Colonial rule was first established in Bengal. It is here that the earliest attempts were made to reorder rural society and establish a new regime of land rights and a new revenue system.
A number of mahals (estates) held by the Raja of Burdwan were being sold. The Permanent Settlement had come into operation in 1793. The East India Company had fixed the revenue that each zamindar had to pay. The estates of those who failed to pay were to be auctioned to recover the revenue. Since the raja had accumulated huge arrears, his estates had been put up for auction.
The reasons for this failure were various. First; the initial demands were very high. This was because it was felt that if the demand was fixed for all time to come, the Company would never be able to claim a share of increased income from land when prices rose and cultivation expanded.
Third: the revenue was invariable, regardless of the harvest, and had to be paid punctually. In fact, according to the Sunset Law, if payment did not come in by sunset of the specified date, the zamindari was liable to be auctioned.
At the time of rent collection, an officer of the zamindar, usually the amiah, came around to the village. But rent collection was a perennial problem.
The rise of the jotedars
The jotedars were most powerful in North Bengal, although rich peasants and village headmen were emerging as commanding figures in the countryside in other parts of Bengal as well. In some places they were called haoladars, elsewhere they were known as gantidars or mandals, Their rise inevitably weakened zamindari authority.
The Zamindars resist
The authority of the zamindars in rural areas, however, did not collapse. Faced with an exorbitantly high revenue demand and possible auction of their estates, they devised ways of surviving the pressures. New contexts produced new strategies.
Fictitious sale was one such strategy. It involved a series of manoeuvres. The Raja of Burdwan, for instance, first transferred some of his zamindari to Ms mother, since the Company had decreed that the property of women would not be taken over.
In the hills of Rajmahal
In the early nineteenth century, Buchanan travelled through the Rajmahal hills. From his description, the hills appeared impenetrable, a zone where few travellers ventured, an area that signified danger. Wherever he went, people were hostile, apprehensive of officials and unwilling to talk to them. In many instances they deserted their villages and absconded.
The Revolt of 1857 was much more than a mere product of sepoy discontent.
It was in reality a product of the character and policies of colonial rule, of the accumulated grievances of the people against the Company's administration and of their dislike for the foreign regime.
The most important cause was the economic exploitation of the country by the British and the complete destruction of its traditional economic fabric.
Other general causes were the British land and land revenue policies and the system of law and administration.
Common people were hard hit by the prevalence of corruption at the lower levels of administration.
The police, petty officials and lower law courts were notoriously corrupt.
The middle and upper classes of Indian society, particularly in the north, were hard hit by their exclusion from the well paid higher posts in the administration.
Displacement of rulers by the East India Company meant the sudden withdrawal of patronage and the impoverishment of those who had depended upon it.
Religious preachers, pandits and maulavis, who felt that their entire future was threatened, were to play an important role in spreading hatred against the foreign rule.
Unlike foreign conquerors before them, British did not mix socially even with the upper classes of Indians; instead, they had a feeling of racial superiority and treated Indians with contempt and arrogance.
The period of the growth of discontent among the people coincided with certain events which shattered the general belief in the invincibility of British arms and encouraged the people to believe that the days of the British regime were numbered.
The British army suffered major reverses in the First Afghan War (1838-42), in the Punjab Wars (1845-49), and in the Crimean War (1854-56).
In 1855-56 the Santhal tribesmen ofBihar and Bengal rose up armed with axes and bows and arrows and revealed the potentialities of a popular uprising by temporarily sweeping away British rule from their area.
The annexation of Awadh by Lord Dalhousie in 1856 was widely resented in India in general and in Awadh in particular.
The excuse Dalhousie had advanced for annexing Awadh was that he wanted to free the people from the Nawab's mismanagement and taluqdars' oppression, but, in practice, the people got no relief
Similarly, merchants, shopkeepers, and handicraftsmen who had catered to the Awadh Court and nobles lost their livelihood.
These dispossessed taluqdars, numbering nearly 21,000, anxious to regain their lost estates and position, became the most dangerous opponents of the British rule.
The annexation of Awadh, along with the other annexations of Dalhousie, created panic among rulers of the native states.
This policy of annexation and subordination was, for example, directly responsible for making Nana Sahib, the more...
Facing a challenge to its dominant position in the world capitalism from newcomers, Britain began a vigorous effort to consolidate its control over its existing empire and to extend it further.
It was necessary that, to render this British capital secure from economic and political dangers, British rule in India be clamped down even more firmly.
An Act of Parliament in 1858 transferred the power to govern from the East India Company to the British Crown.
While authority over India had previously been wielded by the directors of the Company and the Board of Control, now this power was to be exercised by a Secretary of State for India aided by a Council.
Under the Act, government was to be carried on as before by the Governor-General who was also given the title of Viceroy of Crown's personal representative.
The Act of 1858 provided that the Governor-General would have an Executive Council whose members were to act as heads of different departments and as his official advisers.
The Indian Councils Act of 1861 enlarged the Governor-General's Council for the purpose of making laws, in which capacity it was known as the Imperial Legislative Council.
Provincial Administration
The British had divided India for administrative convenience into provinces, three of which - Bengal, Madras and Bombay - were known as Presidencies.
The Presidencies were administered by a Governor and his Executive Council of three, who were appointed by the Crown.
The provincial governments enjoyed a great deal of autonomy before 1833 when their power to pass laws was taken away and their expenditure subjected to strict central control.
The first step in the direction of separating central and provincial finances was taken in 1870 by Lord Mayo.
Local Bodies
Financial difficulties led the Government to further decentralise administration by promoting local government through municipalities and district boards.
Local bodies were first formed between 1864 and 1868, but almost in every case they consisted of nominated members and were presided over by District Magistrates.
A step forward, though a very hesitant and inadequate one, was taken in 1882 by Lord Ripon's Government.
The result was that except in the Presidency cities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, the local bodies functioned just like departments of the Government and were in no way good examples of local self-governments.
Changes in the Army
Several steps were taken to minimise the capacity of Indian soldiers to revolt. Firstly, the domination of the army by its European branch was carefully guaranteed.
Moreover, the European troops were kept in key geographical and military positions. The crucial branches of the army like artillery and, later in the 20th century, tanks and armoured corps were put exclusively in European hands.
The older policy of excluding Indians from the officer corps was strictly more...
The economic policies followed by the British led to the rapid transformation of India’s economy into a colonial economy whose nature and structure were determined by the needs of the British economy.
As the American writer, D.H. Buchanan has put it, "The armour of the isolated self-sufficient village was pierced by the steel rail, and its life blood ebbed away”.
William Bentinck, the Governor-General, reported in 1834-35 : "The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India".
While India had been for centuries the largest exporter of cotton goods in the world, it was now transformed into an importer of British cotton products and an exporter of raw cotton.
By introducing transferability of land the British revenue system enabled the money- lender or the rich peasant to take possession of the land.
The first few decades of British rule witnessed the ruin of most of the old zamindars in Bengal and madras.
This was particularly so with Warren Hastings policy of auctioning the rights of revenue collection to the highest bidders.
At a time when agriculture all over the world was being modernised and revolutionised, Indian agriculture was technologically stagnating : hardly any modern machinery was used.
The first textile mill was started in Bombay by Cowasjee Nanabhoy in 1853, and the first jute mill in Rishra (Bengal) in 1855. These industries expanded slowly but continuously.
The railway policy of the Government also discriminated against Indian enterprise; railway freight rates encouraged foreign import at the cost of trade in domestic products.
British imports were given special privileges under the system of “imperial preference seven” though Indians protested vehemently.
British economic exploitation, the decay of indigenous industries, the failure of modem industries to replace them, high taxation, the drain of wealth to Britain and a backward agrarian structure leading to the stagnation of agriculture and the exploitation of the poor peasants by the zamindars, landlords, princes, money-lenders, merchants, and the state gradually reduced the Indian people to extreme poverty and prevented them from progressing.
William Digby, a British writer, has calculated that, in all over 2,88,25,808 people died during famines from 1854 to 1901.
Another famine in 1943 carried away nearly three million people in Bengal.
For example, Charles Elliott, a member of the Governor-General's Council, remarked : "I do not hesitate to say that half the agricultural population do not know from one yearns end to another what it is to have a full meal.”
From the early twentieth century, Muslim women like the Begums of Bhopal played a notable role in promoting education among women.
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain started schools for Muslim girls in Patna and
Tarabai Shinde, a woman educated at home at Poona, published a book, tripurushtulna, (A Comparison between Women and Men), criticising the social ifferences between men and women.
Pandita Ramabai. a great scholar of Sanskrit, felt that Hinduism was oppressive towards women, and wrote a book about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women,
She founded a widow’s home at Poooa to provide shelter to widows who had been treated badly by their husband’s relatives. Here women were trained so that they could support themselves economically.
Demands for equality and justice
Gradually, by the second half of the nineteenth century, people from within the Non- Brahman castes began organising movements against caste discrimination, and demanded social equality and justice.
The Satnami movement in Central India was founded by Ghasidas who worked among the leatherworkers and organised a movement to improve their social status.
In eastern Bengal, Haridas Thakur’s Matua sect worked among Chandala cultivators.
In what is present-day Kerala, a guru from Ezhava caster, Shrri Narayana Guru, roclaimed the ideals of unity for his people.
According to him. all humankind belonged to the same caste. One of his famous statements. was : "one caste, one religion, one god for humankind"
Gulamgiri
One of the most vocal amongst the "low-caste” leaders was Jyotirao Phute
Born in 1827, he studied in schools set up by Christian missionaries. On growing up he developed his own ideas about the injustices of caste society.
He set out to attack the Brahman's claim that they were superior to others, since they wore Aryans.
Phule argued that the Aryans were foreigners, who came from outside Ac subcontinent and defeated and subjugated the (me children of the country
According to Phule., the “upper” castes had no right to their land and power: in reality, the land belonged to indigenous people, die so-called low castes.
Phule claimed dial before Aryan rule there existed a golden age when warrior-peasants tilled the land and ruled the Maratha countryside in just and fair ways.
The Satyashodhak Samaj, an association Phule founded, propagated caste equality.
In 1873, Phule wrote a book named Gulamgiri, meaning slavery. Some ten years before this, the American Civil War had been fought, leading to the end of slavery in America.
Phule dedicated his book to all those Americans who had fought, to free slaves, more...
The rising tide of nationalism and democracy, which led to the struggle for freedom, also found expression in movements to reform and democratise the social institutions and religious outlook of the Indian people.
Keshub Chandra Sen, for example, said : "What we see around us today is a fallen nation - a nation whose primitive greatness lies buried in ruins".
Similarly, Swami Vivekananda described the condition of the Indian people in the following words : "Moving about here and there emaciated figures of young and old in tattered rags, whose faces bear deep-cut lines of the despair and poverty of hundreds of years; cows, bullocks, buffaloes common everywhere - aye, the same melancholy look in their eyes, the same feeble physique, on the wayside, refuse and dirt; - this is our present day India.
Filled with the desire to adapt their society to the requirements of the modem world of science, democracy and nationalism, thoughtful Indians set out to reform their traditional religions, for religion was in those times a basic part of people's life and there could be little social reform without religious reform.
Brahmo Samaj
The Brahmo tradition of Raja Rammohun Roy was carried forward after 1843 by Devendranath Tagore and after 1866 by Keshub Chandra Sen.
The Brahmo Samaj made an effort to reform Hindu religion by removing abuses and by basing it on the worship of one God and on the teachings of the Vedas and Upanishads even though it repudiated the doctrine of the infallibility of the Vedas.
Brahmos were basically opposed to idolatry and superstitious practices and rituals, in fact to the entire Brahmanical system.
The Brahmos were also great social reformers. They actively opposed the caste system and child-marriage and supported the general uplift of women, including widow remarriage, and the spread of modem education to men and women.
Religious Reform in Maharashtra
Religious reform was begun in Bombay in 1840 by the Parmahans Mandali which aimed at fighting idolatry and the caste system.
Perhaps the earliest religious reformer in western India was Gopal Hari Deshmukh, known popularly as 'LokahitwadF, who wrote in Marathi, made powerful rationalist attacks on Hindu orthodoxy, and preached religious and social equality.
Later the Prarfhana Samaj was started with the aim of reforming Hindu religious thought and practice in the light of modem knowledge.
Two of its great leaders were G Bhandarkar, the famous Sanskrit scholar and historian, and Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901).
Its activities also spread to south India as a result of the efforts of the Telugu reformer, Viresalingam. One of the greatest rationalist thinkers of modem India, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, also lived and worked in Maharashtra at this time.
The politics of the moderate nationalists were founded on the belief that British rule could be reformed from within. But the spread of knowledge regarding political and economic questions gradually undermined this belief
Politically conscious Indians were convinced that the purpose of the British rule was to exploit India economically.
In 1904, the Indian Official Secrets Act was passed restricting the freedom of the Press. The Natu brothers were deported in 1897 without being tried.
The Indian Universities Act of 1904 was seen by the nationalists as an attempt to bring Indian Universities under tighter official control and to check the growth of higher education.
Thus an increasing number of Indians were getting convinced that self-government was essential for the sake of the economic, political and cultural progress of the country.
Growth of Self-respect and Self-confidence
By the end of the 19th century, the Indian nationalists had grown in self-respect and self- confidence. They had acquired faith in their capacity to govern themselves and in the future development of their country.
They taught the people that the remedy to their sad condition lay in their own hands and that they should therefore become fearless and strong.
Swami Vivekananda declared : "If there is a sin in the world it is weakness; avoid all weakness, weakness is sin, weakness is death".
He also urged the people to give up living on the glories of the past and manfully build the future.
Growth of Education and Unemployment
The larger the number of educated Indians, the larger was the area of influence of western ideas of democracy, nationalism and radicalism.
The educated Indians became the best propagators and followers of militant nationalism both because they were low-paid or unemployed and because they were educated in modem thought and politics, and in European and world history.
International Influences
Several events abroad during this period tended to encourage the growth of militant nationalism in India.
The rise of modem Japan after 1868 showed that a backward Asian country could develop itself without western control.
The defeat of the Italian army by the Ethiopians in 1896 and of Russia by Japan in 1905 exploded the myth of European superiority.
Existence of a Militant Nationalist School of Thought
From almost the beginning of the national movement a school of militant more...
The third and the last phase of the national movement began in 1919 when the era of popular mass movements was initiated.
A new political situation was maturing during the war years, 1914-18.
Nationalism had gathered its forces and the nationalists were expecting major political gains after the war; and they were willing to fight back if their expectations were thwarted.
The economic situation in the post-war years had taken a turn for the worse. The First World War gave a tremendous impetus to nationalism all over Asia and Africa. A major impetus to the national movements was given by the impact of the Russian Revolution.
On 7 November 1917, the Bolshevik (Communist) Party, led by VI. Lenin overthrew the Czarist regime in Russia and declared the formation of the first socialist state, the Soviet Union, in the history of the world.
The new Soviet regime electrified the colonial world by unilaterally renouncing its imperialist rights in China and other parts of Asia,
The nationalists movement in India was also affected by the fact that the rest of the Afro-Asian world was also convulsed by nationalist agitations after the war.
The Montagu - Chelmsford Reforms
In 1918, Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State, and Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, produced their scheme of constitutional reforms which led to the enactment of the Government of India Act of 1919.
The Provincial Legislative Councils were enlarged and the majority of their members were to be elected.
The provincial government were given more powers under the system of Dyarchy.
The Governor could, overrule the ministers on any grounds that he considered special.
At the centre, there were to be two houses of legislature. The lower house, the Legislative Assembly, was to have 41 nominated members in a total strength of 144.
The upper house, the Council of State, was to have 26 legislature had virtually no control over the Governor-General and his Executive Council.
Some of the veteran leaders like Surendranath Banerjee were in favour of accepting the government proposals.
They left the Congress at this time and founded the Indian Liberal Federation.
The Rowlatt Act
In March, 1919 it passed the Rowlatt Act even though every single Indian member of the Central Legislative Council opposed it.
This Act authorised the Government to imprison any person without trial and conviction in a court of law.
Unrest spread in the country and a powerful agitation against the Act arose.
During this agitation, a new leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, took command of the more...
Struggle for Swaraj-II (1927-1947) Emergence of New Forces
The year 1927 witnessed many portents of national recovery and the emergence of the new trend of socialism. Marxism and other socialist ideas spread rapidly.
Politically this force and energy found reflection in the rise of a new left wing in the Congress under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose.
Indian youth were becoming active. The first All-Bengal Conference of Students was held in August, 1928 and was presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Socialist and Communist groups came into existence in the 1920s. The example of the Russian Revolution had aroused interest among many young nationalists.
N. Roy became the first Indian to be elected to the leadership of the Communist International.
In 1924, the government arrested Muzaffar Ahmed and S.A. Dange, accused them of spreading Communist ideas, and tried them along with other in the Kanpur Conspiracy
In 1925, the Communist Party came into existence.
In Uttar Pradesh, there was large-scale agitation among tenants for the revision of tenancy laws.
The tenants wanted lower rents, protection from eviction and relief from indebtedness.
In Gujarat, the peasants protested against official efforts to increase land revenue.
The famous Bardoli Satyagraha occurred at this time.
In 1928, under the leadership of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel the peasants organised a No Tax Campaign and in the end won their demand.
After an all India Conference, the Hindustan Republican Association was founded in October, 1924 to organise an armed revolution.
The Government struck at it by arresting a large number of youth and trying them in the Kakori Conspiracy Case (1925).
Seventeen were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Four were transported for life, and four, including Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla, were hanged.
The revolutionaries soon came under the influence of socialist ideas, and in 1928, under the leadership of Chandra Shekhar Azad changed of name of their organisation to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA).
The brutal lathi-charge on an anti-Simon Commission demonstration on 30 October, 1928 led to a sudden change.
The great Punjabi leader Lala Lajpat Rai died as a result of the lathi blows.
This enraged the youth and on 17 December, 1928, Bhagat Singh, Azad and Rajguru assassinated Saunders, the British police officer who had led the lathi charge.
Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April, 1929. The bomb did not harm anyone, for it had been deliberately made harmless.
The aim was not to kill but, as their leaflet put it, "to make the deaf hear”.
Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt could have easily escaped after throwing the bomb but they more...
During partition, several hundred thousand people were killed and innumerable women raped and abducted. Millions were uprooted, transformed into refugees in alien lands.
The term "holocaust" in a sense captures the gravity of what happened in the subcontinent in 1947, something that the mild term "partition" hides.
The "ethnic cleansing" that characterised the partition of India was carried out by self- styled representatives of religious communities rather than by state agencies.
India-haters in Pakistan and Pakistan-haters in India are both products of Partition.
Some scholars see Partition as a culmination of a communal politics that started developing in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
They suggest that separate electorates for Muslims, created by the colonial government in 1909 and expanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature of communal politics.
During the 1920s and early 1930s tension grew around a number of issues. Muslims were angered by "music-before-mosque", by the cow protection movement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samaj to bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi ) those who had recently converted to Islam.
Yet it would be incorrect to see Partition as the outcome of a simple unfolding of communal tensions. As the protagonist of Garm Hawa, a film on Partition, puts it, "Communal discord happened even before 1947 but it had never led to the uprooting of millions from their homes".
Partition was a qualitatively different phenomenon from earlier communal politics, and to understand it we need to look carefully at the events of the last decade of British rule.
On 23 March, 1940, the League moved a resolution demanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent. This ambiguous resolution never mentioned partition or Pakistan.
In fact Sikandar Hayat Khan, Punjab Premier and leader of the Unionist Party, who had drafted the resolution, declared in a Punjab assembly speech on 1 March, 1941 that he was opposed to a Pakistan that would mean "Muslim Raj here and Hindu Raj elsewhere.
The origins of the Pakistan demand have also been traced back to the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal, the writer of "Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara".
In March, 1946 the British Cabinet sent a three member mission to Delhi to examine the League's demand and to suggest a suitable political framework for a free India.
The Cabinet Mission recommended a loose three-tier confederation. India was to remain united.
Only Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the NWFP continued to firmly oppose the idea of partition.
After withdrawing its support to the Cabinet Mission plan, the Muslim League decided on "Direct Action" for winning its Pakistan demand. It announced 16 August, 1946 as "Direct Action Day".
