Over 1, were injured. Myths of British beneficence There are many apologists for the Empire who argue that the British gave many things to India, like the very idea of India, democracy, the English language, the railways, tea and even cricket. But Tharoor has answers for all these claims. Were the British responsible for the idea of India? In history, there had been various rulers who had consolidated much of India, including the Moghuls who were ruling at the time of the arrival of the British.
Moreover, Tharoor argues that there was always a shared sense of a civilisational heritage on the sub-continent, a sacred geography of India, knit together by tracks of pilgrimage. He speculates as the Moghul empire was disintegrating, there is no reason why a new knitting together of the country could not have occurred.
In midth century, the Maharashtras were in the ascendancy, and they could have done it. He imagines a consolidation of the country under Maharashtra rule with the Moghul emperor as a constitutional figurehead, and with strong regional autonomy. He also argues that it is a bit rich of the British to claim that they bequeathed democracy to India, after years of exploiting and abusing the country.
Rather than uniting India, the great British achievement was to divide it. In , the British were horrified to see Hindus and Muslims fighting together against the British during the Indian Mutiny. So British launched a divide and rule policy along religious lines. They sought to forment a separate Muslim consciousness. Others escaped through drowning themselves in alcohol, opium or other drugs.
Several came to see their role as being a peacekeeper between various ethnic and religious groups, despite the irony of the British having encouraged and exploited the categorisation of colonial subjects on these grounds in the first place.
Underneath all of this sits a trauma that the coloniser had to either deal with — or resign their post and go home. One serviceman of the late Raj who I have focused on in my research is an example of the coping mechanisms that British officials deployed.
Andrew Clow entered the Indian Civil Service in at the age of 22 and would remain a civil servant until when he reached the mandatory retirement ceiling of 35 years. His most notable portfolios were as secretary of the Indian Labour Bureau in the late s, followed by minister for communications and then governor of Assam from to Clow, and his one thousand or so colleagues at any one time, effectively ruled India during the late Raj. This was a time of declining British prestige, and declining public and political opinion of colonialism as an acceptable social, economic and political practice.
These local princes were effective at maintaining British rule and gained much from being loyal to the British. British rule from the time after the mutiny is often called the Raj.
During this period a tiny number of British officials and troops about 20, in all ruled over million Indians. This was often seen as evidence that most Indians accepted and even approved of British rule. There is no doubt that Britain could not have controlled India without the co-operation of Indian princes and local leaders, as well as huge numbers of Indian troops, police officers, civil servants etc. Other historians point out that British rule of India was maintained by the fact that Indian society was so divided that it could not unite against the British.
In fact, the British encouraged these divisions. The better-off classes were educated in English schools. They served in the British army or in the civil service.
They effectively joined the British to rule their poorer fellow Indians. There are huge arguments about whether the British created or enlarged these divisions in Indian society British society was deeply divided by class , or whether the British simply took advantage of divisions that were already present in Indian society.
For much of the s the average Indian peasant had no more say in the way he or she was ruled than did the average worker in the United Kingdom. The British view tended to portray British rule as a charitable exercise - they suffered India's environment eg climate, diseases in order to bring to India good government and economic development eg railways, irrigation, medicine. Modern admirers of British rule also note these benefits. Other historians point out that ruling India brought huge benefits to Britain.
India's huge population made it an attractive market for British industry. India also exported huge quantities of goods to Britain, especially tea, which was drunk or exported on from Britain to other countries. Then there were the human resources. The Indian army was probably Britain's single greatest resource. English traders frequently engaged in hostilities with their Dutch and Portuguese counterparts in the Indian Ocean. The Company decided to explore the feasibility of gaining a territorial foothold in mainland India with official sanction from both Britain and the Mughal Empire, and requested that the Crown launch a diplomatic mission.
In , James I instructed Sir Thomas Roe to visit the Mughal Emperor Nuruddin Salim Jahangir to arrange for a commercial treaty that would give the Company exclusive rights to reside and establish factories in Surat and other areas. In return, the Company offered to provide the Emperor with goods and rarities from the European market. This mission was highly successful.
By , the company had 23 factories and 90 employees in India. In an act aimed at strengthening the power of the EIC, King Charles II granted the EIC in a series of five acts around the rights to autonomously acquire territory, mint money, command fortresses and troops and form alliances, make war and peace, and exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction over the acquired areas.
These decisions would eventually turn the EIC from a trading company into a de fact o administrative agent with wide powers granted by the British government. The prosperity that the officers of the Company enjoyed allowed them to return to Britain and establish sprawling estates and businesses and obtain political power. The Company developed a lobby in the English parliament. Under pressure from ambitious tradesmen and former associates of the Company, who wanted to establish private trading firms in India, a deregulating act was passed in This allowed any English firm to trade with India unless specifically prohibited by act of parliament, thereby annulling the charter that had been in force for almost years.
The two companies wrestled with each other for some time, both in England and in India, for a dominant share of the trade. It quickly became evident that in practice, the original company faced scarcely any measurable competition.
The companies merged in by a tripartite indenture involving both companies and the state. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Britain surged ahead of its European rivals. The EIC became the single largest player on the British global market. The Company, with the backing of its own private well-disciplined and experienced army, was able to assert its interests in new regions in India without facing obstacles from other colonial powers, although it continued to experience resistance from local rulers.
The first was the outright annexation of Indian states and subsequent direct governance of the underlying regions, which collectively comprised British India. In the early 19th century, the territories of these princes accounted for two-thirds of India. When an Indian ruler who was able to secure his territory wanted to enter such an alliance, the Company welcomed it as an economical method of indirect rule that did not involve the economic costs of direct administration or the political costs of gaining the support of alien subjects.
In return, the company pledged to defend its allies. The style blended traditional elements from Rajput and Mughal painting with a more Western treatment of perspective, volume, and recession. In the early 19th century, the Indian question of geopolitical dominance and empire holding remained with the East India Company. First recruited from mercenaries and low-caste volunteers, the Bengal Army eventually became composed largely of high-caste Hindus and landowning Muslims.
Within the army, British officers always outranked Indians, no matter how long their service. Indian officers received no training in administration or leadership so they would remain dependent on the British officers.
The Indian Rebellion of , which eventually led to the dissolution of the EIC, had diverse political, economic, military, religious and social causes. A direct trigger was the grievances of the sepoys, a generic term used for native Indian soldiers of the Bengal Army, against the EIC administration, caused mainly by the ethnic gulf between the European officers and their Indian troops.
The spark that led directly to a mutiny in several sepoy companies was the issue of new gunpowder cartridges for the Enfield rifle. In , British officers insisted that the new cartridges be used by both Muslim and Hindu soldiers, but the cartridges were made from cow and pig fat. This insulted both Hindu and Muslim religious practices. Underlying grievances over British taxation and recent land annexations by the EIC were ignited by the sepoy mutineers and within weeks, dozens of units of the Indian army joined peasant armies in widespread rebellion.
The old Muslim and Hindu aristocracies, who were seeing their power steadily eroded by the EIC, also rebelled against the British rule. The Crown took over its Indian possessions, its administrative powers and machinery, and its armed forces.
The EIC was officially dissolved in and the rebellion led the British to reorganize the army, the financial system, and the administration in India.
The country was thereafter directly governed by the Crown as the new British Raj. Although dissolved following the Rebellion of , it stimulated the growth of the British Empire. Its armies were to become the armies of British India after , and it played a key role in introducing English as an official language in India.
In the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of , the British government dissolved the East India Company and established the formal colonial rule in India that would become known as the British Raj. Until the Battle of Plassey, the East India Company EIC or the Company territories in India, which consisted largely of the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, were governed by the mostly autonomous—and sporadically unmanageable—town councils, all composed of merchants.
The councils barely had enough powers for the effective management of their local affairs and the ensuing lack of oversight of the overall Company operations in India led to some grave abuses by Company officers and their allies. Consequently, the Parliament established regulations at aimed to manage the affairs of the EIC. From , the British government had the final word on all major appointments in India.
With increased British power in India, supervision of Indian affairs by the British Crown and Parliament increased as well. By the s, British nationals could transact business or engage in missionary work under the protection of the Crown in the three presidencies. This made the Company a part of British governance, but administration of British India remained the responsibility of Company officers. The first was the outright annexation of Indian states and subsequent direct governance of the underlying regions that came to comprise British India.
The British government took control of the Company and all power was transferred from the EIC to the British Crown, which began to administer most of India as a number of provinces. What followed became known as the British Raj, the rule of the British Crown in the Indian subcontinent between and Bartholomew and Sons, Oxford University Press, The British Raj extended over almost all present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, except for small holdings by other European nations such as Goa and Pondicherry.
This area is very diverse, containing the Himalayan mountains, fertile floodplains, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, a long coastline, tropical dry forests, arid uplands, and the Thar desert. The Government of India Act made changes in the governance of India at three levels: in the imperial government in London, in the central government in Calcutta, and in the provincial governments in the presidencies and later in the provinces.
In London, it provided for a cabinet-level Secretary of State for India and a member Council of India, whose members were required, to have spent at least ten years in India no more than 10 years ago. He was, however, now responsible to the Secretary of State in London and through him to Parliament. The Governor-General in the capital, Calcutta, and the Governor in a subordinate presidency Madras or Bombay was each required to consult his advisory council.
Routine departmental decisions were made exclusively by the member, but important decisions required the consent of the Governor-General and in the absence of such consent, required discussion by the entire Executive Council. This innovation in Indian governance was promulgated in the Indian Councils Act If the Government of India needed to enact new laws, the Councils Act allowed for a Legislative Council—an expansion of the Executive Council by up to twelve additional members, each appointed to a two-year term—with half the members consisting of British officials of the government termed official and allowed to vote and the other half comprising Indians and domiciled Britons in India termed non-official and serving only in an advisory capacity.
A princely state, also called native state, refers to a semi-sovereign principality during the British Raj that was not directly governed by the British, but rather by a local ruler, subject to a form of indirect rule on some matters.
The princely states varied greatly in status, size, and wealth. The remaining approximately states were influenced by agents answerable to the provincial governments of British India under a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, or Chief Commissioner.
In contrast, the courts of the princely states existed under the authority of the respective rulers of those states. By treaty, the British controlled the external affairs of the princely states absolutely. As the states were not British possessions, however, they retained control over their own internal affairs, subject to a degree of British influence which in many states was substantial. Suzerainty over princely states, some of the largest and most important, was exercised in the name of the British Crown by the central government of British India under the Viceroy.
The remaining approximately states were dependents of the provincial governments of British India under a Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, or Chief Commissioner as the case might have been. By the beginning of the 20th century, relations between the British and the four largest states — Hyderabad, Mysore, Jammu and Kashmir, and Baroda — were directly under the control of the Governor-General of India in the person of a British Resident.
Two agencies, for Rajputana and Central India, oversaw 20 and princely states respectively. The mission civilisatrice , a French term which translates literally into English as civilising mission , is a rationale for intervention or colonization, purporting to contribute to the spread of civilization and used mostly in relation to the colonization and Westernization of indigenous peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rationale was also used by the British in their Asian and African colonies. The European colonial powers argued it was their duty to bring Western civilization to what they perceived as backward people.
The intellectual origins of the mission civilisatrice trace back to the European thinkers, who discussed the idea of social change by using a development metaphor. In the 18th century, many saw history as a linear unending inevitable process of social evolutionism with the European nations running ahead. Racism underlined the arguments of two dominant lines of thought that emerged from this assumption. Education in English became a high priority with the goal to speed up modernization and reduce administrative charges.
Colonial authorities fervently debated the question of the best policy, falling roughly in one of the two main camps. The orientalists believed that education should happen in Indian languages and favored classical or court languages like Sanskrit or Persian.
Conversely, the utilitarians also called anglicists strongly believed that traditional India had nothing to teach regarding modern skills and the best education would happen in English. One of the most influential reformers, Thomas Babington Macaulay — , belonged to the latter group. Macaulay was a historian and politician who represented the tradition of Whig history, according to which the past is an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy.
In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms, and scientific progress. Macauley went to India in and served on the Supreme Council of India until This aimed to create a class of anglicized Indians to serve as cultural intermediaries between the British and the Indians. Macualay assumed that the creation of such a class was necessary before any reform of vernacular education. Under Macaulay, thousands of elementary and secondary schools opened, typically with all-male student bodies.
Missionaries opened their own schools that taught Christianity and the 3-Rs reading, writing, and arithmetic. Universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established in , just before the Rebellion. By , some 60, Indians had matriculated, chiefly in the liberal arts or law. About a third entered public administration and another third became lawyers. The result was a very well-educated professional state bureaucracy.
Of the 1, top-level positions, almost all were held by Britons, typically with Oxbridge degrees. By , the number of institutions had doubled and enrollment reached , The curriculum followed classical British standards et by Oxford and Cambridge and stressed English literature and European history.
All these benefits of education, however, went to the Indian elites and middle classes, who were expected to serve as loyal supporters of the British rule in India. Historians of Indian education have generally linked the idea of educational reform under the British rule to colonial dominance and control.
Those who advocated actual reforms became less influential. This campaign served to strengthen imperial support at home and thus bolster the moral authority of the elites who ran the Empire.
Rajabai Clock Tower, seen here shrouded in scaffolding, was completed in The Indian Rebellion of known also as the Great Uprising of resulted from an accumulation of factors over time rather than from any single event. New sepoys local soldiers, usually of Hindu or Muslim background were recruited and to forestall any social friction, the Company took action to adapt its military practices to the requirements of their religious rituals. Over time, however, sepoys developed a number of grievances.
After the annexation of Oudh Awadh by the EIC in , many sepoys were disquieted both from losing their perquisites as landed gentry and from the anticipation of any increased land-revenue payments that the annexation might bring about.
Furthermore, by , some Indian soldiers, interpreting the presence of missionaries as a sign of official intent, were convinced that the Company was masterminding mass conversions of Hindus and Muslims to Christianity. Finally, changes in the terms of professional service also created resentment. Moreover, the new recruits of the Bengal Army, who until had been exempted from overseas service in observance of certain caste rituals, were now required a commitment for general service.
There were also grievances over the issue of promotions based on seniority. This as well as the increasing number of European officers in the battalions made promotion slow, and many Indian officers did not reach commissioned rank until they were too old to be effective. The final spark was provided by the ammunition for the new Enfield P rifle. These used paper cartridges that came pre-greased.
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