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Sunday, 25 August 2013

Benefits of the British Rule in India

A number of historians both India and foreign writers and historians have started justifying the empire and even asking USA to take up the “White Man’s Burden” to bring civilizations and justice to the dark world of the dark skinned people. The views of the Western historians like Neil Ferguson or Michael Ignatief are being reflected by their Indian counterparts like Triankar Roy, Dipak Lal, or even Man Mohan Singh in his lecture in Oxford University recently. The surprising matter is that even the Sangha Parivar writers like M.S.Menon, and Priyadarshi Dutta are also propagating the benefits that the British rule has brought to India.
Before the British came, India was one of the richest countries in the world. In 1800, India, China and Egypt (and probably many of the kingdoms of central Africa) were economically more developed than Britain. Indeed the British had nothing for sale that was of interest to the Indians or Chinese. When the British left in 1947, India was poor and industrially backward.
Britain did bring free trade to India and China. Britain had extracted large surpluses from India, and forced it into a free-trade pattern, which obliged India to export commodities and become a dumping ground for British manufactures. Historians estimate that the net transfer of capital from India to Britain averaged 1.5 percent of GNP in the late nineteenth century. The wealth transfer was financed by a persistent trade surplus of India, which was sent back to Britain or spend to expand the British Empire.  India’s export-import ratio was 172.5 percent in 1840-69, 148 percent in 1870-1912, and 133.4 percent in 1913-38. This export orientation was a tool of colonial exploitation, and free trade a British ploy to force its manufactures on India and crush domestic industry.
Instead of enriching the world, the British Empire impoverished it. The empire was run on the cheap. Instead of investing in the development of the countries they ruled, the British survived by doing deals with indigenous elites to sustain their rule to extract maximum amount of revenues for Britain itself, which the British historians now deny.  
Whether in 18th-centuryIndia, 19th-century Egypt or 20th-century Iraq, the story is the same. As long as taxes were paid, the British cared little about "the rule of law". They turned a blind eye to Indian landlords who extracted rent by coercion or indigo and opium - planters who had forced Indian farmers to cultivate and their products were forced upon the Chinese. Unable to sell anything to the Chinese, Britain sent in its gunboats, seizing Hong Kong and opening up a market for opium grown in India. Despotic repression was fostered where it protected British interests.
India is the prime example. Ruled by Muslims before the British, India was a prosperous, rapidly commercializing society. The Jagat Seth, India's biggest banking network and financier of the East India Company, rivaled the Bank of England in size. British rule pauperized India. The British restricted Indian weavers' ability to trade freely and the result was a drastic drop in living standards. Dhaka, now the capital of impoverished Bangladesh, was once a state-of-the-art industrial city. Its population fell by half during the first century of British rule. Now, average Indian incomes are barely a tenth of the British level in terms of real purchasing power. It is no coincidence that 200 years of British rule occurred in the intervening time.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote “The chronic want of food and water, the lack of sanitation and medical help, the neglect of means of communication, the poverty of educational provision, the all pervading spirit of depression that I have myself seen to prevail in our villages after over a hundred years of British rule make me despair of its beneficence.” 
The impact of British rule in India:
As Davis concludes: "If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947." (in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World by M. Davis, London, Verso Books, 2001) In fact, incomes may have declined by 50 percent in the last half of the 19th century.
Shares of world GDP (percent)

1700
1820
1890
1952
China
23.1
32.4
13.2
5.2
India
22.6
15.7
11
3.8
Europe
23.3
26.6
40.3
29.7
Source: Davis, 2001 
Destruction of agriculture:
Karl Marx wrote in Consequences of British Rule in India,
“England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. The British inEast India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public work s.”
“There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of public works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and large provinces of Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.”
Destruction of self-sufficient rural economy:
“British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.”
“The third form of destruction was the destruction of the self-sufficient village society of India. Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade.”
“Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture, which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver inBengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small communities, by blowing up their economical basis”
De-industrialization of India under the British:
After destroying its agriculture British had embarked upon the destruction of Indian industry. Several Indian historians have argued that British rule led to a de-industrialization of India. By the Act 11 and 12 William III, cap. 10, it was enacted that the wearing of wrought silks and of printed or dyed calicoes from India, Persia and China should be prohibited, and a penalty of £200 imposed on all persons having or selling the same. Similar laws were enacted under George I, II and III, in consequence of the repeated lamentations of the afterward so “enlightened” British manufacturers. And thus, during the greater part of the 18th century, Indian manufactures were generally imported into England in order to he sold on the Continent, and to remain excluded from the English market itself. 
Ramesh Chandra Dutt argued (in Economic History of India, London, 1987):
“ India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as a great agricultural country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asia and Europe. It is, unfortunately, true that the East India Company and the British Parliament, following the selfish commercial policy of a hundred years ago, discouraged Indian manufacturers in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England. Their fixed policy, pursued during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, was to make India subservient to the industries of Great Britain, and to make the Indian people grow raw produce only, in order to supply material for the looms and manufactories of Great Britain”.
According to Karl Marx, ” However changing the political aspect of India’s past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The handloom and the spinning wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society.”
“It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons.”
From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population ofDacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. “
There is a good deal of truth in the deindustrialization argument. Moghul India did have
a bigger industry than any other country, which became a European colony, and was unique in being an industrial exporter in pre-colonial times. A large part of the Moghul industry was destroyed in the course of British rule.  
The second blow to Indian industry came from massive imports of cheap textiles from
England after the Napoleonic wars. In the period 1896-1913, imported piece goods supplied about 60 per cent of Indian cloth consumption, 45 and the proportion was probably higher for most of the nineteenth century. Home spinning, which was a spare-time activity of village women, was greatly reduced.  
It took India 130 years to manufacture textiles and to eliminate British textile imports. India could probably have copied Lancashire's technology more quickly if she had been allowed to impose a protective tariff in the way that was done in the USA and France in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, but the British imposed a policy of free trade. British imports entered India duty free, and when a small tariff was required for revenue purposes Lancashire pressure led to the imposition of a corresponding excise duty on Indian products to prevent them gaining a competitive advantage. This undoubtedly handicapped industrial development. If India had been politically independent, her tax structure would probably have been different. In the 1880s, Indian customs revenues were only 2.2 per cent of the trade turnover, i.e. the lowest ratio in any country. In Brazil, by contrast, import duties at that period were 21 per cent of trade turnover. 
British rule had not promoted industrialization in India either. Japan and China were not colonized by the British; they remained independent.  The Indian steel industry started fifteen years later than in China, where the first steel mill was built at Hangyang in 1896. The first Japanese mill was built in 1898. In both China and Japan the first steel mills (and the first textile mills) were government enterprises, whereas in India the government did its best to promote imports from Britain.  
Until the end of the Napoleonic wars, cotton manufactures had been India’s main
export. They reached their peak in 1798, and in 1813 they still amounted to £2 million, but thereafter they fell rapidly. Thirty years later, half of Indian imports were cotton textiles from Manchester. This collapse in India’s main export caused a problem for the Company, which had to find ways to convert its rupee revenue into resources transferable to the UK. The Company therefore promoted exports of raw materials on a larger scale, including indigo, and opium, which were traded against Chinese tea. These dope-peddling efforts provoked the Anglo-Chinese war of 1842 in which the British drug-pushers won and forced China to accept more and more opium. 
Financial Exploitation of India: 
Until 1898 India, like most Asian countries, was on the silver standard. In 1898, India under British rule, had to adopt a gold exchange standard which tied the Rupee to Pound at a fixed value of 15 to 1, thus forcing India to export more for smaller amount of British goods. This was another kind of exploitation of the Indian people making them poorer and poorer. 
Another important effect of foreign rule on the long-run growth potential of the
economy was the fact that a large part of its potential savings was siphoned abroad. There can be no denial that there was a substantial outflow, which lasted for 190 years. If
these funds had been invested in India they could have made a significant contribution to raising income levels.  
The first generation of British rulers was rapacious. Clive took quarter of a million
Pounds for himself as well as a jagir worth £27,000 a year, the Viceroy received £25,000 a year, and governors £10,000. The starting salary in the engineering service was £420 a year or about sixty-times the average income of the Indian labor force. From 1757 to 1919, India also had to meet administrative expenses in London, first of the East India Company, and then of the India Office, as well as other minor but irritatingly extraneous charges. The cost of British staff was raised by long home leave in the UK, early retirement and lavish amenities in the form of subsidized housing, utilities, rest houses, etc. Under the rule of the East India Company, official transfers to the UK rose gradually until they reached about £3.5 million in 1856, the year before the mutiny.
In addition, there were private remittances.  
D. Naoroji, (in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London, 1901) suggests that the annual remittances including business profits from mainly India and to a limited extent from China were already 6 million in 1838. R.P. Dutt argues that 'the spoliation of India was the hidden source of accumulation which played an all important role in helping to make possible the Industrial Revolution in England' (in Economic History of India, London, 1897) 
In the twenty years 1835-54, India’s average annual balance on trade and bullion was favorable by about £4.5 million a year. During the period of direct British rule from 1858 to 1947, official transfers of funds to the UK by the colonial government were called the “Home Charges”. They mainly represented debt service, pensions, India Office expenses in the UK, purchases of military items and railway equipment. Government procurement of civilian goods, armaments and shipping was carried out almost exclusively in the UK. By the 1930s these home charges were in the range of £40 to £50 million a year. Some of these flows would have occurred in a non-colonial economy, e.g. debt service on loans used to finance railway development, but a large part of the debt was incurred as a result of colonial wars. Some government expenditure was on imports, which an independent government would have bought from local manufacturers. Of these official payments, we can legitimately consider service charges on non-productive debt, pensions and furlough payments as a balance of payment drain due to colonialism.
There were also substantial private remittances by British officials in India either as
savings or to meet educational and other family charges in the UK. In the inter-war period, these amounted to about £10 million a year, and Naoroji estimated that they were running at the same level in 1887. These items were clearly the result of colonial rule.  
In addition, there were dividend and interest remittances by shipping and banking interests, plantations, and other British investors. The total ‘drain’ due to government pensions and leave payments, interest on non-railway official debt, private remittances for education and savings, and a third commercial profits amounted to about 1.5 per cent of national income of undivided India from 1921 to 1938 and was probably a little larger before that. Net investment was about 5 per cent of national income at the end of British rule, so about a quarter of Indian savings were transferred out of the economy, and foreign exchange was lost which could have paid for imports of capital goods.
As a consequence of this foreign drain the Indian balance of trade and bullion was always positive.  In spite of its constant favorable balance of trade, India acquired substantial debts. By1939 foreign assets in India amounted to $2.8 billion, of which about $1.5 billion was government-bonded debt and the rest represented direct investment (mainly tea, other plantations and the jute industry).  
India did not reduce its foreign debt during the First World War as many other
developing countries did. Instead, there were two ‘voluntary’ war gifts to the UK amounting to £150 million ($730 million). India also contributed one-and-a-quarter million troops, which were financed from the Indian budget. The 'drain' of funds to England continued in the interwar years because of home charges and profit remittances.
There was also a small outflow of British capital. In the depression of 1929-33, many developing countries defaulted on foreign debt or froze dividend transfers, but this was not possible for India. The currency was kept at par with sterling and devalued in 1931, but the decisions were based on British rather than Indian needs. Furthermore, the salaries of civil servants remained at high level, and the burden of official transfers increased in a period of falling prices.  
During the Second World War, India's international financial position was transformed.
Indian war finance was much more inflationary than in the UK and prices rose threefold, so these local costs of troop support were extremely high in terms of Pound, as the exchange rate remained unchanged. 
For the last fifty years of British rule there is no increase in per capita income.  The most noticeable change in the economy was the rise in population from about 170 million to 420 million from 1757 to 1947. Very little incentive was provided for investment and almost nothing was done to promote technical change in agriculture. At the bottom of society the position of sharecropping tenant and landless laborers remained wretched.
Meanwhile Indian taxes funded Britain's Indian army, which was used to expand the empire into Africa and Asia and which made a major contribution to defending the same empire in two world wars--all at no cost to the 'home' country! Lord Salisbury said India 'was an English barrack in the Oriental seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them'.
Man-Made Famines in British India:
The British brought an unsympathetic and ruthless economic agenda to India" and that "the creation of famine" was brought about by British "sequestration and export of food for enhanced commercial gain." Three important factors caused devastating famines in India under British rule. First, India’s indigenous textile industries were destroyed by London’s high tariffs and the import of cheap British manufactured products, impoverishing millions of town dwellers, who were forced into the countryside to compete for dwindling land. Second, India’s traditional granary reserve system, designed to offset the impact of bad harvests, was dismantled. Third, India’s peasants were pressured into growing crops for export, making them dependent on fluctuating world market prices for their means of subsistence. As a result, tens of millions of people died of starvation. These famines were not caused by shortages of food. They took place at the very same time that annual grain exports from India were increasing.
One third of the population of the then province of Bengal, which includes today’s Bangladesh, West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and South Assam, were wiped out in the famine of 1770, immediately after Bengal was occupied by the British Easy India Company, due to their inhuman tax system. According to author Mike Davis, during the famine of 1876, "the newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought stricken districts to central depots for hoarding...In Madras city, overwhelmed by 100,000 drought refugees, famished peasants dropped dead in front of the troops guarding pyramids of imported rice."
The British refused to provide adequate relief for famine victims on the grounds that this would encourage indolence. Sir Richard Temple, who was selected to organize famine relief efforts in 1877, set the food allotment for starving Indians at 16 ounces of rice per day--less than the diet for inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp for the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about two dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India. These swept away tens of millions of people. The frequency of famine showed a disconcerting increase in the nineteenth century,” under the British rule
(in Famines in India, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963).  
Very few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians by the British.  The annual death rate in 1877 in British labor camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%. Extraordinarily low population growth between 1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-exacerbated disease and cholera, plague and influenza epidemics) was due to this exploitative policy.  In 1943 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India about 5 million people were perished, but it was never mentioned in the British history books, because it was caused by a deliberate British “scorched earth policy” to deprive the Azad Hind Army and the Japanese to receive any support from the local people. 
The annual death rate in India before 1920 was about 4.8% but this declined to 3.5% by 1947 and is presently about 0.9%(http://countrystudies.us/india/32.htm). Using a baseline “expected” annual death rate value of 1.0% and assuming an “actual” pre-1920 value of 4.8% one can estimated that the avoidable (excess) mortality was about 0.6 billion during 1757-1837, 0.5 billion during 1837-1901 and 0.4 billion during 1901-1947. Thus the British rule of India was associated with an excess (i.e. avoidable) mortality totaling 1.5 billion – surely one of the greatest crimes in all of human history.
An extraordinary feature of the appalling record of British imperialism with respect to genocide and mass, worldwide killing of huge numbers of people (by war disease and famine) is its absence from public perception. There is no mention of famine in India or Bengal in the British textbooks of history. New historians in India are now putting the blame on the victims. Meghnad Desai in his article in Cambridge History of India puts the blame on the Indian speculators; Amartya Sen suggested (in ‘Ingredients of Famine Analysis’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol XCVI, 1981) that people in that area had eaten too much to create the famine. 
Conclusion: 
The progress made in India under British Rule like the coming of railways, Postal System, Telegraphic communications, etc., were all undertaken by the British Administration to facilitate their rule. The aim of British policy was to integrate the Indian economy with that of the British in way such that India supplied Great Britain with cheap raw material for being manufactured into valued-added (costly) finished products. It is not true that if India remained independent it could not have developed railways or telegraphic system; Japan or Thailand was never colonized but they have today much better infrastructure than that in India.
India during the British rule was to provide a ready captive market for British goods made from Indian raw materials. The resultant enrichment and industrial development was to take place in Britain and not in India. Thus at the dawn of independence, India inherited an economy that had the worst features of both the feudal and the industrial ages without the advantages of either. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote in 1941, in his letter from the deathbed to British member of parliament Mrs.Rothbone, that “…in the Soviet Union illiteracy was eradicated with two decades but in India even after two centuries of British rule only 15 percent of the Indians were literate”.
Priyadarsi Dutta, parliamentary secretary to Balbir Punj, the chairman of the BJP’s think-tank, wrote in The Organizer, the organ of the R.S.S on 28 May 2006, that the British rule was only a learning process emphasizing the positive aspects of the British empire as written in the history text books in Britain. Thus, they are suggesting that thousands of our heroes and heroines of the freedom struggle who had sacrificed their lives to liberate India were all very stupid. This is the indication of cultural imperialism, which is bound to take place in India along with the ‘globalization’, and the ‘economic reforms’ put forward by no other than the Anglo-American economists and policy-makers.

THE

The first steps were taken toward self-government in British India in the late 19th century with the appointment of Indian counsellors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the Indian Councils Act of 1892. Municipal Corporations and District Boards were created for local administration; they included elected Indian members.
The Indian Councils Act 1909, known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Minto was viceroy) — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures. Upper class Indians, rich landowners and businessmen were favoured. The Muslim community was made a separate electorate and granted double representation. The goals were quite conservative but they did advance the elective principle.[44]
The partition of Bengal was rescinded in 1911 and announced at the Delhi Durbar at which King George V came in person and was crowned Emperor of India. He announced the capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi, a Moslem stronghold. Morley was especially vigilant in crushing revolutionary groups.[96]

History 1914–1947[edit source | editbeta]

First World War, Lucknow Pact: 1914–1918[edit source | editbeta]

The First World War would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. Shortly prior to the outbreak of war, the Government of India had indicated that they could furnish two divisions plus a cavalry brigade, with a further division in case of emergency.[97] Some 1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of theBritish Indian Army took part in the war, primarily in Iraq and the Middle East. Their participation had a wider cultural fallout as news spread how bravely soldiers fought and died alongside British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia.[98] India's international profile rose during the 1920s, as it became afounding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and participated, under the name, "Les Indes Anglaises" (British India), in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp.[99] Back in India, especially among the leaders of theIndian National Congress, the war led to calls for greater self-government for Indians.[98]
After the 1906 split between the moderates and the extremists, organised political activity by the Congress had remained fragmented until 1914, when Bal Gangadhar Tilak was released from prison and began to sound out other Congress leaders about possible re-unification. That, however, had to wait until the demise of Tilak's principal moderate opponents, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, in 1915, whereupon an agreement was reached for Tilak's ousted group to re-enter the Congress.[98] In the 1916 Lucknow session of the Congress, Tilak's supporters were able to push through a more radical resolution which asked for the British to declare that it was their, "aim and intention ... to confer self-government on India at an early date."[98] Soon, other such rumblings began to appear in public pronouncements: in 1917, in the Imperial Legislative CouncilMadan Mohan Malaviyaspoke of the expectations the war had generated in India, "I venture to say that the war has put the clock ... fifty years forward ... (The) reforms after the war will have to be such, ... as will satisfy the aspirations of her (India's) people to take their legitimate part in the administration of their own country."[98]
The 1916 Lucknow Session of the Congress was also the venue of an unanticipated mutual effort by the Congress and the Muslim League, the occasion for which was provided by the wartime partnership between Germany and Turkey. Since the Turkish Sultan, orKhalifah, had also sporadically claimed guardianship of the Islamic holy sites of MeccaMedina, and Jerusalem, and since the British and their allies were now in conflict with Turkey, doubts began to increase among some Indian Muslims about the "religious neutrality" of the British, doubts that had already surfaced as a result of the reunification of Bengal in 1911, a decision that was seen as ill-disposed to Muslims.[100] In the Lucknow Pact, the League joined the Congress in the proposal for greater self-government that was campaigned for by Tilak and his supporters; in return, the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in the provincial legislatures as well as the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1916, the Muslim League had anywhere between 500 and 800 members and did not yet have its wider following among Indian Muslims of later years; in the League itself, the pact did not have unanimous backing, having largely been negotiated by a group of "Young Party" Muslims from the United Provinces (UP), most prominently, two brothers Mohammad andShaukat Ali, who had embraced the Pan-Islamic cause;[100] however, it did have the support of a young lawyer from Bombay,Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was later to rise to leadership roles in both the League and the Indian freedom movement. In later years, as the full ramifications of the pact unfolded, it was seen as benefiting the Muslim minority élites of provinces like UP and Bihar more than the Muslim majorities of Punjab and Bengal, nonetheless, at the time, the "Lucknow Pact," was an important milestone in nationalistic agitation and was seen so by the British.[100]
During 1916, two Home Rule Leagues were founded within the Indian National Congress by Tilak and Annie Besant, respectively, to promote Home Rule among Indians, and also to elevate the stature of the founders within the Congress itself.[101] Mrs. Besant, for her part, was also keen to demonstrate the superiority of this new form of organised agitation, which had achieved some success in the Irish home rule movement, to the political violence that had intermittently plagued the subcontinent during the years 1907–1914.[101] The two Leagues focused their attention on complementary geographical regions: Tilak's in western India, in the southern Bombay presidency, and Mrs. Besant's in the rest of the country, but especially in the Madras Presidency and in regions like Sind and Gujarat that had hitherto been considered politically dormant by the Congress.[101] Both leagues rapidly acquired new members – approximately thirty thousand each in a little over a year – and began to publish inexpensive newspapers. Their propaganda also turned to posters, pamphlets, and political-religious songs, and later to mass meetings, which not only attracted greater numbers than in earlier Congress sessions, but also entirely new social groups such as non-Brahmins, traders, farmers, students, and lower-level government workers.[101] Although they did not achieve the magnitude or character of a nation-wide mass movement, the Home Rule leagues both deepened and widened organised political agitation for self-rule in India. The British authorities reacted by imposing restrictions on the Leagues, including shutting out students from meetings and banning the two leaders from travelling to certain provinces.[101]
The year 1915 also saw the return of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to India. Already known in India as a result of his civil liberties protests on behalf of the Indians in South Africa, Gandhi followed the advice of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale and chose not to make any public pronouncements during the first year of his return, but instead spent the year travelling, observing the country first-hand, and writing.[102] Earlier, during his South Africa sojourn, Gandhi, a lawyer by profession, had represented an Indian community, which, although small, was sufficiently diverse to be a microcosm of India itself. In tackling the challenge of holding this community together and simultaneously confronting the colonial authority, he had created a technique of non-violent resistance, which he labelled Satyagraha (or, Striving for Truth).[103] For Gandhi, Satyagrahawas different from "passive resistance", by then a familiar technique of social protest, which he regarded as a practical strategy adopted by the weak in the face of superior force; Satyagraha, on the other hand, was for him the "last resort of those strong enough in their commitment to truth to undergo suffering in its cause."[103] Ahimsa or "non-violence," which formed the underpinning of Satyagraha, came to represent the twin pillar, with Truth, of Gandhi's unorthodox religious outlook on life.[103] During the years 1907–1914, Gandhi tested the technique of Satyagraha in a number of protests on behalf of the Indian community in South Africa against the unjust racial laws.[103]
Also, during his time in South Africa, in his essay, Hind Swaraj, (1909), Gandhi formulated his vision of Swaraj, or "self-rule" for India based on three vital ingredients: solidarity between Indians of different faiths, but most of all between Hindus and Muslims; the removal of untouchability from Indian society; and the exercise of swadeshi – the boycott of manufactured foreign goods and the revival of Indian cottage industry.[102] The first two, he felt, were essential for India to be an egalitarian and tolerant society, one befitting the principles of Truth and Ahimsa, while the last, by making Indians more self-reliant, would break the cycle of dependence that was not only perpetrating the direction and tenor of the British rule in India, but also the British commitment to it.[102] At least until 1920, the British presence itself, was not a stumbling block in Gandhi's conception of swaraj; rather, it was the inability of Indians to create a modern society.[102]

Satyagraha, Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms: 1917–1919[edit source | editbeta]

Gandhi made his political debut in India in 1917 in Champaran district in Bihar, near the Nepal border, where he was invited by a group of disgruntled tenant farmers who, for many years, had been forced into planting indigo (for dyes) on a portion of their land and then selling it at below-market prices to the British planters who had leased them the land.[104]Upon his arrival in the district, Gandhi was joined by other agitators, including a young Congress leader, Rajendra Prasad, from Bihar, who would become a become a loyal supporter of Gandhi and go on to play a prominent role in the Indian freedom movement. When Gandhi was ordered to leave by the local British authorities, he refused on moral grounds, setting up his refusal as a form of individual Satyagraha. Soon, under pressure from the Viceroy in Delhi who was anxious to maintain domestic peace during war-time, the provincial government rescinded Gandhi's expulsion order, and later agreed to an official enquiry into the case. Although, the British planters eventually gave in, they were not won over to the farmers' cause, and thereby did not produce the optimal outcome of a Satyagraha that Gandhi had hoped for; similarly, the farmers themselves, although pleased at the resolution, responded less than enthusiastically to the concurrent projects of rural empowerment and education that Gandhi had inaugurated in keeping with his ideal of swaraj. The following year Gandhi launched two more Satyagrahas – both in his native Gujarat – one in the rural Kaira district where land-owning farmers were protesting increased land-revenue and the other in the city of Ahmedabad, where workers in an Indian-owned textile mill were distressed about their low wages. The satyagraha in Ahmedabad took the form of Gandhi fasting and supporting the workers in a strike, which eventually led to a settlement. In Kaira, in contrast, although the farmers' cause received publicity from Gandhi's presence, the satyagraha itself, which consisted of the farmers' collective decision to withhold payment, was not immediately successful, as the British authorities refused to back down. The agitation in Kaira gained for Gandhi another lifelong lieutenant in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organised the farmers, and who too would go on to play a leadership role in the Indian freedom movement.[105] Champaran, Kaira, and Ahmedabad were important milestones in the history of Gandhi's new methods of social protest in India.
In 1916, in the face of new strength demonstrated by the nationalists with the signing of the Lucknow Pact and the founding of the Home Rule leagues, and the realisation, after the disaster in the Mesopotamian campaign, that the war would likely last longer, the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, cautioned that the Government of India needed to be more responsive to Indian opinion.[106] Towards the end of the year, after discussions with the government in London, he suggested that the British demonstrate their good faith – in light of the Indian war role – through a number of public actions, including awards of titles and honours to princes, granting of commissions in the army to Indians, and removal of the much-reviled cotton excise duty, but, most importantly, an announcement of Britain's future plans for India and an indication of some concrete steps. After more discussion, in August 1917, the new Liberal Secretary of State for IndiaEdwin Montagu, announced the British aim of "increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire."[106]Although the plan envisioned limited self-government at first only in the provinces – with India emphatically within the British Empire – it represented the first British proposal for any form of representative government in a non-white colony.
Earlier, at the onset of World War I, the reassignment of most of the British army in India to Europe and Mesopotamia, had led the previous Viceroy, Lord Harding, to worry about the "risks involved in denuding India of troops."[98] Revolutionary violence had already been a concern in British India; consequently, in 1915, to strengthen its powers during what it saw was a time of increased vulnerability, the Government of India passed the Defence of India Act, which allowed it to intern politically dangerous dissidents without due process, and added to the power it already had – under the 1910 Press Act – both to imprison journalists without trial and to censor the press.[107] It was under the Defence of India act that the Ali brothers were imprisoned in 1916, and Annie Besant, a European woman, and ordinarily more problematic to imprison, in 1917.[107] Now, as constitutional reform began to be discussed in earnest, the British began to consider how new moderate Indians could be brought into the fold of constitutional politics and, simultaneously, how the hand of established constitutionalists could be strengthened. However, since the Government of India wanted to ensure against any sabotage of the reform process by extremists, and since its reform plan was devised during a time when extremist violence had ebbed as a result of increased governmental control, it also began to consider how some of its war-time powers could be extended into peace time.[107]
Consequently, in 1917, even as Edwin Montagu, announced the new constitutional reforms, a committee chaired by a British judge, Mr. S. A. T. Rowlatt, was tasked with investigating "revolutionary conspiracies," with the unstated goal of extending the government's war-time powers.[106] The Rowlatt committee presented its report in July 1918 and identified three regions of conspiratorial insurgency: Bengal, the Bombay presidency, and the Punjab.[106] To combat subversive acts in these regions, the committee recommended that the government use emergency powers akin to its war-time authority, which included the ability to try cases of sedition by a panel of three judges and without juries, exaction of securities from suspects, governmental overseeing of residences of suspects,[106] and the power for provincial governments to arrest and detain suspects in short-term detention facilities and without trial.[108]
With the end of World War I, there was also a change in the economic climate. By year's end 1919, 1.5 million Indians had served in the armed services in either combatant or non-combatant roles, and India had provided £146 million in revenue for the war.[109] The increased taxes coupled with disruptions in both domestic and international trade had the effect of approximately doubling the index of overall prices in India between 1914 and 1920.[109] Returning war veterans, especially in the Punjab, created a growing unemployment crisis,[110] and post-war inflation led to food riots in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal provinces,[110] a situation that was made only worse by the failure of the 1918–19 monsoon and by profiteering and speculation.[109] The global influenza epidemic and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 added to the general jitters; the former among the population already experiencing economic woes,[110] and the latter among government officials, fearing a similar revolution in India.[111]
To combat what it saw as a coming crisis, the government now drafted the Rowlatt committee's recommendations into two Rowlatt Bills.[108] Although the bills were authorised for legislative consideration by Edwin Montagu, they were done so unwillingly, with the accompanying declaration, "I loathe the suggestion at first sight of preserving the Defence of India Act in peace time to such an extent as Rowlatt and his friends think necessary."[106] In the ensuing discussion and vote in the Imperial Legislative Council, all Indian members voiced opposition to the bills. The Government of India was, nevertheless, able to use of its "official majority" to ensure passage of the bills early in 1919.[106] However, what it passed, in deference to the Indian opposition, was a lesser version of the first bill, which now allowed extrajudicial powers, but for a period of exactly three years and for the prosecution solely of "anarchical and revolutionary movements," dropping entirely the second bill involving modification the Indian Penal Code.[106] Even so, when it was passed, the new Rowlatt Act aroused widespread indignation throughout India, and brought Gandhi to the forefront of the nationalist movement.[108]
Meanwhile, Montagu and Chelmsford themselves finally presented their report in July 1918 after a long fact-finding trip through India the previous winter.[112] After more discussion by the government and parliament in Britain, and another tour by the Franchise and Functions Committee for the purpose of identifying who among the Indian population could vote in future elections, the Government of India Act 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was passed in December 1919.[112] The new Act enlarged both the provincial and Imperial legislative councils and repealed the Government of India's recourse to the "official majority" in unfavourable votes.[112] Although departments like defence, foreign affairs, criminal law, communications, and income-tax were retained by the Viceroy and the central government in New Delhi, other departments like public health, education, land-revenue, local self-government were transferred to the provinces.[112] The provinces themselves were now to be administered under a new dyarchical system, whereby some areas like education, agriculture, infrastructure development, and local self-government became the preserve of Indian ministers and legislatures, and ultimately the Indian electorates, while others like irrigation, land-revenue, police, prisons, and control of media remained within the purview of the British governor and his executive council.[112]The new Act also made it easier for Indians to be admitted into the civil service and the army officer corps.
A greater number of Indians were now enfranchised, although, for voting at the national level, they constituted only 10% of the total adult male population, many of whom were still illiterate.[112] In the provincial legislatures, the British continued to exercise some control by setting aside seats for special interests they considered cooperative or useful. In particular, rural candidates, generally sympathetic to British rule and less confrontational, were assigned more seats than their urban counterparts.[112] Seats were also reserved for non-Brahmins, landowners, businessmen, and college graduates. The principal of "communal representation," an integral part of the Minto-Morley reforms, and more recently of the Congress-Muslim League Lucknow Pact, was reaffirmed, with seats being reserved for Muslims, SikhsIndian ChristiansAnglo-Indians, and domiciled Europeans, in both provincial and Imperial legislative councils.[112] The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms offered Indians the most significant opportunity yet for exercising legislative power, especially at the provincial level; however, that opportunity was also restricted by the still limited number of eligible voters, by the small budgets available to provincial legislatures, and by the presence of rural and special interest seats that were seen as instruments of British control.[112] Its scope was unsatisfactory to the Indian political leadership, famously expressed by Annie Beasant as something "unworthy of England to offer and India to accept".[113][citation not found]

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre[edit source | editbeta]

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre or "Amritsar massacre", took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the predominantly Sikh northern city of Amritsar. After days of unrest Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer forbade public meetings and on Sunday 13 April 1919 fifty British Indian Army soldiers commanded by Dyer began shooting at an unarmed gathering of thousands of men, women, and children without warning. Casualty estimates vary widely, with the Government of India reporting 379 dead, with 1,100 wounded.[114] TheIndian National Congress estimated three times the number of dead. Dyer was removed from duty but he became a celebrated hero in Britain among people with connections to the Raj.[115] Historians consider the episode was a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India.[116]
Raghaven argues that the massacre caused a reevaluation the Army's role, to make it more pragmatic and nuanced rather than rely on brute force to overawe or punish the natives. The new policy became minimum force. The army was retrained and developed suitable tactics such as crowd control.[117]

Noncooperation, Khilafat, Simon Commission, Jinnah's fourteen points: 1920s[edit source | editbeta]

In 1920, after the British government refused to back down, Gandhi began his campaign of noncooperation, prompting many Indians to return British awards and honours, to resign from civil service, and to again boycott British goods. In addition, Gandhi reorganised the Congress, transforming it into a mass movement and opening its membership to even the poorest Indians. Although Gandhi halted the noncooperation movement in 1922 after the violent incident at Chauri Chaura, the movement revived again, in the mid-1920s.
The visit, in 1928, of the British Simon Commission, charged with instituting constitutional reform in India, resulted in widespread protests throughout the country.[118] Earlier, in 1925, non-violent protests of the Congress had resumed too, this time in Gujarat, and led by Patel, who organised farmers to refuse payment of increased land taxes; the success of this protest, the Bardoli Satyagraha, brought Gandhi back into the fold of active politics.[118]

Kakori conspiracy 1925[edit source | editbeta]

File:Kakori Shaheed.jpg
Photos of 4 rebels who were hanged by British Raj in this case. (from Left to Right): Rajendra Lahiri, Ashfaqulla Khan, Pandit Ram Prasad Bismil and Thakur Roshan Singh.
The Kakori conspiracy (also called the Kakori train robbery or Kakori Case), was a train robbery that took place between Kakori and Alamnagar, near Lucknow, on 9 August 1925 during the Indian Independence Movement against the British Indian Government. The robbery was organised by the Hindustan Republican Association.
Photo of German made Mauser pistol used in the action by rebels.
The plan was conceived by Ram Prasad Bismil in a meeting of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) held at Shahjahanpur. This organisation was established in 1924 to carry out revolutionary activities against the British Empire in India with the object of achieving independence. The robbery plan was executed by Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla KhanRajendra LahiriChandrashekhar Azad,Sachindra BakshiKeshab ChakravarthyManmathnath GuptaMurari Sharma (fake name of Murari Lal Gupta), Mukundi Lal (Mukundi Lal Gupta) and Banwari Lal.[119][120]

Demand for complete independence, Salt March: 1929–1931[edit source | editbeta]

At midnight on 31 December 1929, during its annual session in Lahore, the Indian National Congress, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, raised the flag of independent India for the first time, and afterwards issued a demand for Purna Swaraj (Hindi: "complete independence"), or Purna Swarajya in Sanskrit which Nehru was to later refer to as "a tryst with destiny." The declaration was drafted by the Congress Working Committee, which included Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. Gandhi subsequently led an expanded movement of civil disobedience, culminating in 1930 with the Salt Satyagraha, in which thousands of Indians defied the tax on salt, by marching to the sea and making their own salt by evaporating seawater. Although, many, including Gandhi, were arrested, the British government eventually gave in, and in 1931 Gandhi travelled to London to negotiate new reform at the Round Table Conferences.
In local terms British control rested on the Indian Civil Service, but it faced growing difficulties. Fewer and fewer young men in Britain were interested in joining, and the continuing distrust of Indians resulted in a declining base in terms of quality and quantity. By 1945 Indians were numerically dominant in the ICS and at issue was loyal divided between the Empire and independence.[121] The finances of the Raj depended on land taxes, and these became problematic in the 1930s. Epstein argues that after 1919 it became harder and harder to collect the land revenue. The Raj's suppression of civil disobedience after 1934 temporarily increased the power of the revenue agents but after 1937 they were forced by the new Congress-controlled provincial governments to hand back confiscated land. Again the outbreak of war strengthened them, in the face of the Quit India movement the revenue collectors had to rely on military force and by 1946–47 direct British control was rapidly disappearing in much of the countryside.[122]

Government of India Act: 1931–1937[edit source | editbeta]

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonaldto the right of Mahatma Gandhi at the Second round Table Conference in London, October 1931. Fourth from the left in the foreground is Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, representative of the "Depressed Classes."
In 1935, after the Round Table Conferences, Parliament passed the Government of India Act 1935, which authorised the establishment of independent legislative assemblies in all provinces of British India, the creation of a central government incorporating both the British provinces and the princely states, and the protection of Muslim minorities. The future Constitution of independent India was based on this act.[123] However, it divided the electorate into 19 religious and social categories, e.g., Moslems, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Depressed Classes, Landholders, Commerce and Industry, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, etc., each of which was given separate representation in the Provincial Legislative Assemblies. A voter could cast a vote only for candidates in his own category.
The 1935 Act provided for more autonomy for Indian provinces, with the goal of cooling off nationalist sentiment. The act provided for a national parliament and an executive branch under the purview of the British government, but the rulers of the princely states managed to block its implementation. These states remained under the full control of their hereditary rulers, with no popular government. \To prepare for elections Congress built up its grass roots membership from 473,000 in 1935 to 4.5 million in 1939.[124]
In the 1937 elections Congress won victories in seven of the eleven provinces of British India.[125] Congress governments, with wide powers, were formed in these provinces. The widespread voter support for the Indian National Congress surprised Raj officials, who previously had seen the Congress as a small elitist body.[126]

World War II, Muslim League's Lahore Resolution: 1938–1941[edit source | editbeta]

While the Muslim League was a small elite group in 1927 with only 1300 members, it grew rapidly once it became an organisation that reached out to the masses, reaching 500,000 members in Bengal in 1944, 200,000 in Punjab, and hundreds of thousands elsewhere. Jinnah now was well positioned to negotiate with the British from a position of power.[127] With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on India's behalf without consulting Indian leaders, leading the Congress provincial ministries to resign in protest. The Muslim League, in contrast, supported Britain in the war effort and maintained its control of the government in three major provinces, Bengal, Sind and the Punjab.
The Free India Legion attached to theGerman Army was created in 1941, mainly from disaffected Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army.
Jinnah repeatedly warned that Muslims would be unfairly treated in an independent India dominated by the Congress. On 24 March 1940 in Lahore, the League passed the "Lahore Resolution", demanding that, "the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign." Although there were other important national Muslim politicians such as Congress leader Ab'ul Kalam Azad, and influential regional Muslim politicians such as A. K. Fazlul Huq of the leftist Krishak Praja Party in Bengal, Sikander Hyat Khan of the landlord-dominated Punjab Unionist Party, and Abd al-Ghaffar Khan of the pro-Congress Khudai Khidmatgar (popularly, "red shirts") in the North West Frontier Province, the British, over the next six years, were to increasingly see the League as the main representative of Muslim India.[128]
The Congress was secular and strongly opposed having any religious state. It insisted there was a natural unity to India, and repeatedly blamed the British for "divide and rule" tactics based on prompting Muslims to think of themselves as alien from Hindus. Jinnah rejected the notion of a united India, and emphasised that religious communities were more basic than an artificial nationalism. He proclaimed theTwo-Nation Theory,[129] stating at Lahore on 22 March 1940:
"Islam and Hinduism ... are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, litterateurs. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspect on life and of life are different ... To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built for the government of such a state."[130]

Army expansion[edit source | editbeta]

Sherman tank of the 9th Royal Deccan Horse255th Indian Tank Brigade, Burma 1945
While the regular Indian army in 1939 included about 220,000 native troops, it expanded tenfold during the war[131] and small naval and air force units were created. Over two million Indians volunteered for military service in the British Army. They played a major role in numerous campaigns, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Casualties were moderate (in terms of the world war), with were 24,000 killed; 64,000 wounded; 12,000 missing (probably dead), and 60,000 captured at Singapore in 1942.[132][133]
London paid most of the cost of the Indian Army, which had the effect of erasing India's national debt. It ended the war with a surplus of £1,300 million. In addition, heavy British spending on munitions produced in India (such as uniforms, rifles, machine-guns, field artillery, and ammunition) led to a rapid expansion of industrial output, such as textiles (up 16%), steel (up 18%), chemicals (up 30%). Small warships were built, and an aircraft factory opened in Bangalore. The railway system, with 700,000 employees, was taxed to the limit as demand for transportation soared.[134]

INA[edit source | editbeta]

The soldiers captured at Singapore had the option of going to Japanese POW camps or joining the Indian National Army, headed bySubhas Chandra Bose but under Japanese control. Most joined the INA coming to a total of 50000 soldiers[135] and fought in Burma; about 10,000 survived the war.[136]
On some ideological conflict leading to Tripuri Crisis for the election of the Congress President,[137] Bose resigned from the Congress in 1939 and turned to Germany and Japan to liberate India by force.[138] With Japanese sponsorship he organised the Indian National Army. From the onset of the war, the Japanese secret service had promoted unrest in South east Asia to destabilise the British war effort,[139] and set up several puppet governments in the captured regions. For India Japan created the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India), presided by Bose.[140] After early Japanese success in Burma, the reinforced British Indian Army in 1945 first halted and then reversed the Japanese U Go offensive, and launched its Burma Campaign.
Sir Stafford Cripps negotiating with Gandhi March 1942

Cripps Mission, Quit India Resolution: 1942–1945[edit source | editbeta]

The British government sent the Cripps' mission in 1942 to secure Indian nationalists' cooperation in the war effort in exchange for a promise of independence as soon as the war ended. Top officials in Britain, most notably Prime Minister Winston Churchill, did not support the Cripps Mission and negotiations with the Congress soon broke down.[141]
Women's procession in Bombay during the "Quit India" movement, 1942
A photo of Kolkata street from 1945 GI photo collection.
Congress in July 1942 launched the "Quit India" movement in demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British from India or face nationwide civil disobedience. On 8 August the Raj arrested all national, provincial and local Congress leaders, holding tens of thousands of them until 1945. The country erupted in violent demonstrations led by students and later by peasant political groups, especially in Eastern United Provinces, Bihar, and western Bengal. The large war-time British Army presence crushed the movement in a little more than six weeks;[142] nonetheless, a portion of the movement formed for a time an underground provisional government on the border with Nepal.[142] In other parts of India, the movement was less spontaneous and the protest less intensive, however it lasted sporadically into the summer of 1943. It did not slow down the British war effort or recruiting for the army.[143]
19 September 1945 saw the British offer India limited autonomy within the British Empire. The All-India Congress debated between 20 through 23 September, but they rejected the proposition and demanded that Britain leave India immediately.[144]

Elections, Cabinet Mission, Direct Action Day: 1946[edit source | editbeta]

In January 1946, a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain.[145] The mutinies came to a head with mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, followed by others in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi. Although the mutinies were rapidly suppressed, they had the effect of spurring the new Labour government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick Lawrence, and including Sir Stafford Cripps, who had visited four years before.[145]
Also in early 1946, new elections were called in India. Earlier, at the end of the war in 1945, the colonial government had announced the public trial of three senior officers of Bose's defeated Indian National Army who stood accused of treason. Now as the trials began, the Congress leadership, although ambivalent towards the INA, chose to defend the accused officers.[146] The subsequent convictions of the officers, the public outcry against the convictions, and the eventual remission of the sentences, created positive propaganda for the Congress, which only helped in the party's subsequent electoral victories in eight of the eleven provinces.[147] The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of the partition. Jinnah proclaimed 16 August 1946, Direct Action Day, with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a Muslim homeland in British India. The following day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and quickly spread throughout India. Although the Government of India and the Congress were both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India's prime minister.[148]

The Plan for Partition: 1947[edit source | editbeta]

Later that year, the Labour government in Britain, its exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, and conscious that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support, nor the reliability of native forces for continuing to control an increasingly restless India,[149][150] decided to end British rule of India, and in early 1947 Britain announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948.
As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated. With the British army unprepared for the potential for increased violence, the new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power, allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan for independence. In June 1947, the nationalist leaders, including Sardar Patel, Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad on behalf of the Congress, Jinnah representing the Muslim League, B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines in stark opposition to Gandhi's views. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan; the plan included a partition of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal.

Violence, Partition, Independence: 1947[edit source | editbeta]

On 14 August 1947, the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor General in Karachi. The following day, 15 August 1947, India, now a smaller Union of India, became an independent country with official ceremonies taking place in New Delhi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru assuming the office of theprime minister, and the viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, staying on as its first Governor General.[151]
The great majority of Indians remained in place with independence, but in border areas millions of people (Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu) relocated across the newly drawn borders. In Punjab, where the new border lines divided the Sikh regions in half, there was much bloodshed; in Bengal and Bihar, where Gandhi's presence assuaged communal tempers, the violence was more limited. In all, somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people on both sides of the new borders, both among the refugee and resident populations of the three faiths, died in the violence.[152] Other estimates of the number of deaths are as high as 1,500,000. Source

Ideological impact[edit source | editbeta]

At independence and since India has maintained such central British institutions as parliamentary government, one-person, one-vote and the rule of law through nonpartisan courts. They retained as well the institutional arrangements of the Raj such as district administration, universities and stock exchanges. One major change was the rejection of separate princely states. Metcalf shows that over the course of two centuries, British intellectuals and Indian specialists made the highest priority bringing peace, unity and good government to India. They offered many competing methods to reach the goal. For example, Cornwallis recommended turning Bengali Zamindar into the sort of English landlords that controlled local affairs in England. Munro proposed to deal directly with the peasants. Sir William Jones and the Orientalists promoted Sanskrit, while Macaulay promoted the English language.[153] Zinkin argues that in the long-run, what matters most about the legacy of the Raj is the British political ideologies which the Indians took over after 1947, especially the belief in unity, democracy, the rule of law and a certain equality beyond caste and creed. Zinkin sees this not just in the Congress party but also among Hindu Nationalists in the Bharatya Janata Party, which specifically emphasises Hindu traditions.[154][155]

Economic impact[edit source | editbeta]

"A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today. Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty."
— Jawaharlal Nehru, on the economic effects of the British rule, in his book The Discovery of India[156]
In 1780 the conservative British politician Edmund Burke raised the issue of India's position: he vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray (1998) continues this line of attack, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of "plunder" and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India. Ray accuses the British of depleting the food and money stocks and of imposing high taxes that helped cause the terrible famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal.[157]
P. J. 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 and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation.[158] 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. This notion however contradicts the accounts of pilferage and theft of famous diamonds and rare resources forcibly removed from its citizens. Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still rejected by many historians.[159]

Famines, epidemics, and public health[edit source | editbeta]

According to Angus Maddison, "The British contributed to public health by introducing smallpox vaccination, establishing Western medicine and training modern doctors, by killing rats, and establishing quarantine procedures. As a result, the death rate fell and the population of India grew by 1947 to more than two-and-a- half times its size in 1757."[160]
Population growth worsened the plight of the peasantry. As a result of peace and improved sanitation and health, the Indian population rose from perhaps 100 million in 1700 to 300 million by 1920. While encouraging agricultural productivity, the British also provided economic incentives to have more children to help in the fields. Although a similar population increase occurred in Europe at the same time, the growing numbers could be absorbed by industrialisation or emigration to the Americas and Australia. India enjoyed neither an industrial revolution nor an increase in food growing. Moreover, Indian landlords had a stake in the cash crop system and discouraged innovation. As a result, population numbers far outstripped the amount of available food and land, creating dire poverty and widespread hunger.
—-Craig A. Lockard, Societies, Networks, and Transitions[161]
Famines in India (Estimated deaths in millions)

Victims of the Great Famine of 1876–78 in India
During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–1878, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died[174] and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people died.[175] Recent research, including work by Mike Davis and Amartya Sen,[176] attributes most of the effects of these famines to British policy in India. An El Niño event caused the Indian famine of 1876–1878.[177]
Having been criticised for the badly bungled relief-effort during the Orissa famine of 1866,[178] British authorities began to discuss famine policy soon afterwards, and in early 1868 Sir William Muir, Lieutenant-Governor of the North Western Provinces, issued a famous order stating that:[179]
"... every District officer would be held personally responsible that no deaths occurred from starvation which could have been avoided by any exertion or arrangement on his part or that of his subordinates."
The first cholera pandemic began in Bengal, then spread across India by 1820. 10,000 British troops and countless Indians died during this pandemic.[180] Estimated deaths in India between 1817 and 1860 exceeded 15 million persons. Another 23 million died between 1865 and 1917.[181] The Third Pandemic of plague started in China in the middle of the 19th century, spreading disease to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone.[182] Waldemar Haffkine, who mainly worked in India, became the first microbiologist to developed and deploy vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1925 the Plague Laboratory in Bombay was renamed the Haffkine Institute.
Fevers ranked as one of the leading causes of death in India in the 19th century.[183] Britain's Sir Ronald Ross, working in thePresidency General Hospital in Calcutta, finally proved in 1898 that mosquitoes transmit malaria.[184]
In 1881 around 120,000 leprosy patients existed in India. The central government passed the Lepers Act of 1898, which provided legal provision for forcible confinement of leprosysufferers in India.[185] Under the direction of Mountstuart Elphinstone a program was launched to propagate smallpox vaccination.[186] Mass vaccination in India resulted in a major decline in smallpox mortality by the end of the 19th century.[187] In 1849 nearly 13% of all Calcutta deaths were due to smallpox.[188] Between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths from smallpox.[189]
Sir Robert Grant directed his attention to establishing a systematic institution in Bombay for imparting medical knowledge to the natives.[190] In 1860, Grant Medical Collegebecame one of the four recognised colleges for teaching courses leading to degrees (alongside Elphinstone CollegeDeccan College and Government Law College, Mumbai).