieve their objective. The term ‘Civil Service’ was first used in India by the company to distinguish military and ecclesiastical personnel from civil employees. In the beginning they were commercial-oriented but later on they became public servants.

The civil service was graded from the beginning as apprentices, writers, factors, junior merchants and then finally senior merchants. High officers in India were selected from among the senior merchants. This system of grading continued till 1839. It is Cornwallis who increased the salaries of the civil servants and debarred them from taking bribes.

It is Wellesley who introduced training for civil servants. For a long time, the civil servants were appointed through the process of patronage and in 1833, the selection through limited competition was introduced and by 1853 they selected civil servants through public competition and in 1858 the Civil Service Commission was started for the process of selection of civil servants. The chief officer in the district was the Collector and he was assisted by a Tahsildar, who was a native.

The Collector had both magisterial and chief police functions. By these changes the Collector obtained total authority over the districts. In between the Collector and the Tahsildar, the post of Deputy Collector was created.

It is Cornwallis who initiated the police system. Till then, the police functions were performed by the local Zamindars. The army was also disbanded along with stripping of the police functions of the Zamindars. The police force was organized into Thanas, headed by a Darogha, who was a native and these daroghas were kept under the supervision of the criminal judges. The post of district Superintendent of Police was created to head the police set-up in the district and sometime later the Collector controlled the police also.

The judicial system was one of the main pillars of administrative structure and framework of the British in India. It is Lord Cornwallis, who started building up of the administrative machinery in India, It is he who separated the judicial functions from the revenue functions and laid foundation for the judicial system. Broadly the structure of the judicial system is divided as follows: in civil cases Sadar Diwani Adalat followed by provincial courts followed by district courts presided over by a district magistrate from civil service was introduced.

A category of subordinate courts presided over by Indian judges called Munsiff and Amins was created. In criminal cases Sadar Nizamat Adalat in Calcutta and Sadar Faujdari Adalat in Madras and Bombay happened to be the highest, followed by the court of circuit presided over by civil servants followed by local courts presided over by Indian magistrates who are called principal Sadar Amins in Madras Presidency.

First, all these courts in hierarchical order were experi­mented in Bengal. Both the Sadar Diwani Adalt and Sadar Nizam Adah were located in Calcutta as the highest civil and criminal courts. The provincial courts of appeal both in civil and criminal cases, (circuit courts) were estab­lished in the towns of Calcutta, Dacca, Murshidabad and Patna.

While the British occupied the superior position, the Indians occupied subordinate positions such as Munisiffs, Amins, the Quazis and the Pandits advising the judges in the Hindu and the Muhammadan laws. In subsequent years, the same was extended to other states and after some time a whole network of laws through the process of enactment of laws and codification of old laws was developed. By the time of Bentinck, the Indian penal code and Indian criminal procedure code were prepared.

The entire judicial system was based on the notions of the ‘rule of law’ and ‘equality before law’ of the British. But in practice, the judicial system was not at all beneficial to the Indians as it became very costly and lengthy and Indians failed to comprehend the laws. To give an example of the lengthy process, the case in Madras Presidency may be quoted where a Zamindar went to a court of law in 1832 to settle inheritance and debt suits and the final judgment was delivered in 1896, i.e., after 64 years.

In spite of the above demerits the judicial system created a consciousness of oneness. Thus, what we see in India as a result of the measures, administrative machinery was a network of laws applicable throughout the country and a vast adminis­trative structure to implement the laws. In nature, the structure was modern and pan-Indian in its spread, while the administrative structure served the purpose of maintaining law and order in India from the British view point, it served as a ground to protest and challenge the authority of the British in India.

Related Articles:

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Colonialism in India was traumatic – including for some of the British officials who ruled the Raj

Principal Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University

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When India gained independence from Britain on August 15 1947, the majority of Anglo-Indians had either left or would leave soon after. Many within the Indian Civil Service would write of the trauma that they experienced from witnessing the violence of the years leading up to the end of British rule and the bloodbath that would follow as the lines of partition were revealed.

Colonialism was certainly a far more traumatising experience for colonial subjects than their colonisers. They suffered poverty, malnutrition, disease, cultural upheaval, economic exploitation, political disadvantage, and systematic programmes aimed at creating a sense of social and racial inferiority. While some may argue that any suffering on the part of the British colonialists ought to be met with little sympathy, this is not a reason to obscure it from history.

It was the very notion that Indian civil service servicemen were usurpers, full of privilege, in a foreign land that led to the sapped sense of humanity that many wrestled with – both during and after their India careers.

As my own forthcoming book details, some shut themselves off from the day-to-day lives of Indians, unless forced to engage for work purposes. Others escaped through drowning themselves in alcohol, opium or other drugs. Some convinced themselves of the intellectual superiority of the white man and his right to rule over “lesser races”, while a number found solace in Christianity. Several came to see their role as being a peacekeeper between various ethnic and religious groups, despite the irony of the British having encouraged and exploited the categorisation of colonial subjects on these grounds in the first place.

Underneath all of this sits a trauma that the coloniser had to either deal with – or resign their post and go home.

Serving the Raj

One serviceman of the late Raj who I have focused on in my research is an example of the coping mechanisms that British officials deployed. Andrew Clow entered the Indian Civil Service in 1912 at the age of 22 and would remain a civil servant until 1947 when he reached the mandatory retirement ceiling of 35 years. His most notable portfolios were as secretary of the Indian Labour Bureau in the late 1930s, followed by minister for communications and then governor of Assam from 1942 to 1947.

Clow, and his one thousand or so colleagues at any one time, effectively ruled India during the late Raj. This was a time of declining British prestige, and declining public and political opinion of colonialism as an acceptable social, economic and political practice. The rise of the Indian independence movement with Mohandas Gandhi as its nominal leader, coincided with the anti-British international propaganda concerning its empire that came from the Soviet Union and its sympathisers.

Doubt and self-loathing

In the early 1920s, the Indian independence movement grew in prominence and received a significant level of sympathy at home and abroad. In 1919, the Amritsar Massacre of unarmed protesters by British and Gurka troops received much public criticism. A year later, two of Clow’s civil service intake year group were assassinated in a market in Midnapore, West Bengal. From letters Clow wrote to a friend, we know he considered resigning on several occasions during the early 1920s. This period of reflection led him to fundamentally question his role within the colonial system, but he ultimately decided to continue his career.

Clow was a devout Christian and his life in India would develop into a religious cocoon of sorts where he used his relationship with God to suppress his trauma at being a colonial usurper.

As he became more senior within the administration he increasingly distanced himself from Indians, Indian culture and expressed little sympathy for the plight of people who suffered from British exploitation. He spent the vast majority of his time with other Europeans and his holidays at his house at the British hill station of Simla. His diaries throughout the 1930s and 1940s became almost entirely written prayers requesting salvation punctuated by private comments of self-loathing, written in confidence between himself and God.

Defender of British colonialism

Upon his retirement from the Indian Civil Service in 1947, Clow returned to Scotland and became chairman of the newly-created Scottish Gas Board. His private time was spent largely in the pursuit of the preservation of the legacy of British India. He voraciously read memoirs and other reflections by his former colleagues, and would lambast any critique of the British, even if those criticisms were rather sparse.

Clow’s failure to concede publicly that colonialism was an exploitative practice is indicative of a complex reaction to his trauma at being a key part of a system of suppression. His heightened religiosity was a key part of his way of dealing with this. In many ways he “used” God to negate his discomfort at being one of the main figures of the British colonial enterprise.

Clow was typical of many within the Indian Civil Service who became troubled by their roles facilitating the exploitation of the Indian subcontinent for the British Empire. Yet, rather than resign his post and become a critic of colonial practices, Clow built a number of internal mechanisms so that he could carry on. Reactions like Clow’s go some way to explain the romance that many within British society have had for the age of empire. But today, 70 years on from the end of the Raj, public bodies and the British media are willing to engage in a much more robust critique.

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The British Expansion in India – East India Company, Presidencies, Governor-generals, and Battles

Last updated on April 6, 2024 by ClearIAS Team

There had been trading relations between India and the West from ancient times (land route).

However, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople and this brought the regular trade routes under the control of the Turks. This urged the Europeans to search for new trade routes, especially by sea.

In 1492, Columbus from Spain set out to reach India and discovered America instead.

Later, in 1498, Vasco Da Gama of Portugal discovered a new trade route, traveling around Africa. He reached India at Calicut, Kerala (1498) acquiring the distinction of being the first European to reach India via the sea route.

The Portuguese were the first to establish colonies in India. Due to their superiority on the seas, they could easily maintain their positions against the powerful land forces in India. Also since they were mainly concentrated in south India, they did not have to face the might of the Mughal Empire.

In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was formed, and the people from the Netherlands were empowered by their government to make war, conclude treaties, acquire territories, and build fortresses.

Also read: Opium Wars: History and Aftermath

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Table of Contents

Growth of the English East India Company

In 1599, an English company was formed by a group of merchants to trade with the east, known as Merchant Adventurers. It was given the permission and exclusive rights to trade with the east, by the queen in 1600.

Mughal emperor, Jahangir, gave captain Hawkins the royal farman to set up factories on the western coast. Later, Sir Thomas Roe obtained the farman to establish factories in all parts of the Mughal empire.

Bombay passed into the British hands as dowry given by the Portuguese. The British conflicts with the Dutch were settled by giving up all claims to Indonesia.

The conditions in the south were apt for the English. They started from Madras, by building a fort there, called Fort St. George . The problems broke out when the English sacked Hugli and declared war on the emperor. They failed miserably. This was the first lesson they learnt. From then on, they relied on flattery and humble entreaties, waiting for their chance. In 1698, Fort William was built and Calcutta was founded. Madras, Bombay and Calcutta soon grew up to be flourishing centres of trade.

The French, under Dupleix, who had come to India by then had already started interfering in the affairs of the local princes using their well-equipped army. In 1742, a war had broken out in Europe between France and England.

Following the death of the nizam in 1748, his son Nasir Jung took over the crown. He was challenged by Muzaffar Jung, a grandson of the nizam. Similar situations were in the Carnatic, where Chanda Sahib was conspiring against the nawab Anwarudeen. The French took the sides of both the rebels, and won both of their claims for them, killing Anwarudeen and Nasir Jung. The English, naturally took the side of the fallen, under Muhammad Ali, a son of Anwarudeen. The wars were then won by the English side under the able generalship and cunning of Robert Clive. Finally, the French recalled Dupleix from India, according to their treaty in 1754.  Later, in 1760, the French were completely destroyed at the battle of Wandiwash. Thus, the English remained the sole masters of India.

The farman granted to the British by the emperor enabled them to conduct free trade in Bengal. Neither did they have to pay dastaks for the movement of such goods. However, these were misused by the company’s servants and this meant the loss of revenue for Bengal. In 1756, the grandson of Alivardi Khan, Siraj-ud-Daulah came to the throne, he demanded the English that they should trade on the same basis as the Indian merchants. Matters took a turn for the worse when the English refused and strengthened their fortifications. This led to the Battle of Plassey in 1757 , in which Siraj-ud-Daulah was treacherously defeated by the cheating by Mir Jaffar and Rai Durlabh. This brought the British immense prestige and revenue.

Later, when Mir Jaffar couldn’t keep up with the tribute promised to the British, they installed Mir Qasim on the throne. He was clever and knew that both revenue and an army was required to stand against the British. And finally, he abolished all the duties on internal trade. This angered the British, and they defeated Mir Qasim in the Battle of Buxar in 1764 .

How did the British who came to India for trade become the rulers of territories?

• In 1600, the East India Company acquired a charter from the ruler of England, Queen Elizabeth I, granting it the sole right to trade with the East. Then onwards no other trading group in England could compete with the East India Company.
• However, the royal charter didn’t prevent other European powers from entering the Eastern markets.
• The Portuguese had already established their presence on the western coast of India and had their base in The Dutch too were exploring the possibilities of trade in the Indian Ocean. Soon the French traders arrived on the scene.
• The problem was that all the companies were interested in buying the same things. So the only way the trading companies could flourish was by eliminating rival competitors. The urge to secure markets, therefore, led to fierce battles between the trading companies.
• Trade was carried on with arms and trading posts were protected through fortification.

East India Company begins to trade in Bengal

• The first English factory was set up on the banks of the river Hugli in 1651.
• By 1696 it began building a fort around the settlement near the factory where merchants and traders
• The company persuaded the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb to issue a farman granting the Company the right to trade duty-free.
• Aurangzeb’s farman had granted only the Company the right to trade duty-free. The officials of the Company, who were carrying on private trade on the side, were expected to pay duty. However, they did private trades without paying taxes, causing an enormous loss of revenue for Bengal.
• This behaviour led to a protest by the Nawab of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan.

Also read: India-Portugal Relations

How the trade led to battles?

• We have already seen that with the decline of Mughal rule, many successor states emerged .
• After the death of Aurangzeb, the Bengal nawabs asserted their power and autonomy, as other regional powers were doing at that time.
• Nawabs refused to grant the Company concessions, demanded large tributes for the Company’s right to trade, denied it any right to mint coins, and stopped it from extending its fortifications.
• The Company on its part declared that the trade could flourish only if the duties were removed. It was also convinced that to expand trade it had to enlarge its settlements, buy up villages, and rebuild its forts.
• The conflicts led to confrontations and finally culminated in the famous Battle of Plassey .

The Battle of Plassey

• Sirajuddaulah, then Nawab of Bengal, with his force, captured the English factory at Kassimbazar and then went to Calcutta to establish control over the Company’s fort.
• Company officials in Madras sent forces under the command of Robert Clive, reinforced by naval fleets. Prolonged negotiations with the Nawab followed.
• Finally, in 1757, Robert Clive led the Company’s army against Sirajuddaulah at Plassey.
• Clive had managed to secure the support of one of Sirajuddaulah’s commanders named Mir Jafar by promising to make him Nawab after crushing Sirajuddaulah.
• The Battle of Plassey became famous because it was the first major victory for the English East India Company in India.
• The Company was still unwilling to take over the responsibility of the administration. Its prime objective was the expansion of trade.
• But Mir Jafar protested with the British on administrative matters. He was replaced by Mir Mir Qasim. He too had conflicts with the East India company. The Company defeated him in the Battle of Buxar (1764).
• East India company now started to shift from their primary objective from trade to expansion of territories.
• In 1765 the Mughal emperor appointed the Company as the Diwan of the provinces of Bengal. The Diwani allowed the Company to use the vast revenue resources of Bengal.
• Now revenues from India could finance Company expenses. These revenues could be used to purchase cotton and silk textiles in India, maintain Company troops, and meet the cost of building the Company fort and offices at Calcutta.

Company Rule Expands

• After the Battle of Buxar (1764), the Company appointed Residents in Indian states.
• Through the Residents, the Company officials began interfering in the internal affairs of Indian states.
• Sometimes the Company forced the states into a “subsidiary alliance”. According to the terms of this alliance, Indian rulers were not allowed to have their independent armed forces. They will be protected by the Company but had to pay for the “subsidiary forces” that the Company maintain for the purpose of this protection. If the Indian rulers failed to make the payment, then part of their territory was taken away as a penalty.

Conflict with Tipu Sultan

• Mysore controlled the profitable trade of the Malabar coast where the Company purchased pepper and cardamom. In 1785 Tipu Sultan stopped the export of these substances through the ports of his kingdom and disallowed local merchants from trading with the Company.
• He also established a close relationship with the French in India and modernised his army with their help. All these made the British furious.
• Four wars were fought with Mysore (1767- 69, 1780-84, 1790-92 and 1799). Only in the last – the Battle of Seringapatam – did the Company ultimately got a victory.
• Mysore was later placed under the former ruling dynasty of the Wodeyars and a subsidiary alliance was imposed on the state.

Conflict with the Marathas

• With their defeat in the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, the Marathas’ dream of ruling from Delhi came to an end.
• The Marathas were subdued in a series of wars. In the first war that ended in 1782 with the Treaty of Salbai, there was no clear winner.
• The Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803-05) was fought on different fronts, resulting in the British gaining Orissa and the territories north of the Yamuna river including Agra and Delhi.
• The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817-19 crushed the Maratha power.
• The Company now had complete control over the territories south of the Vindhyas.

The claim to paramountcy

• Under Lord Hastings (Governor-General from 1813 to 1823) a new policy of “paramountcy” was initiated. Now the Company claimed that its authority was paramount or supreme, so it was justified in annexing or threatening to annex any Indian kingdom.
• This view continued to guide later British policies.
• These periods saw the British shifting the control the north-west because of Russian invasion fear.
• British fought a prolonged war with Afghanistan between 1838 and 1842 and established indirect Company rule there. Sind was taken over. In 1849, Punjab was annexed.

The Doctrine of Lapse

• The final wave of annexations occurred under Lord Dalhousie who was the Governor-General from 1848 to 1856 using Doctrine of Lapse policy.
• The doctrine declared that if an Indian ruler died without a male heir his kingdom would “lapse”, that is, become part of Company territory. Many kingdoms were annexed simply by applying this doctrine: Examples – Satara (1848), Sambalpur  (1850), Udaipur (1852), Nagpur (1853) and Jhansi (1854).
• Finally, in 1856, the Company also took over Awadh. Now this time the British mentioned that they took over Awadh in order to free the people from the “misgovernment” of the Nawab, which enraged by the Nawab who was deposed. The people of Awadh later joined the great revolt that broke out in 1857.

Setting up a New Administration

• Warren Hastings (Governor-General 1773 to 1785) played a significant role in the expansion of Company power.
• By his time the Company had acquired power not only in Bengal but also in Bombay and Madras and these were considered as administrative units called Presidencies .
• Each was ruled by a Governor. The supreme head of the administration was the Governor-General.
• Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General, introduced several administrative reforms, notably in the sphere of justice.
• Under the Regulating Act of 1773, a new Supreme Court was established, while a court of appeal – the Sadar Nizamat Adalat – was also set up at Calcutta.
• The principal figure in an Indian district was the Collector whose main job was to collect revenue and taxes and maintain law and order in his district with the help of judges, police officers etc.

Role of Governor Generals in the British conquests

We shall try to understand what happened after Plassey and Buxar. The two battles made the Brits unquestioned champions of the land, but they still had obstacles to pass. These were the small states throughout the territory of India. The way some of the governors-general handled the situation and finally made the British the sole power in India is worth understanding.

Robert Clive

We begin with Robert Clive (1765-72) who was given a second chance following his outstanding military leadership. He introduced a system known as ‘dual administration’ in Bengal. The company already had the power to collect its own taxes. Thus it was the diwan. Now, with the say in the appointment of the deputy subahdar, the company got the de-facto ownership of the nizamat too. Thus, in effect, the company had power without responsibility.

It was also during Clive’s time that the taxation in Bengal became so favourable to the British that they stopped bringing money from England to buy Indian goods. Instead, they invested the revenue they received from Bengal in buying Indian goods itself. Then they sold it in foreign countries. These were called the ‘investments’ of the company in India.

Warren Hastings

The next was Warren Hastings (1772-85) , who had ‘war’ in his name itself. The interference in others’ territories continued. Initially, he fought Mysore with the help of the Nizam, and later intervened in the internal politics of the Marathas, by siding with Raghunath Rao, against the infant Peshwa Madhav Rao 2, who was represented by Nana Phadnis. This long Anglo-Maratha war lasted from 1775 to 1782. It was at this time that he had to face the combined forces of the Marathas, the Nizam, and Mysore. But through tactics and turning one ruler against another, he fought his way through. In the first Anglo-Maratha war, the British couldn’t do much. In the end, the treaty of Salbai was signed which maintained the status quo and gave them ample time to recover. This enabled them to fight with Hyder, in which they were helped by the Marathas.

War with Haider Ali started in 1780. Though Haider won initially, Hastings’ cunning tactics helped the British in choking out deals with Nizam and the Marathas through the cessation of territories. In 1781, Haider Ali was defeated by Eyre Coot and later died in 1782. His son Tipu carried on the fight from 1789 but was defeated in 1792. Half of his treaties were ceded by the treaty of Seringapatanam.

Wellesley (1798-1805) was the next important Governor-General. By 1797, Mysore and Marathas were weakened in power. He knew it was the ripe time for rapid expansion. He followed the policy of ‘Subsidiary alliances’, outright wars, and assumption of territories of previously subordinated rulers. You know what the theory of a subsidiary alliance is. It was described as “a system of fattening allies as we fatten oxen, till they were worthy of being devoured”. The first was the Nizam in 1798 and 1800. Then came the Nawab of Awadh in 1801.

All this time, Tipu was strengthening himself. He had also asked for French help. But in 1799, before the French help could reach him, he fought a fierce war and died.

At this time, the Marathas were a confederacy of five factions namely the Peshwa (Poona), Gaekwad (Baroda), Sindhia (Gwalior), Holkar (Indore), and Bhonsle (Nagpur). Though Peshwa was the nominal head, these factions were constantly at war. When Peshwa Baji Rao 2 was defeated by Holkar, he took the treaty of Subsidiary alliance. Even then, it would have been really difficult for the British to defeat them, only if they stood together. But even in the face of imminent danger, they didn’t unite. Thus, one or more factions stood and watched when another one fought the British and were defeated one by one.

However, the expansionist policy of Wellesley was proving too costly to the government. Hence, he was recalled from India.

The next Governor-General was Hastings (1813-1823) . The Marathas decided to push one last time. They united to form a small group, but by now, it was too late. They were easily defeated. The Peshwas territories were annexed to the Bombay presidency. To satisfy them, a small kingdom of Satara was given to Shivaji’s descendant who ruled it under the British.

Thus, by 1818, the entire subcontinent, except Punjab and Sind was under the British. They completed this task by 1857. The growing Anglo-Russian rivalry in Europe and Asia caused the fear of a Russian attack from the North-West. Sind was a friendly state to the British. Still, in 1843, Charles Napier conquered it. He later wrote, “We have no right to seize Sind, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful humane piece of rascality it will be”.

Dalhousie (1848-1856) was the next Governor-General. He introduced the Doctrine of lapse , by which he annexed many small states like Satara in 1848, Nagpur and Jhansi in 1854, etc. This was a major cause of the Great revolt of 1857. He also wanted to conquer Awadh, but his doctrine wouldn’t work there because the Nawab had many heirs. Thus, he accused him of having misgoverned the state, and annexed it on that pretext, in 1856.

This article is the 2nd part of the article series on Modern Indian History. Click the link to read the  6-part framework to study modern Indian History . This is an easy-to-learn approach to master the history of modern India as a story.

Apart from the 6-part approach, we have also published many other articles on  Indian History , which can be accessed from the  ClearIAS Study materials  section.

Books referred to prepare this article

• NCERT Books Class 6-12
• Modern Indian History by Sonali Bansal and Snehil Tripathi
• History Of Modern India by Bipan Chandra

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Reader Interactions

May 2, 2021 at 6:39 am

Battle of wandiwash happened in 1760 not 1796

May 7, 2021 at 12:54 pm

Updated. Thank you for pointing it out.

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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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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.

The British also imposed their culture and traditions on Indians. They looked down upon Indian traditions and made Indians feel inferior. This caused a loss of self-esteem among Indians and a sense of inferiority that took a long time to overcome.

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.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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