The Constitution of India was framed between December, 1946 and December, 1949. During this time its drafts were discussed clause by clause in the Constituent Assembly of India.
In all, the Assembly held eleven sessions, with sittings spread over 165 days.
The Constituent Assembly that came into being was dominated by one party: the Congress. In effect, therefore, 82 per cent of the members of the Constituent Assembly were also members of the Congress.
It was Nehru who moved the crucial "Objectives Resolution”, as well as the resolution proposing that the National Flag of India be a "horizontal tricolour of saffron, white and dark green in equal roportion", with a wheel in navy blue at the centre.
Besides this Congress trio, a very important member of the Assembly was the lawyer and economist B.R. Ambedkar.
Serving with him were two other lawyers, K.M. Munshi from Gujarat and Alladi Krishnaswamy Aiyar from Madras, both of whom gave crucial inputs in the drafting of the Constitution.
These six members were given vital assistance by two civil servants.
One was B, N. Rau, Constitutional Advisor to the Government of India, who prepared a series of background papers based on a close study of the political systems obtaining in other countries. The other was the Chief Draughtsman, N. Mukherjee, who had the ability to put complex proposals in clear legal language.
On 13 December, 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru introduced the "Objectives Resolution" in the Constituent Assembly.
In returning to the past and referring to the American and French Revolutions, Nehru was locating the history of constitution-making in India within a longer history of struggle for liberty and freedom.
A Communist member, Somnath Lahiri saw the dark hand of British imperialism hanging over the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly.
An interim administration headed by Jawaharlal Nehru was in place, but it could only operate under the directions of the Viceroy and the British Government in London.
Nehru admitted that most nationalist leaders had wanted a different kind of Constituent Assembly. It was also true, in a sense, that the British Government had a "hand in its birth”, and it had attached certain conditions within which the Assembly had to function.
The legislatures elected under the 1935 Act operated within the framework of colonial rule, and were responsible to the Governor appointed by the British.
In his inaugural speech, Nehru had invoked the "will of the people” and declared that the makers of the Constitution had to fulfil "the passions that lie in the hearts of the masses".
On 27 August, 1947, Pocker Bahadur from Madras made a powerful plea for continuing separate electorates. Minorities exist in all lands, argued Bahadur; they could not be wished away, they could not be "erased out more...
Back in the 1920s, the Indian National Congress had promised that once the country won independence, each major linguistic group would have its own province.
However, after independence the Congress did not take any steps to honour this promise.
For India had been divided on the basis of religion.
Both Prime Minister Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel were against the creation of linguistic states.
In October, 1952, a veteran Gandhian named Potti Sriramulu went on a hunger fast demanding the formation of Andhra state to protect the interests of Telugu speakers.
On 15 December, 1952, fifty-eight days into his fast, Potti Sriramulu
Thus, on 1 October, 1953, the new state of Andhra Pradesh came into being. After the creation of Andhra, other linguistic communities also demanded their own separate states.
A States Reorganisation Commission was set up, which submitted its report in 1956, recommending the redrawing of district and provincial boundaries to form compact provinces of Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu speakers respectively.
A little later, in 1960, the bilingual state of Bombay was divided into separate states for Marathi and Gujarati speakers.
In 1966, the state of Punjab was also divided into Punjab and Haryana, the former for the Punjabi speakers (who were also mostly Sikhs), the latter for the rest (who spoke not Punjabi but versions of Haryanvi or Hindi).
Planning for Development
In 1950, the government set up a Planning Commission to help design and execute suitable policies for economic development.
There was a broad agreement on what was called a "mixed economy" model.
Here, both the State and the private sector would play important and complementary roles in increasing production and generating jobs.
In 1956, the Second Five Year Plan was formulated.
The search for an independent foreign policy
India gained freedom soon after the devastations of the Second World War. At that time a new international body - the United Nations - formed in 1945 was in its infancy.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence 'of the Cold War, that is, power rivalries and ideological conflicts between the USA and the USSR, with both countries creating military alliances.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was also the foreign minister of newly independent India, developed free India's foreign policy in this context.
Non-alignment formed the bedrock of this foreign policy.
But this policy of staying away from alliances was not a matter of remaining "isolated" or "neutral".
Shahjahanabad was built by Shah Jahan. It was begun in 1639 and consisted of a fort- palace complex and the city adjoining it.The Red Fort, made of red sandstone, contained the palace complex.
No wonder the poet Mir Taqi Mir said, "The streets of Delhi aren't mere streets; they are like the album of a painter."
The modem city as we know it today developed only after 1911 when Delhi became the capital of British India.
The famous poet Ghalib witnessed the events of 1857 in Delhi.
In 1877, Viceroy Lytton organised a Durbar to acknowledge Queen Victoria as the Empress of India.
In 1911, when King George-V was crowned in England, a Durbar was held in Delhi to celebrate the occasion. The decision to shift the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi was announced at this Durbar.
New Delhi was constructed as a 10-square-mile city on Raisina Hill, south of the existing city. Two architects, Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker, were called on to design New Delhi and its buildings.
The features of these government buildings were borrowed from different periods of India's imperial history, but the overall look was Classical Greece (fifth century BCE).
For instance, the central dome of the Viceroy's Palace was copied from the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, and the red sandstone and carved screens or jalis were borrowed from Mughal architecture.
The Delhi Improvement Trust was set up in 1936, and it built areas like Daryaganj South for wealthy Indians.
Bombay
In the seventeenth century, Bombay was a group of seven islands under Portuguese control.
In 1661, control of the islands passed into British hands after the marriage of Britain's King Charles II to the Portuguese princess.
The City of Bombay Improvement Trust was established in 1898;
A successful reclamation project was undertaken by the Bombay Port Trust, which built a dry dock between 1914 and 1918 and used tile excavated earth to create the 22-acre Ballard Estate, Subsequently, the famous Marine Drive of Bombay was developed,
Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar shot a scene of a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging Gardens and it became India's first movie in 1896.
Soon after, Dadasaheb Phaike made Raja Harishchandra (1913).
The Mediterranean origins of this architecture were also thought to be suitable for tropical weather. The Town Hall in Bombay was built in this style in 1833.
Another style that was extensively used was the neo-Gothic, characterised by high- pitched roofs, pointed arches and detailed decoration. The Gothic style had its roots in more...
In 1895, a man named Birsa was seen roaming the forests and villages of Chottanagpur. People said he had miraculous powers - he could cure all diseases and multiply grain.
Birsa himself declared that God had appointed him to save his people from trouble, free them from the slavery of dikus (outsiders).
Soon thousands began following Birsa, believing that he was bhagwan (God) and had come to solve all their problems.
Birsa was born in a family of Mundas - a tribal group that lived in Chottanagpur.
But his followers included other tribals of the region - Santhals and Oraons.
All of them in different ways were unhappy with the changes they were experiencing and the problems they were facing under British rule.
Their familiar ways of life seemed to be disappearing, their livelihoods were under threat, and their religion appeared to be in danger.
Most tribes had customs and rituals that were very different from those laid down by Brahmans. These societies also did not have the sharp social divisions that were characteristic of caste societies.
All those who belonged to the same tribe thought of themselves as sharing common ties of kinship. However, this did not mean that there were no social and economic differences within tribes.
Some were jhum cultivators
Some of them practised jhum cultivation, that is, shifting cultivation.
This was done on small patches of land, mostly in forests.
The cultivators cut the treetops to allow sunlight to reach the ground, and burnt the vegetation on the land to clear it for cultivation.
They spread the ash from the firing, which contained potash, to fertilise the soil.
They used the axe to cut trees and the hoe to scratch the soil in order to prepare it for cultivation. They broadcast the seeds, that is, scattered the seeds on the field instead of ploughing the land and sowing the seeds.
Once the crop was ready and harvested, they moved to another field. A field that had been cultivated once was left fallow for several years,
Shifting cultivators were found in the hilly and forested tracts of north-east and central India.
The lives of these tribal people depended on free movement within forests and on being able to use the land and forests for growing their crops.
That is the only way they could practise shifting cultivation.
In many regions tribal groups lived by hunting animals and gathering forest produce. They saw forests as essential for survival.
Around 1750, India was by far the world's largest producer of cotton textiles.
European traders first encountered fine cotton cloth from India carried by Arab merchants in Mosul in present-day Iraq. So they began referring to all finely woven textiles as "muslin” - a word that acquired wide currency.
The cotton textiles which the Portuguese took back to Europe, along with the spices, came to be called "calico" (derived from Calicut), and subsequently calico became the general name for all cotton textiles.
In 1720, the British government enacted a legislation banning the use of printed cotton textiles - chintz - in England. Interestingly, this Act was known as the Calico Act.
The tanti weavers of Bengal, the julahas or momin weavers of north India, sale and kaikollar and devangs of south India are some of the communities famous for weaving.
The development of cotton industries in Britain affected textile producers in India in several ways. First: Indian textiles now had to compete with British textiles in the European and American markets. Second: exporting textiles to England also became increasingly difficult since very high duties were imposed on Indian textiles imported into Britain.
Sholapur and Madura emerged as important new centres of weaving in the late nineteenth century.
Khadi gradually became a symbol of nationalism. The charkha came to represent India, and it was put at the centre of the tricolour flag of the Indian National Congress adopted in 1931.
The first cotton mill in India was set up as a spinning mill in Bombay in 1854.
The first major spurt in the development of cotton factory production in India, therefore, was during the First World War when textile imports from Britain declined and Indian factories were called upon to produce cloth for military supplies.
The sword of Tipu Sultan and Wootz steel ²
Tipu's legendary swords are now part of valuable collections in museums in England.
The sword had an incredibly hard and sharp edge that could easily rip through the opponent's armour. This quality of the sword came from a special type of high carbon steel called Wootz which was produced all over south India.
Indian Wootz steel fascinated European scientists. Michael Faraday, the legendary scientist and discoverer of electricity and electromagnetism, spent four years studying the properties of Indian Woodz (1818-22)
The swords and armour making industry died with the conquest of India by the British and imports of iron and steel from England displaced the iron and steel produced by craftspeople in India.
In 1783, a person named William Jones arrived in Calcutta. He had an appointment as a junior judge at the Supreme Court that the Company had set up.
In addition to being an expert in law, Jones was a linguist.
Englishmen like Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Halhed were also busy discovering the ancient Indian heritage, mastering Indian languages and translating Sanskrit and Persian works into English.
Together with them, Jones set up the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and started a journal called Asiatick Researches.
Jones and Colebrooke came to represent a particular attitude towards India. They shared a deep respect for ancient cultures, both of India and the West.
In order to understand India it was necessary to discover the sacred and legal texts that were produced in the ancient period.
So Jones and Colebrooke went about discovering ancient texts, understanding their meaning, translating them, and making their findings known to others.
Influenced by such ideas, many Company officials argued that the British ought to promote Indian rather than Western learning. They felt that institutions should be set up to encourage the study of ancient Indian texts and teach Sanskrit and Persian literature and poetry.
With this object in view a madrasa was set up in Calcutta in 1781 to promote the study of Arabic, Persian and Islamic law; and the Hindu College was established in Benaras in 1791 to encourage the study of ancient Sanskrit texts that would be useful for the administration of the country.
Not all officials shared these views. Many were very strong in their criticism of the Orientalists.
"Grave errors of the East"
They said that knowledge of the East was full of errors and unscientific thought; Eastern literature was non-serious and light-hearted.
James Mill was one of those who attacked the Orientalists.
By the 1830s the attack on the Orientalists became sharper. One of the most outspoken and influential of such critics of the time was Thomas Babington Macaulay.
He saw India as an uncivilised country that needed to be civilised. No branch of Eastern knowledge, according to him could be compared to what England had produced.
Who could deny, declared Macualay, that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.
With great energy and passion, Macaulay emphasised the need to teach the English language.
Following Macaulay's minute, the English Education Act of 1835 was introduced. Education for commerce
In 1854, the Court of Directors of the East India Company in London sent an educational despatch to the Governor-General in India.
European artists also brought with them the technique of oil painting - a technique with which Indian artists were hot very familiar.
One popular imperial tradition was that of picturesque landscape painting.
Another tradition of art that became immensely popular in colonial India was portrait painting. The rich and the powerful, wanted to see themselves on canvas.
There was a third category of imperial art, called "history painting".
This tradition sought to dramatise and recreate various episodes of British imperial history, and enjoyed great prestige and popularity during the late eighteenth.
In Mysore, Tipu Sultan not only fought the British on the battlefield but also resisted the cultural traditions associated with them.
He continued to encourage local traditions, and had the walls of his palace at Seringapatam covered with mural paintings done by local artists. This painting celebrates the famous battle of Polilur of 1780 in which Tipu and Haidar Ali defeated the English troops.
In Bengal, around the pilgrimage centre of the temple of Kalighat, local village scroll painters (called patuas) and potters (called kumors in eastern India and kumhars in north India) began developing a new style of art.
In fact, what is specially to be noted in these early Kalighat paintings is the use of a bold, deliberately non-realistic style, where the figures emerge large and powerful, with a minimum of lines, detail and colours.
Raja Ravi Varma was one of the first artists who tried to create a style that was both modem and national. He belonged to the family of the Maharajas of Travancore in Kerala, and was addressed as Raja.
In Bengal, a new group of nationalist artists gathered around Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore.
So they broke away from the convention of oil painting and the realistic style, and turned for inspiration to medieval Indian traditions of miniature painting and the ancient art of mural painting in the Ajanta caves.
In 1904, Okakura Kakuzo published a book in Japan called The Ideals of the East.
He tried to define what modem art could be and how tradition could be retained and modernised. He was the principal founder of the first Japanese art academy.
Nandalal Bose was student of Abanindranath Tagore.
In the colonial period, rural India also came to produce a range of crops for the world market. In the early nineteenth century, indigo and opium were two of the major commercial crops.
The history of opium production in India was linked up with the story of British trade with China, In tile late eighteenth century, the English East India Company was buying tea and silk from China for sale in England.
As tea became a popular English drink, the tea trade became more and more important In fact, the profits of the East India Company came to depend on the tea trade.
This created a problem. England at this time produced nothing that could be easily sold in China. They searched for a commodity they could sell in China, something they could persuade the Chinese to buy. Opium was such a commodity.
The Chinese Emperor had forbidden its production and sale except for medicinal purposes. But Western merchants in the mid-eighteenth century began an illegal trade in opium,
Where did Opium come from?
When the British conquered Bengal, they made a determined effort to produce opium in the lands under their control. As the market for opium expanded in China, larger volumes of opium flowed out of Bengal ports.
Before 1767, no more than 500 chests (of two maunds each) were being exported from India. A hundred years later, in 1870, the government was exporting about 50,000 chests annually.
For a variety of reasons, Indian cultivators were unwilling to turn their fields over to poppy.
Hew Were Unwilling Cultivators Made to Produce Opium?
Unwilling cultivators were made to produce opium through a system of advances, in the rural areas of Bengal and Bihar, there were large numbers of poor peasants.
From the 1780s, such peasants found their village headmen (mahato) giving them money advances to produce opium.
By taking the loan, the cultivator was forced to grow opium on a specified area of land and hand over the produce to the agents once the crop had been harvested.
By 1773, the British government in Bengal had established a monopoly to trade in opium. No one else was legally permitted to trade in the product.
Indigo
The British realised that the countryside could not only yield revenue, it could also grow the crop that Europe required.
By the late eighteenth century the company was trying its best to expand the cultivation of opium, indigo, jute, tea, sugarcane, wheat, rice and cotton.
Indigo was a rich blue colour. It was produced from a plant called indigo.
India was the biggest supplier of indigo in the world more...
The Historical Development of Cricket as a Game in England
The first written 'Laws of Cricket9 were drawn up in 1744.
The world's first cricket club was formed in Hambledon in the 1760s and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was founded in 1787.
Cricket's most important tools are all made of natural, pre-industrial materials. The bat is made of wood as are the stumps and the bails.
It’s often said that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.
This means that Britain's military success was based on the values taught to schoolboys in its public schools. Eton was the most famous of these schools.
The first Indian club, the Calcutta Cricket Club, was established in 1792.
The tournament was initially called the Quadrangular, because it was played by four teams: the Europeans, the Parsis, the Hindus and the Muslims.
It later became the Pentangular when a fifth team was added, namely, the Rest, which comprised all the communities left over, such as the Indian Christians. For example, Vijay Hazare, a Christian, played for the Rest.
K. Nayudu, an outstanding Indian batsman of his time, lives on in the popular imagination when some of his great contemporaries like Palwankar Vithal and Palwankar Baloo have been forgotten because his career lasted long enough for him to play Test cricket for India while theirs did not.
ICC - The Imperial Cricket Conference renamed the International Cricket Conference as late as 1965.
The first one-day international cricket was played between England and Australia in 1971 in Melbourne.
Pakistan has pioneered two great advances in bowling: the doosra and the 'reverse swing’.
Hockey was introduced into India by the British army in colonial times.
The first hockey club in India was started in Calcutta in 1885-1886.
The brilliance and skill of players like the great Dhyan Chand brought India a string of Olympic gold medals.
Between 1928 and 1956, India won gold medals in six consecutive Olympic Games.
India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts - in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages.
Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or on handmade paper
From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that described itself as "a commercial paper open to all, but influenced bynone’.
The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy.
Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821 and the Hindu orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose his opinions.
By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers,
In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household, leamt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen.
From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women - about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served.
In the 1880s, in present day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.
In Punjab, too, a similar folk literature was widely printed from the early twentieth century. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm Vichar to teach women how to be obedient wives.
Jyotiba Phule, the Maratfaa pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gutanigiri (1871).
In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on the Irish Press Laws.
The Novel
Stories in prose were not new to India. Banabhatta’s Kadambari, written in Sanskrit in the seventh century, is an early example.
The earliest novel in. Marathi was Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna Paryatan (1857), which iised a simple style of storytelling to speak about the plight of widows.
Chandu Menon, a subjudge from Malabar, tried to translate an English novel called Henrietta Temple written by Benjamin Disraeli into Malayalam.
This delightful novel called Indulekha, published in 1889, was the first modem novel in Malayalam.
Kandukuri Viresalingam (1848-1919) began translating Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield into Telugu.
In the north, Bharatendu Harishchandra, the pioneer of modem Hindi literature, encouraged many members of his circle of poets and writers to recreate and translate novels from other languages.
Many novels were actually translated and adapted from English and Bengali under his influence, but the first proper modem novel was written by Srinivas Das of Delhi
