At a Glance...

HISTORY & POLITICS BRITISH INDIA Udham Singh: Avenger of the Amritsar Massacre Udham Singh in Popular Memory The Tragedy of Komagata Maru

Agrarian Unrest: The Deccan Riots of 1875

"Jolly Good Fellows and Their Nasty Ways", review of Joh Newsinger, The Bloo

Never Dried: A People's History of t British Empire

Black Hole of Calcut East India Company Robert Clive Clive and his Pet Tortoise Warren Hastings

BRITISH INDIA [page 1 of 2]

See also [Mahatma Gandhi] [Quit India Movement] [Dandi March] [Hill Stations] See additional papers and references at the end of page two

Battle of Plassey Siraj-ud-daulah Indian History Bibliography

Sir Muhammed Iqba

The British presence in India dates back to the early part of the
seventeenth century. On 31 December 1600, Elizabeth, then the monarch of the United Kingdom, acceded to the demand of a large body of merchants that a royal charter be given to a new trading company, "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies." Between 1601-13, merchants of the East India Company took twelve voyages to India, and in 1609 William Hawkins arrived at the court of Jahangir to seek permission to establish a British presence in India. Hawkins was rebuffed by Jahangir, but Sir Thomas Roe, who presented himself before the Mughal Emperor in 1617, was rather more successful. Two years later, Roe gained Jahangir's permission to build a British factory in Surat, and in 1639, this was followed by the founding of Fort St. George (Madras). Despite some setbacks, such as the Company's utter humiliation at the hands of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, with whom the Company went to war between 1688-91, the Company never really looked back.

Criminality and Colonial Anthropolo Peasant Insurgency Colonial India

ANCIENT INDIA MUGHALS AND MEDIEVAL INDIA GANDHI SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

INDEPENDENT INDI CURRENT AFFAIRS HINDU RASHTRA

Gateway of India, Bombay

In 1757, on account of the British victory at Plassey, where a military force led by Robert

Clive defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, the East India Company found itself transformed from an association of traders to rulers exercising political sovereignty over a largely unknown land and people. Less than ten years later, in 1765, the Company acquired the Diwani of Bengal, or the right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The consolidation of British rule after the initial military victories fell to Warren Hastings, who did much to dispense with the fiction that the Mughal Emperor was still the sovereign to whom the Company was responsible. Hastings also set about to make the British more acquainted with Indian history, culture, and social customs; but upon his return to England, he would be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. His numerous successors, though fired by the ambition to expand British territories in India, were also faced with the task of governance. British rule was justified, in part, by the claims that the Indians required to be civilized, and that British rule would introduce in place of Oriental despotism and anarchy a reliable system of justice, the rule of law, and the notion of 'fair play'. Certain Indian social or religious practices that the British found to be abhorrent were outlawed, such as sati in 1829, and an ethic of 'improvement' wa said to dictate British social policies. In the 1840s and 1850s, under the governal-generalshi of Dalhousie and then Canning, more territories were absorbed into British India, either on grounds that the native rulers were corrupt, inept, and notoriously indifferent about the welf of their subjects, or that since the native ruler had failed to produce a biological male heir to the throne, the territory was bound to "lapse" into British India upon the death of the ruler. Such was the fate of Sambalpur (1849), Baghat (1850), Jhansi (1853), Nagpur (1854), and most tragically -- Awadh (1856). The Nawab of Awadh [also spelled as Oudh], Wajid Ali Shah, was especially reviled by the British as the worst specimen of the Oriental Despot, mo interested in nautch girls, frivolous amusements -- kite-flying, cock-fighting, and the like -and sheer indolence than in the difficult task of governance. The British annexation of Awa and the character of the Nawab, were made the subjects of an extraordinary film by Satyajit Ray, entitled The Chess Players ("Shatranj ke Khilari").

Shortly after the annexation of Awadh, the Sepoy

Mutiny, more appropriately described as the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, broke out. This was by far th greatest threat posed to the British since the beginnings of their acquisition of an empire in India in 1757, and within the space of a few weeks in Ma large swathes of territory in the Gangetic plains had An English baby girl being carried fallen to the rebels. Atrocities were committed on on a palanquin by Indian bearers, both sides, and conventionally the rebellion is view on the road fo Nainital. Photograph as marking the moment when the British would dated 1904. always understand themselves as besieged by hostil natives, just as the Indians understood that they cou not forever be held in submission. If in the early days of the Company's rule a legend was constructed around the Black Hole of Calcutta, so signifying the villainy of Indians, the Rebellion of 1857-58 gave rise to an elaborate mythography on both sides. Delhi was

recaptured by British troops in late 1857, the Emperor Bahadur Shah, last of the Mughals, w put on trial for sedition and predictably convicted, and by mid-1858 the Rebellion had been entirely crushed. The East India Company was abolished, though John Stuart Mill, the Commissioner of Correspondence at India House, London, and the unacknowledged formulator of British policy with respect to the native states, furnished an elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful plea on behalf of the Company. India became a Crown colony, to b governed directly by Parliament, and henceforth responsibility for Indian affairs would fall upon a member of the British cabinet, the Secretary of State for India, while in India itself th man at the helm of affairs would continue to be the Governor-General, known otherwise in capacity as the representative of the monarch as the Viceroy of India.

The proclamation of Queen Victoria, in which she promised that she and her officers would

work for the welfare of their Indian subjects, ushered in the final phase of the British Raj. Among Indians, there were debates surrounding female education, widow remarriage, the a of consent for marriage, and more generally the status of women; and in the meanwhile, wit increasing emphasis on English education, and the expansion of the government, larger numbers of Indians joined government service. There was, similarly, a considerable increas in both English-language and vernacular journalism, and in 1885 the Indian National Congress, at first an association comprised largely of lawyers and some other professionals, was founded in order that educated Indians might gain something of a voice in the governan of their own country. However, nationalist sentiments could not be confined within the parameters set by a gentlemanly organization such as the Congress, and both in Maharashtra where the radicals were led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and in Bengal armed revolutionaries attempted to carry out a campaign of terror and assassination directed at British officials and institutions. In 1905, on the grounds that the governance of Bengal had become impossible owing to the large size of the presidency, the British partitioned Bengal, and so provoked th first major resistance to British rule and administrative policies in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857-58. It is during the Swadeshi movement that Indians deployed various strategies of non-violent resistance, boycott, strike and non-cooperation, and eventually the British had to agree to revoke the partition of Bengal. The partition itself had been attempte partly with a view to dividing the largely Muslim area of East Bengal from the western part Bengal, which was predominantly Hindu, and the communalist designs of the British were clearly demonstrated as well in their encouragement of the Muslim League, a political formation that came into existence in 1907, on the supposition that the interests of the Muslims could not be served by the Indian National Congress. The capital of the country w shifted as well from Calcutta to Delhi, where a new set of official buildings designed to refl imperial splendor led to the creation of New Delhi. [continued on page 2]

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