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Karnataka PCS Free Notes

KPSC KAS Prelims and Mains Exam

Armed rebellion in Karnataka against the British

Karnataka has been a land of freedom fighters from the earliest times. When the British power slowly spread over the whole of India in the last part of the 18th century, the people of Karnataka could not tolerate this alien rule. So they decided to wage a revolt. Thus the revolution started, and we call it as ’Armed Insurrection’. Venkatappa Naik of Surpur, Bheema Rao of Mundaragi, Baba Saheb of Nargund, Rani Channamma of Kittur, Rani Channamma of Keladi were a few notable brave men and women who struggled throughout against the British for the freedom of the country.

The Bedas and Kodagas have been the foremost fighting races of Karnataka, and have continuously maintained their high reputation.

During the second half of the 18th century, the British slowly advanced their power and very shrewdly carried on their operations at first as vassals of the Moghal Emperor and the people accustomed to leave matters of government, could not notice the fact that they were slowly but steadily being succeeded to the position of slaves under a foreigner. The brave resistance put up by Hyder and Tippu to the British had a deep defence of Mysore. Hyder, who had defeated the Wadeyars and conquered Mysore, was fed up with the expansion policy of the British, Earlier, he was on friendly terms with the British. But later on, he came to know about the plan of expansion of the British empire in India, in order to curb their desire he tried to become friendly with the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas. But he could not do so, because by that time tactfully the Britishers had taken the support of the Marathas and Nizam. Hyder had a short lived life and died early. Then Tippu, the son of Hyder, continued the fight with the British. In the year 1792, he fought with the British in order to drive them away. But Tippu was fully defeated and he was put into great trouble. Later on, in the IV Mysore War (1799), Tippu died fighting as a brave man. Thus, the father and the son protested and revolted against the Britishers. However this was not an end, the anti-colonial spirit was further fuelled which is visible in various revolt that broke out in the state across the timeline in British era.

A brief summary of various armed rebellion waged against British in Karnataka

• The First anglo-mysore war  (1767–69) saw Hyder Ali gain some measure of success against the British, almost capturing Madras. The British convinced the Nizam of Hyderabad to attack Hyder, but the Nizam changed sides, supporting the Sultan. That was temporary however, and the Nizam signed a new treaty with the British in Feb. 1768.
• The second anglo-mysore war (1780–84) witnessed bloodier battles with fortunes fluctuating between the contesting powers. Tipu defeated Baillie at the Battle of Pollilur in Sept. 1780, and Braithwaite at  Kumbakonam in Feb. 1782, both of whom were taken prisoner to Seringapatam. This war saw the rise of Sir Eyre Coote , the British commander who defeated Hyder Ali at the Battle of Porto novo and Arni. Tipu continued the war following his father’s death. Finally, the war ended with the last British-Indian treaty with an Indian ruler on equal footing, the 11 March 1784 Treaty of Manglore.
• In the Third anglo-mysore war  (1790–92), Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore and an ally of France, invaded the nearby state of Travancore in 1789, which was a British ally.British forces were commanded by Governor-general Cornwallis himself. The resultant war lasted three years and was a resounding defeat for Mysore. The war ended after the 1792 seize of Srirangapattan and the signing of the treaty of Srirangapattanam, according to which Tipu had to surrender half of his kingdom to the British East India Company and its allies. [
• The Fourth anglo-mysore war  (1799) saw the death of Tipu Sultan and further reductions in Mysorean territory. Mysore’s alliance with the French was seen as a threat to the East India Company and Mysore was attacked from all four sides. Tipu’s army were outnumbered 4:1 in this war.  The Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas launched an invasion from the north. The British won a decisive victory at seize of Srirangapattan(1799).
• Dhondiya Wagh (1800)

One of the first to revolt against the new arrangement was Dhondiya Wagh. He was born in Chennagiri near Mysore. He joined Hyder Ali’s cavalry in 1780. Later he developed differences with Tipu, who incarcerated him. Hence British soldiers found Dhondiya in Srirangapattana’s prison when they ransacked the city after the death of Tipu. Dhondiya was released, who however immediately vanished and tried to gather the demobilised Tipu’s soldiers. Very soon he built up a significant armed force with a cavalry etc. He kept moving from territory to territory and capturing small towns and forts that had been taken over by Marathas, British and the Nizam. Governor General, Richard Wellesley was exasperated by Dhondiya’s revolt and assigned his brother Arthur Wellesley (Later to be known as Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napolean at Waterloo) to suppress Dhondiya’s revolt. He sent troops not only from Madras but even summoned some from Bengal.

The theatre of Dhondiya’s war encompassed  all of Central and North Karnataka. He was supported by the people and smaller principalities (samsthana) that were discontented with the British. British historians have painted him as “rogue bandit”, whereas Dhondiya himself had the title of “lord of both the worlds” among his people

• Venkatadri Nayak (1803)

Aigur (Ballam) Venkatadri Nayak was another leader who started his revolt when the British were tied down by Dhondiya Wagh. His father Krishnappa Nayak, was made the ruler of Aigur by Hyder Ali. But Krishnappa betrayed him and joined the Marathas in 1792 and helped the British. After the war he was scared of Tipu and ran away to Kodagu (Coorg). However Tipu did not punish him but instead reinstated him. Venkatadri Nayak captured Subrahmanya Ghat, a crucial pass in the Sahyadris with access to Mangalore. He attacked the British troops at Arakere and also defeated a 2500 strong army sent by Wodeyar of Mysore.

The campaign lasted nearly three years and finally on February 10, 1803 he and his 6 followers were arrested when they were in search of food supplies. All the insurgents were later executed. Thus two great warriors were suppressed by the British with Machiavellian tactics using the Mysore Wodeyars, Marathas and the Nizam.

• Koppal Veerappa (1819)

Karnataka was torn asunder between Nizam, Marathas and the British after Tipu’s defeat.  As Nizam’s unbridled oppression with heavy taxation increased, there was no way but for the peasantry to revolt. One such revolt was led by Veerappa in Koppal in 1818. Veerapaa was a small landowner in Koppal, he built a force and captured Koppal and Bahadur forts built by Hyder Ali 40 years earlier. British forces led by Major Doughton and Brig General Pritzler rushed to crush Veerappa and Nizam’s general Idruskhan also joined them. Veerappa fought valiantly for five days with only 500 men and died in battle. Even though Veerappa’s rebellion was confined to a small area around Koppal, it represented a popular peasant revolt and inspired many more in the region.

• Deshmukhs of Bidar (1820)

After Tipu’s defeat the remnants of the old Bahmani Kingdom of Bidar too were incorporated into Nizam’s rule and burdened with heavy taxation. As a result revolts started appearing in 1820 in Udgir. Using Suliyal as their base the local Deshmukhs led by Shivalingayya, Tirumal Rao and Meghsham led this revolt. Hence this revolt is known as the revolt of Deshmukhs. The Nizam relied on British help to suppress the Deshmukhs. Lt. Gen. Sutherland was assigned for the same and he defeated them in a campaign lasting two months and imprisoned them.

• Sindagi Revolt (1824)

The popular revolt against the British spread to Bijapur too and in Sindagi, 40 km from Bijapur the local people led by Chidambar Dikshit, his son Diwakar Dikshit and Diwakar’s comrades Shettyappa, Raoji and Rastiya declared sovereignty of people of Sindagi. They took over Sindagi Taluk and boldly declared that “British Raj does not exist here and we anyway do not recognise it. We are sovereign”. British could not tolerate this challenge to their rule in such a brazen way even if though it was confined to a Taluk in North Karnataka. They sent forces led by Lt. Stevenson to capture the leaders. However the forces could not locate the leaders. A traitor Annappa Patne however showed the hiding place to the British. The local people who came to know the same lynched Annappa on the spot. However the British were able to capture the leaders and imprison them. The revolt was confined to a Taluk, but showed advanced consciousness.

• Rani Chennamma and the Kittur Revolt (1824)

Chennamma started ruling the kingdom in the name of the adopted minor prince. But British refused to recognise and took over the administration of Kittur. This enraged the people of Kittur.

Chennamma patiently tried to get justice and sent her emissaries to talk to the “Company Sarkar” (British East India Company) and at the same time started strengthening the fort and carrying out various military preparations anticipating a conflict. She called all the loyal fighters from the surrounding region and discussed the situation with them, sought their advice and loyalty and carried out a daring attack on the British forces. British forces were defeated and many were taken prisoners by the insurgents.

This was a great setback for British Raj and its cultivated image as an invincible force in the region. They soon gathered forces from Sholapur, Mysore and Bombay and neared Kittur. Rani sent them a message that if they attack Kittur then all British prisoners of war will be put to death and then the people of Kittur will fight to death. Taken aback, Chaplin, Commissioner of Deccan sent a message that if the British prisoners are released and Sardar Gurusiddappa is handed over then the status quo will prevail. Chennamma refused to hand over Gurusiddappa but released British prisoners as an act of good faith. However Chaplin had no intention of keeping his end of the deal and sent his forces under the leadership of Lt.. Col Deacon to siege Kittur on Dec. 3, 1824. The fighters of Kittur fought bravely for three days, however due to treachery they found that their gun powder had been mixed with cow dung and made useless. The fort fell. Rani Chennamma escaped with the younger Rani Veeramma through a secret passage towards Sangolli where she had supporters. However British were able to intercept her on her way and capture her. She was imprisoned in Bailhongal prison. After incarceration of four years Chennamma died in prison on February 3, 1829. The Kittur countryside was full of rebellion for over five years. The leader of this rebellion was Rani Chennamma’s ardent admirer Rayanna of Sangolli.

• Sangolli Rayanna (1829)

Rayanna was born in a shepherd family in Sangolli. The family had a fighting tradition and was loyal to the Desais of Kittur. Rayanna fought with the Kittur army in 1824 and was captured by the British after the defeat of Rani. However soon he was released as a part of British pacification program. . In November-December 1829, some of his friends invited him to lead a revolt against the British. Rayanna soon started a guerrilla war suitable to the surrounding landscape. He gathered a compact group of fighters and started attacking treasuries and rich land owners who were British collaborators. He seized mortgage and debt documents of peasantry from them and burnt them.

Realising that it was not possible to capture Rayanna by conventional warfare, British adopted other means to do so. They sent in some spies into his army and caught him unarmed and executed.

• Nagar Peasant Revolt (1830-31)

Nagar comprised of the taluks of Sagar, Nagar, Kowlidurga, Koppa, Lakwally, Sorab, Shikarpur, Shivamogga, Honnaly, Harihar, Chennagiri, Tarikere, Kadur, and Chickamagalur. The region came under heavy taxation. In fact nearly 60% of the Kingdom’s revenues were coming from this region alone. After suffering from the duo’s arbitrariness for three decades, 1800-1830, the region was ripe for rebellion against the Wodeyars and their protectors—the “Company Sarkar”.

Taking advantage of this, Basavappa spread the news that he had assumed the sovereignty of the country and promised the ryots full remission of all balance debt. The rebels gave a good fight to the troops. They captured some of the forts in Nagar, and in many places they repulsed the Mysore troops. The rebellion was spontaneous and did not have a visionary leadership but it however demonstrated the widespread anger among different sections of Kannadigas against the British rule and as well as their puppets like the Wodeyars and Poornaiah.

• Coastal Uprisings (1830-31)

There were widespread uprisings against heavy taxation in the coastal regions of Karnataka. These regions had first protested the taxes earlier in 1809-1810. The later agitations learnt from this experience and were consequently more audacious. The mass struggle started in early 1830 and assumed a host of forms. The most important of these was the koota or simply ‘gathering’. It was in Bekal (Kasargod) that the Kootas started in the first week of January 1831 and within a few days they spread to the northern parts of Kanara. In order to organise these Kootas, the ryots assigned one Patel and two head ryots in each of the villages.

In their petitions, the ryots not only complained about the harsh revenue assessment of November 1830, but they also demanded remission to them all at a uniform rate.

It was after Cameron’s promise (March 1831) to the riots that their petitions would be considered and remissions would be made after an examination of their losses to redress their hardships that they dispersed and stopped organising the Kootas. Thus by April 1831 the rumblings of Koota rebellions died down.

• Kodagu (Coorg) Revolts (1833-37)

After the defeat of Tipu, the East India Company could not directly rule Kodagu. They had to restore the kingdom to the traditional kings of Haleri dynasty who were earlier displaced by Hyder and Tipu. There were constant skirmishes between him and the British administration, which was based in Bangalore and Mysore and finally a war between the British and Kodava forces was inevitable and king was defeated. However, several revolt followed the war. These were led by Swami Aparampaar, Kalyan Swami and Putta Basava. All these fighters claimed to be heirs to Kodagu throne one after another and sought support from the people in their fight against the British in the name of Haleri dynasty.

Other revolts before 1857

There were several other revolts which were local and minor in dimension but which had a lot of impact on the psyche of the people of North Karnataka between 1840 and 1857. One of them was in Badami, a town in today’s Bagalkot district, which has an ancient history and was the capital of Chalukyas who ruled much of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh between 6th and 8th centuries CE. An army built by loyalists of the deposed king of Satara took over the fort and established their rule in 1839-40. They were suppressed by British Army and the leaders sentenced to death and life imprisonment.

Similarly there were uprisings in Nippani, currently in Belgavi district, in 1840-41, where over 300 Arab fighters under the leadership of local Zamindar, Raghunath Rao attacked the fort and took it over. Later they were suppressed by the Company Army. In 1849 the Paleygar of Chitradurga rose up unsuccessfully. Revolts led by Lingappa in Bidar in 1852 harassed the British for several months and he had captured several forts.

Uprisings in Karnataka during Revolt of 1857

There were several uprisings in Karnataka during the Ghadar in 1857 and went on till 1860. Unlike the Gangetic belt, where the revolt was signalled by mutiny of British Indian Army, which were then followed by revolts led by kings and nawabs,  the Karnataka revolts were popular uprisings led by local peasant leaders, or small principalities who linked their local struggles with the larger national one . The area of uprising covered the entire districts from the coastal Canara (present day Karwar and Mangalore) in the Madras Presidency, to the eastern Raichur and Koppal districts under the Nizam; from Bijapurand Dharwadin the North in Bombay Presidency to Sringeri and Hassan in the south.

Some of major uprisings are as follows

                 Bedas of Halagali

fighting tribes which fought the British tooth and nail from 1820’s to 1942 and formed the backbone of many uprisings in the Deccan The East India Company announced on 11 September, 1857 that all Indians should disarm, submit their arms to the company and then get licences to carry arms. This was simply out of question for Bedas. The revolt, which started in a small village called Halagali, kept snowballing and started spreading to surrounding areas. The British Raj saw it as a serious threat to its rule and when the local ruler was not able to suppress . The British followed a scorched earth policy in the region and after the final battle captured 290 Bedas and hanged 19 leaders of the uprising in Mudhol market in December 1857.

Nargund Bandaya (revolt)

The principality of Nargund used to be under the Peshwas after the defeat of Tipu. After the defeat of Peshwas in 1818, it came under British overlordship. Bhaskar Rao Bhave also known as Baba Saheb rose to the throne of Nargund in 1842 but he faced problems because of Doctrine of Lapse as he had no son to heir the throne. This enraged Baba Saheb and he got in touch with several rulers in Karnataka like Mundaragi Bhimaraya, Surpur Venkatappa Nayakaand many others. In May 1858 when the British sent a force to prevent his networking with other rulers, he attacked them. Baba Saheb consulted his comrades and decided to escape to a nearby forest. However in the forest near Torgal he was betrayed by some camp followers. This led to his capture and later execution in Belagavi on June 12, 1858. Nargund Bandaya is a legend in North Karnataka.

Surpur Venkatappa Nayak

Surpur or Shorapuris situated in the hills, about 50 km west of Yadgiri, a district headquarters. In 1857, British got wind that some representatives of Nana Saheb came to Surpur and had secret meetings with young Raja Venkatappa Nayak. In the meanwhile, Mahipal Singh, a rebel from 1857 revolt, was captured by the British and he disclosed to them that he was carrying out instructions of Raja Venkatappa Nayak.  in February 1858, they sent troops led by Capt. Windham and Maj Hughes to attack Surpur, but the fort of Surpur was very strong and a fierce battle ensued. When they were outnumbered, the Raja escaped to Hyderabad and tried to get Nizam and his Diwan’s support for the uprising. Unfortunately however, they handed him over to the British. Then he was jailed and killed subsequently.

Mundaragi Bhimaraya

Bhimaraya of Mundaragi is a legendary hero of 1857 revolt in Karnataka. He had observed the development of anti-colonial movement in Karnataka and networked with various like-minded leaders. Nana Saheb’s call to the people of India and all Desais, Deshmukhs, Deshpandes, Jahagirdars, Patels and Kulkarnis of Karnataka greatly influenced him. On 23 May 1858 the fouzdar of Dambal raided one such arms cache and sealed it. On hearing the news Bhimaraya came with his army attacked the armoury and took back all his arms and ammunition and shifted to a safer place in Shirahatti. Then he started raiding British armouries in various places. . After a fierce fight Bhimaraya fell to British bullets on 1 June, 1858. British carried out brutal reprisals against Bhimaraya’s associates and supporters.

Canara Revolts

The district of Canara consisted of present Mangalore (Dakshina Kannada) and Karwar (Uttara Kannada) districts and were thickly forested and mountainous.  As uprisings in coastal Maharashtra spread during 1857, Canara too became a refuge for revolutionaries and also a centre of resistance. Here the revolutionaries who came from Savantwadi played a major role. Though many British historians have said that these revolts were caused by the increased land and salt taxes, it is clear that they were inspired by the stories of 1857 uprising in the North and were waiting for Nanasaheb to move southwards. Despite the death and capture of many leaders, new ones kept springing up in this region for nearly three years. Finally British divided the district into two and attached Karwar to Bombay presidency in 1862.

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• India under Colonial Rule, 1752-1933

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Power and Preachers comprises 6 diverse primary source collections which detail the political, economic, and spiritual realities of British colonial rule in India. The featured collections include records from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, from the establishment of the East India Company and the India Act to the emergence of Gandhi and the independence movement. Drawn from a diverse range of sources, the materials show the Raj through the eyes of commercial, military, and bureaucratic elites, as well as missionaries, labourers, and Indians themselves. 

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KSEEB SSLC Class 10 History Solutions Chapter 3 The Impact of British Rule in India

Students can Download History Chapter 3 The Impact of British Rule in India Questions and Answers, Notes Pdf, KSEEB SSLC Class 10 Social Science Solutions  helps you to revise the complete Karnataka State Board Syllabus and score more marks in your examinations.

Karnataka State Syllabus Class 10 Social Science History Chapter 3 The Impact of British Rule in India

Class 10 social science the impact of british rule in india textual questions and answers.

I. Fill in the following blanks with suitable answers:

Question 1. Diwani Adalat in civil court was introduced by …….. Answer: Warren Hastings.

Question 2. The post of Superintendent of Police was created by ……… Answer: Lord Cornwallis.

Question 3. The Permanent Zamindari system was implemented in Bengal and Bihar provinces in ………. Answer: 1793.

Question 4. The Land tax system was, implemented by Alexander Reed is ……… Ans: Ryotwari System.

Question 5. The British Officer who supported the Modern Education in India is ……… Answer: William Bentinck.

Question 6. The Regulating Act was implemented in the year ………. Answer: 1773.

II. Discuss and answer the following questions:

Question 1. Illustrate the judicial system formulated through East India Company. Answer: A new Judicial System started finding roots when the British rule began taking over from the Mughal rule. After the Battle of Buxar, the Mughal Emperor ShaAlam handed over the ‘Diwani Rights’, the authority to collect land taxes to the British. With this, Dual¬Administration came into effect in Bengal region. This is also called as ‘Dual¬Governance’. Under this, the authority to collect land taxes, civil and judiciary were given to the Indian officials, whereas the British retained the authority of managing the revenue collected. Later on the British thought of bringing more centralized judicial system in India. With the implementation of this system, the British overtook the authority of the Mughal and established their supremacy in India. This was attained by implementing new Judicial System in India.

According to the administrative plan devised by Warren Hastings who took over the administration as Governor in 1772, two types of courts were heeded to be established in each district:’ ‘A Dewani Aadalat as a civil court and ‘A Fouzadaari Aadalat as a criminal court. In these civil courts Hindus were dispensed justice as per the Hindu scriptures and the Muslims as per the Shariyat. Slowly, the British legal procedures were introduced in the criminal courts. Civil courts came under the administration of European officers. Though the criminal courts were under the control of ‘Qajis’, they were functioning under the supervision of European officers.

Question 2. What are the measures under taken at the time of British in Police system? Answer: The Police are in charge of maintaining the internal law and order situation. Lord Cornwallis implemented the efficient Police System in India for the first time. He created the new post of Superintendent of Police (SP). He divided a district into many ‘Stations’ and put every station under a ‘Kotwal’. Similarly he put every village under the care of ‘Chowkidhar’. ‘Kotwal’ was made accountable for thefts, crimes and other law violations at village level.

The severe drought of 1770 led to the weak law and order situation. Hence, the entire police system was brought under the control of the British Officers. The system of appointing British Magistrates started in 1781. The Police Officers were under the power of the Magistrates. The Police system underwent continuous changes. In 1861, the Police Law was implemented. This law is the base of good law and order administration. But, Indians were not appointed for the post of officers. In 1902, the Police Commission Law allowed the appointment of suitable educational qualification for the post of the police officers. In spite of all these measures, the discrirnination against the Indians did not end.

Question 3. In permanent Zamindari system the Indian farmers “were born in debt, lived in debt and died in debt”. How? Prove. Answer:

• In order to generate steady revenue per annum. This was called the permanent Zamindari system.
• Lord corn Wallis has introduced this system in Bihar and Bengal.
• Zamindar became the landowner. He agreed to pay the land tax to the company.
• He was free to collect any amount of land taxes from the farmers
• He could retain the excess money collected.
• This benefited the zamindar more.
• If the Zamindar was unable to collect land taxes due to floods and famine and pay the company the ownership of the lands was taken away by the company.
• Both the zamindar and the company were benefited by this system.
• The farmers were the grave suffered.
• Farmers and labourers suffered due to irregular work.
• They were exploited and had to lead a life of insecurity. So Charles Metcaff say that: the Indian farmers were born in debt, lived in debt and died in debt due to land tax policies.

Question 4. What were the main aspects of Ryotwari system? Answer: The Ryotwari System was first implemented in Baramahal region by Alexander Reed in 1792. This system was later implemented in Madras and Mysore region by Thomas Monroe in 1801. Most of these regions had become part of British Empire by that time. Under this system, both the farmer and the company were directly linked. The tiller of the land was recognized as the owner of the land. The owner had to pay fifty percent of produce as land tax to the company government. The land tax had thirty years tenure. The tax could be reviewed after this tenure.

Though the small farmers were given land ownership, they were subjected to more suffering due to heavy land taxes.The officials took punitive actions to collect land taxes. The farmers had to borrow from the money lenders whenever the crops failed. They had to sell their lands whenever they failed to repay the loans. Though the company government claimed that the new system benefits the farmers, the irony was that more farmers had to lose their lands due to its implementation.

Question 5. What were the effects of British Land taxes? Answer: Following are the effects of British Land Tax System:

• A new class of Zamindars who exploited the farmers was created.
• The farmers who were subjected to the exploitation of the Zamindars became landless slowly.
• Land became a commodity. Loans could be raised by mortgaging the lands.
• Many Zamindars also had to mortgage their lands in order to pay the land taxes.
• The Agriculture sector became commercialized and had to grow raw materials needed by industries back in England.
• The money lenders became strong.

Question 6. Make a list of the effects of British Education in India. Answer: The traditional education of Indians was in practice continuously. Certain changes occurred in the traditional education system during the rule of Muslim kings during the middle, ages. Later, new changes occurred during the British rule during the 18th century. New schools were started for the children of British and Europeans living in India. Since these facilities were never extended to the locals, it was of no use for them. Warren Hastings facilitated the expansion of modern education in India. In 1781, he started ‘Calcutta Madarasa’. Jonathan Duncan, a British individual started Sanskrit College in Banaras in 1792. But, it was Charles Grant who pressed for the universalization of British’ education in India. It effects are :

•  Indians could develop modernity, secularism, democratic attitudes and rationality along with Nationalistic ideals.
• The impetus was received for the local literature and languages. This facilitated unity in thinking process among the educated class.
• Periodicals started emerging. These scrutinized the policies and. working of the government which in turn enabled the Indians to have critical opinions on various issues.
•  New social and religious reformation movements emerged.
• The thoughts of thinkers like J.S. Mill, Rousseau and Montesquieu brought fresh thinking in the mind of educated youth of India.
• The freedom struggles that were taking place across the globe influenced the Indians also.
• Indians could understand and appreciate their rich tradition. Like this, the new thinking and cultural perception that emerged due to the British Education System created a new generation of Indians with progressive attitudes.

Question 7. What were the restrictions imposed in Regulating Act? Answer: The restrictions imposed in Regulating Act are :

• Before the implementation of the act, there were three presidencies under British rule. They are Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. All these three were independent administrative units. Under Regulating Act, the Bengal Presidency gained control over the other two presidencies.
• The Governor of Bengal became the Governor-General of all the three Presidencies.
• The Governor-General was authorized to direct, exercise control and to supervise over the other two presidencies.
• The Bombay and Madras presidencies could not declare, war on anyone or enter into peace agreements without prior approval of the Governor-General of Bengal Presidency and the Board of Directors of the Company. Only during acute emergencies, they were entitled to act independently.
•  According to this Act, ‘Supreme Court of Judicature’ was established in Calcutta. In this central court, one Chief Justice and three ordinary judges were there.

Question 8. What are the important features of the Indian government act of 1858? Answer: The important features of the Indian Government Act, 1858 are :

• The license of East India Company was canceled and India was brought under the direct administration of the Queen.
• The post of Governor General was changed into ‘Viceroy’. Lord Canning became the first Viceroy of India.
•  A new post called ‘Secretary Of State for India’ was created in the British government. The secretary was part of British cabinet and was responsible for the administration of India.
• A Council of India was created in order to assist the secretary in the administration. The council had fifteen members.

Question 9. How does the India Government Act of 1935 become the base of Indian Constitution? Answer: Most of the provisions in the Indian Constitution are based on this act. This act allowed the formation of fully responsible government by Indians. This act was applicable both to the Indian principalities and also to the British India regions. The following are the important features of this act:

• A federal system of Indian Principalities, British governed regions and dominion states was formed.
• Reserve Bank of India was established.
• Diarchy was established at the Centre.
• Diarchy was canceled at the regional level and autonomy was granted.
• The Federal Court was established.

Question 10. What are the important features of 1919 act? Answer: The following are the important features of this act:

• Act formulated the Bi-Cameral legislative body. Lower House and Upper House were formed.
• Diarchy was allowed at regional governments.
• A high commissioner was appointed for India.
• Promised to improve local self-government.
• The provincial budget was separated from the central budget.
• Separate Electoral College’ was extended for Muslims, Sikhs, Anglo- Indians, and Europeans.

Class 10 Social Science The Impact of British Rule in India Additional Questions and Answers

Question 1. In order to achieve complete domination in India the British employed ……….. and ………. methods cleverly. Answer: War, Negotiation

Question 2. ……….. established two courts namely, A Dewani Adalat and A Fouzadaari Adalat. Answer: Warren Hastings.

Question 3. ……….. was the base of administration during the British Rule. Answer: The Military.

Question 4. In 1828 ………. was appointed as Government-General of India. Ans: William Bentinck

Question 5. The Governor-General Lord Dalhousie established Universities in ………., ………. and ………. Answer: Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.

Question 6. Charters were implemented once in …….. years. Answer: 20

Question 7. Lord Cornwallis created the new post of …………. Answer: Superintendent of Police (SP).

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ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷ್ ಆಳ್ವಿಕೆಯ ಅಡಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಂಗ - Judiciary in India under British Rule

in Modern Indian History /

ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರು ಸಿವಿಲ್ ಮತ್ತು ಕ್ರಿಮಿನಲ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳ ಶ್ರೇಣಿಯ ಮೂಲಕ ನ್ಯಾಯವನ್ನು ವಿತರಿಸುವ ಹೊಸ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯ ಅಡಿಪಾಯವನ್ನು ಹಾಕಿದರು. ವಾರೆನ್ ಹೇಸ್ಟಿಂಗ್ಸ್ ಅವರಿಂದ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವನ್ನು ನೀಡಲಾಗಿದ್ದರೂ, 1793 ರಲ್ಲಿ ಕಾರ್ನ್‌ವಾಲಿಸ್ ಈ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯನ್ನು ಸ್ಥಿರಗೊಳಿಸಿದರು. ಪ್ರತಿ ಜಿಲ್ಲೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿವಿಲ್ ಸೇವೆಗೆ ಸೇರಿದ ಜಿಲ್ಲಾ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರ ಅಧ್ಯಕ್ಷತೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ದಿವಾಣಿ ಅದಾಲತ್ ಅಥವಾ ಸಿವಿಲ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯವನ್ನು ಸ್ಥಾಪಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಕಾರ್ನ್ವಾಲಿಸ್ ಸಿವಿಲ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರು ಮತ್ತು ಕಲೆಕ್ಟರ್ ಹುದ್ದೆಗಳನ್ನು ಹೀಗೆ ಪ್ರತ್ಯೇಕಿಸಿದರು. ಜಿಲ್ಲಾ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯದಿಂದ ಮೇಲ್ಮನವಿಯು ಮೊದಲು ನಾಲ್ಕು ಪ್ರಾಂತೀಯ ಸಿವಿಲ್ ಮೇಲ್ಮನವಿ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳಿಗೆ ಮತ್ತು ನಂತರ ಅಂತಿಮವಾಗಿ ಸದರ್ ದಿವಾನಿ ಅದಾಲತ್‌ಗೆ ಸಲ್ಲಿಸುತ್ತದೆ. ಜಿಲ್ಲಾ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯದ ಕೆಳಗೆ ಯುರೋಪಿಯನ್ನರ ನೇತೃತ್ವದ ರಿಜಿಸ್ಟ್ರಾರ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಮುನ್ಸಿಫ್ ಮತ್ತು ಅಮೀನ್‌ಗಳೆಂದು ಕರೆಯಲ್ಪಡುವ ಭಾರತೀಯ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರ ನೇತೃತ್ವದಲ್ಲಿ ಹಲವಾರು ಅಧೀನ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳು ಇದ್ದವು. ಕ್ರಿಮಿನಲ್ ಮೊಕದ್ದಮೆಗಳನ್ನು ನಿಭಾಯಿಸಲು, ಕಾರ್ನ್‌ವಾಲಿಸ್ ಬಂಗಾಳದ ಪ್ರೆಸಿಡೆನ್ಸಿಯನ್ನು ನಾಲ್ಕು ವಿಭಾಗಗಳಾಗಿ ವಿಂಗಡಿಸಿದರು, ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಂದರಲ್ಲೂ ನಾಗರಿಕ ಸೇವಕರ ಅಧ್ಯಕ್ಷತೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಕೋರ್ಟ್ ಆಫ್ ಸರ್ಕ್ಯೂಟ್ ಅನ್ನು ಸ್ಥಾಪಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಸಿವಿಲ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳು ಅನಾದಿ ಕಾಲದಿಂದಲೂ ಯಾವುದೇ ಪ್ರದೇಶದಲ್ಲಿ ಅಥವಾ ಜನರ ಒಂದು ವರ್ಗದಲ್ಲಿ ಚಾಲ್ತಿಯಲ್ಲಿದ್ದ ಸಾಂಪ್ರದಾಯಿಕ ಕಾನೂನನ್ನು ಅನ್ವಯಿಸುತ್ತವೆ. 1831 ರಲ್ಲಿ, ವಿಲಿಯಂ ಬೆಂಟಿಂಕ್ ಪ್ರಾಂತೀಯ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳ ಮೇಲ್ಮನವಿ ಮತ್ತು ಸರ್ಕ್ಯೂಟ್ ಅನ್ನು ರದ್ದುಗೊಳಿಸಿದರು. ಅವರ ಕೆಲಸವನ್ನು ಮೊದಲು ಆಯೋಗಗಳಿಗೆ ಮತ್ತು ನಂತರ ಜಿಲ್ಲಾ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರು ಮತ್ತು ಜಿಲ್ಲಾಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳಿಗೆ ನಿಯೋಜಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಬೆಂಟಿಂಕ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಂಗ ಸೇವೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾರತೀಯರ ಸ್ಥಾನಮಾನ ಮತ್ತು ಅಧಿಕಾರವನ್ನು ಹೆಚ್ಚಿಸಿದರು ಮತ್ತು ಅವರನ್ನು ಉಪ ಮ್ಯಾಜಿಸ್ಟ್ರೇಟ್‌ಗಳು, ಅಧೀನ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರು ಮತ್ತು ಪ್ರಿನ್ಸಿಪಾಲ್ ಸದರ್ ಅಮೀನ್‌ಗಳಾಗಿ ನೇಮಿಸಿದರು. 1865 ರಲ್ಲಿ, ಜಿಲ್ಲಾ ಮತ್ತು ನಿಜಾಮತ್‌ನ ಸದರ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳನ್ನು ಬದಲಿಸಲು ಕಲ್ಕತ್ತಾ, ಮದ್ರಾಸ್ ಮತ್ತು ಬಾಂಬೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಹೈಕೋರ್ಟ್‌ಗಳನ್ನು ಸ್ಥಾಪಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರು ಹಳೆಯ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳನ್ನು ಜಾರಿಗೊಳಿಸುವ ಮತ್ತು ಕ್ರೋಡೀಕರಿಸುವ ಪ್ರಕ್ರಿಯೆಗಳ ಮೂಲಕ ಹೊಸ ಕಾನೂನು ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯನ್ನು ಸ್ಥಾಪಿಸಿದರು. ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿನ ಸಾಂಪ್ರದಾಯಿಕ ನ್ಯಾಯ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯು ಬಹುಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಸಾಂಪ್ರದಾಯಿಕ ಕಾನೂನನ್ನು ಆಧರಿಸಿತ್ತು, ಇದು ದೀರ್ಘ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯ ಮತ್ತು ಅಭ್ಯಾಸದಿಂದ ಹುಟ್ಟಿಕೊಂಡಿತು. ಅನೇಕ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ಶಾಸ್ತ್ರಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಷರಿಯತ್ ಮತ್ತು ಸಾಮ್ರಾಜ್ಯಶಾಹಿ ಅಧಿಕಾರವನ್ನು ಆಧರಿಸಿವೆ. ಆದಾಗ್ಯೂ, ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರು ಕ್ರಮೇಣ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳ ಹೊಸ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯನ್ನು ಅಭಿವೃದ್ಧಿಪಡಿಸಿದರು. ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರು ನಿಯಮಗಳನ್ನು ಪರಿಚಯಿಸಿದರು, ಅಸ್ತಿತ್ವದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳನ್ನು ಕ್ರೋಡೀಕರಿಸಿದರು ಮತ್ತು ನ್ಯಾಯಾಂಗ ವ್ಯಾಖ್ಯಾನದ ಮೂಲಕ ಅವುಗಳನ್ನು ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥಿತಗೊಳಿಸಿದರು ಮತ್ತು ಆಧುನೀಕರಿಸಿದರು. 1833 ರ ಚಾರ್ಟರ್ ಆಕ್ಟ್ ಗವರ್ನರ್ ಜನರಲ್-ಇನ್-ಕೌನ್ಸಿಲ್‌ಗೆ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾನೂನು ಮಾಡುವ ಅಧಿಕಾರವನ್ನು ನೀಡಿತು. 1833 ರಲ್ಲಿ, ಸರ್ಕಾರವು ಭಾರತೀಯ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳನ್ನು ಕ್ರೋಡೀಕರಿಸಲು ಲಾರ್ಡ್ ಮೆಕಾಲೆ ನೇತೃತ್ವದ ಕಾನೂನು ಆಯೋಗವನ್ನು ನೇಮಿಸಿತು. ಮೆಕಾಲೆಯವರ ಕೆಲಸವು ಅಂತಿಮವಾಗಿ ಭಾರತೀಯ ದಂಡ ಸಂಹಿತೆ, ಪಾಶ್ಚಿಮಾತ್ಯ ಮೂಲದ ಸಿವಿಲ್ ಮತ್ತು ಕ್ರಿಮಿನಲ್ ಪ್ರೊಸೀಜರ್ ಕೋಡ್‌ಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಇತರ ಕಾನೂನು ಸಂಹಿತೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಕಾರಣವಾಯಿತು. ಅದೇ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ಈಗ ದೇಶದಾದ್ಯಂತ ಚಾಲ್ತಿಯಲ್ಲಿವೆ ಮತ್ತು ಅವುಗಳನ್ನು ಏಕರೂಪದ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯಿಂದ ಜಾರಿಗೊಳಿಸಲಾಗಿದೆ.

ಕಾನೂನಿನ ನಿಯಮ (Rule of Law) ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರು 'ಕಾನೂನಿನ ನಿಯಮ'ದ ಆಧುನಿಕ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆಯನ್ನು ಪರಿಚಯಿಸಿದರು. ಇದರ ಅರ್ಥವೇನೆಂದರೆ, ಅವರ ಆಡಳಿತವು ಕನಿಷ್ಠ ಸಿದ್ಧಾಂತದಲ್ಲಿ, ಕಾನೂನುಗಳಿಗೆ ವಿಧೇಯತೆಯಲ್ಲಿತ್ತು, ಅದು ಪ್ರಜೆಗಳ ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳು, ಸವಲತ್ತುಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಕಟ್ಟುಪಾಡುಗಳನ್ನು ಸ್ಪಷ್ಟವಾಗಿ ವ್ಯಾಖ್ಯಾನಿಸುತ್ತದೆ ಮತ್ತು ಅಲ್ಲ. ಆಡಳಿತಗಾರನ ಕ್ಯಾಪ್ರಿಸ್ ಅಥವಾ ವೈಯಕ್ತಿಕ ವಿವೇಚನೆಯ ಪ್ರಕಾರ. ಪ್ರಾಯೋಗಿಕವಾಗಿ, ಅಧಿಕಾರಶಾಹಿ ಮತ್ತು ಪೊಲೀಸರು ನಿರಂಕುಶ ಅಧಿಕಾರವನ್ನು ಅನುಭವಿಸಿದರು ಮತ್ತು ಜನರ ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ್ಯಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಹಸ್ತಕ್ಷೇಪ ಮಾಡಿದರು. ಕಾನೂನಿನ ನಿಯಮವು ಸ್ವಲ್ಪ ಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿಯ ವೈಯಕ್ತಿಕ ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ್ಯದ ಭರವಸೆಯಾಗಿತ್ತು. 'ಕಾನೂನಿನ ನಿಯಮದ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆ'ಯ ಒಂದು ಪ್ರಮುಖ ಲಕ್ಷಣವೆಂದರೆ ಯಾವುದೇ ಅಧಿಕಾರಿಯನ್ನು ಅಧಿಕೃತ ಕರ್ತವ್ಯದ ಉಲ್ಲಂಘನೆಗಾಗಿ ಅಥವಾ ಅವರ ಅಧಿಕೃತ ಅಧಿಕಾರವನ್ನು ಮೀರಿದ ಕೃತ್ಯಗಳಿಗಾಗಿ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯದ ಮುಂದೆ ತರಬಹುದು. ಕಾನೂನಿನ ಮುಂದೆ ಸಮಾನತೆ (Equality Before Law) ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರ ಅಡಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಕಾನೂನು ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯು ಕಾನೂನಿನ ಮುಂದೆ ಸಮಾನತೆಯ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆಯನ್ನು ಆಧರಿಸಿದೆ. ಇದರರ್ಥ ಕಾನೂನಿನ ದೃಷ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ‘ಎಲ್ಲ ಪುರುಷರು ಸಮಾನರು.’ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿಗಳಿಗೆ ಅವರ ವಯಸ್ಸು, ಧರ್ಮ ಅಥವಾ ವರ್ಗವನ್ನು ಲೆಕ್ಕಿಸದೆ ಒಂದೇ ಕಾನೂನು ಅನ್ವಯಿಸುತ್ತದೆ. ಈ ಹಿಂದೆ, ನ್ಯಾಯಾಂಗ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯು ಜಾತಿ ಭೇದಗಳಿಗೆ ಗಮನ ನೀಡುತ್ತಿತ್ತು ಮತ್ತು ಎತ್ತರದ ಮತ್ತು ಕೀಳು ಎಂದು ಕರೆಯಲ್ಪಡುವ ನಡುವೆ ವ್ಯತ್ಯಾಸವನ್ನು ಹೊಂದಿತ್ತು. ಅದೇ ಅಪರಾಧಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ಬ್ರಾಹ್ಮಣೇತರರಿಗಿಂತ ಬ್ರಾಹ್ಮಣನಿಗೆ ಹಗುರವಾದ ಶಿಕ್ಷೆಯನ್ನು ನೀಡಲಾಯಿತು. ಅದೇ ರೀತಿ, ಆಚರಣೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಜಮೀನ್ದಾರರು ಮತ್ತು ಗಣ್ಯರನ್ನು ಸಾಮಾನ್ಯ ಜನರಂತೆ ಕಠಿಣವಾಗಿ ನಿರ್ಣಯಿಸಲಾಗಿಲ್ಲ. ವಾಸ್ತವವಾಗಿ, ಆಗಾಗ್ಗೆ ಅವರ ಕಾರ್ಯಗಳಿಗಾಗಿ ಅವರನ್ನು ನ್ಯಾಯಕ್ಕೆ ತರಲಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲ. ಆದಾಗ್ಯೂ, ಕಾನೂನಿನ ಮುಂದೆ ಸಮಾನತೆಯ ಈ ಅತ್ಯುತ್ತಮ ತತ್ವಕ್ಕೆ ಒಂದು ಅಪವಾದವಿತ್ತು. ಯುರೋಪಿಯನ್ನರು ಮತ್ತು ಅವರ ವಂಶಸ್ಥರು ಪ್ರತ್ಯೇಕ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಕಾನೂನುಗಳನ್ನು ಸಹ ಹೊಂದಿದ್ದರು. ಅಪರಾಧ ಪ್ರಕರಣಗಳಲ್ಲಿ, ಯುರೋಪಿಯನ್ನರನ್ನು ಯುರೋಪಿಯನ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರು ಮಾತ್ರ ವಿಚಾರಣೆಗೆ ಒಳಪಡಿಸಬಹುದು. ಅನೇಕ ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಅಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳು ಭಾರತೀಯರೊಂದಿಗೆ ಕಠಿಣ ಮತ್ತು ಕ್ರೂರವಾಗಿ ವರ್ತಿಸಿದರು. ಅವರನ್ನು ನ್ಯಾಯಾಂಗಕ್ಕೆ ತರಲು ಪ್ರಯತ್ನಿಸಿದಾಗ, ಅವರಿಗೆ ಪರೋಕ್ಷ ಮತ್ತು ಅನಗತ್ಯ ರಕ್ಷಣೆಯನ್ನು ನೀಡಲಾಯಿತು ಮತ್ತು ಇದರ ಪರಿಣಾಮವಾಗಿ ಅನೇಕ ಯುರೋಪಿಯನ್ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಧೀಶರು ಲಘುವಾಗಿ ಅಥವಾ ಯಾವುದೇ ಶಿಕ್ಷೆಯನ್ನು ನೀಡಲಿಲ್ಲ, ಅವರ ಮುಂದೆ ಮಾತ್ರ ಅವರನ್ನು ವಿಚಾರಣೆಗೆ ಒಳಪಡಿಸಬಹುದು. ಪರಿಣಾಮವಾಗಿ, ನ್ಯಾಯದ ಗರ್ಭಪಾತವು ಸಂಭವಿಸಿದೆ (ಆಗಾಗ್ಗೆ). ಪ್ರಾಯೋಗಿಕವಾಗಿ, ಮತ್ತೊಂದು ರೀತಿಯ ಕಾನೂನು ಅಸಮಾನತೆ ಹೊರಹೊಮ್ಮಿತು; ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯದ ಶುಲ್ಕವನ್ನು ಪಾವತಿಸಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವುದರಿಂದ ನ್ಯಾಯವು ಸಾಕಷ್ಟು ದುಬಾರಿಯಾಯಿತು, ವಕೀಲರು ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡರು ಮತ್ತು ಸಾಕ್ಷಿಗಳ ವೆಚ್ಚವನ್ನು ಭರಿಸಬೇಕಾಯಿತು. ದೂರದ ಊರುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳು ಹೆಚ್ಚಾಗಿ ಇರುತ್ತಿದ್ದವು. ಕಾನೂನು ಮೊಕದ್ದಮೆಗಳು ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಕಾಲ ಎಳೆಯಲ್ಪಟ್ಟವು. ಸಂಕೀರ್ಣ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ಅನಕ್ಷರಸ್ಥ ಮತ್ತು ಅಜ್ಞಾನಿ ರೈತರ ಹಿಡಿತವನ್ನು ಮೀರಿವೆ. ಯಾವಾಗಲೂ, ಶ್ರೀಮಂತರು ತಮ್ಮ ಪರವಾಗಿ ಕಾರ್ಯನಿರ್ವಹಿಸಲು ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಗಳನ್ನು ತಿರುಗಿಸಬಹುದು ಮತ್ತು ತಿರುಚಬಹುದು. ಕೆಳ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯದಿಂದ ಮೇಲ್ಮನವಿಯ ಅತ್ಯುನ್ನತ ನ್ಯಾಯಾಲಯಕ್ಕೆ ದೀರ್ಘಾವಧಿಯ ನ್ಯಾಯ ಪ್ರಕ್ರಿಯೆಯ ಮೂಲಕ ಬಡ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿಯನ್ನು ಕೊಂಡೊಯ್ಯುವ ಮತ್ತು ಸಂಪೂರ್ಣ ನಾಶದೊಂದಿಗೆ ಹಾನಿಯನ್ನು ಎದುರಿಸುವ ಬೆದರಿಕೆಯು ಅವನನ್ನು ಹಿಮ್ಮೆಟ್ಟಿಸಲು ಸಾಕಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಪೊಲೀಸ್ ಮತ್ತು ಉಳಿದ ಆಡಳಿತ ಯಂತ್ರದ ಶ್ರೇಣಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ವ್ಯಾಪಕವಾದ ಭ್ರಷ್ಟಾಚಾರವು ನ್ಯಾಯದ ನಿರಾಕರಣೆಗೆ ಕಾರಣವಾಯಿತು. ಅಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳು ಹೆಚ್ಚಾಗಿ ಶ್ರೀಮಂತರಿಗೆ ಒಲವು ತೋರುತ್ತಿದ್ದರು. ಇದಕ್ಕೆ ವ್ಯತಿರಿಕ್ತವಾಗಿ, ಬ್ರಿಟಿಷರ ಪೂರ್ವದಲ್ಲಿ ಚಾಲ್ತಿಯಲ್ಲಿದ್ದ ನ್ಯಾಯ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯು ತುಲನಾತ್ಮಕವಾಗಿ ಅನೌಪಚಾರಿಕ, ವೇಗ ಮತ್ತು ಅಗ್ಗವಾಗಿತ್ತು.

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The British Raj in India

How British Rule of India Came About—and How It Ended

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European Scramble for Colonies in Asia

The battle of plassey, india under the east india company.

• The Indian 'Mutiny' of 1857

Control of India Shifts to the India Office

• 'Autocratic Paternalism'

British India During World War I

British india during world war ii, the struggle for indian independence, arrests of gandhi and inc leadership, hindu/muslim riots and partition.

• Additional Referenc
• Ph.D., History, Boston University
• J.D., University of Washington School of Law
• B.A., History, Western Washington University

The very idea of the British Raj—the British rule over India—seems inexplicable today. Consider the fact that Indian written history stretches back almost 4,000 years, to the civilization centers of the Indus Valley Culture at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Also, by 1850, India had a population of at least 200 million.  

Britain, on the other hand, had no indigenous written language until the 9th century CE (almost 3,000 years after India). Its population was about 21 million in 1850.   How, then, did Britain manage to control India from 1757 to 1947? The keys seem to have been superior weaponry, economic power, and Eurocentric confidence.

After the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope on Africa's southern tip in 1488, opening sea lanes to the Far East by piracy on ancient trade lines in the Indian Ocean , the European powers strove to acquire Asian trading posts of their own.

For centuries, the Venetians had controlled the European branch of the Silk Road , reaping enormous profits from the sale of silk, spices, fine china, and precious metals. The Venetian monopoly ended with the establishment of European incursions in the sea trade. At first, the European powers in Asia were solely interested in trade, but over time they became more interested in acquiring territory. Among the nations looking for a piece of the action was Britain.

Britain had been trading in India since about 1600, but it did not begin to seize large sections of land until 1757, after the Battle of Plassey. This battle pitted 3,000 soldiers of the British East India Company against the 50,000-strong army of the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud Daulah, and his French East India Company allies.  

Fighting began on the morning of June 23, 1757. Heavy rain spoiled the Nawab's cannon powder (the British covered theirs), leading to his defeat. The Nawab lost at least 500 troops, while Britain lost only 22. Britain seized the modern equivalent of about $5 million from the Bengali treasury and used it to finance further expansion.

The East India Company was primarily interested in the trade of cotton, silk, tea, and opium, but following the Battle of Plassey, it functioned as the military authority in growing sections of India as well.

By 1770, heavy Company taxation and other policies had left millions of Bengalis impoverished. While British soldiers and traders made their fortunes, the Indians starved. Between 1770 and 1773, about 10 million people (one-third of the population) died of famine in Bengal.  

At this time, Indians were also barred from holding high office in their own land. The British considered them inherently corrupt and untrustworthy.

The Indian 'Mutiny' of 1857

Many Indians were distressed by the rapid cultural changes imposed by the British. They worried that Hindu and Muslim India would be Christianized. In 1857, a new type of rifle cartridge was given to the soldiers of the British Indian Army. Rumors spread that the cartridges had been greased with pig and cow fat, an abomination to both major Indian religions.

On May 10, 1857, the Indian Revolt began, with Bengali Muslim troops marching to Delhi and pledging their support to the Mughal emperor. After a year-long struggle, the rebels surrendered on June 20, 1858.

Following the rebellion, the British government abolished the remaining vestiges of the Mughal Dynasty and the East India Company. The Emperor, Bahadur Shah, was convicted of sedition and exiled to Burma .

Control of India was given to a British Governor-General, who reported back to the British Parliament.

It should be noted that the British Raj included only about two-thirds of modern India, with the other portions under the control of local princes. However, Britain exerted great pressure on these princes, effectively controlling all of India.

'Autocratic Paternalism'

Queen Victoria promised that the British government would work to "better" its Indian subjects. To the British, this meant educating the Indians in British modes of thought and stamping out cultural practices such as sati —the practice of immolating a widow on the death of her husband. The British thought of their rule as a form of "autocratic paternalism."

The British also created "divide and rule" policies, pitting Hindu and Muslim Indians against one another. In 1905, the colonial government divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sections; this division was revoked after strong protests. Britain also encouraged the formation of the Muslim League of India in 1907.

During World War I , Britain declared war on Germany on India's behalf, without consulting Indian leaders. About 1.5 million Indian soldiers and laborers were serving in the British Indian Army by the time of the Armistice.   A total of 60,000 Indian soldiers were killed or reported missing.  

Although most of India rallied to the British flag, Bengal and Punjab were less easy to control. Many Indians were eager for independence, and they were led in their struggle by an Indian lawyer and political newcomer known as  Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948).

In April 1919, more than 15,000 unarmed protesters gathered at Amritsar, in Punjab.   British troops fired on the crowd, killing hundreds of men, women, and children, even though the official death toll of the Amritsar Massacre as reported was 379.  

When World War II broke out, India once again contributed hugely to the British war effort. In addition to troops, the princely states donated substantial amounts of cash. By the end of the war, India had an incredible volunteer army of 2.5 million men.   About 87,000 Indian soldiers died in combat.  

The Indian independence movement was very strong by this time, and British rule was widely resented. Some 40,000 Indian POWs were recruited by the Japanese to fight against the Allies in exchange for the hope of Indian independence.   Most Indians, however, remained loyal. Indian troops fought in Burma, North Africa, Italy, and elsewhere.

Even as World War II raged on, Gandhi and other members of the Indian National Congress (INC) demonstrated against British rule.

The 1935 Government of India Act had provided for the establishment of provincial legislatures across the colony. The Act also created a federal government for the provinces and princely states and granted the right to vote to about 10% of India's male population.   These moves toward limited self-governance only made India more impatient for true self-rule.

In 1942, Britain sent an envoy to India, led by the British Labour politician Stafford Cripps (1889–1952), offering future dominion status in return for help recruiting more soldiers. Cripps may have made a secret agreement with the Muslim League, allowing Muslims to opt out of a future Indian state.

Gandhi and the INC did not trust the British envoy and demanded immediate independence in return for their cooperation. When the talks broke down, the INC launched the "Quit India" movement, calling for the immediate withdrawal of Britain from India.

In response, the British arrested the INC's leadership, including Gandhi and his wife. Mass demonstrations were carried out across the country but were crushed by the British Army. Britain may not have realized it, but it was now just a matter of time before the British Raj came to an end.

The soldiers who had joined Japan and Germany in fighting the British were put on trial at Delhi's Red Fort in early 1946. A series of court-martial trials were held for 45 prisoners charged with treason, murder, and torture. The men were convicted, but huge public protests forced the commutation of their sentences.

On August 17, 1946, violent fighting broke out between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta. The trouble quickly spread across India. Meanwhile, cash-strapped Britain announced its decision to withdraw from India by June 1948.

Sectarian violence flared again as independence approached. In June 1947, representatives of the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs agreed to divide India along sectarian lines. Hindu and Sikh areas remained part of India, while predominantly Muslim areas in the north became the nation of Pakistan . This division of territory was known as the Partition .

Millions of refugees flooded across the border in each direction, and up to 2 million people were killed in sectarian violence.   Pakistan became independent on August 14, 1947. India followed the next day.

Additional References

• Gilmour, David. "The British in India: A Social History of the Raj." New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 
• James, Lawrence. "Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India." New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997.
• Nanda, Bal Ram. "Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj." Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.  
• Tharoor, Shashi. "Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India." London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2018. 

Lahmeyer, Jan. " INDIA: Population Growth of the Whole Country ." Population Statistics.

Chesire, Edward. " The Results of the Census of Great Britain in 1851 ." Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. 17, No. 1 , Wiley, March 1854, London, doi:10.2307/2338356

“ Battle of Plassey .”  National Army Museum .

Chatterjee, Monideepa. “ A Forgotten Holocaust: The Bengal Famine of 1770 .” Academia.edu - Share Research.

“ World Wars .”  The British Library, 21 Sept. 2011.

Bostanci, Anne. “ How Was India Involved in the First World War? ” British Council, 30 Oct. 2014.

Agarwal, Kritika. “ Reexamining Amritsar .”  Perspectives on History, The American Historical Association, 9 Apr. 2019.

" Report on the Amritsar Massacre ." First World War , The National Archives.

Roy, Kaushik. " Indian Army in World War II ." Military History, Oxford Bibliographies, 6 Jan. 2020, doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199791279-0159

“ Worldwide Deaths in World War II ”  The National WWII Museum | New Orleans .

De Guttry, Andrea; Capone, Francesca and Paulussen, Christophe. “Foreign Fighters under International Law and Beyond.” Asser Press, 2016, The Hague.

Ningade, Nagamma G. " The Government of India Act of 1935 ." Evolution and Basic Principals of Indian Constitution, Gulbarga University, Kalaburgi, 2017.

Perkins, C. Ryan. “ 1947 Partition of India & Pakistan .”  The 1947 Partition Archive, Stanford University, 12 June 2017.

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

• by history tools
• May 26, 2024

Introduction

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

The Systematic Destruction of India‘s Economy

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

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

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

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

The Erosion of Traditional Knowledge Systems and Cultural Heritage

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

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

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

The Unique Factors Contributing to the Deadly Impact of British Rule

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

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

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

The Ongoing Relevance of the British Colonial Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• British Colonial Rule

The famous Kohinoor diamond has been doing rounds in the news. It was a prized possession of pre-colonial India which the British took with them on their way back home. The talks of taking it back have caused a stir in the recent past. However, it forms a very small fraction of what our colonizers took away. As a consequence, our country was in a grim state when they left. This forms the basis that governs our current policies and future prospects.

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The pre-colonial state.

Before the advent of colonial rule , India was a self-sufficient and flourishing economy. Evidently, our country was popularly known as the golden eagle. India had already established itself on the world map with a decent amount of exports. Although primarily it was an agrarian economy, many manufacturing activities were budding in the pre-colonial India.

Indian craftsmanship was widely popular around the world and garnered huge  demands . The economy was well-known for its handicraft industries in the fields of cotton and silk textiles, metal and precious stone works etc. Such developments lured the British to paralyze our state and use it for their home country’s benefits.

Browse more Topics under Indian Economy On The Eve Of Independence

• Agricultural Sector
• Industrial Sector
• Foreign Trade
• Demographic Condition
• Occupational Structure
• Infrastructure

India: The British Colony

The British came to India with the motive of colonization. Their plans involved using India as a feeder colony for their own flourishing economy back at Britain. This exploitation continued for about two centuries, till we finally got independence on 15 August 1947. Consequently, this rendered our country’s economy hollow. Hence, a study of this relationship between the colonizers and its colony is important to understand the present developments and future prospects of India.

The colonial rule is marked with periods of heavy exploitation. The British took steps that ensured development and promotion of the interests of their home country. They were in no way concerned about the course of Indian economy. Such steps transformed our economy for the worse- it effectively became a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of finished goods.

The colonial kings robbed India of education, opportunities etc. reducing Indians to mere servants. Undoubtedly, they never tried to estimate colonial India’s national and per capita income. Some individuals like – Findlay Shirras, Dadabhai Naoroji, William Digby, V.K.R.V. Rao and R.C. Desai tried to estimate such figures.

Although the results were inconsistent, the estimates of V.K.R.V. Rao are considered accurate. Notably, India’s growth of aggregate real output was less than 2% in the first half of the twentieth century coupled with a half percent growth in per capita output per year. By and large, India faced a herculean task to recover from the blows that two centuries of colonial rule landed on its economy.

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Q:   Name some individuals who tried to estimate colonial India’s per capita income.

Ans:   Some individuals like – Findlay Shirras, Dadabhai Naoroji, William Digby, V.K.R.V. Rao and R.C. Desai tried to estimate such figures. Although the results were inconsistent, the estimates of V.K.R.V. Rao are considered accurate. An estimate was the best that could be calculated. The estimate was that colonial India’s growth of output was less than 2%.

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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

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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.

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

Know Who All Ruled India

Since the ancient time, India has remained under international spotlight, due to its immense wealth, spices, gold and an enormous expanse of natural resources, that’s why India was known as Golden Bird or Sone Ki Chidiya at one point of time. And to exploit its seamless wealth the country has been time and again invaded and ruled by numerous dynasties which include Sakas, Kushanas, Huns, Afghans, Turks, Khiljis, Lodhis and Mughals to the Britishers.

Even, Alexander- the great ruler of ancient Greek kingdom also voyaged across several miles along with a huge army of Yavans in 326BC to invade India. However, his impressive winning streak finally met with an unfortunate end at the Hydaspas River where the most powerful King Porus of Paurava Kingdom (spanned across the current Punjab region) engaged him in a bloody battle and pushed him back.

Overall, if we take a peek into the vast history of the rulers of India, we observe that India has witnessed the rule of several smaller kingdoms, while the power centres, mostly remained divided among the rulers of Magadha and Southern India. The bringing together of smaller states and kingdoms spanning from Himalayan region to Indian ocean, into one unified country was made possible only during the era of British rule.

Finally, the British rule in India also ended in the year 1947 after nearly 200 years of Indian freedom struggle. As far as the recorded history of the rulers in India is concerned – it goes back to the middle of the 6 th century BC when Haryanka Dynasty of Magadha emerged as the most powerful kingdom among its counterparts in North India. Here we present a brief history of the great emperors, who ruled over almost entire India.

Who Ruled India?

Haryanka Dynasty (c. 544 BCE- 413 BCE)

Haryanka Dynasty constituted the area currently known as Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Bangladesh and Nepal together that was known as Magadha, the present day Patliputra. Founded by Bimbisara, the Haryanka Dynasty surfaced after defeating Barhadrath Dynasty founded by Brihadratha. The capital of Haryanka Dynasty was Rajgir and the most powerful king of this dynasty was Ajatshatru, the son of Bimbisara. Ajatshatru imprisoned his father Bimbisara and forcefully succeeded to the throne of Magadha. Ajatshatru later fought a war against the republic of Vaishali which was ruled by Licchchhavis. Ajatshatru conquered Vaishali and went on expanding the boundaries of his kingdom and he defeated almost all his neighbouring smaller kingdoms including Kosala and Kashi. Under the rulership of Ajatshatru, Magadha became the most powerful kingdom of North India. Nagadasaka was the last ruler of Haryanka Dynasty.

Shishunaga Dynasty (c. 544 BCE- 413 BCE)

Haryanka Dynasty was eliminated by Shishunaga Dynasty founded by Shishunaga who was an Amatya in Magadha. He led the revolt by the people against Haryanka Dynasty and captured the throne of Magadha and made Patliputra its capital. Shishunaga was the son of one of the Licchavi rulers of Vaishali. Shishunaga expanded his kingdom to present day Jaipur in Rajasthan, apart from Sindh, Karachi, Lahore, Herat, Multan, Kandahar and Vellore. Even Shishunaga Dynasty spread its wings to Madurai and Kochi in South to Murshidabad in East to Mand in West as well. Shishunaga was succeeded by his son Kakavarna, or Kalashoka followed by his ten sons. Later Nanda Empire captured the throne of this kingdom.

Nanda Dynasty (c. 345 BCE- 321 BCE)

Nanda Empire was established in Magadha in c.345BCE by Mahapadma Nanda, who apart from Shishunagas also defeated many other kingdoms like Haihayas, Kurus, Kalingas, etc and he even expanded his territory to far lying south to the Vindhya Range. Dhana Nanda, one of the nine sons of Mahapadma Nanda was the last ruler of Nanda Empire, a powerful kingdom with a vast army consisting of most powerful cavalry, elephants and infantry. Dhana Nand was the last Nanda emperor and he was defeated by Chandragupta Maurya who established Maurya Empire.

Maurya Dynasty (c. 321 BCE-184 BCE)

Chandragupta Maurya with the assistance of Chanakya established Maurya Empire in 322 BCE in Magadha and expanded it to over 5 million square kilometre, thus it was the largest ever kingdom in the world at that time in 316 BCE. Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya was another powerful emperor of Maurya dynasty who captured almost the entire Indian subcontinent and even expanded his kingdom to present day Asam, Balochistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

Ashoka later also conquered Kalinga, but after a severe battle which resulted into mass killings which left Ashoka into a stage of great sorrow and he became a follower of Buddhism to practice nonviolence. He ruled over next 36 years until his death. Maurya Empire continued to exist for the next 56 years. Brihadratha was the last Maurya ruler who was killed by his commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Shunga.

Saka Dynasty, or Indo-Scynthians (200 BCE- 400 CE)

Sakas who invaded and settled in north-western India were nomadic tribes of central Asia. Maus was the first Saka ruler in India and he made Taxila his capital. He was followed by Azes I and Azes II who extended their kingdom till Punjab. Saka rulers were called Saka Satraps. Saka Satraps of Mathura were famous for making great progress. Apart from North India, the Saka also entered in South and extended their kingdom to Kathiawar and Cutch in Gujarat, and till Maharashtra.

The Saka kingdom of Ujjain rulers of which were called as western straps had became most prominent in their region. Chastana was the founder of Saka kingdom of Ujjain. Saka King Rudradaman was a great warrior who conquered the present day Andhra Pradesh, defeating the Andhra King Sri Pulmavi. After the death of Rudradaman, Saka kingdom witnessed seventeen successors.

Shunga Dynasty (c. 185 BCE-73 BCE)

After assassinating the Maurya ruler Brihadratha in the year 185 BCE, Pushyamitra Shunga established Shunga Dynasty and ruled over the region for the next 36 years. Agnimitra, the son of Pushyamitra Shunga succeeded him. There were total ten Shunga rulers who succeeded the throne one after another until the Kanva Dynasty invaded and captured the throne in 73BCE.

Kanva Dynasty (c. 73 BCE-26 BCE)

Vasudeva, the Kanva ruler established Kanva Dynasty in Magadha. He was succeeded by his son Bhumimitra who ruled for the next fourteen years. Narayana, the son of Bhumimitra ruled for the next twelve years. Sushaman, the son of Narayana was the last king of Kanva Dynasty.

Kushan Kingdom (c. 30 to c. 230 CE)

Formed in the early first century, Kushan Empire was established by Yuezhi in the Bactrian territories and it spread further to Afghanistan and north India till Varanasi. The first most powerful ruler of Kushan dynasty was Kajula Kadaphises or, Kdaphises I who is known for issuing gold coins during his rule. Kanishka was one of the great kings of this dynasty, who expanded the kingdom southward towards the Indian subcontinent. The Guptas and the other contemporary Indian kingdoms invaded this empire fragmenting it into semi independent kingdoms.

Satavahana Dynasty (c. 271 BCE-220 CE)

Based in Deccan region, the Satavahana Dynasty was comprised of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh including Telangana, and their rule even extended to Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Gautamiputra Satakarni was one of the most powerful kings under this dynasty. He was succeeded by Vasisthiputra Pulamavi. After the death of Gautamiputra Satakarni, the kingdom began to fall and it ended in the early third century. Satavahana Dynasty had to face continuous invasions of Sakas and Kushanas. Satavahanas are well-known in the history for introduction of coins in their kingdom with portraits of their kings. The Satavahana Dynasty ended near the beginning of third century.

Gupta Kingdom (c. 220- c. 550 CE)

Initiating the golden age in Indian history, Sri Gupta founded the Gupta Kingdom which encompassed maximum part of India during 320 CE to 550 CE. During this period the Gupta kings were successful in ensuring peace and tranquillity in the entire region. It resulted into development and inventions in science and technology; art and engineering as well as in mathematics. Most importantly this period saw spread of Hindu culture. Chandragupta I and Samudragupta were well-known rulers of Gupta dynasty. Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta are the famous monuments and sculptures of this period which has Buddhist, Jain as well as the impressions of Hindus in their creation. The Hindu Udayagiri caves and Dashavatara Temple at Devagarh are a few more eminent historical remains of this period.

Chalukya Empire (c. 543 – c. 753 CE)

It was a prominent south Indian dynasty which later expanded to central India. Pulakeshin II was one of the great rulers of Chalukya dynasty which is known for administrative excellence and overseas trade relations, besides architectural developments. During the rule of Chalukyas, Kannada and Telugu literature saw considerable development.

Chola Kingdom (c. 848 – c. 1251 CE)

Chola dynasty was considered as one of the greatest kingdom in south India which witnessed the golden era when Raja became the king in 985 CE. He extended his kingdom to Sri Lanka Island as well and his successor Rajendra Chola defeated Mahipala, the Pala king and captured the area surrounding the Ganga River.

Chera Kingdom (300 BC – AD 1102)

Chera Kingdom is also called the ancient Dravidian empire which prominently ruled Kerala and Tamilnadu. Chera rulers are also known in the history for establishing trade relations with West Asia, Rome and Greece. Sangam literature is the source of knowledge regarding Chera Kings. According to Sangam literature, Nedum Cheralathan was one of Chera rulers who ruled the kingdom for 58 years.

Delhi Sultanate (1206 AD – 1526 AD)

In the year 1206AD, Delhi Sultanate was founded by the Turks who came from Central Asia and captured most of the North India. Slave dynasty was founded by Qutb-ud-din-Aibak in India in the year 1206. In the year 1290 Jalal ud din Firoz Khilji founded Khilji dynasty in Delhi Sultanate while in the year 1321, Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq founded Tughluq dynasty. From 1414 to 1451 Sayyid Dynasty succeeded tughluqus in Delhi Sultanate. In the year 1451 Lodi dynasty under headship of Bahlol Lodi captured Delhi Sultanate and ruled until they were replaced by Mughals in 1526. The most powerful Hindu states in that period were Vijaynagara, Rajput States, Mewar, Ahom, etc.

The following dynasties ruled one after another in the era of Delhi Sultanate which spanned from 1206 AD to 1526 AD:

• Slave Dynasty or, Mamluk Dynasty (1206 AD- 1290 AD)
• Khilji Dynasty (1290 AD- 1320 AD)
• Tughlaq Dynasty (1320 AD- 1414 AD)
• Sayyid Dynasty (1414 AD- 1451 AD)
• Lodi Dynasty (1451 AD- 1526 AD)

Mughal Empire (1526 AD- 1858 AD)

After eliminating Lodi dynasty, the Mughal empire spread its wings and captured most of the India and ruled conveniently till 18th century until British annexation started by London-based East India Company. Mughal Empire was founded by Babur after defeating Ibrahim Lodi, the last ruler of Lodi Dynasty, in the year 1526 AD. The Mughal Empire witnessed most powerful Mughal rulers Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, among others. The Mughals not only successfully captured almost the entire India, but they also expanded their boundaries to Afghanistan. The Mughals are also known for shifting their capital many times during their rule. They frequently changed their capital from Agra to Shahjahanabad (Delhi) to Fatehpur Sikri and even to Lahore. Bahadur Shah Zafar was the last Mughal emperor who was later exiled to Rangoon (now Yangon) in the year 1858 by the British.

British Rule (1858 AD-1947 AD)

British East India company had started capturing different provinces of India in the guise of their protectors as early as in the year 1757 when they defeated Nawab of Bengal Sirajuddaulah in the battle of Palassey. In 1793 they captured Mughal’s Bihar-Bengal province and till 1857 the East India Company had captured almost the entire Mughal Empire. However, officially the British rule in India started in the year 1858, after they exiled the last Mughal emperor. British Raj lasted until 15th August 1947 when India got freedom after years of struggle. Since then the country is governed by the representative of its people called Prime Minister. Jawaharlal Nehru of Indian National Congress became the first Prime Minister of India.

Other Dynasties Who Ruled India

A vast country India (recognized as Indian subcontinent in the ancient history), has been ruled by several other dynasties, who were most prominent and powerful in their specific regions. Here we are providing you a glimpse of the other kingdoms including details of some which have been extracted from the Puranas that are part of Vedas:

Paurava Kingdom (890 BC- 322 BC)

Paurava Kingdom was an ancient Indian dynasty spread over the region surrounding river Jhelum (Hydaspes in Greek) extending to Chenab and Beas rivers spanning through parts of the area currently known as Punjab and Pakistan. The Paurava Kingdom is known in the history for averting Greek ruler Alexander’s plans to annex India. In the year 326 BC, King Porous of Paurava Kingdom engaged Alexander in a fierce battle on the banks of river Hydaspes in which Alexander’s army had to bear huge losses.

Vakataka Dynasty (c. 250 – c. 500 CE)

It was a Brahmin Dynasty which originated from Deccan region of India. Vakataka Dynasty is known for development of arts, architecture and literature in India. The Vakataka rulers enjoyed the most stable period in the history of Indian subcontinent and hence they led the development of art, literature and architecture. The world famous Ajanta Caves were constructed during this period. Vindhyashakti was the founder of Vakataka Dynasty and the other prominent Pravarasena I&II, Rudrasena I&II, Devasena and Harisena were among the prominent rulers of Vakataka Dynasty.

Pallava Dynasty (275 CE–897 CE)

The Pallava Dynasty was a South Indian empire known for building splendid temples and sculptures, besides rolling out Pallava script. The detailed history of Pallavas is found in Sangam literature “Manimekalai”.  Mahendravarman and Narsimhavarman were among the most prominent rulers of this dynasty. During Pallava era, Hiuen Tsang, the noted Chinese traveller also visited Kanchipuram, known currently as Kanchi in Tamil Nadu.

Western Ganga Dynasty (350–1000 CE)

Western Ganga Dynasty was an ancient kingdom in Karnataka which emerged due to weakening of the hold of Pallava Dynasty in South India. Settled along the Kaveri River, it witnessed the rule of more than 25 kings over the years and among them, Avinita, Durvinita and Sripurusha were the rulers who focussed on major social and cultural development across the region.

Maitraka Dynasty (c.470–c.776 CE)

Maitraka Dynasty was situated in the region currently known as Gujarat in Western India. Vallabhi was the capital of Maitraka Dynasty which later came under the umbrella of Harshavardhan Kingdom of Kannauj.

Shashanka Dynasty (600CE–626 CE)

Shashanka Dynasty was an ancient Kingdom in Bengal formed by the descendent of later Gupta dynasty. King Shashanka was a well-known king of this dynasty who issued Gold and Silver Coins by during his rule.

Pushyabhuti Dynasty (606–647)

Pushyabhuti Dynasty was a major South India dynasty founded by Pushyabhuti, according to the information provided by Harshacharita written by the great poet Bana. Harshavardhana was one of the strongest rulers of this dynasty who expanded its boundaries to North and North-western India as well.

Gurjar- Pratihara Dynasty (650–1036 CE)

Gurjar-Pratihara Dynasty marks more than four centuries rule in Western India in Rajasthan and Gujarat. It emerged after Gupta kingdom started losing ground. The empire later invaded by Mahmud of Ghazani who demolished temples and looted a lot of gold.

Some more dynasties who ruled some parts of India:

Western Kshatrapas (c. 35–405 CE), Harsha Dynasty (606–647), Rashtrakuta Dynasty (735–982), Pala Dynasty (c. 750–1174), Paramara Dynasty (9th to 14th Century), Kabul Shahi Dynasty (c. 500 CE –c.1026 CE), Hoysala Dynasty (1000–1346), Eastern Ganga Rulers (1078–1434), Kakatiya Dynasty (1083–1323 CE), Kalachuris Dynasty (1130–1184), Sutiya Dynasty of Assam (1187–1524), Ahom Dynasty of Assam (1228–1826), Bahmani Dynasty (1347–1527), Malwa Dynasty (1392–1562), Reddy Dynasty (1325–1448 CE), Vijayanagara Kingdom (1336–1646), Sangama Dynasty (1336–1487), Saluva Dynasty (1490–1567), Tuluva dynasty (1491–1570), Dynasty of Mysore (1761–1799), Kingdom of Cochin, Mewar Dynasty of Sisodias (currently Udaipur state), Suri Empire (1540–1545), Monarchs of Sikkim, Monarchs of Ldakh, Deccan Sultanates (1527–1686), Bijapur Dynasty (1490–1686), Ahmadnagar Sultanate (1490–1636), Maratha Dynasty (1674–1881), Golconda Sultanate (1518–1687), Kolhapur Dynasty (1700–1947), Bhosale Dynasty (1707–1839), Kingdom of Travancore (1729–1947), Holkar Dynasty (1731–1948), Sikh Empire (1799–1849), Scindias of Gwalior, Gaekwad Dynasty, Hyderabad State (1720–1948), Foreign emperors in north-western India .

FAQs Related to Who Ruled India

Rapid fire round questions and answers on who ruled India: Here in a nutshell we are providing the specific knowledge on who ruled India in sharp one liner questions and answers:

Who ruled India after Akbar?

After Akbar his eldest son Jahangir ruled India.

Who ruled India after Babar?

Humayun ruled India after Babar under Mugal dynasty.

Who ruled India after Bimbisar?

Ajatshatru imprisoned his father Bimbisar and forcefully succeeded to the throne of Magadh.

Who ruled India after Shah Jahan?

Aurangzeb imprisioned his father Shah Jahan and forcefully succeeded to the throne of Mugal Empire in 1618.

Who ruled India after Dhana Nand?

Dhana Nanda, one of the nine sons of Mahapadma Nanda was the last ruler of Nanda Empire which was later overthrown and captured by Chandragupta Maurya with the assistance of Chanakya.

Who ruled India after Haryanka Dynasty?

Haryanka Dynasty was eliminated by Shishunaga Dynasty founded by Shishunaga who was an Amatya in Magadh. Nagadasaka was the last ruler of Haryanka Dynasty.

Who founded Delhi Sultanate and which dynasty emerged first under its flagship?

Delhi Sultanate was founded by the Turks who came from Central Asia. Slave dynasty founded by Qutub-ud-din-Aibak in the year 1206 was the first flagship kingdom under Delhi Sultanate.

Who ruled India after Sayyid Dynasty?

In the year 1451 Lodi dynasty under headship of Bahlol Lodi captured Delhi Sultanate being ruled by Sayyid Dynasty and established Lodi Dynasty which ruled until they were replaced by Mughals in 1526.

Which languages flourished during the rule of Chalukya Empire?

During the rule of Chalukyas, Kannada and Telugu literature saw considerable development.

Which literature provides us knowledge on Chera Kingdom?

Sangam literature provides us knowledge on the ancient Dravidian empire known as Chera Kingdom.

Who ruled India after Mughals?

Spread over India and beyond the Mughal Empire came under the complete control of the British East India Company in the year 1857 when it successfully crushed the nationwide sepoy mutiny. Moreover, the East India Company later deposed and exiled the last Mughal ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar. Later in the year 1858, Government of India Act was passed in the parliament of United Kingdom and British Crown rule (British Raj) got established formally in India which continued till 1947.

Who ruled India before Mughal Empire?

Before Mughals, India was ruled by several kingdoms lead by both Hindu and Muslim Kings. It was in the year 1526, Babur an afghan ruler from Kabul annexed Delhi Sultanate ruled by Lodi Dynasty and established Mughal Empire which gradually spread its wings all across the country.

Who ruled India before the British?

Mughals Empire ruled India before the establishment of British rule in India.

Countries who ruled India?

India was invaded continuously by several foreign empires, but none of them other than British, French and Portuguese, could succeeded in settling their bases in the country. Portugal established their rule in Goa in 15 th century and then British and French also entered India. British rule in India ended in 1947, however the French left the country in 1954 and to end the rule of Portugal in Goa, the government had to take military action in the year 1961.

Who ruled India during the Mughal period?

Over twenty Mughal emperors ruled India one after another till British East India Company annexed this dynasty. They include Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jehangir, Shahryar, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb (Alamgir), Azam Shah, Bahadur Shah, Jahandar Shah, Farukhsiyar, Rafi-ud-Darajat, Shah Jahan II, Muhammad Shah, Ahmad Shah Bahadur, Alamgir II, Shah Jahan III, Shah Alam II, Akbar Shah II and Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Who ruled India during the time of the famine of Bengal?

Bengal has faced two great famines, first in the year 1770 and another in the year 1943. India was under British East India Company rule during the great famine of Bengal in 1770, while it was under British Crown rule when Bengal faced second major famine in 1943.  

Who ruled India during the medieval period?

India was thronged by several dynasties during the medieval period. In the early medieval period the major rulers in India included Rastrakuta, Chalukya, Chola, Kalachri, Hoysala, Kakatiya, besides different Rajput states, Eastern and Western Ganga dynasties while in the late medieval period, the country witnessed the rule of Delhi Sultanate, Vijaynagar Empire, Ahom and Reddy Kingdoms among others.

Who ruled India during the Vedic period ?

Vedic period in India can be classified under Early Vedic period during ca. 1500 to 1100 BCE and the Later Vedic period between 1100 to 500 BCE. The Early Vedic period is marked by the arrivals of Aryans in India while the later Vedic period witnessed the rule of Kuru Kingdom, Panchala Kingdom and Kingdom of Videha, etc.

Who ruled India after Gupta Empire?

India was ruled by various smaller kingdoms in different regions after Gupta Empire collapsed. The prominent one among them was Harsh Vardhana in North India while in South India, Chalukyas, Pallavas, Rastrakutas, Pandya were the main rulers.

Who ruled India first?

Samrat Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya who founded Maurya Dynasty in Magadha, was the first ruler of India who unified most of the North Indian states first. Later Ashoka embarked on his winning streak and extended the boundaries of the country to even Greeko Bacterians Empire. In this way, Ashoka captured almost the entire Indian subcontinent.

Who ruled India from 1947 to 1950?

Though India got independence in the year 1947, it remained under British Monarchy until the Constitution of India was prepared in the year 1950 and it became a republic nation.

Who ruled India for 150 years?

Kushan dynasty ruled India for nearly 150 years.

Who ruled India for 16 years?

The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru ruled India for more than 16 years. He assumed office on 15 th August 1947 and ruled the country until his death on 27 th May 1964. In all his tenure as a Prime Minister of India was 16 years, 286 days.

Who ruled India after Gupta dynasty?

Chalukya dynasty and Vardhan Dynasty (also known as Pushyabhuti Dynasty) ruled India in parts after the downfall of Gupta Dynasty. Later Pulkeshin II of Chalukya Dynasty defeated Harshvardhan, the last powerful and noteworthy King of Vardhan Dynasty.

Who ruled during India’s golden age?

The era of Gupta Empire is called India’s Golden age. Established by Sri Gupta, the Gupta Kingdom encompassed maximum part of India during 320 CE to 550 CE. The reason why the ruling period of Gupta dynasty is called the Golden age is that during this period the Gupta Kings were successful in ensuring peace and tranquillity in the entire region. It resulted into development and inventions in Science and Technology; art and engineering as well as in Mathematics.

Who ruled India in 1000 AD?

Hoysala Dynasty ruled in the current Karnataka region in India from 1000 AD to 1346 AD.

Who ruled India in 1600 AD?

British East India Company started ruling India in 1600 AD. However, simultaneously Mughal Dynasty also continued to rule the country. The formal British Raj was established in India in 1858 after the British successfully quashed the great Sepoy mutiny in 1857.

Who ruled India in 1st century?

Kushan Empire ruled India in the 1 st century. Kushan Empire was established by Yuezhi in the Bactrian territories and it spread further to Afghanistan and north India till Varanasi.

Who ruled India in 1400 AD?

Tughluq dynasty ruled India in 1400 AD?

Who ruled India the longest?

The Pandyan Dynasty ruled southern parts of India from 7-8 century BCE to middle of the 17 th century which means they ruled approximately 2400 years.

Who ruled India before Lodi dynasty?

Sayyid Dynasty ruled India before Lodi Dynasty.

Who ruled India most?

Ashok ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent.

Who ruled India after mauryas?

Shunga Dynasty ruled India after Mauryas. After assassinating Brihadratha, the last Maurya ruler, Pushyamitra Shunga established Shunga Dynasty in the year 185 BCE.

Who ruled India after Mahabharata?

After Mahabharata war, the Pandavas ruled India for the next 36 years.

Persian princess who ruled India?

Raziya Sultan or Raziya-al-Din was the princess who ruled the Persian speaking Delhi Sultanate. She was the only woman ever crowned as the Sultan of Delhi.

Queens who ruled India?

No queen other than Rajiya Sultan ruled Delhi Sultanate, which was considered the power centre across the country.

Who ruled India starting in the 1800s until 1947?

British annexation through East India Company had started making dominance in India by the years 1700 AD and by 1720 the Mughal Empire was completely reached the stage of collapse. By 1800, the British rule in India started making waves and among the public it was known as British Raj. It is therefore, India was under British rule starting in the 1800s until 1947.

Who ruled south India?

Satavahanas, Cholas, Cheras, Chalukyas, Pallavas, Rashtrakutas, Kakatiyas and Hoysalas were the dynasties who ruled South India during different periods.

Who ruled India after the sepoy rebellion?

British crown rule got established in the year 1858 after Sepoy rebellion was crushed in 1857 by East India Company.

Who ruled Indian villages?

It was during the rule of British Raj; the Indian villages were ruled by District Collectors.

British lords/ Viceroys who ruled India?

There were total 12 British Lords/Viceroys who ruled India as Viceroy of the country namely: Lord Clive (1757), Lord Hasting (1772), Lord Ripon (1880), Lord Curzon (1899), Lord Minto II (1905), Lord Harding (1910), Lord Chelmsford (1916), Lord Reading (1921), Lord Irwin (1926), Lord Willington (1931), Lord Wavell (1943), and Lord Mountbatten (1947).

Who ruled India when Christianity emerged in west Asia ?

It was around the year 1321 Christianity emerged in west Asia and at this time period Delhi Sultanate was under the rule of Tughlaq Dynasty.

Who ruled India during World War One ?

India was under British Rule during World War one broke out in the year 1914.

Kings who ruled whole India?

Samrat Ashok of Maurya Dynasty was the only king who ruled almost the entire India and he later expanded the boundaries of the country to the Greeko-Bacterian Empire, crossing over Afghanistan in the midway.

Who ruled India for 200 years?

British ruled India for 200 years.

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Who was the first king of india, who was in india before the british, who was the first to invade india, when was ancient india found, when did the french come to india, when was the french east india company formed.

Literature in India During British Rule

Literature in India During British Rule!

1. Bengali Literature:

Before the impact of the West, the Bengali literature had two distinct sources—that of the learned and the well-to-do, and of the common people. The aristocratic type of literature, that is the former type, was patronised by the Courts, the Chiefs, the landlords.

The poets who wrote for the common people were kabiwals, Kirtanias, Yatras, lappa, Panchi, Dhop etc. But the difference in the form and content of the aristocratic and the common types of literature was not radical.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century a new order began to emerge and a fresh era was inaugurated in Bengali literature. It was, in fact, after the establishment of the Fort William College that important steps towards the development of modern Indian languages were taken.

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In order to teach the young English officials Indian langu­ages the college had to undertake compilation works in different sub­jects and in different languages for the instruction of the students. Dr. Gilchrist was responsible for production of books in Hindustani, Persian and Arabic while William Carey was for Bengali and other languages. Bengali scholars who wrote text books were Mrityunjay Vidyalankar. Ramram Basu, Chandi Charan Munshi, Rajib Lochan Mukhopaydhyaya etc.

The Christian missionaries, were another agency in the develop­ment of Bengali prose—Carey, Marshman and Ward were the pioneers in this regard. Their main contributions were works on Bengali gram­mar, Dictionary, Translation from English. Felix Carey was respon­sible for the production of the first volume of an encyclopaedia dea­ling with Physiology and Anatomy. Kalimohan Banerjee an early con­vert to Christianity edited an encyclopaedia in thirteen volumes called Vidya Kalpadruma. Works on history, philosophy, science etc, were also brought out.

The development of the Bengali language was largely helped by the contributions of the journals like Samachar Darpan, of the Serampore missionaries, Sambad Kaumudi of Ram Mohan Roy, Tattwabodhini Patrika of Devendranath Tagore – Sambad Prabhakar of Iswar Chan­dra Gupta. Organisations like School Book Society established in 1817 arranged for the supply of cheap books for the schools, and pub­lication of translation of books in Bengali on subjects like history, geography etc.

The Vernacular Literature Society founded in 1851 published books meant for use as rewards and prizes. Among its publications were translation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Elizabeth’s the Exiles of Siberia, the different types of movements such as social, religious and political gave a great impetus to the production of litera­ture.

In James Long’s catalogue of Bengali Works 1400 Bengali books and pamphlets have been listed as have been produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Of the writers of the period Ram Mohan must be reckoned as the precursor and leader. His claim to be recognised as the father of, the Bengali prose literature rests on his originality in composing Bengali in lucid, simple style “at the same time persuasive, orderly and suave, unruffled by winds of emotion or pas­sion” . His works were mainly in prose but he was also a master in poetical composition. He translated Bhagavad Gita in verse and composed many religious songs.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the ‘flood of modern­ism of the West struck India’ and provided a powerful impulse for the revaluation of the old values and for harmonising the East and the West. Bengal in particular had drunk at the fountain of the English literature and studied “English poetry from Shakespeare to Swinburn and prose from Deniel Defoe to Thomas Hardy” . The result was the production of works in poetry, drama, fiction and other aspects of litera­ture deeply soaked in English ideas.

The writers were also not con­fined to the old scholarly class but included members of the middle classes that had imbibed the ideas of modernism. The new literature that had developed reflected the current of the new ideas thoughts and feelings and helped to spread them in the country and the consciousness of the society. The result was that the Indian mind was awakened to a new mental process essential for reception of modern values. A new hu­manism pervaded the literature, and equality of all men and women was stressed and emancipation of conservative authority of the family, caste and tribe was effected.

Poetry, drama and prose witnessed a transformation in the hands of Iswar Chandra Gupta, Hem Chandra Bandyopadhyaya, Nabin Chan­dra Sen, Michael Madhusudan Datta, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Candra Chatterjee. Bankim Chandra’s Anandamath and his song Bandemataram enleavened the political resurgence of the nine­teenth century.

2. Assamese:

Assam was conquered by the British in 1826 and made a part of Bengal. Till 1873 Assamese was regarded as a dialect of Bengali and Bengali was taught in Assam schools as vernacular to the exclusion of Assamese. But it was from 1873 that Assamese was given its rightful place as the language of the people and was taught in schools as vernacular, as well as used in the Courts of law as official language.

Assamese literature was not much developed till the Chris­tian missionaries like Bronson and others did the pioneering work of writing Assamese grammar and dictionary, publishing monthly maga­zine in Assamese called Arunodaya Samvad Patra (1846) and writing school text books in history, elementary science, grammar besides books meant for general readers.

A new literary style based on the spoken Assamese in Central Assam gradually came into existence. Anandaram Dhekial Phukan was the first great writer in Assamese of the modern age. Others who followed him were Hem Chandra Barua (1835-96) and Gunabhiram Barua (1837-95). Hem Chandra Barua was a most versatile writer who was responsible for number of short novels, dra­mas, particularly satirical, and a very good Assamese dictionary named Hema-kosha. Gunabhiram brought out Assam Bandhu, a magazine in 1885.

A number of Assamese youth who received their education in Calcutta were inspired by the phenomenal progress in Bengali lite­rature and brought out a literary magazine Jonaki in 1889 which ex­ercised a great influence in building up modern Assames literature.

Younger writers wrote lyrics and poems and Bholanath Das (1858- 1929) sought to emulate poet Michael Madhusudan Datta and used Assamese blank verse. His work was, however, not received with much favour because of its “highly stiff style and Sanskritised langu­age” . The greatest figure in moderh Assamese literature is Lakshmi- nath Bezbarua (1868-1938). He was a versatile writer—a dramatist, a poet, an essayist, a humorist and a short-story writer. His portrayal of the Assamese middle class life as well as of the villagers remains unsurpassed even today. It may be mentioned that he was one of the founders of the Jonaki. Many other Assamese men of literature flourished towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Modern Oriya Literature developed under the impact of the Western education and influence as in almost every where else in India. Three eminent Oriya writers were the pioneers of the modern Oriya literature. They are Phakir Mohan Senapati, Radhanath Ray and Madhusudan Rao. Oldest of these three was Phakir Mohan. “He was well-versed in five languages, with a working knowledge of Eng­lish, and was pioneer printer, publisher and journalist in Orissa”. He was a prolific writer. “He translated single-handed, both the Ramayan and the Mahabharata, from the riginal into modern Oriya and tried his hand at short stories (the first to be written in Oriya) ballads, hymns narrative poems, rollicking satires and an epic on Buddha”.

But he distinguished himself chiefly as a novelist and his first novel was Chhamana Ata-Guntha (1909). It was a work of outstanding merit departing the life of the villagers exploited by the money-lenders. The themes of his novels were common men and simple village folk “the uneduca­ted weavers, barbers and peasants, the village chowkidar who himself was an accomplice of the dacoits, the unscrupulous and the mischief- mongering maid servants”.

Radhanath Ray (1848-1908) was the harbinger of a new age in Oriya poetry. “His magnum opus the Mahayatra was the first attem­pt to introduce blank verse in Oriya poetry” in emulation of Madhu­sudan Datta of Bengal. He freed Oriya verse from the ‘verbal gymnas­tics which was characteristic of the Oriya poetry before him. His des­cription of natural beauties, the hills, rivers and the Chilka Lake and other landscapes is inimitable. Radhanath wrote a number of small romances in verse in imitation of English poets. He was also the pioneer of Oriya prose. Madhusudan Rao wrote in a very forceful prose style a number of stories and essays.

He was also a lyrical poet. His Vasanta Gatha and Kusumanjali show ‘highest flights of his ima­gination in the realms of Truth and World, and Time. His sense of patriotism is portrayed in his Utkala-gatha”. Phakir Mohan, Radha­nath and Madhusudan were the illustrious trio who inaugurated the ‘modern Oriya literature. Ram Sankar Ray introduced modern tune of Oriya drama. He wrote twelve dramas beginning with Kanchi- Kaveri. Among other dramatists mention may be made of Jagomohan Lala, Kamapala Misra and Raja Padmanava Narayan Deva. Raja Padmanabha of Parlakimedi wrote in collaboration with his teacher Syamasundara Raja guru. The Satinataka of Jagamohan is regarded as one of the best Oriya plays. Nanda-kishor Bai distinguished himself in writing historical and nature poetry.

Oriya periodical journals were started by the Christian missiona­ries they started two monthlies in 1849 and 1861. The first indigen­ous journal in Oriya the daily Utkala Dipika appeared in 1866. In 1871 came out the Anglo-Oriya jounal, a fortnightly, the vernacular portion called Utkala Hitaishini and the English part called the Orissa Pariot. In 1873 were started Utkala Darpana, a monthly and Utkala Patra, a fortnightly. Of the several other papers that followed mention may be made of the weekly called Oriya, Utkala Prabha and Utkala Sahitya.

4. Gujarati:

The progress of English education, foundation of edu­cational newspapers and associations, and the efforts of the Christian missionaries gave a great impetus to Gujarati language. In 1814 The Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor within the Government of Bombay was founded by Archdeacon Barnes which gradually set up six schools four in Bombay city one in Surat and one in Broach; in 1826 it set up another school at Ahmadabad. Under the patronage of this society Ranchhorbhai Girdharbhai who had learnt English produced first series of Gujarati text books and became the guide of almost all the aspiring youngmen who took to literature and social reform. The work was carried forward by the students of Elphinstone College founded in 1827 and of the Bombay University founded in 1857.

Kinloch Forbes, an Assistant Judge at Ahmadabad took interest in the study of Gujarati language and history and secured the services of poet Dalpatram Dayabhai who collected old manuscripts and folk­songs and folk-tales. In 1848 Forbes founded at Ahmadabad the Gujarat Vernacular Society later named Gujarat Vidya Sabha and started the first Gujarat fortnightly called the Buddhiprakas. After his transfer to Surat he set up a similar society there and started a literary journal called Surat Samachar. Dalpatram’s zeal for social reforms found expression in his poems.

Some of his poems found place in the school text books and had an influence over the young minds for nearly forty years. His poem Hunnarkhanni Chadai (1850) dealt with the evil effects of modern industries on Indian crafts, and was regarded as the first expression of Swadeshi. Narmada Sankar Lal-shankar was the most outstanding literary figure of the second half of the nineteenth century.

His principal works are on Gujarati prosody, Gujarati figure of speech, Gujarati dictionary and a Dictionary my­thology. He is regarded as the father of modern Gujarati prose. The only other important prose writer of this period was Navalram Laksh- miram who was a friend of Narmada Shankar. Other important writers were Mahipatram Rupram Nandshankar Tuljashankar.

The best attempt at writing fiction at this time was made by Jehangir Ardeshir Talyar-khan. Bholanath Sarabhai under the influence of Brhamo Samaj wrote psalms rich in prayerfulness. With the Muslim conquest of Gujarat it lost its stage and drama. But these were revived after the study of Shakespeare. Ranchhorbhai Udayram wrote the first modern Gujarati play. During the last part of the nineteenth century Gover-dhanram, Manilal Nabhubhai Dvivedi, Narasingha Rao. Manishankar Ratnaji Bhatt, Sursinhji Gohel, Thakor of Lathi Balvantrai Kalyanrai, Thakor Ramanbhai Mahipatram Nilkanth worked for the progress of the different aspects of the Gujarati literature. A new age of the Gujarati literature, however, began in 1865 with the publication of Vasantotsav by Nanalal.

5. Marathi Literature:

With the passing of the Peshwa’s kingdom into the hands of the British in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a situation similar to that had developed in Bengal began to rise in ‘the Bombay Presidency and factors—political, social and economic began to operate as they did in Bengal. The Marathi language and literature began to be transformed in the way similar to that of Bengal.

Marathi literature in the eighteenth century and earlier was large­ly in verse expressing folk sentiments of love and heroism as well as conveying religious and moral teachings. A new literary deve­lopment began with Eknath and followed by writers like Tukaram, Mukteswar Ramdas etc. In the eighteenth century Marathi literature, mainly poetry, had two distinct divisions, one secular and the other reli­gious and classical.

In the secular literature were the love lyrics, histori­cal ballads etc. while in religious and classical group, composition in imitation of Ramayana and Mahabharata, legends of Puranas etc. appea­red. In prose there was not much excellence to start with and there were adaptations from Sanskrit fables and lores like Betal Panchaishi, Singhasan Battisi etc. Letters, despatches and official records cons­tituted the third form of prose.

The new trend in literature made its appearance from the begin­ning of the nineteenth century. The Christian missionaries were pioneers in the new Marathi language and literature and Carey pub­lished the first Marathi grammar with the help of Marathi Pandit Vaijnath in 1805. In 1814 the Serampore Press published the first Marathi book Singhasan Battisi. Under the patronage of Monstuart Elphinstone, the first governor of Bombay Presidency Bombay Na­tive Education Society was founded in 1920 which undertook preparation of text books in local vernacular. English treatises on sur­veying, mensuration, anatomy nosology and materia medica were tran­slated in Marathi.

School Book Society founded in 1822 encouraged production of books for schools boys as well as adults and Goldsmith’s History of Rome, Malcolm’s Persia, Wilk’s History of the Arabs and History of the Chinese, works on Physics, Chemistry, Ethics, History of Gujarat,

Orme’s Account of Hindusthan. Ain-i-Akbari, Sikandamama etc. were listed for translation by the Society. In this way the foundations of the new Maratha Prose were laid through which secular and scientific knowledge was propagated.

In 1833 the government took a retrograde step by setting up the Bombay Board of Education presided over by Sir Erskine Perry, which became a strong protagonist of English and began to discourage pub­lication in local varnacular. But Bal Sastri Jambhekar, Dadoba Pan-duranga took up the challenge and wrote a number of Marathi books.

An urge and taste for reading Marathi had been created by the Maratha journals that came out at that time. In 1832 Bombay Darpan the first Marathi journal was established by Jambhekar and a second journal Digdarshan came out in 1840. Bhau Maharaja brought out Prabhakar in 1841. Likewise Dnyanodaya, Dnyan Prakash, Vicharlahari etc. came out in subsequent years. These Marathi journals gave a great stimulus to Marathi writing as well as reading Marathi literature.

During the second half of the nineteenth century original writings in Marathi language began to appear and names of writers like Vinayak Janardan Kirtane, Baba Padmanji, Harinarayan Apte deserve special mention. In 1874 Vishnu Sastri Chiplunkar in his Nibandhamala showed the height to which Marathi literature could reach. His essays became models both in style and expression of ideas in Marathi langu­age. “His writings liberated the educated class from the chains of servi­tude that bound it to foreign thought”. His work of enriching the Mara­thi language was followed up by Angarkar, Tilak Shivaram Mahadeo Paranjape. Biography, history, humorous essays, poetry, drama etc. breathed the modern spirit and new Marathi language and literature attained a great height and excellence.

6. Urdu & Hindi Literature:

Under the new conditions Urdu and Hindi began to make rapid progress. While Urdu followed the normal course of progress, Hindi was hampered by a hesitancy as to whether Braja Bhasa or Khari Boli should be adopted as literary language. While Braja Bhasa possessed considerable treasure of literature both prose and poetry, Khari Boli was not considered to be sufficiently elegant as a medium of poetical composition.

But after the establishments of the Fort William College books were being produced in Khari Boli and the language was shown to have the capability of serious writings. But in the hands of Sadasukhlal, Lalluji Lai, Sadal Misra and Insallaih Khan Khari Boli was used in prose composition to excellent effect.

As to the dialect to be used in Hindi poetry the controversy continued. Develop­ment of Hindi as a vigorous language took place in the nineteenth cen­tury. Hindi journals, historical treatises, essays and dramas prepared the ground for subsequent development of Hindi language and litera­ture.

Some of the important Hindi prose writers such as Raja Shiva Prasad, (1823-95) who was responsible for writing a history of India in three volumes used many Persian words in his work. Raja Lakshaman Singh based his composition on highly elegant Sanskrit style while Bharatendu Harish Chandra followed a middle course, and based his dramas on English models.

Hindi poetry composed in Braja Bhasa was largely revivalist in nature. It was not until Sridhar Pathak (1859-1928) made use of Khari Boli in Hindi poetry that the tradition of exclusive use of Braja Bhasa for Hindi poetry was broken, His lead was followed by many others and the Khari Boli became the main medium of the new Hindi poetical lite­rature.

Urdu developed with even pace and had already made great pro­gress. It was in the writings of Ghalib that Urdu prose and poetry showed new, modern trends. Ghalib’s style of prose in his letters-simple yet rich conversational style became a model for modern expression. In poetry Ghalib’s preference to meaning and thought, spontaneity of style and expression, originality in use of simile and metaphors marked a great advance in Urdu literature.

The post-Revolt (1857) era which saw the disappearance of the remnants of the Mughal aristocracy and the setting up of a modern ad­ministration and socio-economic changes, effected a great transforma­tion of the social milieu of northern Indian provinces. With new educa­tion, new problems and a new world of ideas opened before the people which gave an impetus to new Urdu literature. In preference to Gazals, Mathnavi and Musaddas received attention of the writers. “Natural sights and phenomena like the rainy season, winter and summer, flowing rivers and mountain scenes entered poetic imagery. Imaginary narra­tive, historical, didactic and patriotic themes became common” .

Under the impact of new factors of the contemporary time there was a break with the traditional literary ideals and new Urdu literature began to develop in quick pace. Syed Ahmad khan pioneered a na­tural Urdu prose dispelling illusory tradition of artificialities of the past. Nazir Ahmad also was in favour of discarding unreal, artificial nature of the past Urdu literature and advocated real beauty of facts.

The foundations of the new school of Urdu literature were laid by Md. Husain Azad and Altaf Husain Hali at Lahore to promote progressive Urdu literature. Md. Husain Azad composed poems in new style and in new themes such as Sham ki Amad, i.e. Advent of Evening, Mathnavi Hubbi Watan i.e. Love of Mother land, Dad-i-lnsaf, i.e. Praise of Jus­tice, Zanustan i.e. Winter, and Khwab-i-Amn, i.e. Dream of Peace. Hali’s contribution was even greater. He was equally great poet, prose- writer and a critic. His poems dealt themes of patriotism, social re­forms Nature, elegy etc.

His masterpiece was Musaddas-i-Hali other poets of the time were Muhammad Ismail, Durga Sahai Surur, Akbar etc. Among the new prose writers mention may be made of Mir Amman and his associates. The new Urdu prose made its appea­rance under the patronage of Fort William College. Later authors who greatly enriched Urdu literature were Azad, Nazir, Ahmad, Shibli Nifmani, Zakaullah etc. Among those authors who had made their mark as humanists, satirists, novelists and story-writers mention may be made of Sajjad Husain, Ratannath Dhar Sashar, Abul Halim etc.

7. Tamil and Telegu Literature:

What we have noticed in the case of the development of vernacular language and literature in the north, is repeated in the south in regard to Tamil, Telegu, Kannada and Malayalam.

Tamil is an ancient language with a highly developed literature. The Tamils came under the influence of the West quite early, with the arrival of the Portuguese and later, of the French and the English. With the establishment of College of Fort St. George at Madras on the model of the fort William College, Calcutta, Tamil language was being taught to the employees of the East India Company; a Tamil library was set up and books in Tamil were being published.

The Pandits who at first taught Tamil in the Fort St.George College adopted Wes­tern outlook, produced critical works and translation of English books in Tamil. Grammars and dictionaries were also compiled. In this way the language for modern and original literature came into exis­tence. Minakshi Sundaram Pallai who was a great Tamil scholar en­couraged his students to write and express themselves in their own lan­guage—Tamil. Sundaram Pillai’s pupil Vedanayakam Pillai wrote the first novel in Tamil language. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer was another worthy pupil of Sundaram Pillai and was the ‘harbinger of Tamil renaissance’, and was the inspirer of generations of Tamilians including Subramania Bharati.

After a period of translation of English literature into Tamil, began a period of original work in Tamil language. Historical, social, roman­tic, and patriotic literature came to be produced in Tamil.

The Press also helped the development of Tamil language and propagation of modern ideas. With the spread of English education there was an urge for creative literary works and a receptiveness to modern ways of thinking. A class of Tamil scholars and writers grew up who created the new, i.e. the modern Tamil literature.

Telegu language and literature showed the same process of liter­ary development as we notice in other vernaculars. But in case of Telegu literature one century from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century had been a period of decadence. From the middle of the nineteenth to the end of the century the peri­od was, generally speaking, one of transition in regard to Telegu lan­guage and literature and its was not until 1880 that a new movement had set in for the development of the Telegu language and literature of which Kandukari Vinesalingam was the inaugurator.

In his jour­nal Hasya Sanjivan he ridiculed the prevalent social customs and his another journal Vivekavardhini fostered creative art in literature. With him a new era of literature began and a simple natural style was introduced. He was also the first Telegu writer who composed essays, dramas, novels as well as scientific treatises. Among others who pro­moted modernism in Telegu style were G.V. Apparao, Kumaraju Venkata Lakshmanrao, Gidugu Venkata Ramamurthi, D.K. Nageswararao etc. They were the harbingers of Renaissance in Telegu literature and prepared the ground for the new era and Telegu literature.

In conclusion it may be mentioned that the literary movements in some of the languages of India showed common trends in the deve­lopment of Indian mind and thought. Although the Indian mind was ready to absorb the Western ideas and adopt Western attitudes towards expression of thought yet it was never detached from the moorings of its own traditional heritage. In her efforts to effect a harmony bet­ween the Eastern and Western ideas, Indian mind did not abandon the essentials of the East. A common outlook, a community of ideas and sentiments characterised the minds of the Indians, which were the preconditions of a natural consciousness that we notice towards the second half of the nineteenth century.

8. Kannada:

After the creation of the new Hindu State of Mysore at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Mysore was looked upon as the centre of Karnataka culture. The ruler Mummadi Krishnaraja gathered round him Sanskrit and Kannada scholars and himself com­posed fifty works in Kannada. During long fifty years of his patron­age of literature Krishnaraja brought round him number of scholars of all communities. Among the Jaina scholars were Santaraja Pandita, Devachandra, and Charu Kirti Pandita. Aliya Linga Raja was an author in Sanskrit and Kannada. Among other writers patroniset by Mummadi Krishnaraja were were Venkata Rama Sastri Subrahmanya, Rangadasa Srinivasa Tammayya and Maddagiri Nanjappa.

Apart from the above group of scholars and authors who received patronage of Krishnaraja. Krinshnamachrya of Srirangapattanam who was a Vakil at the Sadar Adalat Court at Madras wrote grammar and lexicon for both old and new Kannada. His grammar was one of the first Kannada works to be printed. The influence of the Brahmo Samaj is found in the work of Rama Brahmanda Yogi.

In the later half of the nineteenth century the Kannada writers were inspired by new movements in India the missionaries of Mangalore Basel Mission, the Wellesley Mission etc. were responsible for the publication of number of works, such as English Kannada dictionary, Kannada-English lexicon. Carey, Karel, Zeigler, Kittel, Maben and Campbell wrote grammars of the Kannada language. Kittel produced an excellent English-Kannada dictionary with the help of many Pandits. Rice, the famous epigraphist edited Kannada classics in the Bibli-otheca Carna.

He also edited Amarkosa in Kannada and his intro­duction to the classical works gives us a comprehensive history of the Kannada language and literature. Chama Raja Wodeyar encouraged dramatic production. Among the author of dramas mention may be made of Basavappa Sastri, Motaganhali Sankara Sastri, Ayya Sastri, N. Subba Sastri and S.G. Narasighacharya. Benkatacharya was the novelist in Kannada. His knowledge in Bengali enabled him to tran­slate the important works of Bankin Chandra into Kannada.

9. Malayalam:

The activities of the Christian missionaries of the Basel mission and particularly the work of Dr. Gundert, a German missionary of exceptional linguistic talents gave a spurt to Malayalam language and literature. The Malayalam-English Dictionary pro­duced by Dr. Gundert was a great step in this regard and his book remains an authoritative work even today.

The establishment of the Madras University and the need for Malayalam textbooks and the in­fluence of the Western education gave an impetus to the growth of Malayalam language and literature. Prose was the first branch of the Malayalam literature to receive the impetus by contact with English.

The contributions of Swathi Thirunal and Ayiliyam Thirunal were very great indeed in the growth of Malayalam language and literature. Kerala Verma was an eminent Malayalam prose writer and his prose was modelled on some of the best essayists in English. Maharaja of Travancore Ayiliam Thirunal and Vishakham Thirunal the heir ap­parent, were Malayalam prose writers of great ability.

Growth of journalism helped in a large measure in the develop­ment of Malayalam prose. Began by the Christian missionaries for religious propaganda journalism was taken up by local scholars who started news papers and journals for literary and political purposes. Literary articles, reviews and poems also enriched the Malayalam lan­guage and literature. Another aspect of the new literary activities was the production of novels.

In 1887 Kundalata was produced by Appu Nedungadi, an early graduate of the Madras University. C.V. Raman Pillai and Chandu Menon were two other novelists of great ability. In drama and poetry the names of Venmani Nampoodiris (Sr. and Jr.), Kerala Varma Kunju Kuttan Thampuran, Kachunni Thampuran may be mentioned. The leader of the a new romantic school of poetry in Malayalam was given by A.R. Raja Raja Varma, the famous professor of Malayalam in the Maharaja’s College of TriVandrun. He was both a poet and critics himself.

Contact with English literary criti­cism was the origin of literary criticism in Malayalam and the name of C.P. Achutha Menon deserves special mention in this regard. P.K. Narayana Pillai, in fact, laid the foundation of scholarly criticism and he owed much to his preceptor Raja Raja. Most important of the essayist in Malayalam was Kunju Raman, known by his pseudonym Kesari.

In the early decades of the twentieth century there was a great urge in translating Sanskrit and English works into Malayalam. Dewan Bahadur Govinda Pillai translated several of Shakespeare’s dramas. One of the most successful of the later translators who set a good model by his translation was C.S. Subramanian Potti. He translated Bankim Chandra’s Durgesnandini from its English version.

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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.

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

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