The only power that could contradict the narrative — the British — would never do it for the opposite reason — pride. Rulers of India for years? Sure, we will take that on our collective resumes. In the same vein, there is a new narrative of years of slavery that has been mentioned by the PM himself on multiple occassions.
Now that we understand the underlying mechanism, this is similar to building a sense of shame that can create Hindu nationalism. Kashmiri separatists try the same with a narrative of foreign rule since when Akbar invaded Kashmir to instill the feelings of Kashmiri nationalism.
Given that most of these narratives need suspension of reason for example, one needs to forget the mighty Maratha Empire that lasted nearly years in the narrative it is puzzling why they last.
The only reason I can think of is that the political objective powering the narrative is strong while there is none or a weak one that wants to counter it. People are mostly lazy thinkers as Kahneman shows and will accept narratives that are hurled at them repeatedly with force. I wish a sense of collectively, imagined future we can be proud of could act as a stronger basis of nationalism than an imagined history that we are ashamed of.
History should be a matter of discovery where facts build stories and we are happy to adjust our stories as new facts emerge. The shared ordeal of the Independence movement and Indian constitution give us enough basis for a modern nationalism. The process of figuring a collective future and the energy needed to overcome current challenges can drive a modern nationalism. These atrocities were often used to justify the British reaction to the rebellion. The consensus was that there was no convincing evidence of such crimes having been committed, although numbers of European women and children had been killed outright.
In August, by the Government of India Act , the company was formally dissolved and its ruling powers over India were transferred to the British Crown. A new British government department, the India Office, was created to handle the governance of India, and its head, the Secretary of State for India, was entrusted with formulating Indian policy.
On a political level, the British assumed that the previous lack of consultation between rulers and ruled was a significant factor in contributing to the uprising. In consequence, Indians were drawn into government at a local level, although on a limited scale. Nonetheless, a new white-collar Indian elite comprised of a professional middle class was starting to arise, in no way bound by the values of the past.
The Bengal army dominated the Indian army before and a direct result after the rebellion was the scaling back of the size of the Bengali contingent. The Brahmin presence in the Bengal Army was reduced because of their perceived primary role as mutineers. The rebellion transformed both the native and European armies of British India. The old Bengal Army almost completely vanished from the order of battle.
There were also fewer European officers, but they associated themselves far more closely with their soldiers. More responsibility was given to the Indian officers. The economy of British India was largely designed to protect and expand interests of the British economy, but the British collaborated closely with the Indian elites who, unlike the masses of ordinary Indians, benefited from the many economic changes.
In the second half of the 19th century, both the direct administration of India by the British Crown and the technological change ushered in by the Industrial Revolution closely intertwined the economies of India and Great Britain. Many of the major changes in transport and communications typically associated with Crown Rule of India began before the Indian Rebellion of Finished goods from England were transported back just as efficiently for sale in the burgeoning Indian markets. In the 17th century, India was a relatively urbanized and commercialized country with a buoyant export trade, devoted largely to cotton textiles but also including silk, spices, and rice.
Yet while the British cotton industry underwent technological revolution in the late 18th century, the Indian industry stagnated and industrialization in India was delayed until the 20th century. Historians have suggested that occurred because India was still a largely agricultural nation with low wages.
In Britain, wages were relatively high, so cotton producers had the incentive to invent and purchase expensive new labor-saving technologies. In India, by contrast, wages were low, so producers preferred to increase output by hiring more workers rather than investing in technology.
British control of trade and exports of cheap Manchester cotton are cited as other significant factors. Despite the unrivaled quality of Indian cotton, universally recognized as late as the end of the 18th century, Indian textile exports declined significantly over the 19th century. High tariffs against Indian textile workshops and British restrictions on Indian cotton imports quickly transformed India from the source of textiles to a source of raw cotton.
Industrial production as it developed in European factories was unknown until the s when the first cotton mills opened in Bombay, posing a challenge to the cottage-based home production system based on family labor. While other Indian mills produced cheap coarse yarn and later cloth using local short-staple cotton and cheap machinery imported from Britain, Tata imported expensive longer-stapled cotton from Egypt and bought more complex ring-spindle machinery from the United States to spin finer yarn that could compete with imports from Britain.
In the s, Tata launched plans to expand into heavy industry using Indian funding. It became the leading iron and steel producer in India, with , employees in A plan for a rail system in India was first put forward in A few short lines were built in the s, but they did not interconnect.
In , Governor-General Lord Hardinge allowed private entrepreneurs to set up a rail system in India. The colonial government encouraged new railway companies backed by private investors under a scheme that would provide land and guarantee an annual return of up to five percent during the initial years of operation.
The companies were to build and operate the lines under a year lease, with the government having the option to buy them earlier. Encouraged by the government guarantees, investment flowed in and a series of new rail companies were established, leading to rapid expansion of the rail system in India. Soon several large princely states built their own rail systems and the network spread across regions.
British investors and engineers built a modern railway system by the late 19th century. It was the fourth largest in the world and was renowned for quality of construction and service. The government was supportive, realizing its value for military use in case of another rebellion as well as its value for economic growth.
All the funding and management came from private British companies. The railways at first were privately owned and operated and run by British administrators, engineers, and skilled craftsmen. At first, only the unskilled workers were Indians. Historians note that until the s, both the Raj lines and the private companies hired only European supervisors, civil engineers, and even operating personnel such as locomotive engineers. Like hiring practices, building and maintaining the railways were designed to benefit mostly British companies.
The government required that bids on railway contracts be made to the India Office in London, shutting out most Indian firms. The railway companies purchased most of their hardware and parts in Britain. There were railway maintenance workshops in India, but they were rarely allowed to manufacture or repair locomotives. It later transpired that there was heavy corruption in these investments, on the part of both members of the British Colonial Government in India and companies who supplied machinery and steel in Britain.
This resulted in railway lines and equipment costing nearly double what they should have. India provides an example of the British Empire pouring its money and expertise into a well-built system designed for military purposes after the Rebellion of with the hope that it would stimulate industry. The system was overbuilt and too expensive for the small amount of freight traffic it carried.
However, it did capture the imagination of the Indians, who saw their railways as the symbol of an industrial modernity—but one that was not realized until after Independence. The result was, on average, no long-term change in income levels. Agriculture was still dominant, with most peasants at the subsistence level. Extensive irrigation systems were built, providing an impetus for growing cash crops for export and for raw materials for Indian industry, especially jute, cotton, sugarcane, coffee, and tea.
Agricultural income imparted the strongest effect on GDP. Historians continue to debate whether the long-term impact of British rule was to accelerate or hinder the economic development of India. He vehemently attacked the EIC, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray continues this line of attack, arguing that the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of plunder and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of the Mughal Empire.
Marshall shows that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy. He argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past, which largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century. Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators, keeping the old Mughal rates of taxation.
Many historians agree that the EIC inherited an onerous taxation system that took one-third of the produce of Indian cultivators. Instead of the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, Marshall presents the interpretation supported by many scholars in India and the West that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent cooperation with Indian elites.
Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still highly controversial among many historians. However, historians agree that the British rule did not change the divisive caste-based hierarchy of the Indian society and thus ordinary Indians remained excluded from the benefits of economic growth.
The railway network in , when it was the fourth largest railway network in the world. In , almost all the rail companies were taken over by the government.
The following year, the first electric locomotive made its appearance. With the arrival of World War I, the railways were used to meet the needs of the British outside India. With the end of the war, the railways were in a state of disrepair and collapse. The Indian National Congress has dominated Indian politics since leading the Indian independence movement. In the post-independence era, it has remained the most influential political party in India under the continuous leadership of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty.
Its objective was to obtain a greater share in government for educated Indians and create a platform for civic and political dialogue between educated Indians and the British Raj. The first session was held in December and attended by 72 delegates.
The rest were of Parsi and Jain backgrounds. Within the next few years, the demands of the Congress became more radical in the face of constant opposition from the British government. The organization decided to advocate in favor of the independence movement because it would allow a new political system in which the Congress could be a major party. In , the Congress was split into two factions.
The radicals, led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, advocated civil agitation and direct revolution to overthrow the British Empire and the abandonment of all things British.
The moderates, led by leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, wanted reform within the framework of British rule. Tilak was backed by rising public leaders like Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai, who held the same point of view. Gokhale criticized Tilak for encouraging acts of violence and disorder. But the Congress of did not have public membership and thus Tilak and his supporters were forced to leave the party.
Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa in With the help of the moderate group led by Ghokhale, Gandhi became president of the Congress and formed an alliance with the Khilafat Movement, a pan-Islamic, political protest campaign launched by Muslims to influence the British government and increase Hindu Muslim unity. In protest, a number of leaders resigned to set up the Swaraj Party. The Khilafat movement soon collapsed and in the years following World War I, the party became associated with Mahatma Gandhi, who remained its unofficial spiritual leader and icon.
The nationalist cause was expanded to include the interests and industries that formed the economy of common Indians. For example, in Champaran, Bihar, Gandhi championed the plight of desperately poor sharecroppers and landless farmers who were forced to pay oppressive taxes and grow cash crops at the expense of the subsistence crops that formed their food supply.
The profits from the crops they grew were insufficient to provide for their sustenance. Proposals aimed at eradicating caste differences, untouchability, poverty, and religious and ethnic divisions made the Congress a forceful group that dominated the Indian independence movement. Although its members were predominantly Hindu, it had members from other religions, economic classes, and ethnic and linguistic groups. In the winter of , the British government allowed provincial elections in India that were held in eleven provinces.
The Congress gained power in eight of the provinces. In protest, the Congress asked all elected representatives to resign from the government.
In Azad Hind, an Indian provisional government, was established in Singapore and supported by Japan. In response, the Congress helped to form the INA Defense Committee, which assembled a legal team to defend the case of the soldiers of the Azad Hind government. Nehru emerged as the paramount leader of the Indian independence movement under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi and ruled India from its establishment as an independent nation in until his death in He is considered to be the architect of the modern Indian nation-state: a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic.
After Indian independence in , the Indian National Congress became the dominant political party in the country. In , in the first general election held after independence, the party swept to power in the national parliament and most state legislatures. It held power nationally until It returned to power in and ruled until , when it was once again defeated.
It formed the government in at the head of a coalition as well as in and , when it led the United Progressive Alliance. During this period, the Congress remained center-left in its social policies while steadily shifting from a socialist to a neoliberal economic outlook. During his tenure, Nehru implemented policies based on import substitution industrialization and advocated a mixed economy, where the government-controlled public sector co-existed with the private sector.
He believed the establishment of basic and heavy industries was fundamental to the development and modernization of the Indian economy. The Nehru government directed investment primarily into key public sector industries — steel, iron, coal, and power — promoting their development with subsidies and protectionist policies. Nehru embraced secularism, socialistic economic practices based on state-driven industrialization, and a non-aligned and non-confrontational foreign policy that became typical of the modern Congress Party.
Shastri died in , reportedly of a heart attack but the circumstances of his death remain mysterious. In the parliamentary elections held in , the Gandhi-led Congress won a landslide victory on a platform of progressive policies such as the elimination of poverty. Gandhi rejected calls to resign and announced plans to appeal to the Supreme Court. She moved to restore order by ordering the arrest of most of the opposition participating in the unrest.
This period of political oppression ended in , when Gandhi released all political prisoners and called fresh elections to the Lok Sabha.
The opposition Janata Party won a landslide victory over the Congress. Indira Gandhi, second-longest-serving Prime Minister of India and the only woman to hold the office. She was elected Congress President in In , Ghandi and her followers seceded and formed a new opposition party, popularly called Congress I —the I signifying Indira.
During the next year, her new party attracted enough members of the legislature to become the official opposition. In the same year, Gandhi regained a parliamentary seat.
In , following a landslide victory for the Congress I , she was again elected prime minister. The national election commission declared Congress I to be the real Indian National Congress for general election and the designation I was dropped. As prime minister, Gandhi became known for her political ruthlessness and unprecedented centralization of power. After his government became embroiled in several financial scandals, however, his leadership became increasingly ineffectual, although Gandhi was regarded as a non-abrasive person who consulted other party members and refrained from hasty decisions.
In , Gandhi was killed by a bomb concealed in a basket of flowers carried by a woman associated with the Tamil Tigers. Rajiv Gandhi was succeeded as party leader by P. Narasimha Rao, who was elected prime minister in Rao later resigned as prime minister and as party president. In the general election, the Congress did not regain its leading position. To boost its popularity and improve its performance in the forthcoming election, Congress leaders urged Sonia Gandhi — widow of Rajiv Gandhi — to assume the leadership of the party.
She had previously declined offers to become actively involved in party affairs and stayed away from politics. After her election as party leader, a section of the party that objected to the choice because of her Italian origins broke away and formed the Nationalist Congress Party NCP , led by Sharad Pawar.
Sonia Gandhi remains the leader of the Congress, highlighting the long Indian tradition of politics as a dynastic affair. The Indian independence movement, which achieved its goal in , was one of many independence struggles that intensified after World War II across Asia and Africa.
The decades following the Indian Rebellion of were a period of growing political awareness, manifestation of Indian public opinion, and emergence of Indian leadership at both national and provincial levels. Members of the upwardly mobile and successful western-educated elites, engaged in professions such as law, teaching, and journalism, established organizations to ensure they would gain influence in Indian politics e.
Despite their claims to represent all India, these organizations initially voiced the interests of urban elites, and the number of participants from other social and economic backgrounds remained negligible. This new middle class of educated professionals, although spread thinly across the country, expressed the growing sense of solidarity, empowerment, and discontent with the British rule, fueled by success in education and accordant benefits, including employment in the Indian Civil Service.
Many Indians were especially encouraged when Canada was granted dominion status in and established an autonomous democratic constitution. Discontent, on the other hand, came not just from policies of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from specific government actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns e. The event contributed to the establishment of the Indian National Congress, the single most influential organization of the Indian independence movement.
During its first twenty years, Congress primarily debated British policy toward India. However, its debates created a new outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth.
Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and using Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India. By , although the Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization, its achievement was undermined by its singular failure to attract Muslims, who felt that their representation in government service was inadequate. In response, the All India Muslim League was founded in Like most of the Congress at the time, Jinnah did not favor outright self-rule, considering British influences on education, law, culture, and industry as beneficial to India.
To secure the interests of the Muslim diaspora in British India, the League eventually played a decisive role during the s in the Indian self-rule movement and developed into the driving nationalist force that led to the creation of Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent.
It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role.
However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India as did actually occur to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states. That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia.
The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms.
We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of midth century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.
Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.
When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in , the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India.
The year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India.
He could do little to help the 1, unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor.
It was only much later, in the s, that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor. I n the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India.
But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire. The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey.
It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy — even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants.
In , when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1. While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey.
The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance.
But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died.
This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality — in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time. This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself.
H ow successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in ? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice — with the exception of cricket — remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries.
Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:. Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India.
Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most. The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation.
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