A BRIEF HISTORY
OF INDIA
A BRIEF HISTORY
OF INDIA
JUDITH E. WALSH
State University of New York
Old Westbury
A Brief History of India
Copyright © 2006 by Judith E. Walsh
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Walsh, Judith E.
A brief history of India / Judith E. Walsh
p. cm.
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1. India—History. I. Title.
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Contents
List of Illustrations
viii
List of Maps
ix
List of Tables
x
Acknowledgments
xi
Note on Photos
xii
Introduction
xiii
1 Land, Climate, and Prehistory
1
2 Caste, Kings, and the Hindu World Order
(1000 B.C.–A.D. 700)
20
3 Turks, Afghans, and Mughals (600–1800)
59
4 The Jewel in the Crown (1757–1885)
89
5 Becoming Modern—the Colonial Way (1800–1900)
125
6 Toward Freedom (1885–1920)
153
7 Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement (1920–1948)
178
8 Constructing the Nation (1950–1991)
207
9 Bollywood and Beyond (1947–2004)
239
10 India at the Turn of the Century (1991–2004)
264
Appendixes
1 Basic Facts about India
285
2 Chronology
290
3 Bibliography
308
4 Suggested Reading
321
Index
331
List of Illustrations
Zebu bull seal from Mohenjo-Daro
Front and Back of Unicorn seal from Mohenjo-Daro
“Priest-King” from Mohenjo-Daro
Mahabalipuram rock carving, c. seventh century A.D.,
Pallava dynasty
The Horse Sacrifice, 1780s
The deer park at Sarnath
Lion capital on Ashokan pillar at Lauriya-Nandangarh, Bihar
Ajanta cave paintings
Jagannatha temple at Puri, Orissa
Krishna instructs Arjuna, wall carving at the Birla Mandir,
New Delhi
Portrait of Aged Akbar, 17th century
Jama Masjid, New Delhi
Taj Mahal, Agra
An 18th-century palki
Government House, Calcutta, c. 1824
Mahadaji Sindhia, c. 1820
Sir Henry Lawrence in 1857
Two rajas from the Central Provinces
Bullock cart in Rajasthan
Chalk Farm at Meerut, 1883
St. Mary’s Church, Madras
Writers’ Building, Calcutta
Belvedere House, Calcutta
Jorasanko Thakurbari, Calcutta
Sadharan Brahmo Samaj temple, Calcutta
The Dance of the Emancipated Bengalee Lady,
Gaganendranath Tagore, c. 1921
Dadabhai Naoroji
The science of noses
viii
7
10
12
21
24
32
38
42
49
51
74
82
83
93
99
101
110
114
117
119
121
127
128
129
136
140
156
158
Ganesh, Bhubaneshwar, Orissa
Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa, 1903
Salt march crowds, 1930
Birla Mandir, New Delhi
Jinnah and Gandhi, 1944
Nehru, 1947
Buddhist conversions, New Delhi, 2001
RSS daily rituals, 2000
Rajiv Gandhi reelection billboard, 1984
Campaign poster for Janata Dal candidate, 1989
Urban shack, c. 1978
Man on bicycle
Ice cream parlor, South Delhi
Film posters, Victoria Station, Mumbai
Durga Puja pandal, New Delhi
Sarasvati Puja pandal, Calcutta
Demolition of the Babri Masjid, 1992
BJP campaign poster, 1996
Modi’s “Pride Yatra” 2002
Congress election celebration, 2004
164
174
191
197
202
204
212
230
232
236
242
246
247
251
259
260
269
275
282
283
List of Maps
South Asia
Ancient River Valley Civilizations
Harappan Civilization Sites
Mauryan Empire at Its Greatest Extent, c. 269–232 B.C.
Kingdoms and Dynasties, 300 B.C.–A.D. 550
Gupta Empire at Its Greatest Extent, c. A.D. 375–415
Mughal Empire at the Death of Akbar (1605)
and Aurangzeb (1707)
British India and the Princely States, c. 1947
Modern India, c. 2001
ix
2
8
11
40
45
48
79
113
210
List of tables
Food Production Growth, 1950–2000
Population Growth
India’s Urbanization
Urban and Rural Amenities, 2001
Assets in Urban and Rural Households, 2001
Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
x
218
240
241
246
249
276
Acknowledgments
B
ook projects, like compulsive borrowers, accumulate many debts,
and this brief history has been no exception to that rule. It is not
possible to thank here by name the many people in my work and
home lives who have been inconvenienced in one way or another by
the demands of this project. But I am grateful to all for their sympathy, support, and generally high level of restraint. I would, however,
especially like to thank my husband, Ned, and our daughter, Sita.
They have been as inconvenienced as anyone by this project over the
past two years and yet have remained remarkably good humored
about it.
A number of people have helped me with specific parts of this project, and I would especially like to thank them here. Lucy Bulliet read
an early draft of the first chapters, and I am grateful for her insightful
comments and observations and for the general fun of those discussions. Lucy also provided the fine translation of the Rig-Vedic verse
that opens the first chapter, for which I am also very grateful. I also
want to thank Phillip Oldenburg for his generous loan of election slides
for the book and Ron Ellis in Derby, United Kingdom, for his help in
obtaining an old image of the Writers’ Building in Calcutta. At Facts On
File, Claudia Schaab, my editor, contributed insightful suggestions and
great editorial feedback. I am grateful for all her help—and for her
patience with all my missed deadlines.
At my college, SUNY at Old Westbury, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Patrick O’Sullivan, provost and vice president of academic
affairs. Without Patrick’s early support and encouragement, I could
never have thought of undertaking this project.
Finally, special thanks go to Ainslie Embree. Over the many years of
thanking Ainslie in print and in person for his help, thoughts, comments, criticisms, and friendship, I have (almost) run out of things to
say. Ainslie was the first person with whom I studied Indian history
and is the best Indian historian I have ever known. This book is dedicated to him with great affection and gratitude.
xi
Note on Photos
M
any of the photographs used in this book are old, historical
images whose quality is not always up to modern standards. In
these cases, however, their content was deemed to make their inclusion
important, despite problems in reproduction.
xii
Introduction
S
tout maharajas on bejeweled elephants, naked holy men sitting
silently along the roadside, ragged children begging for scraps of
food, maddened zealots attacking one another out of caste hatred or
religious fanaticism—these are the stark, sometimes exotic images
that dominate American and Western ideas about India. On occasion
they provide all that non-Indians know about the history and culture
of this country, the largest on the South Asian subcontinent. Yet
India’s 5,000-year history offers more than stark contrasts between
rich and poor, more than an exotic religiosity set within a rigidly
defined caste hierarchy.
Popular images do not do justice to the vibrant diversity of India’s
long and complex history and culture. From the mysteries of the stillundeciphered Harappan script to the intricacies of an ancient Sanskritbased culture, from the grandeur of Mughal tombs and mosques to the
imposing 19th- and 20th-century structures of the British Raj, India
offers a wide and varied look at human life, set within the vast expanse
of the South Asian subcontinent. How people lived, prospered, fought,
and made peace through the five millennia of Indian history and how
the diverse populations of the Indian subcontinent wove together their
different ways of life to create the multidimensional tapestry that is
India today—this is the story that this brief history of India tells.
Themes of particular importance to this history are the size and
diversity of the subcontinent, the complex workings of the Indian caste
system, the availability of Indian religiosity for political use and manipulation, and the very modern issue of how to define a national Indian
identity.
Size and Diversity
India is big—in landmass, in population, in the diversity of its many
peoples, and in the length of its historical past. India today is the
world’s second most populous country (after China). It is home to a
wide variety of religious and ethnic groups, its heritage from the mixing of indigenous people with inward migrations, invasions, and colonizations beginning in 1700 B.C. The vast network of India’s farming
xiii
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
villages are also ancient in origin, beginning in the Indus region as early
as 7000 B.C. Indian cities and urban life appear first in the third millennia B.C. and then again (India’s second urbanization) in the sixth to
third centuries B.C. The result is a country whose different peoples
speak 16 languages along with a host of related dialects; belong to most
of the world’s major religions, having founded four of them; and live
according to so wide a range of cultural and ethnic traditions that
scholars have sometimes been tempted to define them village by village.
To put this in a different perspective, the modern country of India
today is three-quarters as large in landmass as the modern region of
Europe (including Russia) but with more than double Europe’s population. Yet where modern Europe is made up of 47 different independent
countries, India today is a single country, governed centrally by a mixed
parliamentary and presidential system and divided internally into 29
regional states (and six union territories). India, like Europe, is held
together (culturally speaking) by a shared set of basic religious and cultural assumptions, beliefs, values, and practices. Also like Europe, India
is made up of multiple regional and local cultures, religions, languages,
and ethnicities.
As this brief history will show, the political unification of this vast
and diverse South Asian subcontinent has been the goal of Indian rulers
from the third century B.C. to the present. Rulers as otherwise diverse
as the Buddhist Ashoka, the Mughal Aurangzeb, the British Wellesley,
and the first prime minister of modern India, Nehru, have all sought to
unite the Indian subcontinent under their various regimes. At the same
time, regional rulers and politicians as varied as the ancient kings of
Kalinga (Orissa), the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the political
leaders of contemporary Kashmir, the Punjab, and Assam have all
struggled equally hard to assert their independence and/or autonomy
from central control. The old cliché of the interplay of “unity and diversity” on the subcontinent still has use as a metaphor for understanding
the dynamics of power relations throughout Indian history. And if this
old metaphor encourages us to read Indian history with a constant
awareness of the subcontinent’s great size, large population (even in
ancient times), and regional, linguistic, and cultural complexity, so
much the better.
Caste
From the time of the third-century B.C. Greek ambassador Megasthenes
to the present, the Indian institution of caste has intrigued and perxiv
INTRODUCTION
plexed travelers to the region. Originally a Brahman-inspired social and
religious system, caste divisions were intended to define people by birth
on the basis of the religious merits and demerits believed to have been
accumulated in their past lives. Many of our modern ideas about caste,
however, have come to us from the observations of 19th- and 20th-century British officials and scholars. These men saw caste as a fixed hereditary system based on arbitrary customs and superstitions that forced
Indians to live within a predetermined hierarchy of professions and
occupations and created the “unchanging” villages of rural India. To
such observers caste was a complete anachronism, a system that was
anathema to egalitarian and competitive modern (that is to say,
European) ways of life.
Many Western-educated Indians also believed that caste was an outdated system; in the early decades after Indian independence in 1947,
such men believed that caste would simply wither away, an unneeded
and outmoded appendage in a modern India organized on the principles
of electoral democracy. But caste did not disappear in modern India.
Instead it showed the flexibility and resilience that has characterized this
institution almost from its origins. Caste reemerged in modern India as
an organizing category for Indian electoral politics and as an important
component within new ethnicized 20th-century Indian identities.
This brief history will have much to say about caste. A short book
cannot do justice to the complex historical variations or local and
regional expressions of this system. But A Brief History of India will
describe the ancient origins of the caste system, what scholars think it
was and how scholars think it functioned, and it will suggest the many
ways in which communities and individuals have adapted caste and
caste categories and practices to their own needs and for their own purposes: to increase their own community’s status (or decrease that of
another); to incorporate their own community (or those of others) into
broader local, regional, and/or imperial Indian political systems; and, in
the modern world, to turn caste categories into broader ethnic identities and adapt them to the new demands of modern electoral politics.
Caste has existed in some form in India from at least 600 B.C., but over
the many centuries of this unique institution’s existence, the single
truth about it is that it has never been static.
Religion and Violence
From as early as we have Indian texts (that is, from c. 1500 B.C.) we
have sources that tell us of Indian religion and religious diversity. Over
xv
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
the millennia many different religions have lived together on the subcontinent, governed by rulers of equally diverse religious persuasions—
whether Buddhist, Jaina, Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. Sometimes these
communities have lived in peace, sometimes in conflict.
Recent events—from the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into a
Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan to the rise to
political dominance of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s—have made
India seem particularly prone to religious violence. Media reports of
communal conflicts have often presented them as the result of a toointense religiosity. “The problem’s name is God,” wrote the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie in the aftermath of brutal Hindu-Muslim riots in
Gujarat in 2002.
Over the centuries, however, God has had some help with religious
violence on the Indian subcontinent. One story India’s history tells well
is the story of how communities live together when their peoples take
religion and religious belief seriously. This is not always an inspiring
story. At times India’s multiple religious communities have lived peacefully together, adapting aspects of one another’s religious customs and
practices and sharing in religious festivities. At other times communities have savaged each other, defining themselves in mutual opposition,
attacking each other brutally. Thus—to use an ancient example—
(Vedic) Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina communities competed with one
another for followers peacefully within the Indo-Gangetic Plain from
the sixth to second centuries B.C. and throughout southern and western India during the first to third centuries A.D. But several hundred
years later (from the seventh to 12th centuries A.D.) Hindu persecutions of Jaina and Buddhist communities drove these sects into virtual
extinction in southern India.
Religion and religious identities, when taken seriously, become available for use—and misuse—by local, regional, and political powers and
communities. The exploitation of religion or religious feeling has never
been the unique property of any single religious community. Many, if
not all, of India’s kings and rulers turned extant religious sensibilities to
their own uses. Sometimes the purpose was benign: The Buddhist
emperor Ashoka urged his subjects to practice toleration; the Mughal
Akbar explored the similarities underlying diverse religious experiences; in modern times, the nationalist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi
used Hindu images and language to create a nonviolent nationalism. At
other times rulers used religion to more violent effect: southern Indian
Hindu kings persecuted Jaina and Buddhist monks to solidify their own
political empires; Mughal emperors attacked Sikh gurus and Sikhism to
xvi
INTRODUCTION
remove political and religious competition. And sometimes the results
of religious exploitation were far worse than intended, as when British
efforts to encourage separate Hindu and Muslim political identities—
”divide and rule”—helped move the subcontinent toward the violence
of the 1947 partition or, in the 1990s, when Hindu nationalist efforts
to use the destruction of a Muslim mosque to create a politicized
Hindu majority resulted in widespread violence and deaths.
Who Is an Indian?
At the core of the religious violence and caste conflict in India from the
late 19th century to the present, however, is a new question, one
unasked in previous centuries: the question of Who is an Indian? This
question—at its core one of both ethnic identity and national belonging—had not arisen in earlier centuries (or millennia) in part because
earlier authoritarian rulers had had little need to pose questions of
overall Indian identity. In part it did not arise because of the functioning of caste itself.
From very early the Indian caste system allowed diverse and differently defined communities to coexist in India, functioning together
economically even while maintaining, at least in theory, separate and
immutable identities. However, over the centuries of such coexistence,
communities did, in fact, alter in response to groups around them,
adapting others’ practices, customs, and even religious ideas. Thus
many Muslim communities in India as well as the 19th- and 20th-century Anglo-Indian British communities functioned as caste communities in India, even though caste had no basis or logic within their own
religious ideologies. They related internally to their own members and
externally to outsiders in ways often typical of Hindu castes. And
movements such as the devotional (bhakti) sects of the 12th–18th centuries appear within many different Indian religions even while sharing, across religious boundaries, similarities in expression and form.
Still, however much ethnic and/or religious groups might borrow or
adapt from one another, the caste system allowed all these communities—to the extent that they thought of such things at all—to maintain
a belief in the cultural and religious integrity of their own ideas and
practices.
In the 19th century the needs of organizing to oppose British rule in
India forced nationalist leaders for the first time to define an all-Indian
identity. Initially, in the effort toward unifying all in opposition to the
British, that identity was defined as “not British.” Indians were, then,
xvii
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
not white, not English speaking, not Western in their cultural practices. More frequently, however, the negative definition turned positive
and nationalists found themselves appealing to audiences on the basis
of regional, cultural, and religious identities: as Bengali speakers or
Urdu speakers or Tamil speakers; as Aryans or Dravidians; or as
Hindus or Muslims. In the years after independence in 1947, these
multiple identities often returned to haunt the governors of modern
India, as ethnic and linguistic groups, their consciousness aroused by
earlier nationalist appeals, sought regional states within which these
identities could find fuller expression.
After 1947, however, India also became a modern democracy—the
world’s largest democracy, in fact—and a country within which all
adult citizens, male or female, were entitled to vote. In this new context of a modern nation-state, the question of Who is an Indian? took
on new meanings. All citizens were, by electoral and constitutional definition, “Indians,” but the abstractions of secular citizenship were hard
put to compete against the more emotionally charged ties of caste, ethnicity, or religion. From the 1950s through the 1970s India’s governors
defined the state as a “secular” and “socialist” republic and used older
emblems and memories of nationalism along with promises of economic justice and a better future to give these ideas greater power.
But the politics of majority electoral rule, and of nationhood itself,
had their own logic. By the last decade of the 20th century the question Who is an Indian? had become one of the most compelling and
contentious issues in Indian life. Modern Hindu nationalists sought to
create a politicized Hindu nation out of the 80 percent of the population who were Hindus in part by excluding Muslims and Christians.
Newly politicized low-caste and Dalit (Untouchable) communities,
increasingly aware that together their members held well over 50 percent of the vote, undertook new efforts to define these communities as
the original Indians and upper caste and/or Brahmans as mere Aryan
interlopers. By the beginning of the 21st century the question Who is
an Indian? had successfully politicized not just Indian public life but
all of Indian history, from Harappa to the present. How modern Indians
will come to interpret their past in future decades and how they will
decide which groups and individuals are entitled to claim India’s historical heritage as their own will have much to say about what India
will look like in years to come.
These are the main themes of A Brief History of India, presented within
a chronological framework throughout this book. The book opens with
xviii
INTRODUCTION
a survey of India’s geography and ecology and with a discussion of the
prehistoric Indus River settlements and early Aryan migrations into the
Indian subcontinent. Chapter 2 discusses ancient India, the origins of
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, the spread of early Sanskrit-based
culture throughout the subcontinent, and the development of the caste
system. Chapter 3 describes the entry of Islam into India and the
growth and spread of Muslim communities and political kingdoms and
empires. Chapters 4 and 5, taken together, describe the establishment
of the British Raj in India and the impact of that rule on Indians both
rural and urban: Chapter 4 specifically outlines, from the British point
of view, the conquests and establishment of the British Empire; chapter
5 then discusses the multiple levels of Indian responses to the structures and ideologies introduced by British rule and to the economic
changes the British Empire brought to the Indian countryside.
Chapters 6 and 7 describe the origins of the Indian nationalist movement and its campaigns, under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi,
against British rule. Finally chapters 8–10 turn to postindependence
India: Chapter 8 describes the creation of the modern republic of India
and its governance through 1991; chapter 9 discusses the social and
demographic changes that have reshaped Indian society and the forms
of popular culture that that new society has developed; and chapter 10
carries the political story up to the election of 2004, describing the
challenges posed by Hindu nationalism to the idea of a secular India
and by low-caste and Dalit movements to the upper castes.
xix
1
Land, Climate,
and Prehistory
Men, racing on fast horses, pray to me,
They call on me when surrounded in battle.
I cause the battle—I, generous Indra.
I, powerfully strong, raise the dust of the racing horses.
■
Rig-Veda IV. 42.5 (Rgveda Samhita 1936, II:671; translated by Lucy Bulliet)
M
ore than 50 million years ago a geological collision occurred that
determined India’s physical environment. The geographical features and unique ecology that developed from that ancient event profoundly affected India’s later human history. The subcontinent’s earliest
human societies, the Harappan civilization and the Indo-Aryans, continue to fascinate contemporary scholars, even as modern Hindu
nationalists, Dalit (Untouchable) organizations, and Indian secularists
debate their significance for contemporary Indian life.
Borders and Boundaries
India is a “subcontinent”—a triangular landmass lying below the main
Asian continent—bordered on three sides by water: in the east by the
Bay of Bengal, in the west by the Arabian Sea, and to the south by the
Indian Ocean. Across the north of this triangle stand extraordinarily
high mountains: to the north and east, the Himalayas, containing the
world’s highest peak, Mount Everest; to the northwest, two smaller
ranges, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush.
Geologists tell us that these mountain ranges are relatively young in
geological terms. They were formed only 50 million years ago, when
the tectonic plates that underlie the Earth’s crusts slowly but inexorably
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
RAN
GE
.
VI
YA
NDH
G
.
moved an island landmass away from its location off the Australian
coast and toward the Eurasian continent. When this island smashed
into Asia (a movement that in itself took some 10 million years), the
island’s tectonic plate slid underneath the Eurasian plate, forcing the
Eurasian landmass upward and creating the mountains and high
2
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
plateaus that lie across India’s north (the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram
Range, the Himalayas, and further west, the Tibetan plateau). The steep
drop from these newly created mountains to the (once island) plains
caused rivers to flow swiftly down to the seas, cutting deep channels
through the plains and depositing the rich silt and debris that created
the alluvial soil of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the coastal plains of the
Gujarat region, and the river deltas along the eastern coastline. These
same swift-flowing rivers were unstable, however, changing course dramatically over the millennia, disappearing in one region and appearing
in another. And the places where the two tectonic plates collided were
particularly prone to earthquakes. (The main landmass of the subcontinent continues to move northward at about 10 kilometers every 1 million years, causing the mountain ranges of the north to rise by
approximately one centimeter a year.) All this took place long before
humans lived in India.
The subcontinent’s natural borders—mountains and oceans—protected it. Before modern times, land access to the region for traders,
immigrants, or invaders was possible only through passes in the northwest ranges: the Bolan Pass leading through Afghanistan to northeastern Iran or the more northern Khyber Pass or Swat valley, leading also
toward Iran in the west or Central Asia to the north. These were the
great trading highways of the past, connecting India to both Central
Asia and the Near East. In the third millennium B.C. these routes linked
the subcontinent’s earliest civilization with Mesopotamia; later they
were traveled by Alexander the Great (fourth century B.C.), still later by
Buddhist monks, travelers and traders moving north to the famous Silk
Road to China, and in India’s medieval centuries by a range of Muslim
kings and armies. Throughout Indian history a wide range of traders,
migrants, and invaders moved through the harsh mountains and
plateau regions of the north down into the northern plains.
The seas to India’s east, west, and south also protected the subcontinent from casual migration or invasion. Here also there were early and
extensive trading contacts: The earliest evidence of trade was between
the Indus River delta on the west coast and the Mesopotamian trading
world (c. 2600–1900 B.C.). Later, during the Roman Empire, an extensive trade linked the Roman Mediterranean world and both coasts of
India—and even extended further east, to Java, Sumatra, and Bali. Arab
traders took over many of these lucrative trading routes in the seventh
through ninth centuries, and beginning in the 15th century European
traders established themselves along the Indian coast. But while the
northwest land routes into India were frequently taken by armies of
3
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
invasion or conquest, ocean trade only rarely led to invasion—most
notably with the Europeans in the late 18th century. But while the
British came by sea to conquer and rule India for almost 200 years, they
never attempted a large-scale settlement of English people on the subcontinent.
Land and Water
Internally the subcontinent is mostly flat, particularly in the north. It is
cut in the north by two main river systems both of which originate in
the Himalayas and flow in opposite directions to the sea. The Indus
River cuts through northwestern India and empties into the Arabian
Sea; the many tributaries of the Ganges River flow southeast coming
together to empty into the Bay of Bengal. Taken together, the region
through which these rivers flow is called the Indo-Gangetic (or North
Indian) Plain. A third river, the Narmada, flows due west about halfway
down the subcontinent through low mountain ranges (the Vindhya and
the Satpura) into the Arabian Sea. The Narmada River and the Vindhya
Range are geographical markers separating north and south India.
South of the Narmada is another ancient geological formation: the high
Deccan Plateau. The Deccan begins in the Western Ghats, steep hills
that rise sharply from the narrow flat coastline and run, spinelike, down
the subcontinent’s western edge. It stretches a thousand miles to the
southern tip of India. It spans the width of India, falling slightly in
height from west to east, where it ends in a second set of sharp (but less
high) clifflike hills, the Eastern Ghats, along the eastern coastline. As a
result of the decreasing west-to-east elevation of the Deccan Plateau
and the peninsula region, the major rivers of south India flow eastward,
emptying into the Bay of Bengal.
Historically the giant mountain ranges across India’s north acted
both as a barrier and a funnel, keeping people out or channeling them
onto the north Indian plains. In some ways one might think of the subcontinent as composed of layers: some of its earliest inhabitants now
living in the southernmost regions of the country, its most recent
migrants or invaders occupying the north. In comparison to the northern mountains, internal barriers to migration, movement, or conquest
were less severe, allowing both the diffusion of cultural traditions
throughout the entire subcontinent and the development of distinctive
regional cultures. The historian Bernard Cohn once suggested that
migration routes through India to the south created distinct areas of
cultural diversity, as those living along these routes were exposed to the
4
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
multiple cultures of successive invading or migrating peoples while
more peripheral areas showed a greater cultural simplicity. In any event,
from as early as the third century B.C. powerful and energetic kings and
their descendants could sometimes unite all or most of the subcontinent under their rule. Such empires were difficult to maintain, however,
and their territories often fell back quickly into regional or local hands.
While in the north the Indus and Ganges Rivers provide year-round
water for the regions through which they flow, the rest of India depends
for water on the seasonal combination of wind and rain known as the
southwest monsoon. Beginning in June/July and continuing through
September (depending on the region) winds filled with rain blow from
the southwest up across the western and eastern coastlines of the subcontinent. On the west, the ghats close to the coastline break the monsoon winds, causing much of their water to fall along the narrow
seacoast. On the other side of India, the region of Bengal and the eastern coast receive much of the water. As the winds move north and west,
they lose much of their rain until, by the time they reach the northwest,
they are almost dry. Technically, then, the Indus River in the northwest
flows through a desert; only modern irrigation projects, producing
year-round water for crops, disguise the ancient dryness of this region.
For the rest of India, farmers and residents depend on the monsoon for
much of the water they will use throughout the year. Periodically the
monsoons fail, causing hardship, crop failures, and, in the past, severe
famines. Some observers have even related the “fatalism” of Hinduism
and other South Asian traditions to the ecology of the monsoon, seeing
a connection between Indian ideas such as karma (action, deeds, fate)
and the necessity of depending for survival on rains that are subject to
periodic and unpredictable failure.
An Ancient River Civilization
The subcontinent’s oldest (and most mysterious) civilization was an
urban culture that flourished between 2600 and 1900 B.C. along more
than 1,000 miles of the Indus River valley in what is today both modern
Pakistan and the Punjab region of northwestern India. At its height, the
Harappan civilization—the name comes from one of its cities—was
larger than either of its contemporary river civilizations in the Near East,
Egypt and Mesopotamia. But by 1900 B.C. most of its urban centers had
been abandoned and its cultural legacy was rapidly disappearing, not
just from the region where it had existed, but equally from the collective
memories of the peoples of the subcontinent. Neither its civilization nor
5
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Finding Harappa
T
races of the Harappan civilization were discovered only in the
1820s when a deserter from the East India Company army happened upon some of its ruins in a place called Haripah.This was the site
of the ancient city of Harappa, but in the 19th century its ruins were
thought to date only to the time of Alexander the Great (c. fourth century B.C.).The site’s great antiquity was not recognized until the 1920s
when a description of two Harappan seals was published in the
Illustrated London News. A specialist on Sumer read the article and suggested that the Indian site might be very ancient, contemporaneous
with Mesopotamian civilization. The true date of Harappan civilization
was subsequently realized to be not of the fourth–third centuries B.C.
but the third millennium B.C.
any aspect of its way of life appear in the texts or legends of India’s past;
it was completely unknown—as far as scholars can tell today—to the
people who created and later wrote down the Sanskrit texts and local
inscriptions that are our oldest sources for knowing about India’s
ancient past. In fact, until India’s Harappan past was rediscovered by
European and Indian archaeologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the civilization had completely vanished from sight.
Who were these Harappan peoples? Where did they come from and
where did they go? For the past 150 years archaeologists and linguists
have tried to answer these questions. At the same time, others from
inside and outside Indian society—from European Sanskritists and
British imperialists to, more recently, Hindu nationalists and
Untouchable organizations—have all sought to define and use the
Harappan legacy. Whatever conclusions may be drawn about the
Harappan peoples, they were neither the earliest nor the only human
inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. From as early as 30,000 B.C.
through 4000 B.C., Stone Age communities of hunters and gatherers
lived throughout India in regions such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. Excavations in Baluchistan at the
village of Mehrgarh near the Bolan Pass (and close to the Indus River)
show that agriculture and the domestication of animals had begun in
this region by 7000 B.C. By the time the Harappan civilization became
an urban culture, around 2600 B.C., the Indus region was home to many
different communities—pastoral, hunting and gathering, and farm6
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
ing—and this diverse pattern continued through the post-Harappan
period.
Scholars today agree that not one but two great rivers ran through the
northwest at this time: the Indus itself (flowing along a course somewhat different from its current one) and a second river, a much larger
version of the tiny Ghaggar-Hakra River whose remnants still flow
through part of the region today. The course of this second river system
paralleled that of the ancient Indus, flowing out of the Himalaya
Mountains in the north to reach almost to the Arabian Sea. By the end
of the Harappan period, much of this river had dried up, and its tributary headwaters had been captured by rivers that flowed eastward toward
the Bay of Bengal. Some suggest this was part of an overall climate change
A zebu bull seal from Mohenjo-Daro.The Brahman, or zebu, bull on this Mohenjo-Daro seal is an
animal indigenous to the subcontinent. Although zebu bull motifs are common in Indus art, the
bull itself is only rarely found on seals and usually on seals with short inscriptions. (Copyright J. M.
Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
7
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
that left the region drier and less able to sustain agriculture than before.
Animals that usually inhabited wetter regions—elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses—are commonly pictured on seals from Harappan sites, but the
lion, an animal that prefers a drier habitat, is conspicuously absent.
Harappan civilization was at the southeastern edge of an interconnected ancient world of river civilizations that included Mesopotamia in
modern-day Iraq and its trading partners further west. Indus contacts
with this ancient world were both overland through Afghanistan and by
water from the Indus delta region into the Arabian Gulf. Harappan-style
artifacts—seals, beads, dice, ceramics—have been found in sites on the
Arabian Sea (Oman) and in Mesopotamia itself. Mesopotamian objects
(although fewer in number) have also been found at Harappan sites.
Mesopotamian sources speak of a land called “Meluhha”—some scholars think this was the coastal region of the Indus valley.
Harappan Culture
Harappan civilization developed indigenously in the Indus region; its
irrigation agriculture and urban society evolved gradually out of the
8
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
smaller farming communities in the region, made possible by the Indus
region’s dry climate and rich alluvial soil. Between 2600 and 1900 B.C.
Harappan civilization covered more than 263,000 square miles, stretching from the Arabian seacoast up to the northern reaches of the Indus
river system and reaching as far south as modern Gujarat. Among the
1,500 Harappan sites known today a small number were urban. Of
these the cities of Harappa in the Punjab and Mohenjo-Daro in Sind are
the best known. Mohenjo-Daro is the largest site: 200 hectares (494
acres) in size. Its “lower town” may once have held more than 40,000
people. Harappa is the second largest city, at 150 hectares (370 acres).
Harappan cities were trading and craft production centers, set within
the mixed economies—farming, herding, hunting and gathering—of
the wider Indus region and dependent on these surrounding economies
for food and raw materials. Mesopotamian records indicate that the
“Meluhha” region produced ivory, wood, semiprecious stones (lapis
and carnelian), and gold—all known in Harappan settlements.
Workshops in larger Harappan towns and sometimes even whole settlements existed for the craft production of traded items. Bead-making
workshops, for instance, have been found that produced sophisticated
beads in gold, copper, lapis, ivory, and etched carnelian. Excavations
have turned up a wide range of distinctive Harappan products: Along
with beads and bead-making equipment, these include the square soapstone seals characteristic of the culture, many different kinds of small
clay animal figurines—cattle, water buffalo, dogs, monkeys, birds, elephants, rhinoceroses—and a curious triangular shaped terra-cotta cake
that may have been used to retain heat in cooking.
Harappan settlements were spread out over a vast region; in fact, the
cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa were separated by 400 miles of
Indus River. Nevertheless “their monuments and antiquities,” as the
British archaeologist John Marshall observed, “are to all intents and purposes identical” (Possehl 2002, 61). It is this identity that allows discussion about Harappan sites as a single civilization. While scholars can only
speculate about the nature of Harappan society, religion, or politics, they
can see its underlying unity in the physical remains of its settlements.
Beads of many types and carved soapstone seals characterized this
culture. In addition Harappans produced a distinctive pottery used
throughout their civilization: a pottery colored with red slip and often
decorated in black with plant and animal designs. They used copper
(from nearby Rajasthan and Baluchistan) and bronze to make tools and
weapons. Their builders used baked bricks produced in a standard size
and with uniform proportions.
9
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Reading the Indus Script
H
arappan civilization developed a script, but scholars cannot yet
read it. Harappans carved a line of their script along the top of
the square soapstone seals that characterized their society; usually they
also carved an animal picture below the writing. Archaeologists find
these seals in abundance in Harappan settlements. Similar to cylindrical
seals used in Mesopotamia and in Central Asia, Harappan seals were
probably used to mark ownership of goods and property and perhaps
also as a kind of identity badge.The picture and writing were carved in
reverse, then the seal was fired to harden it.When stamped in clay, the
writing was meant to be read from right to left. On the back of a seal
was a small boss used either for holding the seal or for attaching a cord
that let it be hung around the neck.
More than 400 different written symbols have been identified on
these Harappan seals—too many for an alphabet but too few for a pictographic writing system. Indus symbols have also been found scribbled
on the edges of pottery and in one case on a 26-symbol “signboard.”
Some suggest Harappan writing is proto-Dravidian, an early script of
the Dravidian languages of south India. But such theories are not yet
generally accepted, and many scholars suggest that the Indus script will
never be decoded.They argue that examples of this writing system are
too short (too few symbols in a row) to allow them to decipher what
was written on these mysterious seals.
The front and back of a unicorn seal from Mohenjo-Daro with a relatively long,
eight-symbol inscription.The back shows the boss common to Indus seals through
which a cord could be run.The unicorn is the most common animal on Indus seals.
(Copyright J. M. Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums,
Government of Pakistan)
10
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
Indus cities and even some smaller settlements show evidence of
being planned societies. The city of Mohenjo-Daro was built on a grid
pattern, with streets running north-south and east-west intersecting at
right angles. Urban Harappan homes were built around central courtyards—as are many Indian homes today—with inner rooms not visible
from the street. Harappans also made careful plans for water. At
Mohenjo-Daro one out of three homes had a well in an inside room.
Latrines were built into the floors of houses, and wastewater was carried out of urban homes through complex brick drainage systems; covered drains carried waste and water along the streets and outside of the
settlement areas.
11
“Priest-King” from Mohenjo-Daro (Copyright J. M. Kenoyer, Courtesy Department of Archaeology
and Museums, Government of Pakistan)
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
While archaeological excavations have provided a great deal of information on the material culture of Harappan civilization, the absence of
oral or written texts still leaves many questions. Without additional
sources scholars cannot know how Harappan cities were governed, how
they related to the surrounding countryside, or even how they related to
one another. At both Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the cities are on two
levels: a higher level of large buildings and structures (sometimes called
the “citadel”) and a lower (perhaps residential?) area. At Mohenjo-Daro
the citadel section includes a large, brick-lined bathing structure (the
Great Bath). Nearby is a second large building whose function—perhaps
a granary or a warehouse?—scholars still debate. Unlike Mesopotamia
in the Near East, Harappan civilization had neither monuments nor
large statues. Many cities seem to lack defenses. One of the relatively few
surviving human sculptures from the Harappan world shows a bearded
man from the waist up. Is he a merchant, a king, or a priest? Although
some have nicknamed this figure the “Priest-King,” we do not know
what the image was meant to represent.
The End of Harappan Civilization
By 1800 B.C. Harappan urban centers had either been abandoned or
were occupied on a much smaller scale and by communities whose cultures were very different from that of the earlier civilization. MohenjoDaro was abandoned and at its uppermost archaeological level,
unburied corpses have been found. At Harappa city, the settlement
shrank in size and was occupied in one section by a people whose pottery and burial customs differed from those of earlier inhabitants. The
drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra River forced many to abandon settlements along it. At many sites in the Indus region in this period older
Harappan-style artifacts disappear, replaced by more regionally defined
cultural products. Trade both along the length of the Indus region and
with the Near East comes to an end. Only toward the south in Gujarat
do we find new, growing settlements linked in style to earlier Harappan
culture, but with a new, now regionally defined culture.
Interestingly, aspects of Harappan civilization lived on in the material culture of the northwestern region. Full-size wooden bullock carts
found in the area today are almost the exact duplicates of the small clay
models from Harappan sites. Sewage drains continue to be common
features of homes in this part of the north. Small Harappan figurines of
large-breasted females remind many of “mother goddess” figures of
more recent derivation. The posture of one broken Harappan statue, the
13
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
torso of a man, bears a striking resemblance to the stance of the later
dancing god Shiva. And a figure on an Indus seal sits cross-legged in a
yogic pose common in later Hinduism.
What happened to Harappan civilization? British archaeologists in
the early 20th century (and others later) blamed its end on the “Aryan
invasion,” the migration into the subcontinent of Indo-Aryan warrior
tribes from Central Asia and Iran. Scholars now know these tribes
entered the region in large numbers centuries after Harappan civilization
Into or Out of India
O
ver the past 150 years many groups have used the Harappan and
Aryan legacies for their own purposes. The “Aryan invasion” theory originated in 19th-century efforts to explain linguistic similarities
between Sanskrit and the languages of Europe and Iran. A collection of
tribes, this linguistic argument runs, once lived together north of the
Black and Caspian Seas.These peoples were nomadic and warlike, used
horses, and raised herds of cattle; they shared a common language
(sometimes called “proto-Indo-European”). As these tribes broke
apart, some migrated west into European lands, others (Indo-Iranians)
moved into southern Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. By 1700 B.C.
a further subgroup, the Indo-Aryans, had broken off to migrate into
southern Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab region of the subcontinent
by 1400 B.C. The term Aryan was used only by the Indo-Iranian group.
However, European scholars of the 19th century commonly (and mistakenly) used Aryan to refer to the entire community from which the
languages of Europe, Iran, and India derived (Bulliet 2002). Until very
recently it was thought that the Indo-Aryans had destroyed Harappan
civilization, but although the linguistic theory is still widely accepted,
studies now show that the Indo-Aryans actually entered India in large
numbers two centuries after the decline of Harappan civilization.
This theory was used by such 19th-century European scholars as
Oxford don Friederich Max Müller to underline the “family” connection
between “the Celts, the Germans, the Slaves [sic], the Greeks and
Italians, the Persian and Hindus.” All of these people at one time “were
living together beneath the same roof. . . .” (Trautman 1997, 177). Later
British imperialists used the same theory to explain the inferiority of the
Indian “race”—through mixing with indigenous peoples, Indians had
degenerated from an earlier Aryan state—and, hence, the need for
British rule. German Nazis in the 20th century claimed the Aryans were
a superior “master race” whose descendants should rule the world. In
14
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
was in decline and many cities had already been abandoned. Instead,
they debate other possible reasons for the Harappan end—climate
change, endemic disease, river flooding—or speculate on how an as-yetunknown Harappan ideology might have contributed to its demise.
Hindu nationalists of the 20th and 21st centuries claim Harappan civilization as the birthplace of Sanskrit and Hindu culture—an “out of
India” idea that many strenuously dispute. In the end we are left with
many questions and with speculations, but with few firm answers.
the German formulation, however, the Indians, as Aryans, were part of
the master race, not inferior to it.
Hindu nationalists in the 20th and 21st centuries have challenged the
Aryan invasion theory, arguing that Aryan culture was indigenous to
India and Aryans were the creators of the ancient Harappan civilization.
Descendants of these Harappans-cum-Aryans later traveled “out of
India,” spreading the Indo-European language (and Aryan race) into Iran
and Europe. According to this theory the Hindus in India all descend
from this original Harappan/Aryan race. As descendants of the original
Indian people, Hindus are the only group who can legitimately claim the
right to live in and govern the modern country of India.
Within India—including among Hindu groups—strong opposition to
the “out of India” theory has come from modern-day Dalit (Untouchable) communities, such as the group that maintains the 21st-century
Dalitstan Web site.The Dalitstan Organisation sees Dalits as the original
Indian peoples who created the ancient Harappan civilization. For
Dalitstan, it was the Aryan invaders, the ancestors of today’s Brahmans,
who “conquered and enslaved the original inhabitants of India” (Ganesan
2001, 1–2).
One problem with the “out of India” theory, lies in the absence of
horses from the ancient Harappan region and sites. Indo-Aryan tribes
were nomadic, pastoral people who fought their frequent battles in
chariots driven by horses. But Harappan civilization has no evidence of
horses:There are no horses on its seals; no remains of horses—although
there are domesticated cattle and donkeys—found at its sites. In the
early 21st century one enthusiastic proponent of the “out of India” theory attempted to improve the historical record by altering an image of
a Harappan seal to make its bull (or unicorn) look like a horse (Witzel
and Farmer 2000). Such efforts show that current controversies over
Harappa and the Aryan invasion are as much struggles for identity and
political legitimacy in the Indian present as they are arguments about the
historical past.
15
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Origins of the Aryans
Around 1700 B.C., 200 years after many Harappan cities had been abandoned, a tribal community living in southern Afghanistan began to
compose hymns in praise of their gods. This community called themselves Aryans (a term that later meant “civilized” or “noble”). By 1400
B.C. these peoples had migrated into the Punjab and completed their
collection of hymns. These hymns eventually became the Rig-Veda, a
sacred text in the modern Hindu religion, the oldest source for ancient
Indian history and the only source of information about the origins of
the community that composed it.
The Indo-Aryans who composed the Rig-Veda had once belonged to
the Indo-Iranian communities settled throughout southern Central
Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. We see elements of this earlier shared heritage in striking similarities between the Rig-Veda and the Avesta, the
ancient scriptures of the Zoroastrian religion, composed by a contemporaneous ancient Iranian people living on the Iranian plateau across
the mountains to the west. The languages of the Rig-Veda and the
Avesta are so similar, linguists tell us, that they are like dialects of the
same language. The religions of the two people also had many similarities: similar gods with similar names, similar legends about these gods,
and similar modes of worshipping these gods. Like the peoples of the
Rig-Veda, the people who composed the Avesta also refer to themselves
as “Aryans.” At some point about 1700 B.C. the Indo-Aryans separated
themselves from these Iranian Aryans and migrated further south into
Afghanistan and eventually, by 1400 B.C., onto the Punjab section of the
Indus plain.
A century ago it was common to speak of this movement as an
“invasion,” a term that conjured images of platoons of mounted horsemen riding down onto the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Now historians are
more likely to emphasize the gradualness of the process. Trade, regular and seasonal movements of seminomadic herding peoples, the
migrations of tribal communities—these are all the means by which
new peoples might have found their way into the subcontinent. By
1500 B.C. long-term trade, pastoral, and migration routes had already
linked India to Iran in the west and Central Asia to the north for more
than a thousand years.
Many different tribes and cultures lived in the northwest in the postHarappan period (1900–1300 B.C.), but archaeologists have not yet
conclusively linked any one of these peoples to the Rig-Veda’s IndoAryans. In the Gandharan region to the north are the remains of a tribal
(perhaps “migrant”) community, dated to 1700–1600 B.C. Cemetery H
16
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
in the city of Harappa holds evidence of a new tribe occupying a small
section of that ancient city, a people who decorated their pottery with
antelopes and peacocks and cremated their dead. At Pirak in the
Baluchistan region have been found small camel and horse figurines—
the first evidence of horses in the subcontinent—and also terra-cotta
and bronze seals, now done in a new style with geometric designs. Each
of these settlements has one or two features—location, cremation,
horses—that might lead us to connect them with the migrating IndoAryans, but in no case is the connection definitive. Interestingly human
physical remains from excavations throughout this region all fall within
the same range of physical types. No “new” human subgroup entered
the region in this period, perhaps because people within the larger geographical region had already interacted with one another biologically
(as they had economically) for more than a millennium.
Aryan Society
Whatever the means by which they made their way into the subcontinent, by 1400 B.C. Indo-Aryan tribes had established themselves in the
Punjab region and were composing their ancient hymns. The Rig-Veda
is a collection of more than 1,000 such hymns addressed to various
Vedic gods. It has come down to us in an ancient and difficult version
of the Sanskrit language (called Vedic Sanskrit), and even today many
of its passages remain obscure and unintelligible. It is, nonetheless, the
only source of information about the ancient peoples whose worldviews and perspectives would come to dominate all of India.
The society described in these hymns is nomadic and pastoral.
Indo-Aryan society was divided into three classes: kings, priests, and
commoners. Aryan life centered on cattle, horses, and warfare. This
can be seen in the hymns’ many metaphors involving cows, in their
use of cattle as a sign of wealth, and in the special energy with which
they condemn those who steal or threaten to steal Aryan herds. IndoAryans protected their herds (and stole cows from others) through
warfare. This was a warrior culture whose major warrior god, Indra,
is shown fighting against the “enemies of the Aryans,” the peoples,
that is, whose religious practices differed from those of the Aryans
themselves.
The hymns also reveal Indo-Aryan society as pragmatic and utilitarian.
Hymns ask the gods for wealth, cattle, progeny, prosperity, and health.
The strong naturalistic elements in the Rig-Veda are represented by gods
such as Agni (fire) and Surya (the Sun), each of whom is portrayed as the
17
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Vedas
T
he Vedas are the oldest and most sacred texts in Hinduism.These
texts include the Rig-Veda, the Atharva-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, and
the Sama-Veda. Each of these was a collection of liturgical materials—
hymns, for instance and ritual sayings—used in the performance of Vedic
rites.Attached to each of the Vedas, in turn, was a series of explanatory,
interpretive, and sometimes speculative texts. These were classified as
the Brahmanas, texts that explained the Vedic hymns and rituals; the
Aranyakas, even more esoteric and secret interpretations of Vedic rituals; and the Upanishads, the last and most speculative interpretations of
rituals and the cosmic order they addressed. The Rig-Veda was probably composed between c. 1700 B.C. and 900 B.C. on the basis of stories,
legends, rituals, and religious practices that had already existed for many
centuries. The rest of the Vedas, including the most important of the
Upanishads, were composed by c. 600 B.C.
The four Vedas were considered sacred and revealed, or sruti (“that
which has been revealed,” or, more literally,“heard”).Their language was
fixed and could not be altered or misremembered.These were all oral
texts, not written down until the early centuries of the Christian era.
To ensure their accuracy, the Brahman priests who were in charge of
them developed an elaborate and precise method of memorization.The
rest of Hindu religious scriptures were also considered important and
sacred, but not in the same way as the Vedas.
Texts such as the epic poems (the Mahabharata, the Ramayana) and
the law codes (the Laws of Manu) were all classified as smrti (“that
which is remembered”).These smrti texts could be (and were) told and
retold, embellished, and added onto in any of a number of religious and
secular contexts.
natural element itself. These natural elements and humankind are bound
together in mutual dependence within the world’s cosmic order (rita).
The ritual of sacrifice, the focus of the hymns, is not only a means of flattering the gods and gaining gifts from them; it is also an act necessary to
continue the world order.
But although the Rig-Veda would later be among the most sacred
texts of the Hindu religion, many of Hinduism’s basic ideas are missing
from it. The hymns are not mystical or devotional in the fashion of later
Hinduism. Nor do they mention key Hindu terms—such as karma
(fate), dharma (duty), or reincarnation. The four classes (varnas) so
18
LAND, CLIMATE, AND PREHISTORY
important in later Indian society appear only in one late Rig-Vedic
hymn. These concepts and categories, central to the Hindu religion and
the social system in which it was embedded, only developed later, as the
Indo-Aryans abandoned their nomadic, pastoral ways and settled down
as farmers on the rich Gangetic plains.
19
2
Caste, Kings, and the
Hindu World Order
(1000 B.C.–A.D. 700)
If the king did not tirelessly inflict punishment on those who should be punished,
the stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit.
■
Laws of Manu (Doniger and Smith 1991, 130)
spread into the Ganges River valley between 1200 and
Inatendo-Aryans
400 . . Their superior iron-age technology enabled them to domithe many different tribes and communities living in Pakistan and
BC
northern India in 1200 B.C. and develop a farming civilization with
urban centers of trade and power in the Gangetic region. By the early
centuries A.D. a Sanskrit-based Aryan culture in which competing
Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina religions vied for dominance had spread its
cultural hegemony through all settled regions of the subcontinent.
India’s Second Urbanization
Iron-age technology gave Indo-Aryan tribes the ability to clear the
heavily forested regions of the Ganges River valley and enabled them to
dominate in the region. Many scholars now agree that the sites in the
Indo-Gangetic region characterized by Painted Gray Ware (PGW) pottery are those of the Indo-Aryans. We first find this pottery—a fine,
wheel-made pottery decorated with black or red geometric patterns—
at sites c. 1200 B.C. along the northern Indus and then increasingly in
the Ganges River valley. Population pressures and the increasing desiccation of the Indus region may have forced the Indo-Aryans to move
farther east. New iron tools and technology, widespread at PGW sites
by 800 B.C. allowed the Gangetic forests to be cut down and Indo-Aryan
20
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Holy Cow
T
here are no cow gods in Hinduism—not in the Rig-Veda or later
Hinduism—but cows have long had both practical and religious significance in India. The Indo-Aryans were a nomadic herding people
when they migrated into the subcontinent.Their pastoral world valued
cows, using them as a measure of wealth. One Vedic text reflected this
in verses praising the cow:
The Cow is Heaven, the Cow is Earth, the Cow is Vishnu, Lord of Life. . . .
Both Gods and mortal men depend for life and being on the Cow.
She hath become this universe: all that the Sun surveys is she (Embree
et al. 1988, 41).
In the ecological conditions of the north Indian plains, however, the
Aryans became farmers. As they moved from a pastoral to an agrarian
way of life cows came to be seen as work animals, too valuable to be
killed for food.Their milk products became the most precious of Indian
foods. The five products of the cow—milk, curd, butter, urine, and
dung—were traditionally seen to have great purifying powers.
(continues)
Mahabalipuram rock carving, c. seventh century A.D., Pallava dynasty.This is one of
eight mandapams (shallow rock-cut halls decorated with rock carvings) carved
during the Pallava dynasty at Mahabalipuram in south India. (Courtesy of Judith
E.Walsh)
21
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
HOLY COW (continued)
The animal sacrifices that once were fundamental to Vedic Hinduism
were abandoned over the centuries beginning with the Upanishads and
later in response to Buddhist and Jaina criticisms. As vegetarianism
became more prevalent, prohibitions against cow slaughter became a
fundamental feature of Hinduism. By the 12th century A.D. one legend
circulated that a Chola king had executed his son because the boy had
accidentally caused the death of a calf.This story (like another about a
Gujarati Jaina king who fined people for killing fleas) was apocryphal but
shows how prestigious cow protection had become by this period. Even
today, many religious Hindus will not eat beef and wealthy Hindus may
donate money to support goshalas, homes for the protection of cattle.
tribes to move into what are today the regions of the Punjab, Haryana,
and Uttar Pradesh. A finer, “luxury” pottery (black polished ware)
marks the later spread of Aryan culture throughout the Gangetic
region; it is this pottery that had also spread (perhaps through trade) as
far south as the Deccan by 500 B.C.
All the later Vedic texts, including the two great epics the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana, had been composed by 500 B.C., although the two
epics would continue to evolve and change well into the early centuries
A.D. Together, texts and excavations show a western Gangetic plain dominated by Indo-Aryan tribal communities that had horses and used iron
tools and weapons. These tribes had domesticated cattle, but they had
also become farmers, growing wheat, barley, and perhaps even rice. It is
this PGW/Indo-Aryan society and its new way of life that spread through
the Gangetic region.
India’s second urbanization took place c. 600–300 B.C. The fertile
alluvial soil of the Gangetic valley combined with Indo-Aryan iron-age
technology to produce crop surpluses that allowed both population
growth and the emergence of new cities. “The number [of cities] is so
great,” wrote a Greek envoy to the region in the late fourth century B.C.,
“that it cannot be stated with precision” (McCrindle 2000, 67). Some
new Gangetic cities were as large as 40,000 people and covered areas
between 150 and 200 hectares (350–500 acres) in size.
Urban settlements were not limited to the central Gangetic plains.
Cities dotted trade routes through the northwest, Taxila below the
22
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Hindu Kush mountains being the most famous. City sites have also
been found to the east in the Gangetic delta, to the west on the Bombay
and Gujarat coasts, and along trade routes leading from the Gangetic
valley into both central and peninsular India.
Vedic Hinduism
As the once-nomadic peoples who produced the PGW pottery settled
into agrarian life in the Gangetic region, the religion they had originally
practiced changed and adapted. Key concepts of Hinduism, such as
reincarnation, karma (actions, fate), dharma (duty), and the four varnas (classes) developed during this time. These new ideas were well
adapted to agrarian (or even urban) settled life; they explained and justified the social and economic divisions of Gangetic society in terms of
an individual’s good or bad conduct in former lives. Taken together
these concepts created the basic worldview assumed by all indigenous
religions in India.
The Vedic Hinduism (or Brahmanism) that developed out of the religion of the Rig-Veda in this period (c. 1000–400 B.C.) was as different
from modern Hinduism as the ancient Old Testament Hebrew religion
was from today’s Christianity. Vedic Hinduism centered on rituals
addressed to Vedic gods, performed by Brahman priests around a sacred
fire. Some gods represented the natural elements—Agni, the fire; Surya,
the sun; or Soma, the deified hallucinogenic plant used in rituals.
Others had human characteristics or were associated with a moral or
ethical principle: the god Indra was a mighty warrior, while Varuna
stood for cosmic order (rita). In later Hinduism some of these Vedic
gods (Indra, Agni, Surya) would become minor figures in the Hindu
pantheon, while others, like Varuna, would disappear entirely. Gods
barely mentioned in the Vedic texts—such as Vishnu—would later
assume much greater importance.
Vedic fire rituals, from the simplest to the most elaborate, involved
offerings of vegetable or meat foods or drink to the gods. In return the
sponsor of the sacrifice might receive a powerful reign (if a king) or (if
a householder) a good crop, a fruitful marriage, or a lifetime lasting a
hundred years. Vedic rituals had no fixed place of worship—no temple,
hall, or building was used—nor did they involve icons or images of the
gods. Daily domestic rituals used a single fire and one priest, while public rituals—the accession of a king, the Horse Sacrifice—required at
least three fires and many priests.
23
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Horse Sacrifice
The Asvamedha, or Horse Sacrifice, was a major ritual of Vedic times
that continued in use well into the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. In
this ritual a royal stallion wandered free for a year. The king’s armies followed behind, either demanding tribute from all whose territories the
horse entered or fighting them. At the end of the year, the horse was
sacrificed in a ritual that associated the power of the king with the animal. Part of the ritual involved the sexual coupling of the (dead) horse
and the chief queen. Here is a section of that part of the ritual, as
described in an early Brahman text:
A cloth, an upper cloth, and gold is what they spread out for the
horse, and on that they “quiet” [kill] him. . . .When the water for
washing the feet is ready, they make the chief queen (Mahishi)
lie down next to the horse and they cover the two of them up
with the upper cloth as they say the verse, ‘Let the two of us
cover ourselves in the world of heaven’, for the world of heaven
is where they ‘quiet’ the sacrificial animal.Then they draw out the
penis of the horse and place it in the vagina of the chief queen,
while she says, ‘May the vigorous male, the layer of seed, lay the
seed’; this she says for sexual intercourse (O’Flaherty 1988, 16).
The Horse Sacrifice, 1780s. This 18th-century painting (attributed to the artist Sital Das) shows
the Asvamedha (Horse Sacrifice).The chief queen sits on the platform with Brahmans and the
sacrificial horse.The sacrificial fire burns in the center next to the plinth to which the horse is
tied. In the upper left panel, the killing of the horse is shown.The Sanskrit text at the top
identifies this as the Horse Sacrifice. (By permission of the British Library. India Office Prints &
Drawings, Shelfmark J.5,21)
24
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Unity and Diversity in the Upanishads
It was in the Upanishadic texts (c. 600 B.C.) that the literal ideas of the
Vedic rituals took on abstract, metaphysical significance. The
Upanishadic texts described secret sessions in which holy men gathered
in the forest to speculate on human life and the cosmos. In the
Upanishads, for instance, the horse in the Horse Sacrifice became an
extended metaphor for the cosmos itself: “Verily the dawn is the head
of the horse which is fit for sacrifice, the sun its eye, the wind its breath.
. . . When the horse shakes itself, then it lightens; when it kicks, it
thunders; when it makes water, it rains” (Macnicol 1963, 43).
Upanishadic sages sought to draw out the hidden connections
between the essence of life in each living thing and the creative force
that brings all life into existence. Atman (the self) was the name the
Upanishadic texts gave to the spark of life in each creature; Brahman
(a neuter noun in this use) was the name for the ultimate force behind
creation—not the Vedic gods (they were part of the universe) but
whatever enabled the universe and all its life-forms to come into existence. In the key insight of the Upanishads, atman and Brahman are
understood to be one and the same: The essence of life in each being
in the world (atman) is the same as the creative force (Brahman) that
brings about all life. “As a spider sends forth its thread, and as tiny
sparks spring forth from a fire,” said one Upanishad, “so indeed do all
the vital functions, all the worlds, all the gods, and all beings spring
from this self [atman]. Its hidden name [upanishad] is: ‘The real
behind the real,’. . .” (Olivelle 1996, 26). Underlying the wild diversity of the universe is a simple unity. Each living being has a different
form but the same “subtle essence.” The differences—the form, the
changes— are only illusory. (Later Hindus would call such illusion
“maya.”) The underlying unity is the essential reality. “This whole
world has that essence for its Self,” says one wise Upanishadic sage to
his son Shvetaketu. “That is the Real. That is the Self. That art thou,
Shvetaketu” (De Bary 1958, 35–36).
Karma and Reincarnation
All Vedic sacrifices, from daily domestic offerings to the great Horse
Sacrifice, were predicated on the assumption that their rituals produced
consequences. But it was only in the Upanishads (c. 600 B.C.) that the
idea appeared that humans also would experience the consequences of
past acts. At death, one Upanishadic passage explains, the most virtuous would go to “the worlds of brahman.” Others—after the effects of
25
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
their good deeds on Earth were used up—would return to Earth and
“take birth in the fire of woman . . . [and] circle around in the same
way.” The least virtuous would “become worms, insects, or snakes”
(Olivelle 1996, 83–84).
These new ideas of reincarnation and karma (the effect of past
actions on future lives) were also linked to the four classes, or varnas,
of human society. These classes had first been mentioned in a late RigVedic hymn. There they were created (as was the entire universe) out
of the sacrifice of the first man (purusha): “His mouth became the
brahman his two arms were made into the rajanyas [Kshatriyas], his
two thighs the vaishyas; from his two feet the shudra was born”
(Embree et al. 1988, 18–19).
In later Vedic texts (as in the Rig-Vedic verse) the four classes were
both hierarchically ranked and occupationally defined. Brahmans performed the ritual sacrifices. They were the teachers, readers, and preservers of the sacred texts. Kshatriyas were the warriors and the kings,
whose duty was to protect society. Vaishyas were the farmers and
merchants. And Shudras were the servants. Rebirth into a higher
class showed that one had been virtuous in past lives; rebirth at a
lower level showed the opposite. Moksha, or escape from the cycle
of reincarnation entirely, was the ultimate goal of the Hindu religious tradition (as also of Buddhism, in which it is called “nirvana,” and Jainism). But moksha was too difficult for most to achieve.
For most Hindus the goal of life was the fulfillment of the religious
and social duties (dharma) of one’s varna so as to acquire good karma
and rebirth into a higher class: “Those whose conduct has been
good,” says the Chandogya Upanishad, “will quickly attain some good
birth, the birth of a Brahman, or a Kshatriya, or a Vaisya. But those
whose conduct has been evil, will quickly attain an evil birth, the
birth of a dog, or a hog, or a Chandala [an Untouchable]” (Macnicol
1963, 161).
In the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—the great epic poems
whose composition had begun by 500 B.C.—these ideas form the
moral backdrop against which human lives and events play out. The
fulfillment of the duties (dharma) of one’s class determined what happened in future lives. “A Shudra,” says the old grandfather in the
Mahabharata, “should never amass wealth. . . . By this he would incur
sin” (Embree and De Bary 1972, 82). This outline of a social system—
and the concepts associated with it—remained fundamental to both
Vedic and later Hinduism, as well as to all the heterodox religions
indigenous to India.
26
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
The Value of a Son
W
hat does one get by means of a son?” asks a son-less man to
the sage Narada.The importance of a son in Hinduism is linked
to his ability both to enable his father’s spiritual progress in future lives
by lighting his funeral pyre and to bring into the paternal home his wife
(and dowry) when he marries. Here, from one of the Brahmanas, is the
Vedic answer to the question:
“
If a father sees the face of his son born alive, he repays a debt
through him and achieves immortality. As many joys as there
are in the earth for creatures who have vital breath, as many
as there are in fire, and as many as there are in water, greater
than this is the joy that a father has in a son. Fathers have
always crossed over the deep darkness by means of a son, for
a son gives a father comfort and carries him across; the self is
born from the self. What use is dirt or the black antelope skin
(of the ascetic)? What use are beards and asceticism? “Seek a
son, O Brahmins”; that is what people keep saying. Food is
breath and clothing is protection, gold is beauty and cattle are
marriage; a wife is a friend and a daughter is misery. But a son
is a light in the highest heaven (O’Flaherty 1988, 20).
Heterodoxy in North India
Cyclical Time, Reincarnation, and Karma
The Brahman priests who composed the early Hindu texts often spoke
as if India was a world exclusively dominated by Vedic Hinduism, but
religious life on the Gangetic plains was heterodox and competitive.
Wandering holy men, monks, and religious teachers were the norm in
the urban towns and cities along the Ganges, particularly in the eastern
regions of modern-day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Public rivalries and
debates among contesting religious communities were common.
Buddhist sources list “six unorthodox teachers” for the period (c.
600–400 B.C.), not counting themselves. Each of the six led a different
religious community with distinctive answers to the religious questions
of the day.
However bitterly these religions competed, they shared fundamental
assumptions about the process of time itself and the nature of life in the
world. These assumptions originated in Vedic and Upanishadic
Hinduism but by 600 B.C. had been so naturalized within Indian society
27
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
that they were unquestioningly assumed to be the functioning nature of
the world. The Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina view of time was and is cyclical, setting human life into an infinite expanse. In one of many Hindu
myths that explore the origins of the world, the god Brahma creates the
universe when he awakes each morning. He does this, the myth
explains, for “play” or “sport.” The universe he creates lasts for 4 billion
320 million years and then is destroyed. All of this occupies only one
day in Brahma’s life, and at the end of the day (and at the destruction of
the universe) he sleeps. Next morning he begins all over again, creating
the universe once again. In this way the god lives to the comfortable age
of 108. On his death, a new Brahma is born who continues the cycle.
Each time Brahma creates the universe, it cycles through four ages
(called “yugas”). The first of these, the Krita Yuga, is the longest and
most perfect, but over time, a process of degeneration and decay sets in.
By the last age, the Kali Yuga (the Black Age), the world has reached a
condition of dangerous corruption, chaos, and degeneracy. It is in this
age that we find ourselves at present. The Kali Yuga is the shortest of
the four periods but a time marked by increasing disharmony, disorder
among beings, and the continued disintegration of the universe itself.
The end of this age brings with it the destruction of the universe and
all creatures in it.
Vedic orthodoxy and the heterodox religions not only assumed a
world in which time was cyclical, they took as a given that the process
of life within those cycles was one in which reincarnation occurred
based on the inexorable law of karma. Where reincarnation had been a
new and secret idea when it first appeared in the Upanishads, by the
fifth century B.C. it had become the axiomatic base on which all indigenous religions rested. Reincarnation was a uniquely painful process,
one which subjected the self to the pain and suffering of not one but an
infinite number of lives. “In every kind of existence,” sang the Jaina
poet, “I have suffered pains which have scarcely known reprieve for a
moment” (De Bary 1958, 60). All teachers and religious schools of the
period addressed the problems posed by karma and unending rebirth.
One heterodox sect, the Ajivikas, argued that as karma was predestined,
humans could do nothing to change it. Another—that of “Ajita of the
Hair Blanket”—took a more atheistic position: This school did not
believe in rebirth and considered the concept of karma irrelevant, since
to them nothing at all remained after death.
Three religions survived the intense competition of the north Indian
plains: Vedic Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. The three were
embedded in society in somewhat different ways. The Brahman priests
28
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
of Vedic Hinduism were connected to both urban and rural society
through their performance of rituals and their knowledge of (and
monopoly over) the oral Hindu scriptures. Brahman holy men often
lived outside urban centers in forest dwellings, alone or in small communities. Some even left society entirely, seeking spiritual salvation by
adopting the life of a wandering sannyasi (ascetic).
Followers of the heterodox schools of Buddhism or Jainism, in contrast, were more likely to live together in monastic communities called
sanghas (assemblies). Monks and nuns were supported by lay communities, especially trading and merchant families. By tradition the
founders of both religions came from the Kshatriya varna. Thus, both
Buddhism and Jainism implicitly challenged the idea that Brahmans
Languages
I
ndians, whatever their preferred religion, shared a common language
base, and by the early centuries A.D., if they were in the elite they
probably also knew Sanskrit. By c. 500 B.C. there were two forms of the
Sanskrit language in existence: Vedic Sanskrit, a form of the language
preserved orally in the Vedas, and classical Sanskrit, a form described in
a text by the Indian grammarian Panini dated to this period. Classical
Sanskrit was probably the form of the language in use in Panini’s time,
and it became the form of Sanskrit used in all later texts. Between the
Mauryan and Gupta periods (300 B.C.–A.D. 320) Sanskrit spread
throughout the subcontinent, and by the Gupta period (c. A.D. 320–550)
it had become the medium for elite communication in most sections of
India.
Ordinary speech of the time, however, was not in Sanskrit.The most
ancient north Indian vernaculars were collectively called the Prakrits—
a word that meant “unrefined” or “common” as opposed to Sanskrit,
which meant “refined” or “elegant.” The oldest Buddhist texts used a
Prakrit, as did most inscriptions before the Gupta period.We also find
Prakrit in Sanskrit drama, in which women and low-caste characters
speak it rather than Sanskrit. By the medieval period (c. A.D. 600) the
Prakrits had been replaced in the north by the regional vernaculars we
know today: Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali, to name only a few. In
south India the vernaculars were Dravidian languages, such as Tamil,
Kanarese, Telugu, or Malayalam. Tamil cankam poetry (an anthology of
Tamil poetry) of the first–third centuries A.D. shows that south Indian
elites used both regional vernaculars and Sanskrit.
29
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
had a monopoly over religious life. Buddhism and Jainism were also
explicitly critical of Vedic animal sacrifices; both religions encouraged
their members to practice ahimsa (nonviolence) and to give up the eating of meat. Lay members of the Buddhist community were not allowed
to work as either hunters or butchers, and religious Jains were even forbidden to farm (as that involved the killing of plants and living things
in the soil). These heterodox criticisms and practices had a great influence on Indian society. Over the next centuries the practice of Vedic
animal sacrifices slowly died out. By the Gupta period (c. fifth century
A.D.) a Buddhist traveler to India reported that vegetarianism was
widely practiced among the higher Indian classes and that only the
lower castes still ate meat.
Jainism
The name of this major heterodox religion of north India, was derived
from the Sanskrit word jina, meaning “to conquer.” The Jaina religion
focused on the need to conquer or overcome the karmic influences that
bound humans to the cycle of reincarnation. To escape this cycle,
Jainism emphasized the unity of all life-forms and the religious, spiritual, and karmic dangers of violence against any of them.
The historical founder of Jainism was Mahavira (Great Hero)
Vardhamana. Vardhamana (died c. 468 B.C.) was said to be the 24th and
last in a long line of “ford-makers” that stretched back, in the Jaina
worldview, through all history. (These ford-makers, or tirthankaras,
were the Jaina saints who created the means whereby humans could
“ford the river” and achieve enlightenment.) Vardhamana was born into
a warrior clan in the northern reaches of modern-day Bihar. He left
home at age 30 and wandered for 12 years before attaining enlightenment. After that he taught for 30 more years before dying at age 72 of
ritual starvation in a village near the modern city of Patna.
Jainism taught that a living soul (jiva) was imprisoned in each and
every material object. The actions of life led to the accretion of more
and more matter (ajiva, or karma) onto these souls, an accumulation
that led to the soul’s continued rebirth within material forms. Only
abstention from action—through a vow of nonviolence (ahimsa)—
could decrease the matter adhering to the jiva and bring its release from
reincarnation and the attainment of moksha, which the Jains referred to
as “Heaven.” Since all matter—rocks and insects as well as people—was
believed to be inhabited by jivas, even in the modern era members of
the Jaina sect may cover their mouths with a fine mesh cloth as they
30
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
walk in order to avoid breathing in insects or sweep the ground before
them with a broom to avoid trampling any small creatures. Such actions
may spring from a profound compassion for all living beings, but their
religious justification lies in the fact that they enable the soul to escape
the karma that might otherwise accrue from the death of these small
beings. The ultimate logic of Jainism was the cessation of all life-sustaining
activities, and in the past, attempts to abstain completely from action led
religious Jains (such as the founder Vardhamana or, according to legend, the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta) to fast to death.
Monastic orders were necessary for such a strict life, and these
orders were supported by a particularly devoted lay community
whose members were encouraged to participate in the monastic experience as they could. But sometime between the second and first centuries B.C. the Jaina monastic and lay community split into two sects,
largely in a dispute over whether monks should be naked or clothed.
Those who wished to follow their founder (Vardhamana) and remain
naked (the “Sky-clad,” or Digambara, sect) argued against the wearing of clothes; those who thought this practice extreme and unnecessary (the “White Clad,” or Shvetambara, sect) argued for it. Scholars
debate how much real theological difference lay behind this division,
although on one point at least the sects were deeply divided: Both
agreed that women could not achieve salvation unless they were nuns
and that women could not be nuns if that required them to be naked.
Therefore, the Digambara (or naked) Jains insisted that women were
not able to achieve salvation, while the Shvetambara (clad) sect
argued that they could.
Buddhism
Like the Jains, early Buddhists believed that the goal of life was escape
from the cycle of reincarnation (moksha, or nirvana). The story that
best illustrated this was that of the Buddha himself, Siddhartha
Gautama. (By tradition the Buddha lived 80 years; the date of his death
is given by some as 486 B.C. and by others as late as c. 355 B.C.)
Siddhartha was the son of a king of the Shakya clan from the foothills
of the Himalayas. Fearing prophecies that his son would become a wandering ascetic, the king raised him in great luxury, taking care to protect him from all pain and sorrow. He married the boy to a beautiful
wife, and she soon gave Siddhartha a son. But on rare trips outside his
father’s palace Siddhartha was disturbed by a series of sights—an old
man, a sick person, and a corpse—and by the realization that old age,
31
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The deer park at Sarnath north of the city of Varanasi was the first place the Buddha
preached after his enlightenment. It became a pilgrimage spot for Buddhists in later centuries
and had numerous stupas.The emperor Ashoka erected a pillar at Sarnath in the third century
B .C .; the Chinese pilgrim Faxian visited Sarnath in the fifth century A.D., as did another Chinese
pilgrim, Xuanzang, in the seventh century.The Dharmekh Stupa, in the background here, was
built between the fifth and seventh centuries A.D. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
illness, and death were the fate of everyone. When, on a fourth trip, he
saw a holy man in a yellow robe begging for food, Siddhartha realized
that he too must leave home to seek a solution to the painfulness of life.
During years of wandering he joined many different religious groups,
but none helped solve his problem. Finally, sitting under the branches
of a Bodhi tree (the tree of awakening), he resolved not to get up until
he had found a solution. After 49 days, he arose. He had become the
Buddha (Enlightened one). In a deer park at Sarnath north of Varanasi
he told an audience of just a few monks his solution. Life is sorrow, he
said: “Birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow,
contact with the unpleasant is sorrow, separation from the pleasant is
sorrow, every wish unfulfilled is sorrow” (De Bary 1958, 102). The
source of this sorrow is desire, the “craving which leads to rebirth.”
Only by ending all desire can we find peace in this world and achieve
enlightenment. By following the “Middle Way”—the practices and
mental disciplines of Buddhism—a Buddhist achieves nirvana (a state
32
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
of final bliss in life and after death) and escapes the cycle of reincarnation forever.
To become a Buddhist was to step outside the social classes of Hindu
society and into a religious society whose obligations were defined by
the Buddhist dharma (here used in the sense of “law” or “religion”). But
the demands of this Buddhist dharma were not easy. A serious Buddhist
had to remain celibate; refrain from harming living beings (that is, not
eat meat); drink no wine; give up dancing, singing, and music (except
for religious purposes); and abstain from sleeping in beds or receiving
money. Such a severe discipline required monastic orders; committed
Buddhists lived in monasteries or nunneries, endowed by wealthy lay
Buddhists, or kings and rulers.
From Clan to King
Between 1200 and 400 B.C. Indo-Aryan tribes cleared the forest regions
of the northern Ganges River and settled down in farming communities
prosperous enough to support cities throughout the region. From the
Rig-Veda it is known that Aryan society was originally organized into
tribal communities, clans dominated by elite warrior lineages. By the
sixth century B.C., 16 large clans or tribes had consolidated claims over
lands in the Gangetic region and begun to define themselves not by kinship but by the territories they claimed. The land of each of these clans
was a mahajanapada (great-clan’s territory). Among the 16, some governed themselves as republics, some through assemblies of elites or
elders, and some through kings. Their capitals were fortified cities,
often located along strategic trade routes, surrounded by the agricultural villages and towns they controlled. Five out of the six largest cities
in the Gangetic region in this period were the political capitals of such
“great-clan territories.”
Political life in the Gangetic region, however, was just as volatile and
competitive as religious life. Over the next century, these great-clan territories fought one another until only four remained. Magadha, located
midway along the Ganges River, was the wealthiest of the four. In the midfourth century B.C. a soldier, Mahapadma Nanda—said by some to be the
son of a Shudra—seized power from the Magadha lineage and established
his own kingdom. He made the Magadha capital city, Pataliputra (modern-day Patna), his capital and quickly brought most of the Gangetic
region and the remaining great-clan territories under his control.
Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were initially composed in
this period, and each may have something to say about the period’s
33
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
violence and changes. The Mahabharata’s core story tells of the struggle for control of a kingdom between two branches of a Kshatriya lineage, the Kurus and the Pandavas. In the war that ensues, all of the evil
Kurus are killed, as are many children and supporters of the virtuous
Pandavas. The Ramayana tells of the banishment and long exile of
Prince Rama, rightful heir to the kingdom of Ayodhya, his long search
for his kidnapped wife, Sita; and the war he fights with the Sri Lankan
demon-king Ravana to regain her. Today both epics are read as Hindu
scriptures, texts that offer moral and exemplary stories of behavior.
The violence of the epics, however, particularly the Mahabharata, may
have had its origins in the violent struggles of the mahajanapada
period. At the same time, the epics’ preoccupation with questions of
kingly inheritance and legitimacy may reflect both the growth of new
ideas about monarchy and the weakening hold clans had on political
power at this time.
Yet even as didactic texts such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana
insisted that kings came only from the Kshatriya varna, political events
showed the opposite. Increasingly kingship was an ad hoc institution,
that is, one defined as much by power and opportunity as by lineage
connections or institutional sanctions. Kshatriya status (as historian
Burton Stein suggested) was becoming an “achieved” status. The fact of
Gambling in Ancient India
D
ice and gambling were important in ancient India as far back as
the Indus civilization. Both long six-sided bar dice (of the kind
used even today in India to play pachisi) and cubical six-sided dice (like
contemporary gambling dice) have been found at Harappan excavations. The Rig-Veda itself contains a hymn—the “Gambler’s Lament”—
that shows the popularity of gambling in early Indo-Aryan society. The
basic dice used in Indian gambling at the time of the epic Mahabharata
were four-sided, and the names of the dice throws—krita (four), treta
(three), dvapara (two), and kali (ace)—are the same as the names of the
four yugas (ages) of the world. The losing streaks of compulsive gamblers figure prominently in the Mahabharata: In one major episode a
dice tournament causes the virtuous Pandava brother Yudhisthira to
lose both his kingdom and his wife, Draupadi, to his evil Kuru cousin. In
a second story (also from the Mahabharata) King Nala’s gambling compulsion almost costs him his wife, Damayanti.
34
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
seizing and holding power conferred royalty on whoever could successfully do it.
Alexander the Great
As the Nanda dynasty solidified its hold over the clan-dominated territories of the Ganges, to the north and west the ruler of a faraway
empire prepared to invade India. In 331 B.C. Alexander of Macedon
conquered the Persian Empire whose easternmost satrapy (province)
included Gandhara and the northern Indus. Determined to assert control over all his Persian territories, Alexander and his army fought
their way eastward. By 327 B.C. the Macedonians had subdued Bactria,
come over the Hindu Kush mountains, and crossed the Indus River.
Alexander’s army—as described by later Greek and Roman historians—numbered 125,000 men. They defeated tribal kings throughout
the Punjab, but at the Beas River the soldiers mutinied and refused to
go farther. Turning south the emperor fought his way down the Indus.
He sent some of his army back to Mesopotamia by sea, while he and
the remainder made the difficult land journey along the Iranian coast.
Alexander’s sudden death in Mesopotamia in 323 B.C. brought his campaigns to a sudden end.
Alexander’s invasion of India had little lasting political impact. After
his death, the eastern end of his empire, beyond the Hindu Kush, came
under the rule of the Seleucids, a dynasty founded by one of his generals. Along the Indus, within a century the settlements left behind to govern Alexander’s conquered lands disappeared, and the lands reverted to
local control. Alexander’s invasion did, however, bring India to the
attention of countries to the west. The literate Greek scribes who accompanied him wrote about the eastern land through which they traveled.
Their writings—our earliest Western sources on India—provoked an
interest in this eastern region that continued throughout the Roman
Empire.
The Mauryans
In 320 B.C. the Nanda dynasty was overthrown in its turn by an officer
in its army, Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta seized the Nanda capital at Pataliputra and the rich Magadha region. A treaty with the northwestern Seleucids ceded all of India south of the Hindu Kush to
Chandragupta. By the end of the century he had conquered most of
northern India, from west to east, and as far south as the Narmada River.
35
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
A Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, sent to Chandragupta’s court by
the Seleucid rulers in the north, left an account of his travels preserved
by later Greek and Roman writers. Megasthenes was particularly
impressed by Chandragupta’s capital at Pataliputra. “The greatest city in
India,” he declared, it had 570 towers and 64 gates and was surrounded
by a ditch “six hundred feet in breadth and thirty cubits in depth”
(McCrindle 2000, 67). The emperor himself also impressed
Megasthenes. “He . . . remains in court for the whole day,” the ambassador wrote, “without allowing the business to be interrupted”
(McCrindle 2000, 71). He even continued to hear court cases while
attendants massaged him with wooden cylinders. Chandragupta was
personally cared for by a large number of women slaves. When he
hunted, Megasthenes noted, “crowds of women surround him . . . some
are in chariots, some on horses, and some even on elephants, and they
are equipped with weapons of every kind, as if they were going on a
campaign” (McCrindle 2000, 70–71). Yet, however wealthy and powerful the king, his life was not easy. Fearing assassination, Megasthenes
reported, Chandragupta never slept during the day and at night he
changed where he slept periodically to defeat any plots against his life.
Many legends surrounded Chandragupta’s life. Buddhist texts
claimed that his family (the Moriyas) came from the same clan as the
Buddha, while Brahmanic sources suggested that they were Shudras.
Two classical writers claimed Chandragupta had met Alexander the
Great during the latter’s invasion of the Punjab. Chandragupta, who
wanted Alexander to attack the Nandas to the east, so offended
Alexander that he briefly imprisoned the Mauryan. An even later Indian
legend claimed the emperor was just a weak and ordinary man and
attributed his rise to power to the advice of a wily Brahman adviser,
Kautilya. Even Chandragupta’s death was the subject of later legends.
After ruling for 24 years, the Jaina tradition says, the emperor abdicated, became a Jaina monk, and traveled to the south where he fasted
to death in the Karnataka region.
The Arthasastra
The clever minister Kautilya, who may have orchestrated Chandragupta
Maurya’s rise to power, was also said to have written a book on statecraft:
the Arthasastra (Treatise on material gain). The text describes the art of
running a kingdom: how to appoint ministers, officials, and judges; how
to collect and keep revenues; how to wage war; how to manipulate
and/or make treaties with neighboring kings. Its pragmatic “the-ends36
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
justify-the-means” suggestions have often been compared to the 16thcentury writings of the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli.
The complex bureaucratic system that the Arthasastra described was
probably more typical of the third-century A.D. Gupta period, during
which the text was substantially revised and expanded, than of the
fourth century B.C. But its practical and often brutal advice suited Indian
political relations of all periods. “Make peace with the equal and the
stronger . . . make war with the weaker” was its advice on political relations (Kangle 1972, 327). Create a network of spies, it advised, and
include among them “secret agents in the disguise of holy men” (267).
Eliminate treacherous ministers by poisoning the food they prepare for
you, then have them put to death as traitors (194). The book explained
in detail how a king in financial need might “replenish” his treasury: by
taking more grain from farmers and more gold from traders or (this with
several variations) by proclaiming a tree, a shrub, a house the site of a
spectacular miracle and then living on the donations given by believers
(296–301). In addition to all this, the book also included lists of magical potions and spells to be used against enemies or in case of a revolt:
Among these were potions that could turn someone’s hair white or cause
leprosy and spells that made people or animals invisible (499–511).
Ashoka
The greatest Mauryan emperor—some say the greatest emperor India
ever had—was Chandragupta’s grandson, the emperor Ashoka (ruled c.
268–233 B.C.). Ashoka became emperor four years after his father
Bindusara died and spent the early years of his reign solidifying and
extending his empire. Scholars judge its size today by the edicts Ashoka
had inscribed on rocks and pillars throughout India. When Ashoka
died, these edicts stretched 1,500 miles from the northern Himalayas
into peninsular India and 1,200 miles across the widest breadth of the
subcontinent.
These Ashokan edicts are not the first examples of writing from
post-Harappan India but are very close to it. The earliest inscriptions
found in India after Harappa are in Kharoshthi, a Persian script derived
from Aramaic, and are from the Persian-ruled northwest in the late
sixth century B.C. For the rest of India the earliest writing is in the
Brahmi script, the script used in most Ashokan edicts and an ancient
form of the Devanagari script in which Sanskrit and Hindi are written
today. Brahmi inscriptions are found throughout the Mauryan Empire.
The script was used to write north Indian Prakrits and, in at least one
37
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
This lion capital on an Ashokan pillar at Lauriya-Nandangarh, Bihar, is 6 feet, 20 inches in
height, standing on top of a pillar 32 feet, 9 inches high, 35 inches in diameter at its base, and
26 inches in diameter at its top.The lion sits on a circular abacus decorated with a row of
pecking geese.The pillar is carved with an Ashokan edict, and although the mouth of the lion
has been damaged, the pillar is intact and in its original place. (Borromeo/Art Resource, N.Y.)
example, to write the south Indian language Tamil. By medieval times,
however, Tamil had developed its own distinctive script, as had many
other regional languages. According to Buddhist traditions, Buddhist
scriptures were written down as early as the first century B.C., but most
38
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Indian texts, secular and religious, were put into written form only in
the early centuries A.D.
Ashoka’s edicts are the main sources of information about the
emperor and the tumultuous events of his career. Ashoka converted to
Buddhism after a violent campaign against the eastern region of
Kalinga (modern-day Orissa). His rock edicts tell us this battle took
more than 100,000 lives and left the ruler questioning the purpose of
such violence. Like his grandfather, Chandragupta, Ashoka had a preference for the heterodox religions. Buddhist sources say he had a son,
Mahinda, with a beautiful and devoutly Buddhist merchant’s daughter.
When the Third Buddhist Council met at Pataliputra c. 250 B.C. at
Ashoka’s invitation and adopted a plan to send Buddhist missionaries
throughout India and the world, it was Ashoka’s son Mahinda (according to Buddhist traditions) who took Buddhism south to the island of
Sri Lanka.
Nonviolence and tolerance were the heart of the Buddhist dharma,
Ashoka proclaimed in his edicts. Disturbed by the violence of the military campaign in Kalinga, the emperor expressed his great regret at
the loss of life and suffering through his edicts there. Ashoka banned
animal sacrifices at his capital and encouraged vegetarianism, in part
by regulating the slaughter of animals for food. Where his grandfather, Chandragupta, had gone on hunting expeditions, Ashoka made
pilgrimages to Buddhist holy places. His edicts urged the different
religions and peoples in his empire to be tolerant: “Honour the sect of
another,” one inscription said, “for by doing so one increases the
influence of one’s own sect and benefits that of the other” (Thapar
2002, 202).
Ashoka called himself a cakravartin—a “universal ruler,” the
Buddhist term for a ruler so powerful he established his righteous
(dharmic) rule over all. In subsequent centuries this became a favorite
title for kings large and small. Even as late as the eighth century A.D.
Indian kings were combining their use of Vedic rituals with endowments to Buddhist monasteries and donations for the building of
Buddhist stupas—all to justify claims to the title of cakravartin.
How could a second-century B.C. ruler control an empire the size of
Ashoka’s? Although Ashoka traveled frequently throughout his realm
and consulted with local officials, he probably had direct control over
only the center of his empire: the wealthy Magadha and Gangetic
region. This area had grown even more prosperous under Mauryan
rule; its population now built more brick homes, dug more wells, and
used more iron implements than they had in earlier periods. On one
39
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Ashokan pillar the emperor described his many public works in the
area:
On the roads I have had banyan trees planted, which will give
shade to beasts and men. I have had mango groves planted and
I have had wells dug and rest houses built every nine miles. . . .
And I have had many watering places made everywhere for the
use of beasts and men (Thapar 2002, 203).
Outside this region and throughout their empire the Mauryans had
certain core territories, important to them for trade or for crucial raw
materials: cities such as Taxila in the north and Ujjain on the IndoGangetic Plain, regions such as Kalinga in the east and southern
Karnataka in the west. The Mauryans ruled these areas through local
governors, and trade routes linked them to the capital. Taxila in the
northwest was the access point for trade beyond India’s borders, while
40
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
the Karnatak region was a rich source of gold. Beyond these core
regions lay the empire’s vast periphery: heavily forested regions or those
that were less inhabited. Here the emperor or his ministers might travel
safely—if accompanied by a large army—and they might leave behind
an occasional inscription, but in most respects they had little control
over these areas.
Ashoka died in 232 B.C. He was followed by a succession of weaker
Mauryan rulers and the gradual shrinking of Mauryan territories. In
185 B.C. Pushyamitra Shunga, a Brahman general, overthrew the last
Mauryan king and established the Shunga dynasty in a small segment
of the earlier empire. Shunga rulers practiced an aggressive Vedic
Hinduism. They restored Vedic animal sacrifices, including the Horse
Sacrifice, and, according to Buddhist sources, they persecuted Buddhist
monks.
Aryanization
By the end of the Mauryan period the Ganges River valley was the hub
for trade routes that ran north, south, east, and west through the Indian
subcontinent. Some routes were initially created by migrating communities of Vedic Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains who traveled out of the
Gangetic region to settle elsewhere. The Mauryan Empire had patronized these existing routes—and the communities that created them—
and had also established additional routes of its own, particularly to
core regions of the empire. The pillars and rock inscriptions of Ashoka
(third–second centuries B.C.) indicate the extent of these Mauryan trading connections.
But more than trade traveled along these routes. Brahman communities (and Vedic Hinduism) had spread throughout much of the subcontinent by the early centuries A.D. Buddhist and Jaina monks,
missionaries, and trading communities had also spread Sanskrit and
Gangetic culture to other regions over these same centuries. Some
scholars have called this movement “Aryanization,” but while the culture spread by all these groups was certainly Sanskrit-based and may
well have been derived from that of earlier Aryans, it was not yet dominated by the Hindu religion.
To the north and west, the Gandharan region was known for its
learned practitioners of Vedic Hinduism in the post-Mauryan centuries.
But Gandhara also had large Buddhist communities that have left
behind substantial archaeological remains. A famous second-century
B.C. Buddhist text, The Questions of King Milinda, records the questioning
41
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Two wall paintings from the Ajanta caves in western India.The 30 caves were carved into the
hillside in a half circle and occupied by Buddhist monks from the second century B.C. through the
sixth century A.D. Sculptures and frescoes decorate the cave interiors and illustrate the life of the
Buddha and stories from the Buddhist Jatakas (Birth Stories) about other incarnations of the
Buddha. The caves were found in 1819 by British soldiers on a tiger hunt.They are in a horseshoe
ravine above a riverbed, approximately 200 miles to the northeast of Mumbai (Bombay).
(Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
of Buddhist monks by King Menander, an Indo-Greek (Bactrian) ruler
and a convert to Buddhism in this region. Gandhara became a major
Buddhist center again during the Kushana dynasty (first–third centuries
A.D.). It was from this region that Buddhist monks traveled north out of
the subcontinent and then east to take their religion across the Silk Road
into eastern Asia.
Buddhist and Jaina migrants and missionaries also traveled south
and west. A Jaina king named Kharavela ruled Kalinga (Orissa) in the
mid-first century B.C. Trade routes that reached as far down the
Narmada River as the Arabian Sea carried Jaina communities into western regions, where they remained dominant through to the 10th and
11th centuries A.D. Buddhism also spread west into the Deccan hills;
the caves at Ajanta, Ellora, and Elephanta had Buddhist orders settled
in them through the early Christian centuries.
Buddhist missionaries from the Ganges region carried early
Buddhism (Theravada Buddhism) into south India and on to Sri Lanka
42
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
and Southeast Asia where it has remained the dominant form of
Buddhism to this day. Within India a newer form of Buddhism—
Mahayana (the Great Vehicle) Buddhism—became dominant in the
centuries after the Mauryans. It was this religion that northern monks
took into China and from there to Korea and Japan.
We know little about south India before the beginnings of this period
of “Aryanization.” The region was peopled—as was much of India—
from prehistoric times by many Stone Age tribal communities. Its
Dravidian languages—Tamil, Telegu, and Malayalam, among others—
may have been indigenous to the south or may have been brought
there, as some suggest, by migrants from the Harappan north. But from
at least the Mauryan period, these south Indian languages coexisted
with Sanskrit in the south. Early Jaina cave inscriptions from the second century B.C. were in the Tamil language but were written in the
Brahmi script, the same script used by the Mauryans. Tamil texts from
the early centuries A.D. also show evidence of Sanskrit influences,
although elite south Indians, whether migrant or indigenous, were literate in both Sanskrit and the Dravidian vernaculars.
Trade with Rome
By the first century A.D. trade routes throughout the subcontinent connected regional centers into both an interregional and an external trade:
Iron came from mines in Rajasthan and other Indian regions; copper,
from Rajasthan, the Deccan, and the Himalayas; precious and semiprecious stones, from peninsular India; salt, from the “salt range” of the
Punjab; and spices, sandalwood, ebony, gold, and precious stones, from
south India. These goods were traded within India and outside through
trade with both the eastern Mediterranean and Southeast Asian regions.
Archaeological finds have documented the existence of trade
between both the western and eastern coasts of India and the Roman
Empire beginning as early as the first century B.C. and continuing
through the seventh century A.D. Merchants who came to India were
called yavanas. While this name may have originally been used for
Greeks in the northwest (perhaps for Ionia in Greece), it quickly came
to be used for all foreigners. Yavanas came from different parts of the
Roman Empire and the Near East and from a wide range of ethnic populations: Greeks, Arabs, Egyptian Jews, and Armenians from western
Asia, among others.
Black pepper was a major item of trade with the west along both the
western and eastern coasts. This rich trade continued on the Malabar
43
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
coast through the medieval period. Other items traded were spices,
semiprecious stones, ivory, and textiles. Western products coming into
India included wine, olive oil, and Roman coins—and in later centuries
horses. The most popular Western commodity for Indians, however,
were Roman coins. Hoards of such coins have been found throughout
the Deccan and further south, most from the period of the Roman
emperors Augustus (ruled 27 B.C.–A.D. 14) and Tiberius (ruled A.D.
14–37). Indians had had a money economy and minted coins from as
early as the sixth century B.C., but the Roman coins may have been
hoarded for use as a high-value currency, since gold coins were largely
missing from these areas.
Indian traders were active at both the Indian and the foreign ends of
this maritime trade. Archaeological sites on the Red Sea have turned up
potsherds with the names of Indians written in Tamil (in Brahmi script)
and in Prakrit. In India archaeologists have found the ancient site of the
port of Arikamedu, a southeast Indian port mentioned in a mid-firstcentury A.D. Greek seafaring geography—The Periplus of the Erythraean
Sea. Excavations there revealed Roman pottery, beads, and evidence of
wines imported from southern Italy and Greece. Arikamedu seems to
have traded with the eastern Mediterranean region from as early as the
first century B.C.
Both coasts of south India were also linked by trade with Southeast
Asia. An impetus for this trade may have been the rich Roman trade—
the profitability of goods sold to the West sent Indian traders farther
east looking for additional sources for spices. We know of trading settlements in Southeast Asia and trading connections that ran as far east
as Java and Bali.
Post-Mauryan Dynasties
In the centuries after the Mauryan Empire the porous border of northwestern India became even more so. Traders, migrants, and invaders
from Central Asia and Iran fought their way through the northwest
mountains to settle in the subcontinent. The most prominent among
these were the Bactrian Greeks, the Scythians (Shakas), and the
Kushanas. While some of these tribal communities maintained their
languages and ethnic identity through several centuries, others adapted
their Indian kingdoms to local culture.
Bactrian Greek kings ruled small kingdoms in northern India from c.
200 to 50 B.C. These Greeks had originally been settled as Persian tributaries in Bactria in Central Asia, but in the second century B.C., some
44
.
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
kings moved south over the Hindu Kush to conquer lands in the subcontinent. Most of what is known of them comes from their multilingual
coins—Greek on one side, Prakrit on the other. Their most famous ruler
was the Buddhist convert King Menander, who ruled c. 160–130 B.C.
45
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
St. Thomas and South
Indian Christians
A
ccording to legend the Christian apostle St.Thomas was brought to
the northwestern region of India soon after the Crucifixion by the
Parthian (Pahlava/Iranian) king Gondophares. After making his first converts at the Parthian king’s court, St.Thomas was said to have preached
in other regions of India and was martyred by an unidentified Indian king;
some legends place this martyrdom in the modern city of Chennai
(Madras). Other legends say St.Thomas arrived on the Malabar coast c.
A.D. 52.A group of Persian Christians are said to have migrated to Kerala
c. A.D. 500, and Christian churches on the Malabar coast and in Sri Lanka
are noted by c. sixth-century travelers.These south Indian Christian communities developed into the modern-day Syrian Christians.
The Scythians were Central Asian horsemen, a nomadic peoples
forced to migrate south and west into Iran and India by stronger tribes
to their east. In the second–first centuries B.C. their kings attacked and
defeated most of the Bactrian Greek rulers in the north of India. A later
branch of the Scythians (called the Western Shakas) ruled over parts of
Rajasthan and Sind through the fourth century A.D.
The Kushanas, tribes of the people known to the Chinese as the
Yueh-chih, migrated south from Central Asia in the first century A.D.,
defeating most of the Scythian kings, and creating a unified empire
that lasted into the third century A.D. Their most powerful king,
Kanishka (whose reign began in A.D. 78 or 144), ruled an empire that
may have equaled Ashoka’s in size: It stretched from Bactria through
northern India to Varanasi on the Ganges. Kanishka was also a great
patron of Buddhism, which flourished under his rule in the
Gandharan region.
In south India the Satavahana dynasty ruled a Deccan kingdom
below the Narmada River from the first to third centuries A.D. The
Satavahanas allied themselves with Vedic Hinduism; their first major
ruler even celebrated the Horse Sacrifice. Farther south were three lineages that Ashoka’s edicts once claimed to have defeated: the Cholas,
the Cheras, and the Pandyas. Tamil cankam poetry (c. first–third centuries A.D.) shows these lineages in constant combat with one another.
The Chola lineage was associated with the Coromandel coast; the
46
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Cheras, with Kerala and the Malabar coast; and the Pandyas, with the
southernmost tip of the subcontinent.
The Guptas
Historians often label the Gupta period as “classical” because it brings
to fruition a Sanskrit-based culture begun in earlier centuries. By A.D.
300 Vedic Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism had spread throughout
India. Brahman priests had composed most of the great Sanskrit texts
and scriptures of Hinduism, most recently the Hindu law codes and the
Puranas (Ancient tales), a collection of legends focused on key gods
and goddesses. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana had almost
reached their final forms. During the Gupta dynasty (c. A.D. 320–550)
this Sanskrit-based culture, now spread across India, reached a peak of
creativity that included the production of secular literature, poetry, and
art, of which the Sanskrit plays and poems of the court writer Kalidasa
are the best-known example.
But the Gupta period also saw the reformulation of much of the earlier tradition. As much as it is “classical,” Gupta India should also be
seen as the starting point for new forms of Hinduism, Hindu political
relations, and Hindu social institutions.
The Gupta dynasty was founded in the Ganges River valley c. A.D. 320
by a man who took the name of the founder of the Mauryan dynasty,
Chandragupta. This proved prophetic, for the Guptas’ empire would
reconquer much of the territory once held by earlier Mauryan kings. The
base for the Guptas was (as it had been for the Mauryans) the Gangetic
plains. The founder’s son, Samudragupta (reigned 335–376) also made
Pataliputra his capital. Samudragupta’s conquests created an empire that
reached from Assam in the east through the Punjab and as far to the west
as the territories of the Scythians (Western Shakas) allowed. The third
Gupta king, Chandragupta II (reigned 376–415), became legendary in
later centuries as King Vikramaditya, a wise and benevolent ruler about
whom many tales and stories circulated. Chandragupta II extended
Gupta territory to its greatest size. After the destruction of the Scythians
in A.D. 388 the dynasty controlled all of north India from the Indus in the
west to Assam in the east and was acknowledged even by regional rulers
south of the Narmada River. A Chinese Buddhist monk, Faxian, who
lived in India for six years during Chandragupta II’s reign, commented on
the peacefulness of Indian society in this period.
But where the Mauryans had favored heterodox religions, Gupta
kings identified themselves and their dynasty more with elite Sanskrit
47
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
culture and with the new devotional, temple-based Hinduism—even
though the Guptas took the title cakravartin and continued to endow
Buddhist monasteries and stupas. The Guptas built and endowed
Hindu temples, and they wrote inscriptions on these temples in
Sanskrit (not Prakrit), now the elite written language of India. They
also used Hindu rituals to formalize the incorporation of defeated tribes
and kings into their empire. In a consecration ritual attended personally by the emperors, they reconsecrated defeated kings as tributary
subordinates; the defeated ruler became a regional king of his land, paying tribute to and attending occasional audiences with the Gupta
cakravartin but otherwise ruling independently in his land. Where the
Mauryans had maintained control over only the center and a few core
regions of their empire, the Guptas, through tributary relationships,
attempted to control most of it.
48
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Stupas and Temples
B
uddhist stupas and cave temples were built in India as early as the
second century B.C. Stupas were round structures that held relics
of the Buddha and were perambulated by devotees. They were built
through donations from kings and laypeople from at least the time of
Ashoka. The earliest freestanding Hindu temples in the subcontinent,
however, date only to the Gupta period (fourth–mid-sixth centuries
A.D.).These structures were small in comparison to the temples of later
centuries; most had flat roofs and were built of thick masonry without
mortar.The temple design of sixth century A.D. has remained the standard even to the modern period:At the center of the temple is a small,
dark shrine room containing the image of the chief deity, and outside
this is a larger hall and a porch through which worshippers enter. A
large tower rises over the core shrine room, and the whole building
complex is set within a rectangular courtyard, sometimes (in later
buildings) enclosing a temple tank.The great Hindu temples were built
under the patronage of the south Indian dynasties of the fifth to 12th
centuries: the Pallavas, Chalukyas, and Cholas. In the north many older
(continues)
Jagannatha temple at Puri, Orissa. Built in the 12th century on the east coast of
India, this is one of the largest Hindu temples in India.The temple’s main deity is
Jagannatha (Vishnu), worshipped in addition to his brother, Balabhadra, and his
sister, Subhadra. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
49
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Stupas and Temples (continued)
temples were destroyed by Muslim invaders, and most large temples,
even in Varanasi, are recent.Two large, famous temple complexes dating
to the 12th and 13th centuries can be found in Orissa: the Jagannatha
temple in the city of Puri and the temple to Surya (the sun god) at
nearby Konarak.
The successors of Chandragupta II, however, were unable to maintain his vast empire. In the north, beginning in the mid-fifth century,
the Hunas—a Central Asian tribe descended from the White Huns—
repeatedly attacked the empire and even occupied its western regions
from 500 to 530. This, combined with the dynasty’s failure to produce
a strong king, weakened the Guptas. By 550 no successor of the original line remained, and Gupta territories fell back into the hands of
regional and local rulers.
Puranic Hinduism
In the early centuries A.D. Hinduism developed into a temple-based,
devotional religion. This new form of Hinduism maintained the sanctity of earlier Vedic texts and the preeminent position of the Brahman
priest, even as the dominant forms of Hindu worship (puja) became
devotional and focused more exclusively on the gods Shiva or Vishnu
(and Vishnu’s incarnations) or on the worship of Devi (the Goddess).
Whereas Vedic Hinduism had placed rituals performed by Brahman
priests at the center of human efforts to control the cosmos, both the
Upanishads and the later heterodox religions saw the goal of life as
attaining moksha—in Buddhism, nirvana—and escaping the cycle of
reincarnation. Bhakti (the devotional worship of a god) developed out
of these ideas. Its first mention is in the Bhagavad Gita (Song of the
blessed one), a long addition to the Mahabharata dated to approximately 100 B.C.–A.D. 100. In the Gita, the prince Arjuna stands in his
chariot on the battlefield, beset by doubts about the morality of going
to war against his own grandfather and cousins. Arjuna’s charioteer,
the god Krishna in disguise, explains that even though such conduct
may seem immoral, it is simply Arjuna’s Kshatriya dharma. But
dharma is just one of many paths by which men can find liberation
from rebirth. The best of all these paths, Krishna says, is that of bhakti.
50
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Krishna instructs Arjuna on the efficacy of bhakti (devotion) in this scene from the Mahabharata
carved on a wall of the Lakshmi Narayan Temple (Birla Mandir) in New Delhi.The temple was
built by the industrialist B. D. Birla in 1938 and was inaugurated by the nationalist leader
Mohandas K. Gandhi. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
Then Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in his true form—he is the universe itself, all the cosmos is incorporated within him. Krishna says,
“Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer in sacrifice,
whatever you give away, whatever penance you practice—that, O son
of Kunti, do you dedicate to Me” (Embree et al. 1988, 291–292).
Through bhakti, Krishna explains, karma ends, and liberation from
rebirth is achieved.
The idea of devotion to a god as the center of religious life was
accompanied in the early centuries A.D. by the rise in importance and
centrality of the Hindu temple and of worship in that temple to its god.
Where ancient Vedic rituals had taken place in the open and without
images, now an image (murthi) believed to embody the god being worshipped was installed at the heart of large temple complexes. Where
Vedic religious life had centered on the performance of rituals, now religious life—for both priests and individual worshippers—was based on
tending and worshipping the temple deity. The new gods worshipped
in this way were celebrated in a new collection of Hindu texts: the
Puranas. Written down no earlier than the fourth century A.D., these
texts retold myths and legends associated with gods such as Vishnu,
Shiva, or Devi and described the correct ways to worship them. While
51
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
older Vedic gods such as Agni, Surya, and Indra continued to have a
place within the Hindu pantheon, it was Vishnu (and his nine avatars,
or incarnations), Shiva, or the Goddess who were the focus of the stories and tales of the Puranas and of devotional, temple-based worship.
Kings and Emperors
For centuries Indian kings had fought one another, the loser forced to
accept subordination (or often death) at the hands of the winner. “The
big fish eats the small fish,” as the Indian proverb puts it. The Gupta
dynasty, however, attempted to replace these older ad hoc relations with
a more formal relationship, a tributary system. Under the Guptas such
relations could stretch in a descending spiral from the cakravartin himself down to the headman of a local village, with tribute passed up to
each successive overlord.
In this system dharma was “king.” “This dharma is the sovereign
power ruling over kshatra [royal power] itself,” explains an early
Upanishad (De Bary 1958, 241). In the Laws of Manu, one of a number
of Hindu law codes composed between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100, society is
to be governed by the varna system, its duties and obligation overseen
by Brahman priests. The king’s role was only the maintenance of these
structures as they already existed: “The king was created as the protector of the classes [varnas] and the stages of life, that are appointed each
to its own particular duty, in proper order” (Doniger and Smith 1991,
131). Whether he was as great as a rajadhiraja (king of kings) or
cakravartin or as “little” as the head of a small village, the ruler functioned to preserve dharmic order.
The set of regional tributary relations begun by the Guptas
remained the model for Indian political relations through the
medieval period. Within this system kings spent most of their time
trying to survive. A 12th-century text chronicling the lives of the
kings of Kashmir (the Rajatarangini) shows us the likely fate of a
ruler. If ministers did not plot against him, relatives did not overthrow
him, or his wives did not have him murdered, his own sons might
cause his death. Sons, like crabs, the traditional warning goes, survive
by destroying their fathers.
Another way to think of this political system, as anthropologist
Bernard Cohn once suggested, is as a means for channeling the agricultural surplus of peasants up through the various levels of power to
the ruler with the greatest force. Describing the 18th-century king of
Varanasi, Cohn wrote,
52
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Politically the Raja of Benares had to face in two directions. He
fought a continuous and devious battle to be completely independent of the Nawab [a more powerful ruler and theoretically
his overlord]. He also had to keep in check lineages and local
chiefs and rajas who had power within his province (1960, 422).
The central issue was tribute, and the measure of a superior’s success
was the amount he could collect from his subordinates. Success for subordinates, on the other hand, lay in the degree to which they could
elude payment. By tradition, the king owned the land and had the right
to a portion of the crop. But these rights existed within a system in
which collection signified superiority and willingness to pay signaled
weakness.
Rulers could not dispense with the regional and local powers
beneath them, however, because they lacked the ability to collect the
tribute themselves. Therefore collection was delegated from superior
to subordinate, from the “emperor” down through the various levels of
political power to the level of the dominant caste in each village.
Within this pyramid, village communities were the most stable units,
the units most easily dominated and controlled by local clan or caste
lineages over long periods of time. In some parts of the subcontinent,
long-term regional control was also possible. Certain regional divisions—Bengal in the east, for instance, and the Deccan in the southwest—slip in and out of India’s history, held by one group, then by
another. Unification of larger areas was hard to achieve—and even
harder to maintain. As the territory of a king expanded, he became
increasingly vulnerable to challenges from more stable regional and/or
local kings below him.
If the origins of a regional tributary political system can be placed
in the Gupta period, however, it should also be recognized that the
Guptas, to some degree, simply put an institutional and ritual face on
a system of political relations that had existed long before them. Even
with their reconsecration of defeated rulers the Gupta dynasty still
existed within a largely ad hoc system of kingship and empire. The
skill of a ruler and/or the luck or circumstances in which he found
himself had as much to do with his success as anything else. Whether
an emperor or a “little king,” rulers spent their days protecting or
extending their power over and against that of other rulers around
them. Only with the Mughals in the medieval period and even later
with the British are there political systems that attempt to challenge
the tributary system.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Caste, Varna, and Jati
The term caste comes from the Portuguese word casta, first used during
the 16th century to describe the Indian social system. Indigenous terms
for social groups in both the ancient and modern periods were varna
(class) and jati (birth group). The four varnas—Brahman, Kshatriya,
Vaishya, and Shudra—appear as early as the Rig-Veda and in both
Hindu and non-Hindu sources. Each varna was identified very early
with a hereditary occupation—priest, warrior, farmer/merchant, and
servant, respectively—and by the time of the early Upanishads the different and unequal duties of these groups were justified by karma and
the individual’s acts in former lives. Jatis were lineages, clans, and/or
families whose membership was determined by birth. Different jatis
might interact economically, but their social contact was restricted; for
instance, people married, shared meals, or participated in funerals only
with members of their own birth group.
In contrast to the four varnas whose hierarchical order was universally known and acknowledged throughout the subcontinent, jatis were
local or regional groups. Members of a village jati would know their status relative to other jatis in their immediate region, but there was no allIndia hierarchy for these groups. Jati status changed from region to
region—and over time. Village studies from north India in the 20th century have shown that jatis whose economic circumstances change can
raise their varna status through a process sociologists call
“Sanskritization”—the adoption of customs defined in Sanskrit texts as
appropriate for a higher varna. If a jati can maintain such practices over
several generations, their new varna status will be accepted. Conversely,
groups that fall on hard times and are forced to adopt social customs
associated with lower varnas—the eating of meat, for instance—can
“lose caste” as a result. Untouchable communities in northern India,
Bernard Cohn found, explained their low status in just such historical
terms, as a loss of caste caused by poverty and the necessity of adopting
practices associated with untouchability sometime in the ancient past.
If we think of the caste system in terms of jatis, varnas, and the connections between them, we can appreciate the complexity and flexibility of this social institution. Villages never remained “unchanged” over
time. Instead, the caste system allowed frequent changes of social position, and jatis “lost caste” or raised it as their historical and economic
circumstances changed. One example of a jati group whose status
changed dramatically over time are the Kayasthas, a group from the
Gangetic region that was classified as Shudra in the Gupta period. By
the 11th century Kayastha status had improved dramatically as its
54
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
members came increasingly to work as scribes and administrators for
political rulers. Individual kings in ancient India, as we have already
seen, frequently came from non-Kshatriya origins; in the fourth century
some Puranic texts try to fix these varna aberrations by providing nonKshatriya kings with appropriate royal genealogies. Similarly the Hindu
law codes (c. 100 B.C.–A.D. 100) try to fix the shifting varna statuses of
all these groups by offering elaborate classifications for groups that did
not fit ordinary varna categories: a Brahman who marries a Shudra, for
instance.
Birth groups were a way to give varna status to a wide range of peoples (and religions) who might otherwise not fit into varna classifications. From the mid-fifth century B.C. through the Gupta period, Indian
society had to adjust to the presence of many new and/or non-Aryan
groups: the heterodox followers of Buddhism and Jainism and also
Bactrian Greeks, any number of Central Asian tribes, and south Indian
Dravidian-speaking communities, to name just a few. Local and
regional societies could integrate these peoples by considering each of
them as a separate jati and assigning a varna status appropriate to the
group’s economic wealth or political power. In this sense jatis functioned as a way to bring a wide range of non-Hindu peoples under the
rubric of a Hindu (Aryan) varna system that in origin had been a
Brahman view of society, not historical reality.
Women in Ancient India
Her father guards her in childhood, her husband guards her in youth,
and her sons guard her in old age. A woman is not fit for independence.
■
Laws of Manu (Doniger and Smith 1991, 197)
Although this much quoted passage from the Laws of Manu illustrates
women’s subordination to men in ancient India, other texts and
sources give a more varied picture of how women lived and were
expected to behave. Passages from the Rig-Veda suggest an early society in which unmarried girls and young men freely associated and in
which women took part in public ceremonies such as the Horse
Sacrifice. The Upanishads show two learned women (Maitreyi and
Gargi) participating in philosophical speculations. By the early centuries A.D., however, knowledge of the Vedas had become forbidden to
Hindu women (as also to Shudras), and women were described as an
inferior class who could obtain moksha only after rebirth as men. Only
55
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
in the heterodox sects of Buddhism and Jainism did women still have
access to religious scriptures. In this same period the Arthasastra notes
that the antahpur (women’s quarters) of a king’s harem was secluded
and closely guarded and that wives who drank, gambled, or left home
without permission were fined. A different impression, however, from
the same period appears in stories describing young girls who visit
temples without chaperones and in sculptures showing unveiled
women watching processions from open balconies. Although it had
long been customary for women’s literacy to be forbidden, a 10th–11th
century Khajuraho sculpture shows a woman holding her writing
tablet.
Hindu religious scriptures reveal a deep ambivalence toward women.
On the one hand, in the Laws of Manu a wife is the “lamp” of her husband’s home, and if she brings him children (preferably sons), she is
called a Lakshmi, the goddess of good fortune (Doniger and Smith
1991, 200). According to the Mahabharata,
The wife is half the man,
the best of friends,
the root of the three ends of life,
and of all that will help him in the other worlds (Basham 1958, 181).
On the other hand, women and women’s sexuality are frequently portrayed as dangerous and uncontrollable. “Good looks do not matter to
them, nor do they care about youth,” says Manu. “‘A man!’ they say,
and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly” (Doniger
and Smith 1991, 198). Religious scriptures are unequivocal, however,
about the need for a woman’s absolute duty to serve her husband “like
a god.” As stated in the Laws of Manu, “A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely
indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities . . . it is because
a wife obeys her husband that she is exalted in heaven” (Doniger and
Smith 1991, 115).
By custom high-caste widows were not allowed to remarry, and a
wife demonstrated her extreme devotion to her dead husband by
becoming a sati (the one who is true), a woman who was burned or
buried alive with her husband’s corpse. As late as Mauryan and Gupta
times, widow remarriage was still possible, but by the medieval period
the ban on widow remarriage extended even to child brides widowed
before the marriage was consummated. Widows were expected to live
lives of austerity, their atonement for having had the bad karma to sur56
CASTE, KINGS, AND THE HINDU WORLD ORDER
Sati
S
ati (also spelled suttee) was the Hindu practice in which a newly
widowed wife chose to be burned or buried alive with her husband’s corpse. The custom was not mandatory for Hindu women and
was never widely practiced, occurring mostly in the Ganges River valley, the Punjab, and Rajasthan.The woman who chose to become a sati,
it was commonly believed, was reunited with her dead husband in the
afterlife. In the brief period before her death, the sati was thought to
have magical powers to curse or bless those around her.
Mention of satis appear sporadically in Hindu scriptures (some claim
as early as the Rig-Veda), while travelers reported witnessing satis from
the fourth century B.C. The custom was common among Central Asian
tribes, however, leading some scholars to suggest it became more common with the movement of these tribes into India after 200 B.C. Rajput
(a military caste of northern India) widows’ suicides (jauhar) often followed the death of a Rajput king in battle. Sati was made illegal by the
British in 1829.A recent case was the sati of a young Rajasthani college
student in 1988.
vive their husbands. By custom widows were to shave their heads, wear
only simple white saris and no jewelry, and eat only once a day a simple vegetarian meal with no condiments.
Harsha
After the Gupta period and before the Muslim incursions of the 13th
century, only one ruler was able to create a substantial north Indian
empire. This was Harshavardhana (ruled A.D. 606–647). Harsha inherited his elder brother’s small Punjab kingdom at the age of 16 and soon
after added to it the nearby lands of his widowed sister. Making his capital in the city of Kanauj, he expanded eastward, eventually controlling
lands as far east as the Ganges delta and as far south as the Narmada
River. Harsha claimed the title of cakravartin and, like the Guptas, controlled his empire by gifting lands and subordinate status to the kings
he defeated. Later Buddhist texts claimed Harsha as a convert. The
Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who visited India during Harsha’s
reign, claimed that kings only took the throne after receiving permission to do so from a Buddhist semigod (a bodhisattva). When Harsha
57
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
died without an heir in 647, his empire quickly fell back into the hands
of local and regional powers.
By the seventh century elites who identified with a Sanskrit-based,
Aryan culture dominated all regions of the Indian subcontinent. A revitalized, temple-based Hinduism was coming to dominance, particularly
in the south. Invading tribes of the past centuries had been successfully
incorporated into local and regional life, and relations among India’s
political elites had attained a stasis of ever-present warfare and intrigue.
Harsha, as it turned out, would be the last Hindu king to rule a great
north Indian empire. All future imperial powers in India would govern
with an eye on events and contexts far beyond India’s borders: on the
court of the Baghdad caliph, for instance, or (eventually) on the
Parliament of a British queen.
58
3
Turks, Afghans, and
Mughals (600–1800)
We placed our feet in the stirrup of resolve, grabbed the reins of trust in God,
and directed ourselves against Sultan Ibrahim, son of Sultan Sikandar,
son of Bahlul Lodi the Afghan, who controlled the capital Delhi and the
realm of Hindustan at that time.
■
The Baburnama (Thackston 2002, 320)
I
n the seventh century A.D. the armies of a newly energized Arab
Empire brought the religion of Islam to India. The Central Asian
Turks and Afghans who conquered India were fierce warriors. As rulers,
however, they struggled with their commitment to Islam and their
minority status among a greater Hindu population. The Mughal
emperor Akbar found the most successful resolution to this conflict.
The Mughal war machine he created maintained Mughal dominance
over most of India until the 18th century.
Islam Enters India
In 622 the Mecca-born Arab Muhammad (569–632) and a small number of followers established themselves and their new religion, Islam
(meaning “submission”), in the Arabian city of Medina. This date
marks the start of a rapid military expansion that within a century had
created the Islamic Empire, the most powerful empire the Western
world had ever known. At its height this empire controlled the
Mediterranean Sea and lands from Spain in the west through the Middle
East and as far east as India.
Islam spread quickly through the lands conquered by the Arabs. As
the third “religion of the book,” Islam claimed a heritage that included
both Judaism and Christianity. At the heart of Islam was submission to
59
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
the will of Allah, the one, only, and omnipotent God. Muhammad was
“the seal of the prophets,” the last in the line of human transmitters of
Allah’s message that began in the Old Testament. For Muslims, as for
Jews and Christians, human history began with Allah’s creation of the
world and would end in a Last Judgment, when human souls would be
punished for their sins or rewarded for their virtues.
By the time Islam entered India in the eighth century, Muhammad
was long dead, and political power over the expanding empire had been
placed in the hands of a caliph and his office (caliphate) located, at the
empire’s height, c. 750–1258, in the city of Baghdad. The Qur’an, Allah’s
revelations to Muhammad, had been written down in Arabic. Islam had
already divided into two competing sects: the Sunnis, a majority sect
that based its teachings on Islamic written and legal codes (the sharia)
as interpreted by special theologians-scholars (the ulama); and a minority sect, the Shiites, that followed the charismatic teachings of the
twelve imams, the true spiritual descendants of Muhammad, the last of
whom would disappear in the 12th century. Islam’s mystic tradition,
Sufism, would begin only later, in the eighth century, and between the
13th and 15th centuries the great Sufi orders would spread throughout
north India.
Dar ul-Islam
In many ways Muslim rulers in India behaved just as Hindu, Buddhist,
or Jaina kings before them. They increased their lands through battle.
They bound defeated rulers to them through alliances and gifts. They
endowed buildings and supported the religious activities of religions
other than Islam, and they adapted themselves and their courts to local
Indian institutions, culture, and customs. Islam and Hinduism mutually influenced each other’s social structures, art, architecture, and religious practices over 1,200 years.
But Islam also had a well-defined location outside the Indian subcontinent. When Muslims prayed, they faced in the direction of the
holy city of Mecca. When they recited the Qur’an, they were encouraged to recite it in Arabic, for no translation was authentic. As often as
they could, good Muslims should join the annual religious pilgrimage
to Mecca (the hajj). In all their dealings—religious, social, or political—they should see themselves as part of a brotherhood of Muslims
and seek to spread Islam and its teachings. All these practices tied
Indian Muslims, kings, courts, and elites to the Arabian Peninsula and
its centers of Islamic scholarship and law.
60
TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
Muslim rulers, courts, and communities also saw themselves within
a worldwide Muslim context. They were part of a global network of
places—dar ul-Islam (the Abode of Islam)—where Muslim peoples
observed the religion of Allah, or where Muslim kings and/or powerful
men maintained Islamic practices even while ruling non-Muslim populations. The strictest interpretation of Islamic injunctions would have
required a jihad (holy war) against all non-Muslims, the destruction of
all infidel temples and churches, and the death or conversion of all nonbelievers. The realities of ruling a large non-Muslim population, however, caused Muslim rulers in India, as elsewhere, to quickly apply the
protected status of dhimmis (protected peoples of the book) to the
Hindu population. This allowed the continuation of Hindu religious
rites and customs on payment of a yearly tax. To satisfy their own
orthodox ulama, Muslim rulers would sometimes declare their local
conflicts a jihad or deface prominent local temples.
In the wider Muslim world (dar ul-Islam), elite Muslims found others
like themselves with whom they could share their knowledge of and perspectives on Islamic laws, customs, and practices. When the Moroccanborn Ibn Battuta traveled the world in the 14th century, he met many
non-Arab peoples and encountered non-Muslim cultures. But although
he traveled from Spain and North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa, India, and
China, for most of his travels he remained within an elite Islamic world
and with “individuals who shared his tastes and sensibilities and among
whom he could always find hospitality, security, and friendship” (Dunn
1986, 7). In India, as elsewhere in the medieval world, Muslim kings and
their related elites lived with a deep awareness of their location within an
Islamic network of places and peoples linked throughout the world.
Arabs and Turks
By 712, Arab military commanders had seized control of Baluchistan
and Sind in the northwest. By 871, Sind was an independent kingdom
under local Arab rule. In the northwest, by the 10th century, independent Persian Muslims controlled the lands between Persia and the Oxus
River (later called Amu Darya). Buddhism, which had flourished earlier
in these regions, was abandoned as Turkic tribes converted to Islam.
During the eighth and ninth centuries Arab traders settled peacefully
in permanent communities on the southwest coast, replacing moribund
Roman trade routes with global routes that linked India to both the
Mediterranean world and to Southeast Asia. Like the Christian communities that had settled in Kerala, Muslim traders were given land, allowed
61
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
to maintain their own religion, and incorporated, as jatis, into the west
coast’s political and social structures. The Mappila (Moplah) community
on the Malabar Coast and the Navayat Muslim community in the Konkan
are the modern descendants of these early Arab settlements.
Mahmud of Ghazni
In the late 10th century, a Turkish military slave, Sebüktigin, established an Afghan kingdom centered on the city of Ghazni. His son,
Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) expanded that kingdom into the
Indian Punjab. In 1001 Mahmud defeated an alliance of north Indian
kings—their slower elephant-based armies could not withstand his
more mobile cavalry. For 26 subsequent years Mahmud raided the subcontinent, destroying and looting major Hindu temples at Mathura,
Kanauj, and Somnath and bringing back to Ghazni great caravans of
riches and slaves. Writing to the caliph at Baghdad, Mahmud boasted
that his raids had killed 50,000 infidels and 50,000 Muslim heretics. He
asked for (and received) the honor of being named a fighter in the cause
of Islam.
Mahmud used his plunder to bring Muslim scholars to Ghazni and
establish a library there—the books were plundered from conquered
Persian libraries—and to build a beautiful mosque. His dynasty was
succeeded by the Ghurids in 1151. The Ghurids were more ambitious
than Mahmud, who had extended his kingdom into the Punjab, but
otherwise made no effort to control the lands he raided. By 1206
Ghurid rulers had conquered much of the north, controlling the cities
of Delhi, Kanauj, and Varanasi (Benares), much of Rajasthan, and
destroying the Sena dynasty in Bengal along with the Buddhist monasteries that the Senas supported.
South India (600–1300)
The flat farmlands of the northern Indo-Gangetic Plain invited the
establishment of large agrarian empires. In regions south of the
Narmada River, however, a more rugged geography enabled smaller,
more regional clans and lineages to survive. The Chalukyas in
Karnataka, the Pallavas in Kanchipuram, the Pandyas in Madurai, and
the Cholas at Tanjore all struggled for power with one another and with
even smaller kings and local rulers between the sixth and ninth centuries. The Chalukya control of the Deccan during the seventh century
kept the north Indian emperor Harsha from expanding farther south.
62
TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
The Temple at Somnath
M
ahmud of Ghazni’s destruction of the Hindu Shaivite temple at
Somnath provided later historians with an event that seemed a
perfect symbol for the clash of religions on the subcontinent. Muslim
historians, such as the 16th-century Qasim Hiindushah Firishta, celebrated Mahmud’s destruction of the temple as the act of a pious
Muslim. In the 1840s, a British member of Parliament (wishing to prove
the British better rulers than the Muslims) claimed that Mahmud’s raids
had created “painful feelings which had been rankling against the
[Hindu] people for nearly a thousand years” (Thapar 1999). In the 21st
century Hindu nationalists have also used Mahmud’s attack as an example of Muslim aggression that would leave “a split in India’s national
character” (Birodkar 2004).
For historians, Somnath raises interesting questions. Earlier Muslim
accounts emphasized the destruction of the Somnath temple idol;
Mahmud of Ghazni was said to have struck off its nose and sent pieces
to Ghazni, Mecca, and Medina.The temple was Shaivite, however, so the
temple idol was not an image but a lingam—a solid stone object, with
no features (and certainly no nose) to be struck off and probably no
hollow inside either to hold (as in many stories) vast quantities of gold
and diamonds (Embree et al. 1988, 437).
British and Hindu nationalist claims that the temple raid had scarred
contemporary Hindus deeply are also hard to demonstrate from 11thcentury evidence. Jaina texts from the region record the event but only
to make the point that the Jaina temple (protected by a stronger god)
escaped unscathed. Sanskrit inscriptions at Somnath say nothing about
it, although the inscriptions do register bitter complaints about the conduct of local Hindu kings, who, it seems, frequently looted pilgrims on
their way to worship.“There are,” historian Romila Thapar concludes in
her review of the Somnath evidence, “no simplistic explanations that
would emerge from any or all of these narratives” (Thapar 1999).
But by the eighth century Chalukya power was gone. In the far south,
the Pandyas held on to their Madurai region by a series of ever-shifting
alliances until the 10th century.
Unlike the Chalukyas, Pandyas, and Cholas—lineages that had
fought one another for power since Mauryan times—the Pallavas were
a new dynasty. One Tamil legend attributed their origin to a love match
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
between a local prince and a Naga (snake) princess from the underworld. Contemporary historians link the Pallavas to an Iranian lineage
(the Pahlavas, or Parthians) that briefly held power in the northwest
during the first century B.C. Pallava kings controlled the eastern peninsula between the Krishna and Kaveri Rivers by the seventh century and
remained powerful for the next 300 years. The last Pallava king died in
the early 10th century.
By the ninth century, the ancient lineage of the Cholas had
reemerged in the south. From 850 to 1279, kings of the Chola dynasty
controlled most of the Tamil-speaking south, including the region
around Tanjore, the Coromandel Coast, and much of the eastern
Deccan. Two Chola kings (Rajaraja I [985–1014] and Rajendra I
[1014–42]) extended the Chola domains to the northern part of Sri
Lanka, which remained a Chola tributary until the 1070s.
Bhakti Is Born
“I was born in Dravida [south India],” says the goddess Bhakti in a
Puranic story about the origins of devotional Hinduism. “I was born in
Dravida and grew up in Karnataka. I lived here and there in
Maharashtra; and became weak and old in Gujarat” (Prentiss 1999, 31).
Although the concept of bhakti appears as early as the Bhagavad
Gita (c. 100 B.C.–A.D. 100), the first bhakti sects are not seen in south
India until the seventh to 10th centuries. They spread throughout
the entire subcontinent during the 12th through 18th centuries.
Bhakti sects were regional movements linking language, geography,
and cultural identities in the devotional worship of a god—and
sometimes blurring distinctions between Hinduism and Islam in the
process.
Bhakti became the most popular form of Hindu worship, not so
much replacing Vedic Hinduism as existing alongside it. The major
bhakti gods were Vishnu (in any of his nine incarnations), Shiva, or a
form of the Mother Goddess (Devi). Shiva was most popular in the
south, Vishnu (particularly in his incarnation as Rama or Krishna) in
northern India, and the Goddess in the east (Bengal). The choice of
god, however, could also be a matter of personal preference, one
brother in a family becoming a Vaishnavite (a devotee of Vishnu), while
another was a Shaivite (a devotee of Shiva).
Sixty-three Shaivites (called the Nayanars) and 12 Vaishnavites (the
Alvars) made up the earliest south Indian bhakti saints. “I have never
failed to worship you,” sang the Tamil saint Appar, “with flowers and
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Plowing for Devotion
I
n this song of the Tamil saint Appar it is clear that farming and the
worship of Shiva are completely intertwined.
Using the plow of truth
sowing the seeds of love
plucking the weeds of falsehood
pouring the water of patience;
They look directly into themselves
and build fences of virtue.
If they remain rooted in their good ways,
the Bliss of Shiva will grow (Prentiss 1999, 92).
incense and water, never failed to sing you in melodious Tamil songs”
(Peterson 1998, 176). The saints sang to all castes and classes of society. They linked their songs to specific Tamil places and to the ordinary
tasks of work and daily life.
Bhakti in South India
The Tamil bhakti movement was quickly linked to a temple-centered
Hinduism in which puja (worship) rather than Vedic sacrifices was the
central mode of veneration. As early as the Pallava dynasty, the songs of
the itinerant saint-devotees were being sung in Hindu temples. Chola
kings built temples to Shiva all across Tamil land, particularly in places
identified in the bhakti saints’ songs. By the 12th century, devotional
songs were a regular part of the liturgy and worship of south Indian
temples. The performance of temple rituals and sacrifices was still the
unique provenance of Brahman priests, but now a special class of nonBrahman Shudra singers was attached to the temples to perform the
bhakti songs.
Although south Indian Hindus recognized the four classes of the
varna system, these four classes were not well represented in south
Indian society. In much of the south the main distinction was between
Brahman and non-Brahman classes, and most non-Brahmans were classified as Shudras. Thus the Vellala community of south India was technically classified as Shudras, although they were quite prosperous, in
many places major landowners, and represented a dominant jati in
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regional society. Despite their Shudra status the Vellalas were allowed
to recite the Tamil saints’ songs in temples.
In the same period as the south Indian bhakti movement, two
south Indian Brahmans used the central insights of the Sanskrit
Upanishads to develop different branches of a philosophy called
Vedanta (the end of the Vedas). The first to do this was Shankara (c.
eighth–ninth century A.D.), who emphasized the reality that underlay the illusions (maya) of life. Only by recognizing this reality can
one escape from the cycle of reincarnation. Moksha (liberation,
release) from reincarnation was, for Shankara, the ultimate goal of
Hinduism. Shankara’s teachings were spread through the subcontinent by the monastic order (matha) he founded and by the missionaries his order sent out. A later philosopher, Ramanuja (c. 12th
century), also a south Indian Brahman, developed a school of
Vedanta that emphasized the importance of devotion (bhakti) in
attaining moksha.
Bhakti in North India
By the 15th century the bhakti movement was present in the north.
By the 18th century it had spread into all Indian regions and vernaculars. In Varanasi (Benares) on the Ganges River, Kabir (1440–1518),
an ex-Muslim weaver, sang of a god without attributes (nirguna),
unlimited by Islamic sectarianism or Hindu caste. In the Punjab,
Nanak (1469–1539) rejected the caste system of his Hindu birth and
founded the Sikh religion, the devotional worship of a monotheistic
nirguna god. In eastern India, the Bengali ex-Brahman Chaitanya
(1485–1533) and his followers replaced caste and Hindu rituals with
ecstatic public dances and songs of devotion to Krishna. Chaitanya’s
Krishna was a god with attributes (saguna), worshiped, not as the
warrior-god of the Mahabharata, but as a naughty child or adolescent
lover. Other 16th-century bhakti saints also sung of saguna gods. The
north Indian Hindi speaker Tulsidas (1543–1623) retold the story of
Rama in the devotional Ramcaritmanas (Spiritual lake of the acts of
Rama). Surdas, a blind saint from Mathura, and Mirabai, a woman
devotee from Rajasthan—both dated by tradition to the reign of the
Mughal emperor Akbar (1556–1605)—worshipped the god Krishna
in their songs. In Maharashtra, Tukaram (1608–49) sang in Marathi to
the god Vitobha (a form of Vishnu). As in the south, bhakti worship
was incorporated into Hindu temples, but bhajan maths (singing
halls) were also built in many north Indian towns where saints and
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their followers could meet, sing, and worship their god. Sang Surdas
to the god Krishna (Hari):
Songs to Hari work great wonders.
They elevate the lowly of the world,
who celebrate their lofty climb with drums.
To come to the feet of the Lord in song
is enough to make stones float on the sea. . . .
(Embree et al. 1988, 362)
Mirabai Worships Krishna
One of the most popular of bhakti saints in north India was Mirabai.
According to legend, she was a Rajput princess devoted to the god Krishna
from childhood. Forced to marry, she nevertheless dedicated herself only
to the god Krishna. In her in-laws’ home she refused to bow to her
mother-in-law or to the family’s household goddess. In spite of her sisterin-law’s pleas she spent her time with wandering holy men. When the
rana (the king, and her father-in-law) tried to poison her, the god Krishna
transformed the poison and saved Mirabai’s life. She eventually left her inlaws’ home to became a wandering saint; according to legend she disappeared, drawn into the Krishna image one day as she worshipped it.
Mirabai’s devotion shows the unselfish devotion of the true wife. Her
struggle to maintain this devotion reveals the many difficulties women
faced in their in-laws’ homes and shows a strength of character often
found in popular Hindu goddesses:
Life without Hari is no life, friend,
And though my mother-in-law fights,
my sister-in-law teases,
the rana is angered,
A guard is stationed on a stool outside,
and a lock is mounted on the door,
How can I abandon the love I have loved
in life after life?
Mira’s Lord is the clever Mountain Lifter:
Why would I want anyone else?
(Hawley and Juergensmeyer 2004, 134)
(In one legend, the boy-god Krishna holds aloft Mount Govardhan to
shelter cows and cowherds from the anger of the rain-god Indra.)
Persecution of Jains and Buddhists
During the seventh to 12th centuries south Indian kings increasingly
identified themselves as devotees (bhaktas) of particular Hindu gods.
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Kings of the Pallava, Pandya, or Chola dynasties incorporated the institutions and ceremonies of devotional Puranic Hinduism into their royal
functions and used this new revived Hinduism to solidify their control
over the peoples and territories they claimed. Kings built temples dedicated to the god with whom they identified, generously endowed those
temples’ operations, and gifted whole villages to temples, to Brahmans,
or to Brahman communities. Kings gave these gifts in temple pujas, ceremonies that now replaced older Vedic rituals as the way a king legitimated his relationships. Such gifts left kings constantly searching for
new sources of land or wealth. The more plunder a ruler had, the more
subordinates (such as lesser kings, temple officials, and Brahman jatis)
he could bring under his sway.
Where earlier rulers had given gifts and used ceremonies drawn from
many different religions, south Indian kings were increasingly willing
to consider the rivals and enemies of the Hindu sect they endorsed as
their own rivals and enemies. Tamil bhakti saints sang of the differences
among themselves (as devotees of Shiva) and the Buddhist monks or
Jaina ascetics with whom they competed for royal favor. “The Jains who
expose their skulls,” sang the saint Appar, “Conceal Shiva with their
minds. / But is it possible to conceal him?” (Prentiss 1999, 72). After
the Shaivite saint Appar converted the Pallava king Mahendravarman I
(c. A.D. 580–630) from Jainism to Shaivism, a 12th-century Shaivite
text tells us, the king attacked the Jains’ temples and monks. According
to another legend, after the Shaivite saint Campantar defeated the Jains
in debate in the Pandya-ruled city of Madurai, 8,000 Jaina monks were
impaled on stakes.
By the 13th century, as a result of these persecutions, Jaina and
Buddhist communities in south India had lost influence and power. The
Jaina religion survived in western India, where it retains a strong presence down to the present day. Buddhism, however, disappeared entirely
from India. In north India Buddhism was incorporated into Hinduism,
the Buddha appearing as one of the nine incarnations (avatars) of the
god Vishnu. In the mountain regions farther to the north—the old centers of Gandharan culture—Buddhism disappeared as local populations
converted to Islam.
The Delhi Sultanate
The Delhi Sultanate was not a single dynasty but a succession of five unrelated lineages: the Slave, or Mamluk, dynasty; the Khaljis; the Tughluqs;
the Sayyids; and the Lodis. For more than 300 years (1206–1526) the sul68
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tans (rulers) of these lineages ruled a north Indian kingdom with its capital at Delhi. At its largest the sultanate controlled virtually all of India,
but at its weakest it could barely rule its own capital and the encircling
villages.
Sultanate lineages came from Turkish and Afghan military clans, initially forced into the subcontinent by tribal movements related to the
expanding Islamic Empire. In theory the sultans governed as Muslims
under the political authority of the caliph at Baghdad; in reality they
were independent kings, most focused on wealth and glory. During the
first two centuries of the sultanate, Delhi sultans faced the constant
threat of attacks from the Mongol armies that swept across Central Asia
and into Persia and Arabia. By 1258 the Mongols had destroyed the
caliphate itself at Baghdad. Mongol power cut off local Turks and
Afghans from their original homelands beyond the mountains, while, at
the same time, making the sultan capital at Delhi an attractive refuge
for Muslim elites fleeing south.
The Mongol Threat
The Mongols were a nomadic, pastoral people based in the arid grasslands north of China. Mongol tribes had been unified in the early 13th
century under the leadership of Chinggis Khan, whose grandson would
found the Yuan dynasty in China. In 1220 the killing of a Mongol emissary brought Mongol cavalry under Chinggis Khan to the Oxus River
region north of the Indian subcontinent. A second Mongol invasion
destroyed the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad in 1258 and established
Mongol rulers in territories that reached from the Mediterranean
through Central Asia and into China.
As Mongol armies terrorized lands to India’s north and west, successive sultans kept the Mongols from overrunning India by a combination
of diplomacy, military skill, and luck. Attacks from Mongol forces
between 1229 and 1241 overran the Punjab region but were stopped at
the Mamluk dynasty’s Indus border. During the Khalji dynasty, the
Mongols attacked four separate times—1299, 1303, 1305, 1306—but
each time the sultan’s armies drove them back. Throughout the 13th
and 14th centuries, the sultan’s court at Delhi was a refuge for elite
Muslims—scholars, religious leaders, and intellectuals—fleeing
Mongol violence beyond India’s borders.
At the end of the 14th century, a Turkish/Mongol ruler Timur
(Tamerlane) based in Transoxiania (modern Uzbekistan) conquered
Persia and occupied Russia. The violence of Timur’s campaigns exceeded
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
even the Mongol heritage he claimed as his own. In 1398–99 Timur’s
armies, already resident in the Punjab, occupied, sacked, and plundered
Delhi, dragging back across the northern mountains wealth and thousands of slaves; behind him, in Delhi, Timur left towers made out of the
skulls of slaughtered Delhi residents. Timur’s invasion broke the power
of the Tughluq dynasty, which was overthrown in 1413.
Sultanate Dynasties
The power of the Delhi sultans, as that of Indian kings before them, was
based on constant warfare and on alliances with conquered lesser kings.
Sultans also faced the constant threat of plots by sons, wives, relatives,
and courtiers, all eager for their power. What was gained in one season
might easily be lost in the next. As the sultans expanded their territories across north India, they appointed Muslim subordinates to govern
regions they had conquered. In this way Muslim rule spread through
north India, for when a region declared its independence from the sultan, the ruler who did so, more often than not, was also a Muslim.
The first dynasty of the Sultanate was the Mamluk, or Slave, dynasty,
established by Qutbuddin Aibak, who proclaimed himself sultan of
Delhi in 1206, when the last Ghurid ruler was assassinated. Qutbuddin
was a Mamluk, a Turkish military slave bought as a child and trained to
fight for his masters. Mamluks were widely used throughout kingdoms
in Central Asia, Persia, and the rest of the Islamic Empire. They made
fierce and skillful soldiers, particularly as cavalrymen, and were famed
for their ability to fire their crossbows backward as they galloped away
from an enemy. Qutbuddin, however, died in a polo accident in 1211.
His son-in-law and successor, Iltutmish (ruled 1211–36), secured the
kingdom’s northern frontier along the Indus River and expanded its territories into Sind, Rajasthan, and Bengal. The sultan pacified his Hindu
subjects by granting all Hindus the status of dhimmis. His daughter
Raziyya (ruled 1236–39), succeeded him on his death, the only Muslim
woman ever to rule in India. Within three years she was murdered by a
coalition of palace guards (known collectively as “the Forty”), one of
whom, Balban, later ruled as sultan between 1265 and 1287.
The Khalji dynasty, founded by Jalauddin Firuz Khalji (ruled
1290–96), had Turkish origins but had long been settled in the Afghan
region. The second Khalji sultan, Alauddin (1296–1316), used gold
gained from his raids in the Deccan to arrange his uncle’s assassination
and then to buy the loyalty of his nobles. Alauddin’s army—funded
through increased taxation—successfully repelled repeated Mongol
attacks between 1299 and 1306. When the Mongols withdrew,
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Alauddin sent his armies south under the command of Malik Kafur, a
Hindu convert from Gujarat with whom the emperor was said to have
a homosexual relationship. The Khalji forces conquered as far south as
the city of Madurai, giving the sultan dominion over virtually all of
India. By 1316, however, when Alauddin died, the empire was in disarray. Malik Kafur was killed by his own soldiers, and both Gujarat and
Rajasthan had regained independence.
The Tughluq lineage was founded by Ghiyasuddin Tughluq in a
revolt against the Khaljis in 1320. Both Ghiyasuddin and his heir died
suddenly in 1325, when a pavilion collapsed, and another son,
Muhammad (ruled 1325–51) came to the throne. Muhammad’s reign
was characterized by plans to rebuild the empire and by idiosyncratic
decisions that suggest he may have been mentally unstable. In 1327, in
an effort to gain better control over conquered south Indian territories,
he attempted to move the capital—his administration and all Delhi residents—500 miles south to the Deccan. Many died in the move, and
heat and health conditions later caused the Deccan capital to be abandoned. In the same period Muhammad also introduced a new copper
and brass currency, which had to be withdrawn several years later
because of difficulties with forgeries. In 1335–42, when a severe
drought caused famine and death in the Delhi region, the sultanate
offered no help to the starving residents. The latter years of
Muhammad’s rule saw many regions of his empire in rebellion. The
Deccan became increasingly independent, and in 1336 the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar was founded. In 1339 Bengal became independent
under a Muslim ruler.
In 1351 Muhammad died from fever while in Sind trying to quell a
rebellion. His cousin Firuz Shah (ruled 1351–88) was the choice of
court nobles and religious leaders. Firuz repaid these nobles and orthodox ulama for his appointment by returning previously confiscated
estates and lands, building no fewer than 40 mosques, and through
laws that required that Brahmans (previously exempt) to pay the jizya
(a tax on non-Muslims). After his death, the dynasty had no strong
rulers and was finally destroyed at the end of the century by the invasion of Timur.
The Sayyids, a Turkish clan, took power in 1414 and remained in
control until 1450. From this time on, regional Muslim rulers controlled most of what had once been sultanate lands. Sind, Gujarat,
Malwa, the Deccan, and Bengal were all governed by independent
Muslim rulers. The Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar held the southern
peninsula, and independent Hindu Rajputs ruled in Rajasthan. During
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the rule of the last Sayyid, Alauddin Alam Shah (1445–51), the Delhi
Sultanate ruled over little more than the city of Delhi and its immediate surrounding villages.
The last dynasty was founded by a Sayyid provincial governor,
Buhlul Lodi (ruled 1451–89). The Lodis were descended from Afghans,
and under their rule Afghans eclipsed Turks in court patronage.
Buhlul’s son Sikandar (ruled 1489–1517) once again extended the sultanate control to the northern reaches of the Indus and southeast along
the Ganges River valley up to, but not including, Bengal. The last Lodi,
Sikandar’s son Ibrahim (ruled 1517–26), antagonized his own Afghan
nobles by assertions of the absolute power of the sultanate. They
appealed for help to Kabul, where Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, a
Turkic descendant of both Timur and Chinggis Khan, had established a
small kingdom.
Vijayanagar and the Bahmani Sultanate
In south India, in 1336 a Hindu who had converted to Islam in order to
serve the Tughluq dynasty rebelled, founded the city and kingdom of
Vijayanagar, and became its first king. He ruled as Harihara I
(1336–57). By 1343, Vijayanagar included virtually all of the southern
half of the peninsula. Its rulers protected themselves by adopting
Muslim tactics, cavalry, and forts. Vijayanagar kings developed tankirrigated agriculture in their higher lands and made their coastal
regions into a center of trade between Europe and Southeast Asia. Their
greatest kings ruled in the 16th century: Krishnadevaraya (1509–29),
Achyutadevaraya (1529–42), and Aliya Rama Raja (1542–65).
Further north in the Deccan, the Bahmani Sultanate was founded by
a local Muslim ruler, Hasan Gangu, who declared his independence
from the Delhi Sultanate in 1347. Over the next 200 years, Bahmani
rulers fought Vijayanagar kings over the rich doab (land between two
rivers) on their border. In 1518 the sultanate split into five smaller
ones: Admadnagar, Berar, Bidar, Bijapur, and Golconda. In 1565 these
five kingdoms combined to attack and defeat Vijayanagar. All five
Deccani sultanates were subsequently absorbed by the Mughal Empire.
The Mughal Empire
Babur, the ruler of Kabul, had dreamed for 20 years of conquering India.
In 1526, when discontented Lodi nobles invited him to save them from
their power-mad sultan, Babur invaded India. At Panipat in 1526 his
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mobile cavalry, matchlock-equipped infantry, and light cannon drove the
sultan’s larger army and war elephants from the field. A year later Babur’s
cavalry and firepower had a second victory, this time over a confederacy
of Hindu Rajput kings with an army of 500 armored elephants.
Babur became the first ruler of the Mughal dynasty, which continued to
rule powerfully and effectively for nearly 200 years (1526–1707) and then
survived in a much weaker form through to the mid-19th century. At the
height of the great Mughals’ rule the empire covered almost all of the subcontinent and had a population of perhaps 150 million. The wealth and
opulence of the Mughal court was famed throughout the world. Even
today the vibrancy of Mughal miniature paintings and the elegance of the
Taj Mahal show us the Mughals’ greatness. For Mughal contemporaries,
Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne more than demonstrated the empire’s
wealth: Ten million rupees’ worth of rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and
pearls were set in a gold encrusted throne that took artisans seven years to
complete.
No one could foresee this greatness, however, in 1530, when Babur
died in Agra and his son Humayun took the throne. Humayun, an opium
addict, found himself under attack from his four younger brothers and
the even stronger ruler of Bengal, Sher Shah (ruled 1539–45). Sher Shah
drove Humayun out of India and eventually into refuge at the court of the
Persian Safavids. There, to gain the court’s acceptance, Humayun converted to the Shiite sect of Islam. In return the shah sent him back to
India in 1555 with a Persian army large enough to defeat his enemies.
Within a year, however, Humayun died from a fall on the stone steps of
his Delhi observatory. His son, Akbar, was 12 years old at the time.
Akbar
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar became emperor 17 days after his father’s
sudden death in 1556. An accord among the regime’s nobles placed the
boy under the authority of a regent, Bairam Khan. By 1560 Akbar and
his regent had expanded Mughal rule across the Indo-Gangetic heartland between Lahore and Agra. Within two decades, Akbar, now ruling
on his own, extended the Mughal Empire into Rajasthan (1570), Gujarat
(1572), and Bihar (1574). By the 1580s he would annex the provinces
of Sind and Kashmir, and by 1600 he would take Berar in the Deccan.
Akbar’s military expansion was accompanied by the use of both
diplomacy and force. Over the 40 years of his reign, which ended with
his death in 1605, Akbar diluted his own Turkish clan within the
Mughal nobility and gave the high rank of emir to men of Persian,
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Portrait of Aged Akbar, a 17th-century portrait of Akbar as an old man, attributed to
Govardhan (c. 1640–50). Govardhan was one of a number of artists at the emperor Jahangir’s
court who developed individual artistic styles. (Govardham [artist], Indian, active c. 1600–c. 1656.
Portrait of Aged Akbar, c. 1640–1650. Ink and gold on paper, 25.2 × 16.8 cm. © The Cleveland Museum
of Art, 2004.Andrew R. Martha Holden Jennings Fund, 1971. 78)
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Rajput Martial Clans
T
he Rajput (sons of the king) military clans that first appear in the
ninth and 10th centuries in northwestern and central India were
probably descended from earlier Central Asian tribes and may not have
had any hereditary connections to one another. Nevertheless, Rajput
clans claimed ancient Hindu and Kshatriya status based on genealogies
linking them to the Hindu solar or lunar royal dynasties and on legends
connecting mythological Rajput founders with Vedic fire rituals.
Rajputs successfully maintained their independence through much of
the Delhi Sultanate. Under the Mughals they were both defeated and
incorporated into the Mughal nobility.Akbar defeated the great Mewar
clan through sieges of its key cities, Chitor and Rathambor, in 1567–69.
But he also encouraged the Rajputs to become part of his court.Akbar
made his first Rajput marriage alliance in 1562, marrying the daughter
of the Rajput of Amber. By 1670, all Rajputs but the king of Mewar had
accepted noble status and sometimes marriage alliances with Akbar. In
these alliances Rajput kings kept control over their ancestral lands, but
in all other ways came under Mughal authority. Under future emperors
the Rajputs remained a key Hindu element within the Mughal nobility.
As late as Shah Jahan’s reign (the 1640s), 73 of the 90 Hindus in the
higher mansabdari (Mughal service) ranks were Rajputs.
Under the emperor Aurangzeb, however, the percentage of Rajput
nobles decreased, and new administrative rules limited the lands (jagirs)
from which Rajputs could collect revenues.Aurangzeb’s more orthodox
Islamism also led him to attempt to place a Muslim convert on the
Marwar clan’s throne. All these changes led to the Rajput war of 1679
and to the Rajputs’ support of Aurangzeb’s son Akbar II in his unsuccessful effort to overthrow his father in 1781. Although Aurangzeb
ended the Rajput rebellion and forced one Rajput clan, the Mewars, to
surrender, and although his son’s coup failed, the Marwar Rajputs
remained in rebellion against the Mughals for a generation.
Indian Muslim, and Hindu (mostly Rajput) descent. At the same time,
in the 1567 siege of the Rajput city of Chitor, Akbar demonstrated the
high cost of resistance to his will: His armies destroyed the fort itself,
massacred its inhabitants, and killed 25,000 residents in the surrounding villages.
Akbar was a brilliant military commander and a man of great personal charisma and charm. Illiterate—and perhaps dyslexic (four tutors
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tried to teach him how to read)—he was still curious and interested in
history, religion, and philosophy. Above all, Akbar was a great leader of
men not only on the battlefield but also within his own court and
administration. It was the structures of Mughal organization and
administration devised by Akbar and his Muslim and Hindu ministers
that held the Mughal Empire together over the next century and a half.
After 1560 Akbar administered his empire through four ministers:
one each for finance, military organization, the royal household, and
religious/legal affairs. He reserved for himself control over the army,
relations with other rulers, and appointments/promotions in rank. The
Mughal system assigned all mansabdars (those in Mughal service) a
rank that specified status, salary, and assignment. Ranks were not
hereditary; they could change as a result of service, great courage in battle, or the emperor’s wish. Each mansabdar provided the Mughals with
a fixed number of soldiers (determined by rank) and, in return, each
received a salary. Higher-ranking mansabdars might also receive a jagir
(the right to collect land revenues from a specified village or region).
The Mughal War Machine
War was the business of the great Mughals. Mughal emperors from Akbar
through Aurangzeb spent fully one-half their time at war. Mughal wars
were initially fought to bring the different regions of the subcontinent
under Mughal authority, and then, subsequently, Mughal military power
and warfare was used to maintain Mughal rule against unruly regional
powers. As early as the end of Akbar’s reign, the Mughal war machine was
so powerful that local and regional rulers saw their only alternatives as
surrender or death. The Mughals, however, never solved the problem of
succession. The saying went, “takht ya takhta” (throne or coffin) (Spear
1963, xiii), and before and after the death of each emperor, contending
heirs turned the great Mughal army viciously against itself.
Under the Mughal system, as it evolved, all mansabdars, whether
noble or non-noble, military or bureaucratic, were required to recruit,
train, command, and pay a fixed number of soldiers or cavalry for the
emperor’s armies. The number of soldiers varied from 10 to 10,000,
with the lowest mansabdars providing the former and the highest
nobles the latter. This system gave Mughal emperors a ready, wellequipped army, and they depended on these armies and their mansabdar leaders to extend and preserve the Mughal Empire. At the end of
Akbar’s reign, 82 percent of the regime’s revenues and budget supported
the mansabdars, their troops, and assistants.
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The Mughal administrative system existed to funnel vast sums to its
armies. As Mughal land revenues paid the mansabdars, Akbar’s Hindu
revenue minister, Todar Mal, ordered a survey of Mughal north Indian
lands. Beginning in 1580 Mughal revenue officials determined land
holdings, climate, soil fertility, and appropriate rent assessments at the
district level. Annual assessments were set at approximately one-third
the crop (lower than had been traditional or would be customary later).
Taxes were to be partially remitted in years of bad crops. Local chiefs
and zamindars (lords of the land) could keep only 10 percent of the revenues they collected each year. Unlike earlier tributary relationships
between kings and subordinates, Mughal rule required local rulers to
pay an annual tax based on crops and place all but lands personally
occupied under Mughal fiscal and administrative control.
Akbar’s Religion
This more intensive administrative control, however, was accompanied
in Akbar’s reign by greater religious freedom. Early in his reign (1563)
the emperor abolished taxes on Hindu pilgrims and allowed Hindu temples to be built and repaired. In 1564, he abolished the jizya (the tax
paid by all non-Muslim dhimmis). “Both Hindus and Muslims are one in
my eyes,” one imperial edict declared, and thus “are exempt from the
payment of jazia [jizya]” (Richards 1993, 90). Land grants were still
made to Muslims and the court ulama, but now they also went to
monasteries, Zoroastrians (Indian followers of Iranian Zoroastrianism,
later called Parsis), and Brahman priests. Cow slaughter was even prohibited late in Akbar’s reign.
On a personal level, Akbar’s religious convictions also changed. As a
young man he had been a devotee of the Sufi saint Sheikh Salim Chishti
(d. 1581), but by the 1570s he was developing more eclectic religious
ideas. He invited representative Hindus, Jains, Parsis, Sikhs, and
Christians to debate religious ideas in his Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private
Audiences). He began to practice his own “Divine Faith,” a form of
worship centered on the Sun. High nobles were encouraged to become
Akbar’s personal disciples, agreeing to repudiate orthodox Islam and
worship Allah directly.
Over the course of his long reign, at least half of which was spent at
war, Akbar was frequently on the move. He had capitals at both Agra
and Lahore and at the city of Fatehpur Sikri, which he built outside Agra
and used as a capital between 1571 and 1585. The emperor also took
much of his court, wives, children, and servants with him on military
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
campaigns. The Jesuit Antonio Monserrate, who tutored Akbar’s second
son, accompanied the emperor on one such expedition into Afghanistan
in 1581. The entire court lived in a great white city of tents, after the
fashion of the Mongols. On the right, Monserrate wrote, were located
“the tents of the King’s eldest son and his attendant nobles; these are
placed next to the royal pavilion. . . . [Behind the tents of the King’s sons
and nobles] come the rest of the troop in tents clustered as closely as
possible round their own officers” (Richards 1993, 42).
Europeans in India
During the 16th–17th centuries, the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and
French established trade with India, built “factories” (warehouses) in
various Indian ports, and hired independent armies to protect them.
Trade was lucrative: Imports of black pepper to Europe in 1621 were
valued at £7 million. Cotton textiles were the second most valuable
commodity, with Indian silks, indigo, saltpeter, and other spices following behind. Unlike China or Japan in these centuries, Europeans
could travel freely in Mughal India and had settled in most major cities
by the end of the 17th century.
Trading wars (and actual armed conflict) between European companies in India were frequent. The Portuguese initially dominated
Indian and Asian trade from their Goa settlement (1510). The Jesuit
missionary Francis Xavier (1506–52) came to Goa in 1542, and as
early as Akbar’s reign Jesuits were in residence at the Mughal court,
working both as Christian missionaries and to further Portuguese trading interests. Portugal’s union with Spain (1580), however, the defeat
of the Spanish Armada (1588), and Portuguese naval defeats in the
Indian Ocean all reduced Portuguese dominance in India. Under a
grant from Jahangir, the English established factories at Surat and
Bombay (1612), Madras (1639), and Calcutta (1690). By 1650 the
Dutch controlled the Southeast Asian spice trade from their bases on
Sri Lanka. In the late 1660s the French company established settlements at Surat and Pondicherry (south of Madras) and in Bengal
upriver from Calcutta.
The Great Mughals
By Akbar’s death in 1605, the Mughal military and administrative systems were well established and would remain, more or less unchanged,
through the reign of the last great Mughal, Aurangzeb (1658–1707).
78
TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
Daulatabad
0
0
500 miles
500 kilometers
Mughal military expansion was blocked to the far north by mountainous terrain and resistant hill tribes, to the east and west by the oceans,
and to the south at the Kaveri River and—in spite of Aurangzeb’s
efforts—by Deccani resistance.
The Mughals maintained public order throughout this vast empire
through constant military readiness and a well-organized infrastructure. Hindu service castes such as the Khatris and Kayasthas, as well
as Brahmans, had learned Persian and staffed the provincial levels of
Mughal government. An extensive road system, built and maintained
by a public works department, connected the Agra-Delhi region to
the provinces, allowing for the easy movement of troops and the
securing of routes against roving bandits or local armies. A far-flung
“postal system” of couriers relayed paper reports, news, orders, and
funds back and forth from the imperial center to the mofussil (rural)
periphery.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Trade flourished in markets, towns, and cities throughout the
empire, and the manufacturing of traded goods was widely dispersed.
Cotton textiles, such as calicoes, muslins, and piece goods, were the
largest manufactured product, produced for both internal and external
trade. Economically the Mughals were self-sufficient. Foreign traders
found they needed gold or silver to purchase products desired in
Europe or Southeast Asia.
This centralized, orderly, and prosperous empire did not survive
Aurangzeb’s reign. Its greatest problem was not the religious differences
between Muslim rulers and Hindu populations; Muslim rulers adapted
their religious convictions to the realities of governing a mostly Hindu
land. The Mughals’ great weakness was succession: From Babur through
Aurangzeb and beyond, an uncertain succession pitted impatient sons
against aging fathers, and brothers against brothers in violent, costly,
vicious struggles that only escalated in destructiveness throughout the
Mughal period.
Jahangir
Jahangir (ruled 1605–27), Akbar’s eldest son and heir, became emperor
after a six-year struggle that began with his own attempt to overthrow
his father in 1599 and ended with his own son Khusrau’s attempt to
usurp the throne. On his deathbed Akbar recognized Jahangir as
emperor, and Khusrau was imprisoned and partially blinded. Khusrau’s
supporters, among whom was the fifth Sikh guru, Arjun, were all captured and executed.
Jahangir maintained with little change the lands he inherited from
his father and continued Akbar’s political alliances and his policy of
religious tolerance. He allowed the Jesuits to maintain churches in his
capital cities, and he treated both Hindu holy men and Sufi saints with
reverence. Like his father Jahangir took a number of Hindu wives. Like
Akbar he also encouraged court nobles to become his personal disciples. The mixture of Persian and Indian elements in Mughal court culture became more pronounced during his reign. Persian was now the
language of court, administration, and cultural life throughout Mughal
India. Court artists, both Hindu and Muslim, developed distinctively
“Mughlai” styles of painting and portraiture.
In 1611 Jahangir married Nur Jahan (light of the world), the beautiful
Muslim widow of one of his officers who was also the daughter of one of
his high-ranking nobles. Nur Jahan, in conjunction with her father and
brother, dominated court politics for the remainder of Jahangir’s reign.
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TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
Origins of the Sikh Khalsa
T
he Sikh religion was founded in the early 16th century by the first
guru, Nanak (1469–1539). Guru Nanak taught a monotheistic,
devotional religion that accepted Hindu ideas of reincarnation and
karma but rejected caste.This religion proved popular among Hindu Jat
peasants in the Punjab. Up to 1708 the community was led by 10 Sikh
gurus, and during this time the Sikh sacred scriptures (the Granth Sahib,
or Adi Granth) were compiled in a special Sikh script, gurumukhi (from
the Guru’s mouth).
The third and fourth gurus were patronized by Akbar. But the fifth
guru,Arjun (1563–1606) was tortured to death by Jahangir on suspicion
of treachery. Arjun’s son and successor, Hargobind, fled to the
Himalayan foothills with armed followers.The ninth guru,Tegh Bahadur
(1621–75), was executed by Aurangzeb when he refused to convert to
Islam. The two young sons of the 10th and last guru, Gobind Rai
(1666–1708), were executed by Aurangzeb’s successors, and the guru
himself was assassinated when he sought to protest their murder.At his
death Gobind Rai declared himself the last of the gurus and vested his
authority in the Adi Granth, which was to guide Sikhs in the future.
Constant Mughal-Sikh conflict during the 16th–18th centuries forged
the Sikhs into a fighting force, a khalsa (an army of the pure). As signs of
membership in this army, male Sikhs left their beards and hair uncut,
always carried a comb and a sword, and wore steel bracelets on the right
wrist and knee-length martial shorts.The Sikhs remained a powerful military force in the Punjab into the mid-19th century.
Shah Jahan
Jahangir died in 1627. His son Shah Jahan (ruled 1627–58) assumed
the throne at the age of 35, after a brief but bloody succession struggle
that was resolved by the execution of two brothers and several adult
male cousins. At the time, Shah Jahan was already a mature general in
his father’s armies. Over the course of his reign he maintained Mughal
military dominance against challenges from Afghan nobles, through
campaigns in Sind, and against regional rulers in Central India. He
ruled a mature empire, enormous in size and wealth, where the revenues from a large district in Lahore or Agra brought in more than 1
million rupees each year.
Shah Jahan was a seasoned general, and his army overall was larger
than it had been in Akbar’s time. Yet he spent a smaller proportion of
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
his wealth on military and government officials than had his grandfather. Instead he directed a series of spectacular building projects. For
his coronation he had the Peacock Throne constructed. At the death of
his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, he commissioned the Taj Mahal as an
eventual tomb for both their bodies. In 1639 he ordered a new capital
city, Shajahanabad, to be built on a site just south of Delhi. When finished in 1648, the new city contained a great royal fortress and the
largest mosque in India, the Jama Masjid.
During Shah Jahan’s reign, a Sufi revival movement was urging Sunni
Muslims to adhere strictly to the orthodox sharia laws. Perhaps this, as
much as personal inclination, accounts for the more Muslim style of
Shah Jahan’s rule. He celebrated Islamic festivals with great enthusiasm
and resumed sponsorship of a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. Beginning in
1633 he enforced sharia laws forbidding the repair of churches or temples. In his relations with court nobles he abandoned the personal discipleship encouraged by his father and grandfather, emphasizing
instead the long-standing familial ties Muslim nobles had with Mughal
rulers. By the middle of his reign all the highest nobles and 80 percent
of middle-ranking mansabdars were Muslim.
Conflict among Shah Jahan’s adult sons (and their court factions)
preoccupied the last years of the emperor’s reign. Dara Shukoh, the
emperor’s favorite and appointed heir, shared his great-grandfather’s
Jama Masjid, New Delhi. Built by Shah Jahan in the 17th century, this is one of the largest and
finest mosques in India. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
Taj Mahal, Agra.The Taj was built by Shah Jahan as a memorial and resting place for his
favorite wife, Arjurnand Bano Begam (otherwise known as Mumtaz Mahal, “ornament of the
palace”).They were married in 1612, and all 14 of Shah Jahan’s subsequent children were
hers. She died in 1631, at the age of 39, giving birth to her 15th child. Construction of the Taj,
which would provide a tomb for the bodies of both Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan, began in
1632. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
ecumenical interest in religion. He had had the Upanishads translated
into Persian and believed that they reflected a monotheistic religious
sensibility that was, at its core, Islamic. Dara attracted those at court
who yearned for a return to Akbar’s more religiously diverse court. At
the opposite pole was Shah Jahan’s third son, Aurangzeb. An excellent
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
military commander and experienced administrator, Aurangzeb was a
pious Muslim. “He pretended to be a faquir (faqir), a holy mendicant,”
observed an unsympathetic Italian at the court, “by which he
renounced the world, gave up all claim to the crown, and was content
to pass his life in prayers and mortifications” (Richards 1995, 153).
Aurangzeb attracted those who wanted a court committed to Islam and
the institution of a religiously orthodox state.
Aurangzeb
When Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in 1657, these two court factions
turned the Mughal military inward upon itself. The struggle for succession lasted two years. It ended with Aurangzeb (ruled 1658–1707) as
emperor; his father, Shah Jahan, imprisoned; and all three of his brothers dead. Dara Shukoh was executed after the Delhi ulama convicted
him of apostasy and idolatry.
Aurangzeb’s rule inaugurated a more aggressively orthodox and
Islamic court culture. The new austerity curtailed large building projects, ended Mughal patronage of musicians and painters, and banned
wine and opium from court. The sharia, as interpreted by court ulama,
was to provide the ideological basis for Mughal government. New temple construction was banned, and old temples and idols were often
destroyed; new taxes were imposed on temple pilgrims and Hindu merchants; and in 1679 the jizya was again imposed on all Hindus.
Aurangzeb also sought to increase the number of Muslims in Mughal
service and to restrict Rajput access to the higher mansabdari ranks.
When he learned that the ninth Sikh guru had converted Muslims to
his religion, Aurangzeb had him arrested and put to death. His armies
pursued the 10th guru for years in the Himalayan foothills.
The first 30 years of Aurangzeb’s reign aimed at creating a more
Islamic Mughal regime. But in 1681, in part because of the emperor’s
anti-Hindu policies, Rajput clans supported the efforts of a son,
Akbar II, to usurp the throne. The attempt failed, and Akbar fled to
the Maratha kingdom and eventually to the court of the Persian
kings. Aurangzeb, fearing a possible coalition of enemies at court
with Rajputs, independent Deccani sultans, and Marathas, determined to bring the Deccan under his control. He marched south, taking with him his own army, the armies of his three sons, and those of
his major generals. In 1685 he defeated the sultans of Bijapur (the
Karnatak) and Golconda (Hyderabad). In 1689 his forces tracked
down and killed the Maratha king Sambhaji. By then Mughal territo84
TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
Shivaji and the Marathas
T
he Maratha peoples originated among the non-Muslim, nonBrahman cultivators of the Deccan plains. By the 16th century they
were soldiers and administrators within Deccani Muslim governments.
Their most famous leader, Shivaji Bhonsle (1627–80), began to build his
kingdom and his army of mobile guerrilla fighters at the age of 18. His
exploits and the daring of his guerrilla forces became legendary in the
Deccan. In 1659, surrounded by Muslim troops, he disemboweled the
general Afzal Khan with “tiger claws” strapped to his fingers. In 1665,
offended by Aurangzeb’s treatment, he escaped imprisonment in Agra
(allegedly by hiding in a basket) and returned to the Deccan on foot. In
1674, after Brahman ritual specialists invested him with the sacred
thread and Kshatriya status, Shivaji installed himself as ruler in an elaborate Vedic ritual employing thousands of priests and reputedly costing
5 million rupees.At the time of his death in 1680, Shivaji’s Maratha kingdom extended the length of the Konkan hills in the west and included
smaller domains to the southeast, the largest centered on Tanjore city.
Shivaji’s heir, Sambhaji (ruled 1680–89), supported the failed coup of
Aurangzeb’s son Akbar II in 1681 and was hunted down, tortured, and
killed by the Mughals in 1689—his body torn apart and thrown to dogs.
But although the Mughal emperor annexed the Deccan the next year,
neither he nor his successors could stamp out Maratha power. In 1714,
the Mughals gave the Marathas all of Shivaji’s earlier territories in return
for a yearly tribute.
During the 18th century, a series of literate Chitpavan Brahman
peshwas (prime ministers) shaped the Marathas into a powerful confederacy. Shivaji’s grandson Shahu (1682–1749) appointed Balaji
Vishwanath (ruled 1713–20) as the first peshwa; the position became
hereditary with his son, Bajirao I (ruled 1720–40). Peshwa bureaucrats,
based in Pune (Poona), used Mughal techniques to organize the confederacy and farm out its extensive land revenues. Marauding Maratha
armies periodically swept across the north India plains in plundering
raids that in 1742 reached the outskirts of Calcutta. By 1751 Maratha
Confederacy territories extended north into Rajasthan, Delhi, and the
Punjab and south into the Karnatak and Tamil land.
ries extended from the Himalayas to all but the very tip of the Indian
peninsula.
But the Marathas refused to surrender. Aurangzeb spent the last 20
years of his life in the Deccan, much of it living in a giant tent city 30
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
miles in circumference, vainly attempting to bring the Deccan under his
control. Even after Mughal troops killed Sambhaji’s brother Rajaram in
1698, Rajaram’s widow, Tara Bai, fought on as regent for her infant son.
From 1700 to 1705 the Mughals repeatedly besieged and captured
Maratha hill fortresses only to have the Marathas recapture them as
soon as the Mughals withdrew. In the countryside, Maratha armies collected the land revenues before the Mughals could secure them.
In the north, Mughal administrative and fiscal systems were breaking down. The cost of the Deccan war was depleting the treasury even
as the growing practice of “tax farming” (hiring a third party to collect
revenues from a jagir) was reducing overall revenues. The old mansabdari military system was no longer honored—soldiers were either not
provided or inadequately horsed and equipped. Rebellion, disorder, and
disaffection were breaking out even in the Indo-Gangetic heartland. In
the late 1680s, Hindu Jat peasants south of Agra plundered Mughal
supply trains with such impunity that Aurangzeb had to send troops
from the Deccan to stop them.
In 1705, old and ill, Aurangzeb abandoned his war and began a slow
march north. Two years later he died, in his tent city outside
Aurangabad. “My famous and auspicious sons should not quarrel
among themselves and allow a general massacre of the people,” he
wrote in almost identical letters to his three sons and heirs shortly
before his death. “My years have gone by profitless. . . . I have greatly
sinned and know not what torment awaits me” (Smith 1958, 426).
Muslim Society
The Muslim society that developed across India over the centuries of
Muslim rule was divided into elite, or ashraf (honorable), and nonelite
households. Ashraf Muslims were urban, religious officials (ulama), soldiers, and administrators. By the end of the Delhi Sultanate, independent Muslim rulers had established themselves throughout much of the
subcontinent. Muslim elites settled along with these rulers in their capitals and trading centers. By the 15th century elite Muslims who
claimed Arab ancestry were called Sayyids; from Central Asian ancestry,
Mughals; and Afghan ancestry, Pathans.
Non-ashraf Muslims were urban artisans and rural cultivators organized into endogamous jati communities, some of which certainly had
preexisted the Muslims. The first British census in the mid-19th century found that Muslims made up one-quarter of the population, concentrated in the largest numbers in the Punjab and Bengal. Conversions
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TURKS, AFGHANS, AND MUGHALS
Later Mughal Emperors
and the Cause of Their
Reign’s End
Date of Rule
Emperors
1707–12
Bahadur Shah I (died)
1712–13
Jahandar Shah (murdered)
1713–19
Farukkhsiyar (murdered)
1719–48
Muhammad Shah (died)
1748–54
Ahmad Shah (deposed)
1754–59
Alamgir II (murdered)
1759–1806
Shah Alam II (died)
1806–37
Akbar Shah II (died)
1837–57
Bahadur Shah II (deposed)
in Bengal probably date to Mughal efforts to expand deltaic farmlands
under Aurangzeb and were carried out by Sufi masters who established
mosques and Muslim religious centers in the eastern Bengal region.
Muslim elites and Muslim artisan jatis lived in the urban centers of
India, in the prosperous trading cities and in the various provincial capitals and the capitals of independent, regional sultanates. The Bengal sultanate, for instance, had its capital in Gaur in the early 16th century. Gaur
was a large and prosperous city. It had a population of 40,000 and
stretched for several miles along the river. Its markets were full of cheap
and plentiful food, and its streets and lanes were paved with bricks. A
Portuguese traveler who visited it noted how crowded its streets had
become: “The streets and cross-lanes are so full of people that [it] is
impossible to move and it has reached the point where the high noblemen have taken to being preceded along the road to the palace by men
carrying bamboo sticks to push people out of the way” (Eaton 1993, 98).
Purdah
The Qur’an places women and men in terms of absolute equality before
God (Allah), but in social terms, Muslim women were subordinate to
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Muslim men. “Men are in charge of women,” says the Qur’an, “because
Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they
spend their property (for the support of women)” (Eaton 1993, 297).
The Muslim practice of purdah (meaning literally “veil” or “curtain”)
required that women not be seen by men unrelated to them. Elite
Muslim women lived in the zenana (women’s quarters) of the home,
away from all men but their husbands and closest male relatives. When
they traveled, they did so in covered conveyances. Ancient Indian society had also developed practices that restricted women’s social mobility
and behavior, particularly in the early centuries A.D. Over the centuries
in which Muslims ruled many sections of India, Muslim conventions
intensified these Hindu practices, and by the 19th century purdah was
the customary practice of high-caste Hindu and elite communities
throughout India.
In Decline
The centralized Mughal Empire did not survive much past the last of its
great Mughal leaders. Aurangzeb’s ambition to control the Deccan
forced him to spend long years there, to the detriment of his north
Indian empire. Wars of succession, the one problem the Mughals never
solved, tore them apart periodically during the time of the great
Mughals. After Aurangzeb’s death, with administrative and revenue systems in growing disarray, succession struggles brought Mughal power
more or less to an end. In the succession crisis that followed
Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Bahadur Shah (ruled 1707–12) killed his
two competing brothers and became the sixth Mughal emperor.
Between his death in 1712 and 1720, repeating wars of succession convulsed the Mughal court. By 1720 regional Mughal nobles were asserting their independent control over Punjab, Oudh, Bengal, Gujarat, and
the Deccan. Rajput kings and the Marathas encroached on Mughal territories at every opportunity. By the mid-18th century the Mughals
themselves controlled little more than the territory surrounding Delhi.
It would only be under the next great empire—that of the British—that
the centralization begun by the great Mughals would reach its logical
conclusion.
88
4
The Jewel in The Crown
(1757–1885)
When, by the blessing of Providence, internal tranquility shall be restored,
it is our earnest desire to stimulate the peaceful industry of India,
to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer
its government for the benefit of all our subjects resident therein. In their
prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security,
and in their gratitude our best reward.
■
Proclamation of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, 1858 (Muir 1969, 384)
I
n 1739 the Persian king Nadir Shah (ruled 1736–47) raided the
Mughal capital at Delhi, destroyed the current emperor’s army, killed
more than 30,000 Delhi residents, and returned to Persia with gold, jewels, and Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne. The Mughal Empire was over—
although it would survive as a weakened shell for more than another
hundred years. The remaining competitors for Mughal power were local
and regional Mughal officials (nawabs and nizams), regionally dominant
tribes and rulers (Hindu or Muslim), and two foreign trading companies,
one English and one French, both relative newcomers to the Indian scene.
Of all of these, it was British East India Company that would replace
the Mughals as India’s new paramount power—against the objections
of many in Great Britain itself. By 1876, when the British government
finally declared Queen Victoria empress of India, Great Britain had
made India the “jewel in the crown” of its worldwide empire and was
developing new ideologies—”Pax Britannica” and the “civilizing mission”—to justify British imperial rule.
Nawabs and Nabobs
The Mughals were so weak by the mid-18th century that they had
become, in effect, a regional power, controlling Delhi and its surrounding
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
environs but little else. Their war machine was in ruins, and their land
taxes were farmed out to the highest bidders. Regional nawabs (Mughal
provincial governors) in Hyderabad, Oudh, and Bengal were now de facto
rulers. They maintained a superficial deference to Mughal authority but
sent no revenue and fought wars or sued for peace at their will. To the
north, an Afghan-based empire that included Sind and much of the
Punjab was ruled by Ahmad Shah Abdali (ruled 1743–73).
To the south, the Marathas ruled homelands in the Deccan and adjacent centers in Tanjore and the Karnatak. By the 1750s the Maratha
peshwa (prime minister) at Pune headed the Maratha Confederacy dominated by four Maratha ruling families, each with its own local domain:
The Gaekwar dynasty controlled Baroda; Holkar controlled Indore;
Sindia, Gwalior; and Bhonsle, Nagpur. The breakdown of Mughal
authority left villages across north India unprotected and allowed
Maratha armies to raid virtually unchecked across the subcontinent.
Maratha horsemen rode up to the walled villages of the Indian plains,
demanding gold and rupees—and killing those who did not have them.
An 18th-century observer described the terror of these raids:
. . .the bargis [Maratha horsemen] entered the villages.They set
fire to the houses, large and small, temples and dwelling places.
. . . Some victims they tied with their arms twisted behind them.
Some they flung down and kicked with their shoes. They constantly shouted “Give us rupees, give us rupees, give us rupees.”
When they got no rupee, they filled their victims’ nostrils with
water and drowned them in tanks. Some were put to death by
suffocation. Those who had money gave it to the bargis; those
who had none gave up their lives (Smith 1958, 466).
In 1742 Maratha raiders reached as far east as the outskirts of Calcutta
before being turned back. Maratha hopes of installing their own candidate on the Mughal throne were destroyed in 1761, however, on the
battlefield of Panipat, when Afghan armies helped the weak Mughal
ruler to destroy Maratha forces.
As the Mughals’ collapse became increasingly obvious, two
European trading companies, one French and the other English, battled each other for commercial and political dominance along the
Indian coasts. By the mid-18th century the India-Europe trade in textiles, indigo, saltpeter, tea, and spices was extremely lucrative. The
French company was returning almost 25 percent on its investment to
shareholders at home. The British East India Company’s share in this
trade was worth £2 million. As early as the late 18th century wealthy
company “nabobs”—a corruption of the Indian title nawab—had
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THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
The East India Company
T
he English East India Company was founded in 1600 as a private
joint-stock corporation under a charter from Queen Elizabeth I
that gave it a monopoly over trade with India, Southeast Asia, and East
Asia.The company was governed in London by 24 directors, elected by
its shareholders (known collectively as the Court of Proprietors). Profits
from its trade were distributed in an annual dividend that varied during
1711–55 between 8 and 10 percent.The company’s trading business was
carried on overseas by its covenanted “servants,” young boys nominated
by the directors usually at the age of 15. Servant salaries were low (in
the mid-18th century a company writer made £5 per year), and it was
understood they would support themselves by private trade.
Between 1773 and 1833 a series of charter revisions increased parliamentary supervision over company affairs and weakened the company’s monopoly over Asian trade. In the Act of 1833 the East India
Company lost its monopoly over trade entirely, ceasing to exist as a
commercial agent and remaining only as an administrative shell through
which Parliament governed Indian territories. In 1858 the East India
Company was abolished entirely, and India was placed under the direct
rule of the British Crown.
begun to return to England to live in “Oriental” splendor on their
Indian riches.
The main French trading settlement was at Pondicherry (south of
Madras), with smaller centers at Surat (north of Bombay), and
Chandernagar (north of Calcutta on the Hugli River). After 1709 the
British East India Company carried on trade from well-fortified settlements at Bombay, Fort St. George in Madras, and Fort William in
Calcutta. Satellite factories in the mofussil (the Indian hinterland) were
attached to each of these “presidency” centers.
The French East India Company was led at Pondicherry after 1742
by François Dupleix (1697–1764), a 20-year commercial veteran in
India. Dupleix’s goal was to make himself and his company the power
behind the throne in several regional Indian states. The English in
Madras had much the same idea, and French and English forces fought
the three Carnatic Wars (1746–49, 1751–54, 1756–63) over trade and
in support of their candidates for nizam of Hyderabad and nawab of the
Carnatic (the southeastern coast of India, from north of Madras to the
southernmost tip). Robert Clive (1725–74), a company servant turned
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
soldier, used English forces to place the British candidate on the
Carnatic throne in 1752. Dupleix was recalled to France, and in the last
Carnatic war the French were completely defeated. Chandernagore and
Pondicherry remained nominally French, but French commercial, military, and political power in India had come to an end.
The Carnatic Wars showed servants of the British East India
Company such as Clive the potential for political and economic power
(and personal fortune) in India. The wars also demonstrated to both
Indians and Europeans the military superiority of European armies.
The disciplined gun volleys of a relatively small English infantry formation could defeat the charge of much larger numbers of Indian cavalry. This military superiority would be a critical factor in the company’s
rise to power.
The Battle of Plassey
In 1756 the 20-year-old nawab of Bengal, Sirajuddaula (1736–57),
marched on British Calcutta to punish its citizens for treaty violations.
The British soldiers fled, and the nawab had the remaining English residents (either 64 or 146 in number) imprisoned overnight in a local cell
(the “Black Hole”). The smallness of the cell, the heat of the June
weather, and the shock of confinement killed all but 23 (or 21) by
dawn. Clive marched north from Madras with 3,000 troops to avenge
the disaster. Company forces defeated the nawab’s army at the Battle of
Plassey in 1757—a date often used to mark the beginning of British rule
in India. Clive owed most of his victory, however, to a private understanding reached before the battle between Clive, the Hindu banking
family of the Seths, and the Bengal nawab’s uncle, Mir Jafar. The
nawab’s soldiers were bribed to flee the field, and Clive subsequently
had Mir Jafar installed as nawab. Four days later Sirajuddaula was captured and executed by Mir Jafar’s son.
The Battle of Plassey began a 15-year period during which the company’s new political power allowed its servants to acquire great fortunes. Clive himself received more than £200,000 at Plassey, in addition
to a mansabdari appointment worth £30,000 per year. For most company servants, wealth was why they had come to India. The saying was
“Two monsoons are the age of a man”—so if a servant survived, his goal
was to become rich and return to England as quickly as possible (Spear
1963, 5). After Plassey servants trading privately in Bengal were exempt
from all taxes and had unlimited credit. Posts in the mofussil, even quite
modest ones, were now the source of lucrative presents and favors.
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THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
An 18th-century palki (palanquin). The palanquin was a common form of conveyance for both
men and women in 18th- and even 19th-century India. East India Company servants (like the
gentleman pictured within) could read as they were carried about on their business. This drawing
is a detail from the Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) etching View of Calcutta, c. 1786–88.
(Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
In the 1760s and 1770s company servants began to return to
England with their post-Plassey wealth. Clive himself returned in 1760
one of England’s richest citizens and used his new wealth to buy a fortune in East India Company stock, hoping to forge a career in politics.
Criticisms mounted in Parliament about nabobs who had pillaged
Bengal’s countryside and returned to live in splendor. In 1774 the censure became so intense that Clive, who had had earlier bouts of depression and attempted suicide, took his own life.
When the new nawab, Mir Jafar, took power in Bengal in 1757, he
found himself saddled with huge debts from the Plassey settlement, and
his tax coffers emptied by concessions made to company servants. Tired
of his complaints, the British East India Company briefly replaced him
with his son-in-law, Mir Qasim, only to return Mir Jafar to power in
1763. Mir Qasim, however, then looked for help to the Mughal
emperor, Shah Alam. At the 1764 Battle of Buxar (Baksar) the Mughal
emperor’s army was defeated by a much smaller company force. In the
1765 peace negotiations, Clive (who had returned to India as governor
of Bengal that same year) left political control in the office of nawab (to
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Opium Schemes
I
n the pre–Battle of Plassey years, there was little demand in India for
European or English commodities (such as woolens), and the British
East India company had imported bullion to pay for its trade. After 1757
the company imported little bullion into Bengal. Bengal’s land revenues,
estimated at 30 million rupees per year, now funded a variety of company expenses, among which was the trade in opium.The company had
a monopoly over opium cultivation in Bengal and Bihar, and beginning in
1772 land revenues were used to purchase the opium crop. The company shipped its opium through middlemen to China, where it was
exchanged (illegally under Chinese law) for gold and silver bullion.That
bullion, in turn, bought Chinese goods that were then shipped back for
sale in England.Although this exchange never worked quite as planned,
the opium trade was enormously profitable to the company.
This trade sent a steadily rising supply of opium into China: 1,000
chests a year in 1767, 40,000 chests in 1838, and 50–60,000 chests after
1860. By 1860 the British had fought two wars to force the Chinese
government to legalize opium trading. The East India Company lost its
commercial functions in 1833; nevertheless, opium remained a government monopoly in India until 1856, contributing up to 15 percent of the
Indian government’s income and making up 30 percent of the value of
Indian trade. Opium imports into China continued into the 20th century, ending only in 1917.
be held by an Indian appointed by the company) but took for the company the diwani (the right to collect the tax revenues) of Bengal.
From 1765 on, the East India company collected Bengal’s tax revenues. Land taxes paid for company armies and were “invested” in
company trade. Local company monopolies of saltpeter, salt, indigo,
betel nut, and opium improved the company’s position in international
trade. That trade made Bengal potentially one of India’s richest
provinces. In theory, after 1757 and 1765, much of Bengal’s wealth
came under the direct control of the East India Company.
Regulations and Reforms
Between Plassey in 1757 and 1833 when the East India Company’s
commercial activities ended, company territory in India grew enor94
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
mously. By 1833 the company controlled directly and indirectly most of
the subcontinent. This expansion, however, was accompanied by parliamentary objections and public outcry, often from the company’s own
directors.
Within India, most officials saw expansion as inevitable. The only
way to secure company trade and revenues or to protect territories
already conquered was to engage in the intrigues and warfare that characterized 18th- and 19th-century Indian politics. The military superiority of the East India Company armies gave the company an
advantage, but it was the loyalty of company servants that made the
greatest difference. Servants might (and did) put personal profit ahead
of company interests, but they saw no future in siding with an Indian
ruler in battle or in court intrigues. In a world where Indian rulers faced
at least as much danger and treachery from their own relatives and
courts as from external enemies, the loyalty of its servants gave the East
India Company a great advantage. “The big fish eats the small fish,”
said the ancient Indian proverb. From the point of view of company
officials in India the choice was either eat or be eaten.
From the perspective of England, however, the company’s wars in
India often appeared immoral, pointless, and extravagant. To the company’s many parliamentary enemies it seemed immoral for a private
corporation to own a foreign country. Countries needed to be under the
guidance of those who would act, as the member of Parliament William
Pitt (the Younger) put it, as “trustees” for their peoples. Even the company’s own directors and its parliamentary friends had difficulty understanding why Indian territories should be expanded. Indian wars did
not improve company dividends; more often than not they put the
company further in debt. But India was six months away by ship from
England, and London directives were often moot before they arrived. In
the end it was the company’s failure to pay its taxes after 1767—even as
its servants returned with private riches—that forced the issue of government regulations.
The Regulating Act and Warren Hastings
In the years after Plassey and the East India Company’s assumption of
the diwani of Bengal, conditions in Bengal deteriorated rapidly. The
company’s servants used its political power for personal gain, the
nawab’s government had no funds, and the company’s efforts to secure
returns from the tax revenues were in chaos. In 1767–70 strong monsoons produced crop failures that led to the death of almost one-third
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
of Bengal’s peasants. The company took no steps to ameliorate famine
conditions in these years, but its reduced revenue collections left it
unable after 1767 to pay its taxes to the British Crown.
Parliament responded in 1773 with two acts. The first authorized a
loan of £1.5 million to the company. The second—the Regulating Act
of 1773—reorganized company operations. The company’s London
directors were to be elected for longer terms, and in India the three
presidencies (Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras) were unified under the
control of a governor-general based in Calcutta.
The first governor-general appointed under the Regulating Act was
Warren Hastings (1732–1818), a 20-year veteran of company service
in India who held the appointment from 1774 to 1785. As governor of
Fort William in Bengal (Calcutta) Hastings had already brought the
collection of Bengal taxes directly under company control. As governor-general he abolished the office of nawab, bringing Bengal under
the company’s direct political rule. He used East India Company
armies aggressively: first to protect an ally, Oudh, from marauding
Rohilla tribes; then to attack Maratha armies in the Bombay area; and
finally against Haidar Ali Khan (1722–82) of Mysore. To refill his treasury after these military operations, he forced the dependent kingdoms
of Oudh and Benares to pay additional tribute to the company.
Orientalists
Hastings’s long residence in India had given him a deep interest in
Indian society and culture. It was under his auspices that Sir William
Jones, judge of the Calcutta supreme court, founded the Asiatic Society
of Bengal in 1784. Jones had studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and
Persian at Oxford before turning to law. In India he also studied
Sanskrit, a language almost unknown to Western scholars at that time.
It was Jones who first suggested the link between Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit that began the comparative study of Indo-European languages.
The Asiatic Society began the European study of the ancient Indian
past. Europeans in both India and Europe, Jones included, were more
familiar with Muslim society and culture than with India. It required
considerable work over the 18th and 19th centuries for men such as
Jones and his Asiatic Society colleagues to translate India’s ancient past
into forms compatible with and comprehensible to European sensibilities and scholarship. In Bengal Jones and a successor, H. T. Colebrooke,
compiled materials for both Hindu and Muslim personal law codes,
basing the Hindu codes on pre-Muslim Brahmanical Sanskrit texts. In
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THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
Rajasthan James Tod compiled records and legends into his Annals and
Antiquities of Rajastan (1829–32). In south India Colin Mackenzie collected texts, inscriptions, and artifacts in an extensive archive on south
Indian history. These efforts, along with the great cartographic projects
that reduced the physical features of empire to paper maps, constructed
an India intelligible to Europeans.
Men such as Jones, Tod, and Mackenzie were loosely classed together
as Orientalists, a term that to them implied a European scholar deeply
interested in the Oriental past. In the late 20th century, the intellectual
Edward Said gave this term a more negative gloss: “Orientalists,” he
pointed out, had often studied what was to them foreign and exotic in
Middle Eastern and Asian cultures only to demonstrate the inherent
superiority of the West (Said 1978).
Pitt’s India Act and Lord Cornwallis
William Pitt’s India Act was passed by Parliament in 1784 in a further
effort to bring company actions in India more directly under
Parliament’s control. Under the act the East India Company’s London
directors retained their patronage appointments, including the right to
appoint the governor-general, but a parliamentary Board of Control
now supervised company government in India—and could recall the
governor-general if it wished. When Warren Hastings in India learned
of Pitt’s act, he resigned his position as governor-general. Within two
years Parliament had brought impeachment proceedings against
Hastings, in part on grounds that he had extorted funds from Indian
allies. The broader point was the issue of British “trusteeship” over
India and the idea that political behavior considered immoral in Britain
should also be immoral in India. After seven years Hastings was acquitted of all charges but financially ruined and barred from any further
public service.
In 1785 the East India Company directors sent Charles Cornwallis
(1738–1805) to India as governor-general, an appointment Cornwallis
held until 1793. Lord Cornwallis, who had just returned from America
where he presided over the surrender of British forces at Yorktown (1781),
had a reputation for uncompromising rectitude. He was sent to India to
reform the company’s India operations. His wide-ranging reforms were
later collected into the Code of Forty-eight Regulations (the Cornwallis
Code). Cornwallis fired company officials found guilty of embezzling
and made illegal servants’ private trade. He barred Indian civilians from
company employment at the higher ranks and sepoys (Indian soldiers)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
from rising to commissioned status in the British army. He replaced
regional Indian judges with provincial courts run by British judges.
Beginning with Cornwallis, the “collector” became the company official in charge of revenue assessments, tax collection, and (after 1817)
judicial functions at the district level. Where Pitt’s India Act defined a
dual system of government that lasted until 1858, Cornwallis provided
administrative reforms that structured British government through
1947.
Cornwallis’s most dramatic reform, however, was the “permanent
settlement” of Bengal. Pitt’s act required new tax rules for Bengal, and
initially a 10-year settlement was considered. Bengali tax collectors
under the Mughals had been the zamindars (lords of the land), an
appointed, nonhereditary position. Over the centuries, however,
zamindari rights had often become hereditary. In 1793, hoping to create a Bengali landowning class equivalent to the English gentry,
Cornwallis decided to make the revenue settlement permanent. The
“permanent settlement” gave landownership to Bengali zamindars in
perpetuity—or for as long as they were able to pay the company (later
the Crown) the yearly taxes due on their estates. The settlement’s disadvantages became clear almost immediately, as several years of bad
crops forced new zamindars to transfer their rights to Calcutta
moneylenders. The Bengal model was abandoned in most 19th-century
land settlements, in part because by then the government’s greater
dependence on land revenues made officials unwilling to fix them in
perpetuity.
The Company as Paramount Power
By the early 19th century British wars in Europe against France had
produced a climate more favorable to empire. From 1798 to 1828 governors-general in India aggressively pursued wars, annexations, and
alliances designed to make the British dominant in India. Richard
Colley Wellesley (1761–1842) was sent to India in 1798 with specific
instructions to remove all traces of French influence from the subcontinent. As a member of the British nobility comfortable with the pomp
of aristocratic institutions (much under attack by the French), Lord
Wellesley assumed that uncontested British dominance in India would
improve both company commerce and the general welfare of the Indian
people. Consequently Wellesley took the occasion of his instructions as
an opportunity to move against virtually all independent states in India.
Wellesley also augmented the imperial grandeur of company rule by
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THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
building, at great cost, a new Government House in Calcutta. As an
aristocratic friend said in defense of the expense of this undertaking, “I
wish India to be ruled from a palace, not from a counting house; with
the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail-dealer in muslins and
indigo” (Metcalf and Metcalf 2002, 67).
In addition to war and outright annexation, Wellesley used the
“subsidiary alliance” to expand British territories. Under this agreement a ruler received the protection of East India Company troops in
exchange for ceding to the company all rights over his state’s external affairs. Rulers paid the expenses of company troops and a representative of the company (called a resident) lived at their courts.
Internally the state was controlled by the ruler; foreign relations—
wars, peace, negotiations—were all the business of the company. The
East India Company had had such alliances since the time of Robert
Clive, but Wellesley made them a major instrument of imperial
expansion.
Government House, Calcutta, 1819. Lord Wellesley had Government House (Raj Bhavan) built in
Calcutta between 1799 and 1803 to give himself and future governors-general a palatial
dwelling appropriate for the empire they were creating in India. The East India Company directors
in London only learned about the building (and its enormous cost) in 1804. The building’s
architect was Charles Wyatt (1759–1819), and the design was modeled on a Derbyshire English
manor, Kedleston Hall, built in the 1760s. This drawing, A View of Government House from
the Eastward, is by James Baillie Fraser, c. 1819. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–1799)
Wellesley’s anti-French instructions led him first to attack Tipu Sultan
(c. 1740–99), the ruler of Mysore in south India. Both Tipu Sultan and
his father, Haidar Ali Khan, were implacable foes of the British. Haider
Ali had built up an extensive army of infantry, artillery, and cavalry on
the European model and used it in a series of wars with the company.
Haidar Ali had won an early contest with the British in 1769. Then in
1780, after a series of company treaty infractions, the Mysore king, in
alliance with the Marathas and the nizam of Hyderabad, had sent
90,000 troops against the British at Madras. Warren Hastings sent
Calcutta troops to defend Madras and sued for peace with Tipu Sultan,
who had become ruler after his father’s death. In the third AngloMysore war (1790–92) the East India Company made alliances with the
Marathas and Hyderabad against Mysore. These allied forces besieged
Tipu at his capital at Seringapatam. In the surrender Tipu lost half his
kingdom.
After his defeat in the third war, Tipu, who had reached a tentative
alliance with the French on the Mascarene Islands, had shown his sympathy with the French Revolution by planting a “tree of liberty” in his
capital, Seringapatam. This was considered enough to justify Wellesley’s
attack on him in 1799. The war ended in three months with Tipu’s death
in battle. In the subsequent division of the Mysore kingdom, the East
India Company took half and gained direct access from Madras to the
west coast. Wellesley installed a Hindu king over the small remaining
kingdom, with whom he signed a subsidiary alliance. (Mysore would
remain a princely state ruled by Hindu kings until 1947.)
Between 1799 and 1801, Wellesley also annexed a series of territories
from rulers who had been company allies for some time. Tanjore (1799),
Surat (1800), and Nellore, the Carnatic, and Trichinolopy (all in 1801)
came under direct company rule. In Oudh, Wellesley forced the current
nawab’s abdication, and in the renegotiation of the kingdom’s subsidiary
alliance the company annexed two-thirds of Oudh’s territory.
Maratha Wars (1775–1818)
Wellesley turned next to the Marathas. The Maratha Confederacy had
fought British East India Company troops for the first time in 1775–82
in a struggle over company territorial expansion. But Nana Fadnavis, the
peshwa’s Brahman minister and his skilled diplomacy had kept the
Marathas relatively united and the English at bay. After his death in
1800, however, the confederacy began to degenerate into a loose and
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Mahadaji Sindhia, c. 1820.This picture (a modern hand copy of an 1820 painting) shows the
Maratha ruler of the house of Sindia entertaining a British naval officer and military officer
with a nautch (a performance by dancing girls). (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
feuding collection of clans, although the major Maratha houses were
still powerful and controlled substantial territories in central India. The
Sindias at Gwalior had long employed a French-trained military, and
Wellesley used this limited French connection to justify a war against
them. In 1802 Wellesley took advantage of internal Maratha conflicts to
convince the peshwa, Baji Rao II (1775–1851), to sign a subsidiary
alliance with the company. Wellesley used this treaty to justify attacks on
the four Deccan Maratha clans; by 1805 new subsidiary alliances with
the houses of Bhonsle and Sindia gave him direct control over additional
lands in the Deccan and Gujarat, as well as over Orissa and the cities of
Delhi and Agra (all of which had been under Maratha control).
Wellesley’s campaign against the Marathas was interrupted when he
was recalled to London in 1805. By then his military expansions had
almost doubled the company’s debt. Neither the East India Company
nor Parliament could justify the expense of additional Indian wars. Yet
by 1805, even the prime minister, William Pitt, a frequent critic of company activities, supported the company’s new supremacy in India. If
Britain’s war against France (and company indebtedness) momentarily
required a halt to further Indian campaigns, all agreed that the future
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stability of British interests required Britain’s unchallenged domination
of India.
Wellesley’s successors—Lord Cornwallis (who died in 1805, the year
of his second appointment), Sir John Barlow, Lord Minto, Lord
Hastings, and Lord Amherst—continued his policy of expansion. The
company’s charter was renewed in 1813 but only with new provisions
allowing private traders (and missionaries) to travel to and work in
company domains. Hastings forced the kingdom of Nepal to accept a
subsidiary alliance in 1816 and the next year negotiated 19 subsidiary
alliances with Rajput states. He then renewed company attacks on the
Marathas; by 1818 the Marathas were defeated. A final settlement dismantled their Pune court, sending the peshwa into retirement and exile
at Cawnpore on the Ganges and making the Pune region part of the
Bombay Presidency. The Maratha clans of Sindia, Holkar, Gaekwar, and
Bhonsle all signed subsidiary alliances with the British. In 1824
Amherst began a series of wars against Burma that forced the kingdom
into a subsidiary alliance in 1826. In India by 1833 the Sikh kingdom
of Ranjit Singh in the Punjab was the only independent Indian state
within a subcontinent otherwise completely under company control.
Land Revenues and Pax Britannica
British territorial gains in both north and south India led relatively
quickly to new revenue settlements in these regions. Between 1790 and
1826 the company’s twin goals were the reassessment of taxes in newly
conquered territories and the pacification of villagers, peasants, and
tribesmen to ensure the regular collection of those taxes. Whereas
Bengal land taxes had brought in £3 million, by 1818 the company’s
conquests and annexations had increased the total to £22 million. Land
taxes underwrote the company’s balance of trade with India and China
and subsidized the cost of the East India Company’s far-flung army.
Taxes also paid the annual “home charges”—£6 million in 1820. These
were the monies the company spent for offices, salaries, pensions, and
other expenses associated with the running of its Indian empire. All
these expenses prompted a senior company official to note in a letter to
the new governor-general Lord William Bentinck in 1828 that India
“has yielded no surplus revenue. It has not even paid its own expenses”
(Bayly 1988, 121).
Although Bengal’s permanent settlement was extended to zamindars
in Bihar and Orissa in 1802–05, British officials were already disillusioned with it. Instead of a reforming gentry, the settlement had pro102
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
duced only a class of wealthy absentee rent collectors. More important,
as the company increasingly focused on revenues and tax collection,
the disadvantages of a “permanent” settlement, under which taxes
could never be raised, became increasingly obvious. In the Madras
Presidency in the 1820s its governor-general, Sir Thomas Munro,
devised a system to settle revenues directly on peasant cultivators (the
ryots). Under this ryotwari system assessments were made with individual cultivators on the basis of small plots of land for periods of 30
years. Taxes took one-half the net value of the crop, a high assessment
given that Mughal taxes had only taken one-third of the crop (and even
that was not always collected). Munro’s ryotwari system was later used
in Bombay, Gujarat, and in the Deccan. In the Delhi region, in parts of
Oudh, and in the Punjab, however, the land settlements made between
1833 and 1853 followed a variety of different models, sometimes settling revenues with village communities or village elders, usually for
periods of 30 years.
Even as they mapped and catalogued revenue statistics, company officials were also trying to bring order to their new territories. To reduce
the military capabilities of chiefs and petty rajas (princes or nobles) they
awarded honors to some and used their armies against others. They
attempted to award migrant tribes and forest peoples landholdings (and
tax assessments) in marginal marsh and waste lands and on the peripheries of more settled regions—in part to fix their location. Company
armies hunted down and eliminated marauding Maratha pindari (plunderers) tribes and Afghan Rohilla bands.
The British named their pacification of company lands the Pax
Britannica. As had also been true during early Mughal rule, peace and
stability brought renewed prosperity to many areas. Recycled Mughal
rest houses along major routes helped farmers and merchants move
goods to regional markets. In Delhi, urban property values almost
tripled between 1803 and 1826, and interest rates fell sharply both in
Delhi and throughout India. By the 1830s British armies had brought
peace and order—and heavier taxation—to much of urban and rural
India.
Lord Bentinck’s Reforms
When Lord William Cavendish Bentinck (1774–1839) became governorgeneral in 1828, the warfare that had characterized the company’s expansion was over. As a utilitarian, Bentinck believed in the rational
organization of society, and during his time in office the restructuring of
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company expenditures turned a deficit of £1.5 million into a surplus
of £0.5 million. The company’s court system was also reorganized,
making English, not Persian, the official language for the higher courts
and for government business. Company armies and police eradicated
the gangs of thagi (ritual thieves and murderers) from central and
north India.
Bentinck’s most dramatic act as governor-general was the abolition of
sati. Sati was not widespread in either Bengal or India. It occurred
mostly in the Gangetic region and (in a slightly different form) among
Rajputs in central India. Nevertheless, for Christian missionaries and
officials like Bentinck, an evangelical Christian, sati symbolized all that
was evil and barbaric in an idolatrous Hinduism. Missionaries in Bengal
had long campaigned against the practice, but British officials feared
that interfering with a religious practice might provoke an uprising. In
1829 Bentinck signed Article XVII into law in company territories. The
article made the burning or burying alive of a widow “culpable homicide”; if drugs or compulsion were used, the offense was murder. When
the missionary William Carey was sent the new regulation for translation into Bengali, he was said to have jumped to his feet crying, “No
church for me today! . . . If I delay an hour to translate and publish this,
many a widow’s life may be sacrificed” (Thompson 1928, 78).
Bentinck’s regulation provoked no mass protests or uprisings. The only
protest came from a group of Calcutta Hindus, who sent an 800-signature petition to the Privy Council in England asking (unsuccessfully)
for the law’s repeal.
Toward the end of Bentinck’s tenure, Parliament took further steps
toward direct British rule in India. The Charter Act of 1833 abolished
the East India Company’s commercial functions, opening all of Asia to
private trade and ending the company’s existence as a commercial
body. It left the company’s government structures in place, however, as
a bureaucratic shell through which Parliament would continue to govern India.
By 1833 Great Britain had become an industrialized country. English
machine-woven cloth was exported to India as early as 1800. After
1815 the Bengal handloom industry—Bengal’s most popular and lucrative industry since Mughal times—could no longer compete in either
Europe or Asia with Lancashire woven cottons, and by 1833 Bengal’s
cotton industry had collapsed. Increasingly raw cotton was India’s
major export, and industrially produced finished goods were the
imports British merchants wanted to sell in India. By ending the commercial functions of the old East India Company, Parliament signaled
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the end of the mercantile economy that had brought the English to
India centuries earlier.
Against this background of changing political and economic relations between Great Britain and India, the government in Calcutta
debated the question of Indian education. The debate was between two
groups of British officials: the Orientalists, who believed Indians should
be educated in their own indigenous languages, and the Anglicists, who
argued that education should be in the superior and more useful language of English. The Anglicists’ spokesman, the new law secretary
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), summed up his arguments in
1835 in the famous “Minute on Education.”
“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit [sic] or Arabic,” Macaulay
wrote without apology, but “I have never found one among them [the
Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library
was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Macaulay
2001). The best and most responsible course the British could take in
India was to educate a small elite group of Indians in the superior British
language and traditions. By doing so they would create a group to serve as
intermediaries between the British and the Indian masses—”a class of persons,” Macaulay wrote, who would be “Indian in blood and colour, but
English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (2001).
Behind the debate but largely unaddressed were some practical realities: English had just been made the official language for court and
government business throughout India. In future years, government
would need substantial numbers of local people literate in English to
carry out its ordinary administrative functions. Probably for both ideological and practical reasons, the government committed itself to the
financial support of English-language education for Indians. There
were already English-language schools for Indians in Bombay, Calcutta,
and Madras. However, government orders expanding college-level education throughout India would not be mandated for almost 20 years.
Dalhousie’s Reforms and Annexations
If in Wellesley’s time the British goal was for British power to dominate
India, by the time James Andrew Brown Ramsey, the marquis of
Dalhousie (1812–60), was appointed governor-general in 1848, the
British were ready for an even more ambitious task: the creation of an
empire. But as Dalhousie’s regime saw the outlines of a modern British
empire emerge in India, more than one Indian constituency found reasons to wish for an end to British rule.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Sikhs and Afghans
Dalhousie’s first major effort was a simple war of expansion against
the Sikhs, the last independent Indian kingdom on the subcontinent.
Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) had ruled the Sikh Punjabi community
from 1799 to his death in 1839. His army, made up of Sikh, Muslim,
and Hindu soldiers, was organized on modern lines and trained by
European officers. But when Ranjit Singh died in 1839, the British,
began the first of their three Afghan Wars (1839–42, 1878–80, 1919).
Fearing the Russians would attack through Afghanistan, the British
tried to place their own candidate on the Afghan throne. In 1841,
Afghan troops trapped 16,000 British troops in winter weather at
Kabul and only one man survived the retreat back to British territories. By 1843, however, British armies had successfully annexed Sind,
and troops had been massed on the Sutlej border, ready to move
against the Sikhs. In the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46) the Sikhs
lost the northeastern edge of the Punjab. In the Second Anglo-Sikh
War (1848–49), fought under Dalhousie, the British destroyed the
Sikh army and annexed the remaining Sikh lands. Dalhousie sent the
Lawrence brothers, John and Henry, to pacify the region. Within a
year Punjabi land revenues were contributing a surplus of 5 million
rupees to the government treasury.
“Lapse” and “Paramountcy”
The Dalhousie government used the administrative tools of “lapse”
and “paramountcy” to expand British land and land revenues in India
even further. Ignoring Indian adoption customs, “lapse” argued that
where there was no biological male heir to a throne, the British could
legally annex the kingdom. “Paramountcy” said that, as the British
were the paramount power in India, they had responsibility for each
ruler’s behavior and could annex territories where rulers governed
irresponsibly.
Relying on these doctrines, Dalhousie’s government moved aggressively between 1849 and 1856 to eliminate royal titles and privileges
and to annex states where the royal line had “lapsed” or where rulers
governed “unwisely.” The government eliminated the royal titles of the
Carnatic and Tranvancore—and the pensions of the families that held
them. Officials attempted the same with the Mughal imperial title—its
last holder, Bahadur Shah II, was living on a pension in Delhi—but the
intervention of British aristocrats forced Dalhousie’s regime to settle for
a provision under which the title would die with the old man who held
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it. In the same way, the government used “lapse” to annex seven
princely states in Bengal, Rajasthan, and the Punjab—among which
were the Rajput state of Udaipur (1852) and the Maratha states of
Jhansi (1853) and Nagpur (1854). Dalhousie also terminated the pension of the adopted son of the Maratha peshwa, living in Britishimposed exile at Cawnpore. His government’s last and most dramatic
act was the annexation of Oudh in 1856. Oudh had been a subsidiary
ally of the British since the days of Clive. British officials now argued
that its rulers had misgoverned the state, and Dalhousie’s government
annexed it.
Railways, the Postal System, and Telegraphs
When he left India in 1856, Dalhousie noted that he had introduced the
“three great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to the Western nations—I
mean, Railways, uniform Postage and Electric Telegraphs” (Muir 1969,
365). Dalhousie had overseen the development of Britain’s railway system as president of London’s Board of Trade. In India he did the same.
The railway began with two lines, one in Calcutta (150 miles from
Howrah to the coal fields at Raniganj) and the second in Bombay (21
miles from the city to its suburbs). The Bombay line opened to passenger traffic in 1853.
Dalhousie also oversaw the unification of India’s mail system and the
laying of its telegraphic lines. Where mail between Calcutta and
Bombay had previously cost 1 rupee per letter, the new unified postal
service delivered mail anywhere in British India at a cost of only a halfanna (1/32 of a rupee). Between 1851 and 1854, 2,500 miles of telegraph
line connected all India’s major cities. In 1855, post and telegraph were
unified into a single, all-India system.
Dalhousie and his successor, Charles John Canning (1812–62), also
saw the beginnings of a number of educational and social reforms with
far-reaching consequences. In 1854, the Wood dispatch created three
university centers at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras to oversee college
education in the English language. These universities had no teachers
or classes but oversaw the curricula, examinations, degrees, and honors
for affiliated, privately run English-language institutions. Throughout
the provinces private English-language schools at the primary, middle
school, and secondary levels would serve as feeder schools for the university system. This was not mass education—as the government
specifically pointed out in 1858. This was an elite educational system,
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The Great Indian Railroads
T
he Indian railroads were built mostly by private companies with
government land grants, government incentives, and profits guaranteed by the government.After the tracks were built, the government
purchased and ran the lines. The major lines were laid between 1853
and the 1920s: the first 5,000 miles of track by 1869; 16,000 by 1890;
35,000 by 1920; and 40,000 by 1946. In 1946, 78 percent of the Indian
countryside was no more than 20 miles from a rail line.
The government’s initial intent was to connect the three great
British capitals—Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras—by rail and to run a rail
line up the Ganges River valley into the Punjab. By the 1880s, however,
a main trunk-line network connected Indian inland regions to the major
port cities of Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi, and Madras. Freight carried by
the rail lines increased from 3.6 million tons in 1871, to 42.6 million
tons in 1901, to 143.6 million tons in 1945–46. The same tracks, of
course, could also move troops in times of conflict and food in times of
famine. By the 20th century the railroads had unified India’s internal
markets, producing cheaper prices and greater availability of goods even
as they destroyed small-scale and local industries. Rail transport was
popular and crowded from its very beginnings, despite prophecies that
caste barriers would keep Hindus away. By 1927 government purchasing programs had given the government ownership of 72 percent of
India’s rail lines.
designed to create graduates with English-language skills and Western
knowledge in every province in British India.
The government also passed several reforms contravening customary
Hindu religious practices. The 1850 Caste Disabilities Act allowed
Hindu converts to Christianity to inherit property, and a subsequent
1856 law allowed Hindu widows to remarry. In the same year Lord
Canning’s government also passed a reform act directed at soldiers in
the military. The 1856 General Service Enlistment Act ordered Indian
soldiers to serve wherever the British government sent them, regardless
of caste customs and concerns. (Four years earlier, 47 sepoys in a
Bengal regiment had been executed for refusing to break caste customs
and board ships bound for Burma.) Most of these measures had limited
effect at the time they were passed. But, taken together, they showed a
government more ready than ever before to create a British colonial
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state in its Indian territories—regardless of the concerns, prejudices, or
religious practices of its Indian subjects.
Mutiny and Rebellion
When Dalhousie left office in 1856, turning over the government to
Lord Canning, observers might have considered Dalhousie as the
governor-general who had modernized British India. Within less
than two years, however, as India was convulsed by the violent uprisings of 1857, it appeared that Dalhousie’s regime might go down in
history as responsible for bringing British rule in India to an end.
The uprisings of 1857–58 began as mutinies among Indian troops
but spread quickly through northern India among states and groups
recently disempowered by the British. The Sepoy Rebellion, or Indian
Mutiny, began in the barracks at Meerut, 30 miles outside Delhi. New
Enfield rifles had recently been introduced but to load them soldiers
had to bite open the cartridges. The rumor spread that the cartridges
were greased with pig and cow fat. When 85 sepoys at Meerut refused
to use the guns and were put in irons, their comrades rebelled on May
10, killed several officers, and fled to Delhi. There they found the 80year-old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, and declared him the
leader of their rebellion. At Cawnpore, Nana Sahib, adopted son of the
former peshwa, and at Jhansi, the Maratha rani (queen) Lakshmibai
joined the uprising. At Lucknow in Oudh, Sir Henry Lawrence
(1806–57) and the European community were besieged within a fortified and supplied residency. At Cawnpore the British general surrendered to Nana Sahib, and all 400 Englishmen, -women, and children
were killed.
The rebellion spread through much of the central and northern
Ganges River valley, centering on Lucknow (Oudh), Cawnpore, and
Delhi. In central India, Rajput and Jat communities and in the Deccan,
old Maratha centers were also involved. Opposition in Oudh was the
most unified. Almost one-third of the Bengal army came from highcaste Oudh families, and there was widespread support for Oudh’s
deposed ruler, Wajid Ali Shah. Throughout the affected areas, local
rajas and chiefs also took this opportunity to settle old scores or acquire
the holdings of longtime enemies.
Despite widespread opposition to the British, the rebellion’s main
leaders never unified, and even in the Delhi, Oudh, and Cawnpore centers, court factions competed with and undercut one another. Delhi was
recaptured by the British in September 1857. Bahadur Shah’s sons were
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Sir Henry Lawrence, in a 19th-century drawing based on a photograph taken at Lucknow. In
1857 Lawrence organized and led the English community within the besieged Lucknow
Residency. He died in July from wounds received in battle, but his planning enabled the English to
hold out until the siege was lifted. In later years it became a point of pride that the flag was
never lowered at the residency, and both Lawrence and the residency itself became part of the
heroic memories Anglo-Indians attached to the period’s events. (Earl Roberts, Forty-one years in
India, 34th ed., 1905)
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
summarily executed, and the old man was exiled to Burma where he
died the next year. The siege of Lucknow was lifted in November, and
Cawnpore, recaptured in December. The Maratha city of Gwalior fell in
1858. The Rani of Jhansi died in battle, and Nana Sahib’s main general,
Tantia Tope, was captured and executed. The peshwa himself vanished
into Nepal.
By July 1858 the British had regained military control. Although
there were only 40,000 English troops to 230,000 sepoys (and 200
million Indian civilians), the British had been unified. They had
regained the north with Sikh troops from the Punjab, English troops
sent from overseas, and sepoys from south India—a region generally
untouched by rebellion. Outside the Gangetic north, most of British
India and many of the princely states had not actively participated in
the rebellion.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, the British took their revenge.
British troops and sometimes civilians attacked neutral villagers almost
at random. Captured sepoys were summarily executed, often by being
strapped to cannons and blown apart. Governor-General Canning’s call
for moderation won him only the contemptuous nickname “Clemency
Canning.”
The Well at Cawnpore
O
f all the Sepoy Rebellion, or Indian Mutiny, stories that later circulated among British and Anglo-Indian communities, none was as
famous as that of the well at Cawnpore (Kanpur). Cawnpore, a book
written eight years after the 1857–58 mutiny, retold a bystander’s
account of the murder of British women and children well suited to the
racialized feelings of the English in post-mutiny India:
The bodies . . . were dragged out, most of them by the hair of
the head. Those who had clothes worth taking were stripped.
Some of the women were alive. I cannot say how many. . . .They
prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to their
sufferings. . . .Three boys were alive.They were fair children.The
eldest, I think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest
five years. They were running round the well (where else could
they go to?) and there was none to save them. No: none said a
word, or tried to save them (Embree 1963, 35).
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The 1857–58 rebellion changed the nature of the Indian army and
racialized British relations with Indians in ways that were never forgotten. The army had had its origins in the independent forces hired by the
Bengal, Bombay, and Madras Presidencies. By 1857 the number of soldiers had grown to 271,000 men, and European officers were only one
out of every six soldiers. After the rebellion, the army was unified under
the British Crown. Only British officers were allowed to control
artillery, and the ethnicity of regiments was deliberately mixed. In addition, the ratios of European troops to Indian troops increased: In Bengal
there was now one European soldier for every two Indians; in Bombay
and Madras, one for every three. The army also recruited Indian soldiers differently after 1857. Where the pre-mutiny army had had many
high-caste peasants from Oudh and Bihar, the post-rebellion army
recruited from regions where rebellion had been weakest and among
populations now (somewhat arbitrarily) identified as India’s “martial
races”—from Punjabis (Sikhs, Jats, Rajputs, and Muslims), from
Afghan Pathans, and from Nepali Gurkhas. By 1875, half of the Indian
army was Punjabi in origin.
In the later decades of the 19th century key mutiny locations were
monumentalized by British imperialists and India’s Anglo-Indian
community. The well at Cawnpore received a sculpture of Mercy with
a cross. The Lucknow Residency’s tattered flag was never lowered.
Windows in churches and tombs in graveyards were inscribed with
vivid memories of the place and violence of mutiny deaths. The
mutiny confirmed for the British their own “heroism . . . moral superiority and the right to rule” (Metcalf and Metcalf 2002, 106). But the
violence of attacks on women and children, and the “treachery” of
sepoys and servants on whose devotion the British had thought
they could rely also weighed heavily in later memories of events.
The Sepoy Rebellion left the British intensely aware of the fragility of
their rule.
Crown Rule Begins
The 1857–58 rebellion cost Britain a full year of Indian revenues (£36
million), and many in Parliament blamed the archaic structures of the
East India Company’s administration for the loss. In 1858 Parliament
abolished the company entirely and placed the Indian empire directly
under Crown rule. The Government of India Act created a secretary
of state for India, a cabinet post responsible for Indian government
and revenues, together with an advisory 15-member Council of India.
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0
0
500 miles
500 kilometers
In India, Lord Canning kept the title of governor-general but added
to it that of viceroy, in recognition of India’s new place in Great
Britain’s empire. Queen Victoria herself would become empress of
India in 1876.
In November 1858, the Queen’s proclamation—”India’s Magna
Carta” Indian schoolbooks later called it—announced these changes to
the “Princes, Chiefs, and People of India” (Stark 1921, 11; Muir 1969,
384). The proclamation declared there would be no further religious
interference in India. Dalhousie’s doctrine of “lapse” was rejected, several former rulers were restored to their thrones, and the princes were
assured that treaty obligations would be “scrupulously” observed in
future. Aristocrats and princes were to be the new bulwark of the
Crown-ruled empire; indeed, from 1858 to 1947 the Princely (or
Native) States made up almost one-third of British India. The almost
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Two rajas from the Central Provinces. Almost one-third of India was controlled by Indian princes
who ruled their states under the watchful eyes of local British residents. The princes were
among the strongest supporters of British rule after 1858. They ruled over almost 600 Indian
princely states that ranged in size from territories as large as England to those only covering
several square miles. These two local rajas held territories of the smaller type in the Central
Provinces during the late 19th century. (Andrew H. L. Fraser, Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots: A Civil
Servant’s Recollections and Impressions of Thirty-Seven Years of Work and Sport in the Central Provinces
and Bengal, 3rd ed., 1912)
600 Indian princes, both individually and collectively, became the
staunchest supporters of British rule.
The Princely States were overseen by the governor-general/viceroy
through his political department. The rest of British India was directly
governed by the governor-general with the advice of a five-person
Executive Council. The army was directly under the governor-general
as were the provincial governments. At the district level, administration was through the Indian Civil Service (ICS), whose covenanted
civil servants were appointed after 1853 on the basis of competitive
examinations. The head of each district, variously called the “district
magistrate” or the “collector,” was an ICS officer. In 1861 the Indian
Councils Act added members (up to the number of 12) to the governor-general’s Executive Council for the purposes of legislation. Half of
these additional members could be “non-officials,” that is, Indians.
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The Invention of Caste
T
he British were great critics of the Indian caste system, seeing it as
a retrograde institution that caused the decline of India’s ancient
“Aryan” civilization and blighted India with its superstitions and restrictions. During British rule, however, the British government’s analytic
frameworks and survey practices—as well as British assumptions that
caste was a fixed and unchanging social institution—politicized and
changed how caste functioned. In the provincial gazetteers that were
compiled beginning in 1865, caste was a major ethnographic category.
In the census, the 10-year population surveys begun in 1871, caste was
a core organizing principle.The 1891 census ranked castes in order of
“social precedence,” and in 1901 the census attempted to assign a fixed
varna status to all castes.
From the 1880s through the 1930s, in part due to British census tabulations, hundreds of caste conferences and caste associations came
into existence throughout British India.Although these regional organizations had multiple agendas and many were short lived, a common reason for organizing was to control how census tabulations recorded
their caste status. Some groups met to define their status; others sent
letters and petitions to protest census rankings. By 1911 many Indians
believed that the purpose of the census was not to count the population but to determine caste ranks. By 1931 caste groups were distributing flyers to their members, instructing them on how to respond to
census questions. Over a century of surveys and tabulations, British statistical efforts threatened to fix caste identities more permanently than
at any other time in the Indian past. It is in this sense that some scholars have suggested that the British “invented” the caste system (Dirks
1992, 2001).
Economics of Imperial Expansion
The second half of the 19th century was a period of growth for India’s
economy and saw the increased exploitation of the empire’s rural
regions. The Indian government guaranteed foreign investors a rate of
return whether or not their projects proved profitable, and under these
arrangements British companies invested £150 million into railroads,
hard-surfaced roads, and irrigation canals. Irrigation projects increased
cultivated lands in the western United Provinces and in Andhra. Almost
half of all new irrigation, however, was in the “canal colonies” of the
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Punjab where 3 million acres were added to cultivated lands by 1885
and 14 million by 1947. By the end of the century, rail routes and
improved roads connected the Indian hinterlands to major sea ports,
facilitating the movement of raw materials such as cotton and coal out
of the country and British imports in. The opening of the Suez Canal in
1869 added further impetus to European and British commercial
exploitation of the empire.
During the first 50 years of the 19th century, India had exported
indigo, opium, cotton (first cloth and yarn, then later raw cotton), and
silk. In the decades after the East India Company’s monopoly on trade
ended in 1833, private European planters developed tea and coffee
estates in eastern and southern India. By 1871 tea plantations in Assam
and the Nilgiri hills shipped more than 6 million pounds of tea each
year. By 1885 south Indian coffee cultivation expanded to more than a
quarter million acres by 1885. The jute industry linked jute cultivation
in eastern Bengal to production mills in Calcutta in the late 19th century. European merchants also took control of indigo production in
Bengal and Bihar; they treated their “coolie” workers so harshly that
they precipitated India’s first labor strike, the Blue Mutiny of 1859–60.
Between 1860 and 1920, however, both the opium and indigo trades
disappeared. Opium exports declined from 30 percent of all Indian
exports in the 1860s to nothing in 1920 as a ban on its trade came into
effect. Indigo also disappeared as an export commodity, declining from
6 percent of Indian exports in the 1860s to zero in the 1920s.
Between 1860 and 1920, raw cotton, wheat, oilseeds, jute, and tea
were the major exports of the imperial Indian economy. Apart from tea,
a plantation crop, the remainder were crops produced in rural communities as part of the peasant crop cycle and firmly rooted in the peasant
economy. Raw cotton was the largest single export item. Before 1850
most Indian cotton was exported to China; after the 1870s, Indian cotton
went to the European continent and to Japan. The export of Indian wheat
and oilseeds (as well as rice grown in Burma) developed after the Suez
Canal opened in 1869. By the 1890s about 17 percent of India’s wheat
was exported, and between 1902 and 1913 Indian wheat provided 18
percent of Britain’s wheat imports. Jute, which provided the bags in
which the world’s grain exports were packed for shipment, was the most
valuable Indian export during the early decades of the 20th century. Tea
production began in the 1830s, and by the early 1900s Indian tea made
up 59 percent the tea consumed in Britain.
British business firms received most of the profits of India’s late 19thcentury export trade. British firms controlled the overseas trade in
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Indian export commodities and also their shipping and insurance. The
secondary beneficiaries of the export trade were Indian traders, middlemen, and moneylenders. Such men facilitated the production of export
crops at the rural level and usually profited regardless of export fluctuations. Of all the participants in the export trade, peasant cultivators took
the greatest risks and made the least profits. Local farmers bore the brunt
of the price and demand fluctuations of exporting to global markets, and
as a result, rural indebtedness became a major problem in the late century. Well into the 20th century peasant cultivation, even of export
crops, remained at the simplest technological level. As late as the 1950s,
peasants’ tools for agricultural production were still “bullocks, wooden
ploughs and unsprung carts” (Tomlinson 1993, 83).
Although agricultural exports were the major reason for imperial
India’s economic growth, the second half of the 19th century also saw
the beginnings of Indian industrial production if only on a small scale.
The first Indian steam-powered cotton mill opened in Bombay in 1856.
In the 1870s–80s the Indian textile industry in Bombay expanded in
earnest, as first 47 and then 79 mills opened there. Bombay cotton
industries were often started by Indian traders in raw cotton looking to
expand their business activities. In the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad,
Bullock cart technology. As this picture from Rajasthan in the late 1970s shows, bullocks and
the carts they pulled remained a major technology of Indian farming in the late 20th century.
(Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
long a regional weaving center, indigenous banking families (shroffs)
added the industrial production of cotton yarn as part of their dealings
with cotton growers and handloom weavers. By 1900 Indian mill-produced yarn was 68 percent of the domestic market and also supplied a
substantial export market to China and Japan. By 1913 Ahmedabad had
become a major center for Indian mill-made cloth. Imported cloth,
however, was half the cloth sold in India up to 1914, falling to less than
20 percent only by the 1930s.
In eastern India industrial production appeared first in the late 19th
century in jute and coal businesses controlled by European and AngloIndian firms. Jute was manufactured by firms in Calcutta between 1880
and 1929. Coal production began in the 1840s, and by the early 1900s
Indian railways used mostly local coal. In 1899 J. N. Tata, a Parsi businessman, founded the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO). The Tata
family already owned cotton mills in western India and their family
firm, Tata Sons and Company, was among India’s largest iron and steel
importers and dealers. Unable to finance their new company through
London, the Tatas obtained funding from Indian investors in Bombay.
In 1907 the company opened its first modern plant at Jamshedpur in
Bihar.
The British in India
The long-term British residents of India, called Anglo-Indians in the
19th century, were only a small minority on the Indian subcontinent,
never numbering more than 100,000, even at the height of the British
Empire. The men in this community ran the upper levels of the Indian
government and the Indian Civil Service and were often from families
that could trace connections with India over several generations. Such
connections gave Anglo-Indians as a whole both faith in their own
authoritative knowledge about India and a strong vested interest in the
continuance of British rule in India.
While during the course of the British Raj many Anglo-Indians made
important contributions to our understanding of Indian history and
culture, it is also true that the Anglo-Indian community was often the
source of racist and supremacist ideas about India and its peoples.
Anglo-Indians believed implicitly in the benefits of British rule in India
and in what is sometimes called the “civilizing mission” of British
imperialism—the belief, that is, that the British had a mission to civilize India by reforming its indigenous ways of life with the more
“advanced” ideas, culture, and practices of Great Britain and the West.
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“Imperial Chintz”
T
he kitchen is a black hole, the pantry a sink,” wrote Flora Annie
Steel and Grace Gardiner in their late 19th-century manual for
Anglo-Indian housewives, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook:
“
The only servant who will condescend to tidy up is a skulking
savage with a reed broom; whilst pervading all things broods the
stifling, enervating atmosphere of custom, against which energy
beats itself unavailingly as against a feather bed. The authors
themselves know what it is to look round on a large Indian
household, seeing that all things are wrong, all things slovenly,
yet feeling paralysed by sheer inexperience in the attempt to
find a remedy (Steel and Gardiner 1902, ix).
Like many in the late 19th century, Steel and Gardiner saw the English
home in India as the local and domestic site of the more general confrontation between British civilization and Indian barbarism. By imposing
proper practices of cleanliness, system, and order within their Indian
homes, Anglo-Indian housewives could demonstrate both the superior
virtues of Victorian domesticity and that domesticity’s ability to civilize
(continues)
Chalk Farm at Meerut, 1883. An Anglo-Indian bungalow home in Meerut, Bengal,
complete with horses, dogs, and servants (harappa.com)
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“Imperial Chintz” (continued)
India itself. Anglo-Indian wives who decorated their Indian homes with
English chintz, grew English pansies in hill stations, arranged tea parties
and croquet matches on Indian lawns, buried their children, and survived
the Indian heat participated in a “public domesticity” of empire (George
1998, 51).They were seen (and sometimes saw themselves) as exemplars
of a global and naturalized domesticity fundamental to civilization itself.
The basic Anglo-Indian view that India was a decadent and uncivilized
society much in need of British tutelage became specific and concrete
through demonstrations of the superior virtues of the Anglo-Indian
home. Anglo-Indian domesticity became an important part of the
broader “civilizing mission” of British imperial rule in India.
Such beliefs when combined with the dominant position of AngloIndians within British India itself often resulted in relations with
Indians that were either overtly or covertly racist. And the ingrained
conservative and racist attitudes of Anglo-Indian officials may also have
contributed to the slowness of constitutional reforms during the late
19th and early 20th centuries.
There is some irony in the fact that while many 19th- and 20th-century
British critics railed against Indian customs and caste practices, the
Anglo-Indian community in India lived and worked in conditions that
replicated many practices of indigenous caste or jati groups. Like members of Indian castes, the British ate and socialized only with each other.
As in Indian castes, Anglo-Indians married only within their own community (or with people from “home”). They worshipped with and were
buried by members of their own community and according to its customs. And for those who broke Anglo-Indian social conventions,
ostracism was as severe as for any indigenous Indian “outcaste.”
The Anglo-Indian community in India developed slowly from the
late 18th to the mid-19th century. In these decades it took six months
to travel from England to India by way of the African cape. There were
few European women in India, and company servants regularly kept
Indian mistresses and socialized with local Muslim elites. In 1830,
however, an overland route across Egypt shortened the journey somewhat, and in 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal cut the time for travel
between England and India to less than three weeks. More
Englishwomen accompanied their husbands to the subcontinent (or
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St. Mary’s in Madras. Churches were a standard feature of Anglo-Indian communities. St.
Mary’s Church in the city of Madras (present-day Chennai) was built in 1679. Often described
as the Westminster Abbey of the East, it is the oldest British building in Chennai and the first
Anglican church built in Asia. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
traveled to India in search of husbands). As a result Anglo-Indian society grew, becoming in the process both more elaborate and more
restrictive.
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Particularly after 1857, British urban settlements in India were physically separated from the surrounding Indian society. British cantonments (towns where armies were quartered) or provincial or district
centers had sections set apart—the “Civil Lines”—for Anglo-Indians
and Europeans. The bungalow-style residences of the Anglo-Indian
officials and staff were located within these Civil Lines, as were their
church, club, polo grounds, and cemetery. Army barracks were separate. And most towns and cities also had a “black town,” a section for
Indian residents and their businesses.
The demands and patterns of government service also bound
together Anglo-Indian families and separated them further from
indigenous Indian life. Anglo-Indian civilian life was extremely peripatetic, with officers and their families moving constantly from station to station over the course of a career. In addition, it was a
government practice, inaugurated in the 1830s, to move officials and
staff to the hills during the hot Indian summer season. The central
government moved from Calcutta to the Himalayan town of Simla,
while provincial governments developed their own local hill stations,
such as Darjeeling for Bengal and Mahableshwar for Bombay. Not all
memsahibs (wives of English officials, or sahibs) thought this was a
good idea—or even necessary. Steel and Gardiner advised their readers to consider remaining in the plains with their husbands. “Don’t
give in to it,” they said of the hot weather, “and it will give in to you”
(1902, 204).
But whether in Civil Lines or in hill stations, Anglo-Indian society
developed its own strict codes and customs. Just as Anglo-Indian men
staffed the ICS and the upper levels of central and provincial governments, the law courts, and the military, Anglo-Indian society divided
itself internally along these lines. One 20th-century Anglo-Indian
joked,
The Brahmins . . . were the members of the topmost Government service, the Indian Civil Service . . . below them were the
semi-Brahmins, the various other covenanted services—the
provincial civil services and so on. Then you had the military
caste . . . [and the] British businessmen, very wealthy and powerful in places like Calcutta, but fairly low caste (Allen and
Mason 1976, 83).
Precedence for seating and for presentation at parties was defined by
printed “civil lists.” At the larger stations, dress codes were elaborate,
and visiting customs, complex (Allen and Mason 1976, 68). “Dress
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THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
becomingly,” advised The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, “. . . and
never, even in the wilds, exist without one civilised evening and morning dress” (Steel and Gardiner 1902, 217).
The English writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) wrote many stories chronicling Anglo-Indian life in India. Kipling himself came from
an Anglo-Indian family. Born in Bombay, the son of Lockwood Kipling
and Alice Macdonald, he had spent his early years in India, raised by
Indian servants and speaking Hindustani with them. In 1871, as was
common with Anglo-Indian families, he and his sister were sent
“home” to England, where they boarded with a retired merchant captain and where Kipling attended school. When he returned to India in
1882, Kipling began work as a reporter for a Lahore newspaper. He was
a bad reporter; he garbled facts and had no memory for details. But his
stories of Anglo-Indian life began to be published, first in the local press
and then as Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) in England. When he
returned to England in 1889, he was already a popular and well-known
author. He would write most of his later work, including the famous
adventure novel Kim (1901), in either England or America, and in 1907
he would receive the Nobel Prize in literature, the first Englishman to
win this honor.
Kipling’s famous 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” although
written about U.S. involvement in the Philippines, nevertheless captured the Anglo-Indian community’s own sense of its purpose and function in India:
Take up the White Man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need. . . . (Howe 1982, 602).
The self-sacrifice, honor, duty, and service that Kipling eulogized in
this poem were qualities that defined, for Anglo-Indians, the meaning and purpose of their lives and work in India. The poem’s assumption that all nonwhite peoples needed white “civilization” was also
one with which Anglo-Indians would have agreed. For the most part
neither the Anglo-Indian community nor British imperialists more
generally gave much thought to the many ways British rule profited
Great Britain and British citizens at the expense of India and Indian
people.
Still, even in 1899 when Kipling wrote his famous poem, his views
were not entirely unchallenged. The British daily, London’s Truth, added
this poetical coda to Kipling’s poem:
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Pile on the brown man’s burden
To satisfy your greed (Bartlett 1992, 593).
By 1899 there was already an audience in India that would have
approved this critique of imperialism. Over the course of the 19th century English education had produced an elite class of Indians intimately
familiar with the colonial modernity that British rule had brought to
India. By the end of the century this Indian elite had begun to organize
itself politically and was both ready and willing to add its own opinions
of British greed and racism to the London paper’s short coda.
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5
Becoming Modern—
the Colonial Way
(1800–1900)
To the memory of the British Empire in India which conferred subject
hood on us but withheld citizenship. To which yet everyone of us threw
out the challenge “Civis Britannicus Sum” because all that was good and
living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British Rule.
■
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1968, dedication)
A
s British armies consolidated imperial control across the subcontinent, British institutions and economic structures reshaped life
in towns and cities and in the countryside. British architecture redrew
the skylines of urban centers, while British technologies and administrative structures reorganized urban public spaces and public life. In
rural India a new focus on exports shifted from agricultural production
for local consumption and exchange to farm products to be sold across
the subcontinent and in world markets.
These changes had an enormous impact on Indians themselves. For
both urban and rural Indians Pax Britannica meant more than just foreign rule and India’s political unity. For the high-caste sons of regional
Indian elites it meant attendance at new English-language colleges, an
introduction to the ideas and concepts of Western modernity, and
futures shaped by the need to succeed within the new occupations and
professions introduced into India along with British rule. As early as the
1820s the members of the growing “English-educated elite” formed literary clubs, debating societies, and religious and social reform groups
in which they debated the merits of India’s past and their own and their
country’s future. By the 1870s many members of this urban, middleclass elite were joining regional political associations.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
For rural Indians, however, current conditions posed more urgent
problems than debates about the future. As farmers produced more
crops for commercial export, substantial food shortages appeared in
rural regions, particularly among poorer communities. Both famine and
disease spread more quickly than ever before through India’s now
closely interlinked provinces. Over the last 30 years of the century
major famines ravaged villages, towns, and cities, often followed closely
by contagious diseases that further devastated already weakened populations. Sporadic protests during these years revealed undercurrents of
local opposition to the changes brought by the new colonial regime.
Colonial Modernity
Over the course of the 19th century the British presence and power in
India altered the physical, economic, social, and even domestic landscapes
of urban towns and cities across the subcontinent, introducing into them
the structures, ideologies, and practices of a British-mediated colonial
modernity. Along with governmental and administrative offices, British
rule brought to Indian cities law offices, hospitals, hotels, emporiums,
schools and colleges, town halls, churches, learned societies, printers and
publishers—the full panoply of 19th-century life as it existed in mid-century English or European cities. These changes were most dramatic in
India’s capital, Calcutta, but they also reshaped public and work spaces in
most towns, cantonments, and cities throughout the Raj.
The use of English rather than Persian as the language of courts and
government and the railroads, telegraphs, and unified post all contributed to the new urban British India. Along with these changes came
European-style buildings and the institutional structures of Westernstyle office work and British administrative practices. In downtown
Calcutta the old East India Company Writers’ Building was rebuilt over
the 1850s and 1870s into a vast Gothic brick building. Its endless corridors and offices made it the proper home for the reports, forms, receipts,
officials, clerks, scribes, and peons (servants) of a colonial bureaucracy.
Such workers and their array of paper procedures became the standard
features of the businesses and other modern occupations introduced
into India with British rule. By mid-century, office work and its routines
and hierarchies defined daily life throughout urban British India.
Just as imperial-style buildings dominated public space in British
India, British concepts of time, efficiency, and order organized life
within those spaces. Clock time (a concept almost equally new in
industrialized England and Europe) structured daily public life. Office
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BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY
work began and ended at fixed times. Trains ran according to “timetables,” and streets were cleaned on schedule. “How the English appreciate the value of time!” wrote one Indian admiringly. “They work at the
right time, eat at the right time, attend office at the right time, and play
at the right time. Everything they do is governed by rules. . . . It is
because of this quality that the English get the time to accomplish so
much” (Chakrabarty 1993, 6). The pocket watch became an emblem of
British colonial modernity for Westernized Indian men.
Printed books and newspapers were equally omnipresent signs of
modern colonial life. Print culture and print capitalism—in both
English and newly revitalized indigenous languages—grew quickly in
the 19th century. Multiple newspapers and tracts addressed the diverse
reading publics that coexisted in British Indian towns and cities.
English-language newspapers for the Anglo-Indian community dated
from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The first vernacular newspaper, The Bengali Gazette, began in 1816. Bombay had its first Indian
press in 1861; Madras had its first Indian-owned newspaper, the Madras
Mail, in 1868. By mid-century literate Calcutta families were said to
prefer printed almanacs to live astrologers. By the 1860s Indian-printed
publications had become so numerous the government needed new
Writers’ Building, Calcutta, as it looked after being rebuilt in the 1850s and 1870s (Courtesy
Ron Ellis, Derby, United Kingdom, and also with thanks to the Center for Study of the Life and
Work of William Carey, D.D. [1761–1834],William Carey College, Hattiesburg, Mississippi)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Belvedere House and its 30-acre estate in south Calcutta was occupied during the 19th
century by the lieutenant governors of Bengal. When the capital was moved to New Delhi in
1911, Belvedere became the Calcutta residence of the viceroy. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
laws to catalog and track them. Printing was the capital’s second largest
industry by 1911. Throughout the rest of India, as in Calcutta, a large
and diverse Indian reading public consumed books of all types in both
English and the many regional Indian vernaculars.
Hindu Renaissance in Bengal
The earliest urban Indian response to the ideas and practices of the
English came in the 1820s from the Indian elites based in the city of
Calcutta. By the 1820s Calcutta was already a “city of palaces,” so
named for its palatial European-style mansions. It was the capital of
Britain’s Indian empire and the second city of the world (after London)
in Britain’s global trading empire. Many well-known Bengali men in the
city had grown rich either working for the East India Company or as
zamindars under Bengal’s permanent settlement (or sometimes as
both). Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), who founded the city’s most
famous family, made his fortune in Calcutta trade and then solidified it
by purchasing extensive zamindari estates in eastern Bengal.
Rammohan Roy (1774–1833), later called “the Father of Modern
India,” worked for the East India Company in various capacities before
retiring to Calcutta as a wealthy zamindar in 1815. Gopimohan Deb,
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BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY
the father of the conservative Hindu Radhakanta Deb (1784–1867), had
been Robert Clive’s Persian secretary and munshi (clerk) and acquired
large zamindari estates in the late 18th century.
In 1817 Tagore and the Debs (father and son), along with other
locally prominent English and Indian men, founded Hindu College, a
private English-language school for the boys of their own and other
similar families in the city. Gopimohan Deb became the school’s first
director and a year later Radhakanta Deb took over the directorship, a
position he held through the 1830s. Rammohan Roy also approved of
English education and supported the college—but not openly. He was
already an anathema to many Calcutta Hindus because of his wellknown opposition to Hindu idolatry and his interest in Christianity.
In the late 1820s (the same period in which the government made
sati illegal and Roy founded his Brahmo Sabha) students of the new
Hindu College began to put their education’s ideas into practice. The
students had come under the influence of a young Eurasian teacher at
the college, Henry Derozio (1809–31), who had lectured on rationalism, the European Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.
Determined to demonstrate their opposition to what they now saw as
Jorasanko Thakurbari,Tagore family mansion in Calcutta. Jorasanko Thakurbari was a residence
in north Calcutta—the “black,” or Indian, part of town—but it was as palatial and grand as
the European-style homes to the south.Today the building houses the Rabindra Bharati
Museum. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Rammohan Roy
R
ammohan Roy (1774–1833) was one of India’s earliest public figures, a man whose interest in and response to Western ideas later
won him the title of “the Father of Modern India.” After retiring to
Calcutta in 1815 Roy wrote and published newspapers in English, Persian,
and Bengali. He was deeply opposed to idolatry, which he found in both
Hinduism and in the Christian idea of the Trinity. He also opposed the
Hindu custom of sati, which, it was said, he had once seen a member of
his own family commit. In 1804 Roy wrote a tract in Persian denouncing
image worship, and in 1818, a tract in English opposing sati. Another
English publication, his 1820 “The Precepts of Jesus,” praised aspects of
Christianity. In 1828 Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha (later renamed the
Brahmo Samaj, or “Society of Brahma”). He based his new religious association on the ancient Hindu Upanishads; there he found a monotheism
that demonstrated, as he put it, the “unity of the Supreme Being as sole
Ruler of the Universe” (Kopf 1979, 14). In 1830 Roy traveled to England
to visit English Unitarian friends in Bristol with whom he had long corresponded. He died in Bristol three years later, in 1833.
the irrational superstitions of Hinduism, Hindu College students began
to eat meals together that broke Hindu dietary and commensality laws
and to attend public meetings at which they were heard shouting
“Down with Hinduism! Down with orthodoxy!” (Bhattacharjee 1986,
113). In one scandalous and provocative incident several students
threw beef bones into the courtyard of a prominent Brahman family.
The director of Hindu College, Radhakanta Deb, had already made
his convictions on reform issues known by founding the Hindu
Dharma Sabha (Hindu Association for Dharma), a group that had collected signatures for a Privy Council petition against the new anti-sati
law. Blaming Derozio for the students’ behavior Deb and his associates
forced Derozio’s resignation from the college. It made no difference.
Over the next decade Hindu College students, graduates, and sympathizers—later collectively labeled “Young Bengal”—founded clubs and
associations, started newspapers, and wrote tracts and plays, all with
the goal of reforming and rationalizing Hindu religious and customary
practices, or (as one participant put it) of achieving the “eradication of
Hindu idolatry” (Bhattacharjee 1986, 139).
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BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY
Later scholars would call this movement the “Hindu Renaissance”
because of its participants’ desire to see Hinduism “reborn,” shorn of its
idolatry and superstitions. But the Hindu Renaissance was as much
about social and cultural reform—about adaptation to British colonial
modernity—as it was about religion. While a strong Christian missionary presence in and around Calcutta in the 1830s shaped the language
and rhetoric with which men such as Roy and the student reformers
wrote and spoke, few Hindus actually converted to Christianity in this
period. In the second half of the 19th century, as the ideas and practices
of British colonial modernity became institutionalized in the routines of
office work in Indian towns and cities and through the teachings of an
expanding English-language educational system, later conflicts over
reform and adaptation would take on a more secular tone.
The Hindu Renaissance was also, as many contemporaries pointed
out, a generational struggle among the men of elite Calcutta families.
Participants on both sides of the conflict, both “orthodox” men such as
Radhakanta Deb and “reformers” such as Roy and the Hindu College
students, were members of a Calcutta elite already substantially influenced by Western ideas and practices. What they disagreed over was
the degree of adaptation, the degree to which reform ideas and practices
should replace older customs and traditions. Later in the 19th century,
as the Western-style employment of English-educated men became
increasingly necessary for their families’ economic well-being, the
Western ideas and practices such men advocated would become more
acceptable, even to more conservative family elders.
English Education
The Wood Dispatch of 1854 had established the outlines of an English
education system in India with university centers at Calcutta,
Bombay, and Madras. Over the next half century, as English-language
education became a required credential for elite employment throughout British India, both the number of schools and their enrollments
rose dramatically. In 1854 there were only 180 English-language
schools at all levels (primary through college) in the country. By 1885
most provinces had English-language schools, and 78 colleges were
affiliated to the three university centers. By 1902, 140 arts colleges
enrolled 17,000 college-level students. Two years later, the system
expanded to five universities with 200 affiliated colleges. By 1918
Calcutta University’s 27,000 students made it the largest university in
the world.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Although organized by region, the educational system was remarkably uniform both in structure and in content across British India.
Regardless of region, students studied English, a classical language
(European or Indian), mathematics, logic, physical science, geography, and history in their first two years. They were tested on these
subjects through written examinations whose questions were set two
years in advance and whose answers were to be factual and detailed,
based on information in a recommended textbook. In history, for
instance, exam questions might ask students to name “some of the
chief of our liberties established by the Magna Carta,” or ask “Who
was the founder of the Mahratta [sic] dynasty? Give a brief account of
his career” (Punjab University Calendar 1874, 195; Calcutta
University Calendar 1861, 32).
The standard for passing was severe. At the Matriculation
Examination (M.E.), required for entrance into the college curriculum,
half the candidates regularly failed. At the B.A. level, the pass rate was
even lower, just above 10 percent. Between 1857 and 1885, for
instance, 48,000 candidates passed the M.E., but only slightly more
than 5,100 obtained a B.A. degree. By the end of the century, Indians
who had studied in the system but had failed their examinations took
to appending “B.A. Failed” to their names on cards and publications as
an indication of their English-language credentials.
The English-Educated Elite
The young Indian men who graduated from English education institutions were part of what contemporaries called the “English-educated
elite.” The numbers of such men were minuscule in relation to the wider
Indian population, not even 1 percent of the total as late as 1900.
Nevertheless this elite dominated Indian religious, social, and political
movements throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. It was the urban,
middle-class English-educated elite who organized the religious and social
reform movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; it was
English-educated men who agitated for widow remarriage, against child
marriage, and for women’s literacy and education. In the last decades of
the 19th century it would be the Westernized elite that provided the organizational base and the leadership for the Indian nationalist movement.
Although schooled in different regions and speaking different vernaculars, English-educated graduates had much in common. Most were
Hindus, relatively high caste, and from families already literate in the languages of the Mughal Empire (Persian or Urdu) or in Sanskrit. The edu132
BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY
Defining the Middle Class
T
he English-educated elite were a wealthy select community, less
than 0.3 percent of the total Indian population in the 1880s,
according to one estimate (McCully 1940, 177). Nevertheless they were
frequently referred to, then and now, as the “Indian middle class.” There
were two reasons for the use of this term. First, many 19th-century
British and Indian writers assumed that there was an analogy to be
made between the “respectable” educated classes of Indian society and
the bourgeoisie of various European countries. And second, as urban
professionals and/or office workers, the English-educated fell into no
other category of Indian life:They came from the upper castes (usually
defined as those linked with the Brahman, Kshatriya, or Vaishya varnas),
but not from any one caste or varna. They were not a hereditary aristocracy, nor were they peasants.
The “Indian middle class,” to the extent that it can be defined as such
in the 19th century, lived professional lives structured by employment
within the British Raj and had lifestyles broadly adapted to the ideas and
practices of British colonial modernity. The men of such families were
invariably literate, usually in both English and at least one vernacular language. Family backgrounds were generally those of high-caste Hindu or
ashraf Muslim, and often these families had traditions of service within
the courts and provincial centers of earlier Muslim rulers. In income,
members could range from the wealthiest descendants of zamindars to
impoverished office clerks.
cational system through which they passed added to this shared background a common language (English) and a perspective shaped by common Western ideas and values of the time. Indian students, although
living under the absolute imperial power of the Raj, memorized the
“rights” given by the Magna Carta; they learned about science and scientific method; and they rehearsed the “Benefits of British Rule”—an obligatory chapter in many Indian history textbooks that listed the benefits of
technology, peace, and prosperity that the British had brought to India.
School textbooks actively urged students to acculturate, to become
Anglicized and Westernized, and to leave behind the decadent accretions of their indigenous pasts. After acculturation would come prominent positions within British India, schoolbooks promised; it was the
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
British government’s intention, as one text put it, “to offer a large share
in the administration . . . to natives of India who were qualified by character and education” (Thompson 1908, 393). The educational system,
however, taught more than a simple message of acculturation. It also
taught schoolboys about India’s “degenerate” past and their own “weak”
and/or “effeminate” natures. Caste, idolatry, the treatment of women,
India’s debilitating climate, and vegetarianism were, according to schoolbooks, responsible for India’s backward and superstitious culture and its
puny and small citizenry. The nationalist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869–1948) recalled from his Gujarati youth a verse that ran
Behold the mighty Englishman,
He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall (1957, 21).
British racism was institutionalized within an educational system
that simultaneously taught Indian inferiority and British superiority.
These superior Western qualities and inferior Indian counterparts
became base points of a core identity increasingly internalized over the
19th and 20th centuries in succeeding generations of English-educated
families. After graduation, employment in British institutions or under
British superiors introduced the educated elite to racial prejudices but
in more personal circumstances. One English-educated Punjabi gentleman, for instance, worked as an engineer for the government in
turn-of-the-century India and admired many qualities of his British
employers, but at work he had the sense of being always “on test.” The
British, his son remembers the father saying, “could afford to relax
because if things went wrong they managed to explain it to each other.
. . . But when an Indian made a mistake the reaction, if an understanding one, was that the job, perhaps, was too difficult for him”
(Tandon 1968, 210–211).
Religious and Social Reform Associations
“The Life of the Educated Native: What Should It Be?” This was the
title of a student essay in the 1870s and a question many Westerneducated Indians asked themselves in the second half of the 19th century. “Rationalism” and the “Enlightenment” were the keys to a modern
future; just as caste, idolatry, and superstition were its anathema. But
beyond schoolbook formulas lay the thornier realm of actual practice.
The wearing of a sacred thread, prohibitions against eating beef, restric134
BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY
tions on commensality (sharing food across caste lines), prohibitions
against the use of utensils for eating and against overseas travel, the ban
on widow remarriage, and the customs of child marriage and of purdah—all were linked to social practices embedded in Hindu daily and
domestic life. The changed conditions of life in British-ruled India
politicized these practices (and many more), precipitating debates and
conflicts within Westernized communities. The religious and social
reform associations that formed over the latter half of the 19th century
were the contexts in which the Western educated debated the degree to
which they would adapt themselves and the Indian past to the ideas and
practices of British colonial modernity.
The Brahmo Samaj and the Prarthana Samaj
Originally founded by Rammohan Roy in 1828, the Brahmo Samaj
expanded throughout the second half of the 19th century, gaining new
followers and splitting several times over issues of practice. By the end
of the century Brahmos functioned almost as a separate caste within
Bengali Hindu society. They had their own religious beliefs and practices, their own “churches,” and their own social rituals. Their children’s marriages were arranged within the Brahmo community.
In the 1840s and 1850s Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) renewed
the Brahmo Samaj as a religious association committed to the
monotheistic worship of a formless deity. Then in 1866 Keshab
Chandra Sen (1843–84) left Tagore’s society to found the Brahmo
Samaj of India, a society in which members could aggressively practice
their religious beliefs. Sen’s Brahmos refused to wear the Hindu sacred
thread or to perform Hindu rituals or death ceremonies, practices that
provoked violence, ostracism, and disinheritance from converts’ families. Sen established ashrams (hostels) for Brahmo converts who
needed shelter, and his Brahmos traveled throughout Bengal and India
as missionaries spreading the Brahmo faith. In 1878, however, when
Sen ignored Brahmo reforms in order to marry his daughter to a Hindu
prince, younger members left him to form the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj
(the People’s Brahmo Samaj), a sect with even more reformist practices
particularly in regard to women. Sadharan girls wore petticoats under
their saris and ate at European-style tables using Western utensils; they
studied math and science and were encouraged to go to college.
Sen’s missionary lectures in Bombay inspired the founding there in
1869 of a West Indian religious reform group, the Prarthana Samaj
(Prayer Society). Its founder, Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901),
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj (the People’s Brahmo Samaj) was formed by a split away
from Keshab Sen’s Brahmo group in 1878 over differences in the practice of the Brahmos’
monotheistic faith. The building for the new sect was begun the next year, on Cornwallis Street
(now Bidhan Sarani) in Calcutta. Debendranath Tagore, although himself still a member of the
original Brahmo group (the Adi Brahmo Samaj) gave 7,000 rupees toward the building project.
The new mandir (temple) opened in 1881. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
was a Chitpavan Brahman from the Konkan region who became a
lawyer and later judge in the Pune region. The Prarthana Samaj shared
Brahmo ideas on monotheism and on the desirability of reforming caste
customs, particularly in regard to women, but, as elsewhere, orthodox
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BECOMING MODERN—THE COLONIAL WAY
pressure could make it difficult to translate these beliefs into practice.
Ranade, for instance, spent much of his life working for social reform,
founding the Widow Re-marriage Association in 1861 and the Deccan
Education Society to promote girls’ education. But when his first wife
died in 1873, he did not marry a Hindu widow, as he had long advocated and as he wished; instead he accepted the 11-year-old bride chosen for him by his father.
Muslim Education and Reform
Writing about conditions in India after the 1857 rebellion, the wellknown Urdu poet Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali (1837–1914) said:
We [Muslims] are not trusted by the government,
Not are we among the prominent courtiers or the ruler
Neither are we among the educated elite
We have no share in trade or the industry
Nor do you found [sic] us in the civil services
Or among the businesses. . . . (Khalidi 1995, 52)
Muslim elites had been slow to enlist under the British rulers who had
replaced them, and Muslim families had been reluctant to enroll their
sons in English-language schools. But Muslim religious leaders were
not unaware of the changed society around them. Northern Indian
Muslim elites saw their control over positions in regional government
services steadily declining in the second half of the 19th century, from
65 percent in 1857 to 35 percent by the early 20th century, as Muslims
lost ground to English-educated applicants from Hindu trading, money
lending, and professional communities.
The six years between 1868 and 1875 saw the founding of competing
Muslim educational institutions in the towns of Deoband and Aligarh in
northern India, institutions that appealed to different levels of elite
Muslim society and offered different reactions to British rule in India. The
Deoband Dar-ul-Ulum was a madrasa (religious seminary) founded in
1868 for the education of Muslim ulama (theologian-scholars). It took an
orthodox approach to Islamic studies, attracted poorer but elite Muslim
students, and produced teachers for local religious schools throughout its
region. Deoband offered a traditional Islamic curriculum. But it taught in
Western-style classrooms modeled on the British school system and used
the North Indian language Urdu. In the 20th century Deoband’s relatively
anti-British politics would cause its teachers, students, and graduates to
align themselves with the Indian nationalist movement.
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The other school, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, was
the first Muslim English-language college in India. It was founded at
Aligarh in 1875 by the Muslim reformer (and later Muslim separatist)
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98). Ahmad Khan was descended from
Mughal nobility but had worked many years under the British. He
founded the Scientific Society in 1864 and a modern Urdu-language
journal in 1870, hoping through these media to demonstrate to upperclass Muslims that Western science was compatible with and complementary to the teachings of Islam. Impressed by Western colleges on a
trip to England in 1875, Ahmad Khan founded Aligarh (as the school
came to be known) on the model of Cambridge University. The school
taught classes in English and combined Western and Islamic subjects
within a single curriculum. Ahmad Khan wrote in a letter at the time,
The adoption of the new system of education does not mean
the renunciation of Islam. It means its protection. . . . The truth
of Islam will shine the more brightly if its followers are well educated, familiar with the highest in the knowledge of the world; it
will come under an eclipse if its followers are ignorant (De Bary
1958, 745).
Unlike Deoband, Aligarh’s students were drawn from the wealthier
Muslim landlord and service communities of northern India.
Aligarh’s “reformist” religious attitudes, however, placed it and its
founder in opposition to contemporaneous pan-Islamic movements
from the Middle East. In the 1880s, one pan-Islamicist, Jamal al-Din alAfghani, lived and lectured in both Calcutta and Hyderabad; alAfghani’s movement stressed the role of the Ottoman sultan as supreme
leader of a worldwide Muslim community. In his speeches al-Afghani
argued for Hindus and Muslims to unite against the British in India and
abroad, a position the Deobandis found attractive, and British government officials, alarming. Aligarh had always received considerable government funding; Ahmad Khan’s pro-British views had led the British to
hope that the school would develop a new (pro-British) Muslim elite
that would dominate Indian Muslim communities. In the 1880s the
British further raised their economic support for the college, and this
was one of the factors that led Aligarh to become the premier Englishlanguage institution for Muslim Indian students in India.
Arya Samaj
The north Indian religious reform association, the Arya Samaj, was
founded in 1875 in Bombay and in 1877 in the Punjab. It shared
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many of the same reform concerns as the Bengal and Bombay associations but added to these an aggressively militant stance in relation to
other north Indian religions. Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), the
society’s founder, was a Gujarati sannyasi (holy man) with little interest in English education. Dayananda traveled through the Bombay
and north Indian regions debating competing religionists (Muslims,
Sikhs, or Hindu Sanatanists, that is, orthodox Hindus). He based his
reformed Hinduism on the Sanskrit Vedas and opposed all idolatry,
caste exclusivity, and customary restrictions on women. In
Dayananda’s Hinduism, jatis (local caste divisions) should be replaced
by a varna system that would be fixed for boys and girls “according to
merits and actions” (Jaffrelot 1996, 14).
Dayananda’s teachings particularly resonated with Western-educated
professional and trading communities in the Punjab and north Indian
regions where his followers nicknamed him “the Luther of India.” By
the 20th century, unlike both the Brahmo or Prarthana Samajs, which
declined in influence and in membership, the Arya Samaj switched its
focus from reform and education to both Hindu revivalism and
nationalism.
Theosophical Society
The theosophist movement of the late 19th century was also a religious reform society, but one that drew its membership primarily from
Europeans and Americans. The society was founded in New York City
in 1875 by a Russian, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and an American,
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. The society’s religious ideas were originally drawn from Jewish mysticism and Western occultist movements. In 1879, Madame Blavatsky traveled to India to meet Swami
Dayananda Sarasvati, whose Arya Samaj movement greatly interested
her. Within a few years the society based its religious ideas on Hindu
and Buddhist concepts of karma and reincarnation. Madame
Blavatsky established the Indian headquarters of the Theosophist
Society in Madras in 1882.
The Women’s Question
Throughout the second half of the 19th century the “women’s question” encompassed a set of concerns debated in many Indian forums.
For British critics Indian women’s social conditions demonstrated the
backwardness and decadence of Indian civilization. In public meetings
and tracts Western-educated Indian men debated the need to reform
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Dance of the Emancipated Bengalee Lady by Gaganendranath Tagore, c. 1921. Tagore
(1867–1938) was born at Jorasanko, the Tagore mansion in north Calcutta, and was the
nephew of Rabindranath Tagore.Well known as an artist, cartoonist, and social critic,Tagore
drew several versions of this cartoon. He titled this version Colour Scream, noting “the times
are changed and we are changed with them” and drawing his very liberated Indian lady
dancing with a rather red- (and pig-) faced English dancing partner. (Chandi Lahiri)
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A Gujarati Woman’s
Journal
T
he new wives desired by young Western-educated men in the late
19th century were to be modern, literate, and educated. Equally
important they were to bring new domestic skills to family and home
life. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries many domestic magazines and manuals appeared in north Indian languages, specifically
addressed to women (both Hindu and Muslim) and written to teach
women the new skills needed for modern home management, cooking,
account keeping, child care, hygiene, and married life. The manuals and
magazines of the 19th century were almost all written or edited by
English-educated Indian men, but by the 20th century Indian women
had taken over the production of these materials.The Gujarati-language
journal Stribodh (Enlightenment of women), published from 1857 well
into the 20th century, was part of this domestic literature. Stribodh
encouraged women to use their leisure reading for domestic and selfimprovement. Its issues profiled “An Inspiring Woman” (for example,
Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale) and offered instructions on
sewing, embroidery, and drawing, advice on how to purchase and
arrange furniture, how to hire servants, how to use Western eating
utensils, and on the moral benefits of reformed practices like the wearing of shoes and socks. Of special concern was how a wife cared for her
husband when he returned home after a hard day at the office.The following are a few of Stribodh’s suggestions:
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
vi.
vii.
viii.
ix.
x.
xi.
xii.
Arrange the house neatly and aesthetically.
Keep the children neat and disciplined.
Do not shout at children or beat them.
Dress in nice clothes, especially to receive him when he
returns home in the evening.
Manage the servants well but do not mix with them.
Never sit idle.
Do not sit with other women to gossip and make idle talk.
Do not complain to your husband about your children,
mother-in-law, and sisters-in-law.
Do not complain to him about your problems in household
management.
Sing or play a musical instrument to help your husband
relax when he returns home.
Speak to him in a soft and pleasant manner.
Do not ever nag him (Shukla 1991, 65).
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practices such as the early age of marriage (child marriage), the seclusion of women (purdah), the ban on widow remarriage, and the Hindu
religion’s prohibition against women’s literacy and education. At the
same time young Western-educated Indian men read Romeo and Juliet
in college classes and often wrote passionately of their desire for romantic love and companionate marriage.
Both to reform women’s social conditions and to create wives more
to their liking, young English-educated men founded numerous societies for women’s social reform and education during the second half of
the 19th century. Women’s education grew rapidly in this period among
urban elites. In the mid-19th century provinces such as Bengal had had
only a small number of girls in school, but by the 20th century education was an accepted part of an urban middle-class girl’s life. Many customary practices regarding women had changed or been adapted in
urban and middle-class families: The age of marriage had risen, women
more frequently appeared in public, and even widow remarriage had
become marginally acceptable, especially if for child widows, that is,
girls whose “husbands” had died before the marriage was consummated. Two million girls were in schools in 1927, a small percentage of
the total population of women but nevertheless a dramatic increase.
Women’s education was now identified with the general progress of
Indian society: “Educating a girl,” said one early 20th-century reformer,
“means educating a family” (Chanana 1988, 97).
Rural India
Even as British rule reshaped Indian towns and cities and the urban
Westernized Indian elite explored the ideas and practices of colonial
modernity, in the Indian countryside a much larger population struggled to deal with the consequences of higher land revenues, a more
commercially oriented agriculture, famine, and disease. India was a
rural and agricultural society throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
In 1901 there were only 2,100 towns and cities in British India; India’s
total population was 284 million, and villages held 90 percent of those
people.
Although records for 19th-century village life are limited, scholars
think villages were populated by multiple castes and subcastes in the
north and in the south by castes and subcastes that identified primarily
with the Brahman or the Shudra varna. Religious and social relations in
northern villages were structured through local castes’ and subcastes’
varna identifications. Hereditary service relationships (called jajmani
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relations) bound village service and subordinate castes to the dominant
caste of a village, that is, to the caste community that owned the greatest amount of the land surrounding the village.
During the 19th century, the British land settlements redefined rural
life for the purpose of revenue collection by awarding land ownership
to select categories of Indian peasants. In permanent settlement
regions, such as Bengal, land ownership was awarded on the basis of
prior zamindar (tax collector) status; in later settlements (particularly
in south India), on the basis of land cultivation (ryotwari, or peasant,
cultivation). In both types of settlement, however, landholdings
became further subdivided over time, either as a result of divisions due
to inheritance or because landowners subleased their lands to subordinate cultivators. Further, by the 20th century (if not earlier), large numbers of peasant households both owned land and worked as tenants on
other families’ lands. In the 1950s when the first direct surveys of land
control were done, 75 percent of rural households held less than five
acres of land and 23 percent owned no land at all.
Below village landowners, partial landowners, and tenants was the
poorest rural class: the landless laborer. These workers had no rights in
lands and survived only by working the lands of others. These workers
and their families were often desperately poor; in 1881 one British official noted that this class permanently lacked sufficient food. By some
estimates, landless laborers and their families numbered more than 52
million in 1901, almost 20 percent of the total Indian population. They
came mostly from lower caste and tribal communities.
Commercialization of Agriculture, 1860–1920
During the second half of the 19th century Indian rural products
became increasingly integrated into global markets, and Indian peasants shifted to growing raw materials for export to these markets.
Peasant proprietors had an absolute need for cash funds both to pay
land revenues and sometimes to buy seed crops. Money lenders,
whether locals or outsiders (such as Marwari traders said to have come
originally from Rajasthan), were the peasants’ only source of funds.
Local food crops grown for exchange within the village economy were
less attractive than the commercial export crops—cotton, jute, wheat,
oilseeds, tea, indigo, opium—that could be grown for cash.
From the 1860s to the 1920s the commercialization of agriculture
reshaped rural India, altering the crops planted as well as patterns of
rural relationships. Agriculture expanded from 1881 to 1931, and the
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number of agricultural workers rose 28 percent. But peasant
economies, growing crops for export, could now also be destroyed by
fluctuating world markets, and both rural indebtedness and loss of land
became major rural problems in this period. During the 1860s and
1870s, for instance, the worldwide shortage of cotton caused by the
American Civil War encouraged Indian peasants to increase cotton
plantings. When the Civil War ended and cotton from the U.S. South
reentered the world market, prices for Indian-produced cotton
plunged. In addition, as Indian farmers switched to export crops, they
lowered their production of food crops, particularly of the millets and
pulses that fed poorer people in their economies. Between the 1890s
and the 1940s commercial crops increased by 85 percent, but the overall production of food crops declined by almost 30 percent. More rigid
contractual agreements and new transportation networks linking
Indian regions and tying into a world market worked together to give
local producers little flexibility in deciding where their crops would go.
Famine
Famine had been a regular feature of Indian life from at least the 12th
century, usually caused by the failure or excess of monsoon rains and
usually limited in impact to a single region. Severe famines had
occurred during both the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.
Under East India Company rule, in 1769–70 a famine in Bengal killed
one-third of the region’s population.
From 1869 into the early years of the 20th century, however, a new
pattern of famine emerged in British India. The commercialization of
Indian agriculture reduced supplies of locally consumed food crops, at
the same time as railroads and roads tied even remote hinterlands into
the wider Indian economy. Fixed contracts moved crops out of a region
for sale elsewhere regardless of local conditions and even as local shortages mounted. Famines that once had been local or regional now
spread more widely, affecting food supplies and causing deaths across
several regions or even the whole country. Infectious diseases (bubonic
plague in the 19th century, influenza in the 20th) often followed in the
wake of these mass famines, attacking populations already weakened by
starvation.
The first of this new type of famine was the 1866–67 “Orissa
famine,” a spreading series of food shortages and dearth that extended
from the Ganges River valley down the eastern seacoast (well past
Orissa) through the Madras Presidency and west into Hyderabad and
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Mysore. The Orissa famine caused 800,000 famine deaths and affected
more than 3 million people. (“Famine deaths” are calculated by subtracting the number of deaths normally expected in a region or period
from the number of deaths that occur.)
Orissa was followed over the next several decades by an almost continuous number of regional or multiregional famines. In 1868–70 a second famine caused 400,000 deaths in the western Ganges, Rajasthan,
central India, and the northern Deccan; 1873–74 saw severe famine in
Bengal and eastern India; 1875–76 in the Deccan; 1876–78 in the
Ganges region and in the cities of Madras, Hyderabad, Mysore, and
Bombay. At the end of the century two devastating India-wide famines
occurred one after the other: The 1896–97 famine affected 96 million
Indians and caused more than 5 million famine deaths; the 1899–1900
famine affected 60 million Indians, also causing 5 million deaths.
Initially the British Indian government attributed the increased
famines to monsoon failures and bad weather and argued that government intervention would only make conditions worse. But during the
viceroyalty of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (Lord Lytton) in the late
1870s, public outcry in Great Britain forced some government intervention. In 1883 a more Liberal viceroy, George Frederick Samuel
Robinson, Lord Ripon, passed the Famine Code, a series of regulations
to guide government interventions in famines and food shortages. The
code prescribed methods for the early determination of shortages,
declaring states of scarcity and famine, and using railways and shipping
to move grain into famine regions. By the early 20th century the Famine
Code, in conjunction with more aggressive food relief and public health
measures, had all but eliminated mass famine deaths from India.
Rural Protests
After 1857 there was never again a regional uprising that threatened
British dominance in India. Nevertheless British land revenue pressures, peasant indebtedness, and widespread famines produced a series
of smaller, regional tribal, communal, and caste uprisings during the
second half of the 19th century. Before 1857 local uprisings were most
likely to be organized by regional rulers, chiefs, or zamindars dispossessed by an expanding British authority. After 1857, however, surviving princes and zamindars became staunch supporters of the Raj. Rural
rebellions and social protests, some of the most important of which are
described below, came mostly from lower-caste and -class communities
and were not always directed against the British.
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Tribal Rebellions
Tribals, or Scheduled Tribes, were forest-dwelling communities linked
by kinship rather than caste and found throughout the subcontinent
wherever cultivated lands met unexploited forests. By the late 19th century tribals still made up perhaps 10 percent of the total Indian population. British laws gave land and tenancy rights to peasant farming
populations that paid land revenues but not to tribal communities that
used the forests for hunting and gathering or for shifting cultivation but
paid no revenues for this use.
Throughout the 19th century the British government made repeated
efforts to force the tribal communities of northeastern Bengal, Bihar,
central India, Gujarat, and Madras into cultivation (and the payment of
land taxes) wherever possible. Violent protests against these pressures
from the 1850s to the 1920s came from the Santhals in northeastern
India (1855), from Naikda tribes in Gujarat (1868), and from several
different communities in Madras Presidency (1879–80, 1886, and
1900). The largest tribal uprising, however, was the 1899–1900 Ulgulan
(great tumult) of the Munda tribespeople of southern Bihar. By the
1890s Munda traditional lands had been seized by Hindu migrants from
the plains and encroached on by the British government itself. Birsa
Munda (c. 1874–1900), a sharecropper convert to Vaishnavism with
some missionary education, became the leader of the Munda movement
in 1899. Claiming to be a new prophet Birsa Munda urged his followers
to kill Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, telling them that the weapons
of the British police would magically melt into water once fighting
began. Between December 1899 and January 1900 the Birsaites attacked
churches and police stations in Ranchi district before being captured
and imprisoned. Birsa Munda himself died in jail, and 350 Mundas were
tried, three of whom were hanged and 44 transported for life.
Moplah Rebellions
Along the Malabar Coast, a Muslim community called the Moplahs
(Mappilas) had developed out of eighth- and ninth-century Arab trading settlements. When the British took over the region in the early 19th
century, they gave landlord rights to Hindu upper-caste groups. A series
of violent conflicts between the Moplahs and their Hindu landlords
erupted, occurring in 1836, 1854, 1882–85, 1896, and 1921. In these
uprisings small bands of Moplahs attacked high-caste Hindu landlords
and moneylenders, desecrated temples, and led suicide attacks against
local police.
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Peasant Protests
Peasant groups in the Deccan and in eastern India used a combination
of violence, mass meetings, and legal challenges to seek relief from high
land revenues and rural indebtedness in the decades after 1870. In 1875
the Deccan was torn by riots following the fall of cotton prices after the
American Civil War. Villagers facing bankruptcy and the loss of lands
joined together in attacks on the Marwari moneylenders to whom they
were in debt. One of the Deccan’s worst famines followed on the heels
of riots, and the combination drove many peasants into banditry.
Vasudeo Balvant Phadke (1845–83), a Chitpavan Brahman petty clerk
in Pune, led a multicaste dacoit (bandit) gang in this period. Phadke
declared himself the new minister to Shivaji II and led a series of robberies to finance what he hoped would be a more general rebellion
against the British. Captured in 1879, Phadke was sentenced to transportation for life and died four years later.
In eastern Bengal, Assam, and Bombay, peasant movements turned to
organization and legal actions to protest the imposition of higher land
revenues. In 1873 in Pabna district in eastern Bengal, prosperous peasants organized protest meetings, rent strikes, and legal challenges to
fight zamindar rent increases. In two districts of Assam in 1893, village
assemblies and local elites used rent strikes to protest higher revenue
settlements. In the region surrounding Bombay city, the famine of
1896–97 led to the looting of grain stores and to general demands for
the remission of revenues. When the Bombay government refused these
demands, a Pune political association, the Sarvajanik Sabha, sent representatives out to the villages to inform peasants of their rights to rent
remissions under British famine law. In the later famine of 1899–1900
“no revenue” movements also appeared in Surat and Ahmedabad.
Jyotirao Phule’s Non-Brahman Movement
Not all protest was anti-British, however. In 1873 Jyotirao Phule
(1827–90), an Untouchable from the mali (gardener) caste in Pune
founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth Rectification Society), an organization whose purpose was to unify the lower castes. During his missionary school education Phule had read the 18th-century
revolutionary writer Thomas Paine, as well as books on the American
Civil War. He wanted to bring together what he called the bahujan
samaj (the masses, the multitude) to free them from upper-caste
oppression. In Phule’s reading of Indian history the low castes and
Untouchables, the original inhabitants of India, had been forced into
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“Brahmin thralldom” by invading foreign Aryans (Jaffrelot 2003, 153).
For Phule the British were liberators, come to India to free “the disabled
Shudras from the slavery of the crafty Aryas” (Wolpert 1962, 7). Phule’s
movement developed into a 20th-century Marathi protest movement
that was village-based and anti-Brahman.
Second Afghan War, 1878–1880
The small revolts in the Indian interior that occurred after the 1857
rebellion could be easily contained by police and armies. But in the
1870s slow Russian advances into the Central Asian region of Turkistan
renewed the fears of British officials in London that Russia might attack
India through the Afghan country to the northwest. To ensure a sympathetic Afghan regime, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, deposed the Afghan
ruler, Sher Ali, in 1878, replacing him with one of his sons, Yakub
Khan; however, in September 1879 the British political resident and his
entire staff were massacred at Kabul in a popular uprising. British
armies retaliated with great brutality. The cost and the violence of the
war provoked public opposition in Great Britain. With the fall of the
Conservative government and the appointment of the Liberal Lord
Ripon as viceroy, the Indian government sued for peace. They supported Abdur Rahman, a brother of the deposed Sher Ali, as emir of
Kabul, providing him with an annual subsidy on the sole condition that
he have no relations with any foreign powers except Great Britain. By
1881 Abdur Rahman had gained control over all of Afghanistan, which
he ruled until his death in 1901. (In 1919 a third, one-month war
forced the British to concede the Afghans’ rights to conduct their own
foreign relations.)
Vernacular Press Act
To forestall Indian public criticism over the expenses of the Second
Afghan War, Lord Lytton’s government passed the Vernacular Press Act
of 1878. The act required Indian-language presses (but not those that
published in English) to post bonds for their conduct with the government, with the clear threat that such bonds would be forfeited if
what the presses published displeased the government. The act provoked angry objections from both press owners and their Indian readers. It became the occasion for political organizing in Calcutta, Pune,
and Bombay, where newly formed political associations arranged
protests and wrote petitions demanding its repeal. At a public meeting
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in Pune to oppose the act, speakers from the Sarvajanik Sabha (Public
Association) denounced the act for infringing on that “freedom of
thought and speech [which] is a right to which all subjects of the
British Crown are entitled by their birth and allegiance” (Wolpert
1962, 12).
Regional Political Associations
By 1878 politics was a major interest of urban Indian elites. Indians
began forming regional political associations in the late 1860s and early
1870s. The religious or social reform associations of the century
focused inward on questions internal to indigenous Indian society: religious practices, women’s social conditions, caste interactions. Political
associations, in contrast, looked outward, focusing their activities on
the policies and actions of the British Indian government.
English-educated Indians organized their regional political associations along “modern” lines, using contemporary political forms and
practices, and framed their concerns using the language and concepts
of British constitutional democracy. Political associations elected officers, collected dues and subscriptions, kept minutes of their activities,
and held Town Hall meetings to debate and publicize their issues. They
petitioned regional governments on issues of concern to Englisheducated and middle-class communities that supported them. Key
issues were access to ICS (civil service) examinations, broader (middleclass) Indian participation in the government’s Legislative Councils, the
excessive expenses of the Afghan wars, and government inaction during famines.
Pune
One of the earliest and most successful of the regional associations was
Pune’s Sarvajanik Sabha. Founded in 1870 out of several smaller
groups, Pune’s political association regularly organized public meetings, debates, protests, and petitions on the issues of the day. It provided an early and regional context for the political development of
three of India’s most famous nationalist leaders.
The three men were Mahadev Govind Ranade, founder of the
Prarthana Samaj in Bombay, Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), and
Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920). All came from Maharashtra,
from the elite Chitpavan Brahman community, and all three were English
educated: Ranade and Gokhale at Elphinstone College in Bombay and
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Tilak at Pune’s local Deccan College. Ranade, the eldest of the three, was
a lawyer and judge, college teacher, historian, and above all else, social
reformer. He founded in 1887 the National Indian Social Conference.
Gokhale, Ranade’s disciple, was a founding member of Pune’s Fergusson
College, where he taught for 20 years. He was committed to secular social
reform, founding the Servants of India Society in 1905, an organization
of full-time volunteers dedicated to welfare work. In contrast, Tilak was
the editor and publisher of two popular Pune newspapers: the Englishlanguage Mahratta and the Marathi-language Kesari (Lion). In his newspapers and speeches Tilak rejected the idea of social reform. He preferred
to direct his energies toward the revival of Hinduism and the use of
Hindu religious images and festivals for political organizing in the region.
Over the years, from the 1870s until their deaths in the 20th century, the
two younger men, Gokhale and Tilak, fought out their opposing views—
first on social reform and religion, later on politics—both within Pune’s
Sarvajanik Sabha and later on the national stage.
Bombay
In Bombay city, the English educated came from commercial and trading communities, one of the most visible of which was the Parsis.
Descended from seventh-century Zoroastrian migrants from Iran, the
Bombay Parsis had been early supporters of English-language education. Their most famous member in the 19th century, and one of India’s
earliest nationalist writers, was Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1922). Naoroji
was an early graduate of Elphinstone College who had founded one of
the first Indian business firms in London and Liverpool in the 1850s.
Traveling frequently between England and India, he wrote on BritishIndian economic relations and became a mentor in England to Indian
boys sent abroad for education. In the 1890s he became the first Indian
elected to the British Parliament. Another politically prominent Parsi
was Pherozeshah Mehta (1845–1915), a prominent Bombay lawyer.
Mehta began his long career in regional and national politics in the late
1870s, when he was drawn into local efforts to protest the Vernacular
Press Act. He and other members of Bombay’s urban elite formed a local
political association, the Bombay Presidency Association, in 1885.
Madras
In the 19th and early 20th centuries Madras Brahmans dominated the
local English-educated community, and local Brahman communities
competed for control over the city’s political activities. G. Subramaniya
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Ayyar and M. Viraghava Charia, joint publishers of the leading Madras
newspaper, The Hindu, initially founded a local political association, the
Madras Native Association, in 1878. When disagreements split that
association during the 1883–84 Ilbert Bill controversy, the original
founders reformed it as the Madras Mahajan Sabha (Great Peoples’
Association). Madras politics were further complicated after 1893,
when the English Socialist Annie Besant (1847–1933) moved to the
city. Besant, who became the Theosophical Society’s president in 1907,
actively involved herself in regional (and national) politics on the side
of Indian political self-determination.
Calcutta
Bengal was home to what was probably the oldest political association
in the country. The British Indian Association was a loyalist organization of princes, zamindars, and, later, industrialists founded in the
1840s. In 1875 a new political organization, the Indian League, was
founded by members of the English-educated Bengali community who
worked in the city’s new professions of law, education, and journalism.
After a year, it was supplanted by the newly formed Indian Association,
founded by Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1926), a former ICS officer
who had been fired from the service and had turned instead to college
teaching and journalism. Under Banerjea’s leadership the Indian
Association aggressively pursued public issues of interest to its members, among other things helping to organize a multiregional protest by
Indian elites against the 1878 Vernacular Press Act.
The Ilbert Bill
The return of a Liberal government to power in Britain had brought the
marquis of Ripon to India as viceroy in 1880. Ripon began his term in
a mode popular with Westernized Indians by repealing the Vernacular
Press Act of 1878. He also encouraged the growth of primary and secondary schools and created governing boards in municipalities and districts that elected two-thirds of their members. But in 1883 he aroused
the fury of the Anglo-Indian community when his law member, Sir
Courtney Ilbert, proposed modifying an 1873 law to allow certain cases
involving Europeans to be tried by Indian judges. At well-organized
public meetings and in newspaper ads, the Anglo-Indian community
(numbering by this time 100,000 throughout British India) declared
the Ilbert Bill “intensely distasteful and humiliating to all Europeans”
(Metcalf and Metcalf 2002, 119). In blunter language, Anglo-Indian
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
associations denounced the idea that “nigger natives” could be considered their “peers or equals” (Wolpert 1989, 257). In 1884 Ripon’s government gave in and amended the bill to mandate that if a European’s
case was to be tried by an Indian judge, his jury must be at least half
Europeans. For Anglo-Indians this was a great victory. For Westernized
Indians, both the process and the resolution demonstrated the fundamental racism of Anglo-Indians and the Indian government in which
they served. The bill also demonstrated to the Indian elite the power
and effectiveness of organized public protest.
By the time of the Ilbert Bill controversy, British rule in India had
transformed many aspects of Indian society. The British Raj had introduced British administrative structures and the ideas and practices of
the West to a newly forming urban Indian elite. British economic structures had transformed Indian agricultural production even as government-subsidized railroads and roads bound the subcontinent more
tightly together. In rural India, these changes left peasants more vulnerable than ever both to the economic fluctuations of the global marketplace and to the spread of calamitous famine and disease. In urban
India, over the course of the 19th century the new elites of British
Indian towns and cities had adapted themselves to the office work,
administrative structures, and Western practices of the British Raj. By
the late 19th century these elites had begun to change their focus. From
earlier preoccupations with religious and social reform, acculturation,
and self-improvement, they now wrote and spoke more about the
revival and protection of indigenous religion and culture, about finding
ways to participate in India’s imperially controlled government, and
even about nationalism, independence, and swaraj (self-rule).
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6
Toward Freedom
(1885–1920)
This is the first and most essential thing to learn about India—that there is not,
and never was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to
European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious. . . .That
men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-Western Provinces and Madras, should ever
feel that they belongs to one great Indian nation, is impossible.
■
Sir John Strachey, India, 1888 (Embree 1972, 3)
T
he men who participated in the Indian nationalist movement from
its beginnings in the Indian National Congress in 1885 to
Mohandas Gandhi’s assumption of leadership in the 1920s all came from
the English-educated elite. They agreed broadly on the issues that most
affected them as a class—the need for greater access to the ICS and for
middle-class appointments to the Legislative Councils—and they agreed
on the terrible effects of “the drain” of Indian wealth to Great Britain.
But on the questions of whether the nationalist movement should work
for social reform or Hindu revivalism or whether its members should see
themselves as Her Majesty’s loyal opposition or as freedom fighters, they
had no such easy answers. Early nationalists spent as much energy fighting one another over these matters as they did in fighting the British.
In the decades between 1885 and 1920, in response to nationalist
pressures British rulers offered a series of constitutional concessions,
giving Indians marginal participation in India’s government while conceding as little real power as possible. At the same time, British officials
worked to “divide and rule.” To preserve British power, officials encouraged minority constituencies to define themselves in opposition to one
another, as Muslims against Hindus, Dravidians against Aryans, or
Untouchables against Brahmans.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
In the end, however, despite all their efforts, it was the British themselves who brought about the unity of Indian nationalists. Unbridled
demonstrations of imperial power and British racism in both 1905 and
in 1919 brought elite urban Indians not only into unity but looking
outside their own elite class for broader support for their movement
against the British.
The Indian National Congress
In December 1885, 73 self-appointed delegates from all over British
India met in Bombay for a three-day conference. This was the first
meeting of the Indian National Congress. It had originally been scheduled to meet in Pune, for Ranade and Pune’s Sarvajanik Sabha were
among its leading organizers, but an outbreak of cholera forced its relocation to Bombay. Its delegates represented every province of British
India; 54 delegates were Hindu (most of whom were Brahman), two
delegates were Muslim, and the rest came from the Parsi or Jaina communities. All were English educated. “Congress,” as it came to be
called, began its existence as a supraregional political association, a
three-day yearly forum through which middle-class Indian men could
petition and memorialize the Indian government, just as regional associations had already been doing but now on a wider basis.
The immediate impetus for the meeting came from Allan Octavian
Hume (1829–1912), a retired ICS official who believed, as he told
the viceroy, Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Lord Dufferin
(1826–1902), that such a gathering would stabilize the English-educated
elite. Hume helped organize the first meeting of Congress, circulating
letters to English-educated graduates to encourage their support and
serving as its first secretary. But many Congress attendees already knew
or knew of each other before the first meeting. Surendranath Banerjea,
W. C. Bonnerji (the first Congress president), Romeshchandra Dutt,
Pherozeshah Mehta, and Badruddin Tyabji had all come under the influence of Dadabhai Naoroji while in England in the 1860s and 1870s.
Leaders of regional political associations in Pune, Bombay, Madras, and
Calcutta knew of each other from shared protests against the 1878
Vernacular Press Act. And Banerjea’s Indian Association had already
organized two national conferences, one in 1883 and one held at the
same time as the Bombay meeting in 1885.
Until Gandhi reorganized it in the 1920s the Indian National
Congress met for only three days each year, each meeting organized by
members from the region in which it was held. It had limited funds, and
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TOWARD FREEDOM
for its first nine years its only full-time officer was Hume, its general
secretary. In its first years, Congress grew quickly: from 73 delegates in
1885 to 600 in 1887 and almost 2,000 in 1889. Through Hume’s efforts,
Muslim participation grew to 14 percent of the delegates by 1887.
Attendance at the 1887 and 1888 sessions was particularly broad based,
with more than half the delegates traveling to the meeting from outside
the region in which it was held.
Congress delegates came from every British Indian province and
spoke many dialects, but they shared the elite status and high-caste
background common to the English-educated elite. They agreed (as
did the English educated generally) that Indians needed greater access
to the ICS and that middle-class Indians should serve on the government’s Legislative Councils. The ICS was the premier service in India;
appointment within the civil service gave Indians the only direct governmental power they could have in British India. ICS appointments
were chosen by open competitive examinations, but the exams were
held only in England, and the maximum age for examinees (in 1876)
was 19. As late as 1880 the 900-member ICS had only 16 Indians. In a
similar way, the Legislative Councils also offered Indian members a
voice, if not in government decisions, at least in the debates that preceded them. But while the councils had had appointed Indian members since the 1860s, in practice only Indian princes and zamindars
were ever nominated.
Seven successive years of Congress oratory and petitions succeeded
in 1892 in having the maximum age for taking the ICS exams raised to
23. In the same year the Indian Councils Act provided for indirect elections to the central and regional Legislative Councils in Bengal,
Bombay, and Madras. Through an elaborate procedure local municipal
boards, universities, and landowners’ associations (among others) submitted lists of elected representatives to the government for final selection. Nevertheless the process brought prominent regional leaders such
as Banerjea and Tilak onto their respective regional councils and moderate Congress members, such as Mehta and Gokhale, onto the central
Legislative Council. Despite constant Indian pressure, however, the ICS
examinations, the key to Anglo-Indian dominance within the service,
would not be held in India until the 1920s.
While Congress petitions on English-educated issues brought some
limited success, escalating conflicts between social reformers and religion revivalists split the English-educated elite in the 1890s, and violent communal clashes divided the broader Indian society. These
conflicts took their toll on Indian political associations. Interest in both
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Drain
F
rom the perspective of British imperialists, all the expenses of the
British Empire in India went toward services and projects that
improved India itself. “England receives nothing from India,” wrote Sir
John Strachey,“except in return for English services rendered or English
capital expended” (Sarkar 1983, 27). But for Indian nationalists nothing
was farther from the truth. Against the backdrop of the widespread
famines, sickness, and poverty of late 19th-century rural India, nationalist leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Romeshchandra Dutt put
forth their economic theory of “the drain.”
Far from benefiting India, they argued, British rule was draining India’s
wealth away from her.Yearly home charges (funds sent to Great Britain)
drained revenues from India to pay for the high salaries and pensions of
British civil servants in India and for the exorbitant expenses of an Indian
army used by Great Britain throughout the world. British rule, said
nationalist economists, had replaced a prosperous, indigenous Indian
economy with an imperial economic network that benefited foreigners
(and Great Britain itself) at the expense of indigenous Indians.
Modern scholars have continued to debate “the drain.” Some argue
that railroads, technology, and export agriculture benefited India’s economy in the end. Others assert that the British Empire drained off as much
as 4 percent of India’s national income in the later decades of the 19th
century (Tomlinson 1993, 14).
Dadabhai Naoroji was from the
Parsi community of Bombay. He
was educated at Elphinstone
College in that city before
traveling abroad to England
where he established himself in
business and even won election
to Parliament in 1892. Naoroji
mentored many Indian students
who traveled to England to
study in the late 19th century,
and his economic theories about
the British Empire—especially
“the drain”—shaped the
views of several generations
of Indian nationalists. (R. P.
Patwardhan, ed., Dadabhai Naoroji
Correspondence, Vol. 2, Part 1:
Correspondence with D. E.Wacha,
1977)
TOWARD FREEDOM
Congress and regional political associations declined in the 1890s, and
Muslim attendance at Congress sessions was cut by half. Annual
Congress meetings began attracting fewer delegates from outside the
state where they were held and making up the difference with more
local members.
Hindu Race/Hindu Nation
As was true of much of 19th-century society, early Indian nationalists
imagined “the nation” using two different and often contradictory sets
of ideas and images. One strand of 19th-century thought conceived of
the nation in terms of citizenship and constitutionalism. Nations, in
this view, were composed of individual citizens living within a territorial state, their political obligations and rights defined by a constitutional contract between each citizen and that state. Congress and
regional political leaders known collectively to their contemporaries as
the “moderates,” men such as Ranade, Gokhale, Mehta, or Banerjea,
advanced this concept of the nation, citizenship, and constitutionalism.
They spoke the language of British constitutional democracy and presented themselves as the government’s “loyal opposition,” as leaders of
India’s citizenry struggling to obtain for them their inalienable rights.
Comfortable themselves with a style of life, dress, and habits adapted
to British colonial public life, these leaders enjoyed their new elected or
appointed positions within British government and their status within
elite urban Indian society. They looked forward to middle-class Indians
making gradual gains in influence and power within British-ruled India
but were not troubled by the idea that such gains might be far into the
future. They frequently (if not always) supported social reforms; these
would, as they saw it, modernize Indian society, ridding it of the
degraded practices of the past.
But there was a second way of imagining “the nation” current in the
19th-century world. Nationhood, as social anthropologist Susan Bayly
has pointed out, “was widely regarded both in India and elsewhere as
an expression of collective moral, spiritual, and racial essences” (1999,
156). This second view conceived of the nation as a unit bound
together by racial ties of blood and ethnic ties of culture. The language
of race itself was in constant use in whatever was said or written in this
period about Indian communities. Writers frequently referred to the
Hindu or “Mohammedan” races and talked of castes (varnas or jatis) as
racial entities. Both Westernized social reformers and Hindu cultural
revivalists used “race” without self-consciousness to describe the
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Science of Noses
T
he leading exponent of “race science” in India was H. H. Risley
(1851–1911), a British ethnologist who joined the Indian Civil
Service in 1873. Risley became the census commissioner in 1901, and
after his retirement in 1910, he was elected president of the (British)
Royal Anthropological Institute. Following the anthropometric techniques of the French anthropologist Paul Topinard, Risley used a “nasal
index” (a ratio of the width of a nose to its height) to divide Indians into
two races—a dark-skinned Dravidian race and a fair-skinned IndoAryan race. Using this nose science, he proved (to his own satisfaction
and that of contemporaries) the existence of a seven-caste racial hierarchy in India, with Dravidians at the “primitive” bottom and IndoAryans at the “civilized” top. “The social position of a caste,” he once
said,“varies inversely as its nasal index” (Trautman 1997, 203). Race, not
occupation, he concluded, was the true cause of the Indian caste system. For late 19th-century “race scientists” such as Risley, this type of
physiological measurements served to confirm the distinct racial
essences they believed
existed within the Indian
population (and more generally in the larger world).
The “science” of noses. H. H.
Risley drew his ideas on nose
measurements from the work
of a contemporary, 19thcentury French scholar Paul
Topinard.Writing in his 1885
Elements of General
Anthropology (Éléments
d’anthropologie générale)
Topinard developed a “nasal
index” (a ratio of the breadth
of the nose to its height) that
enabled him to classify noses
(and their owners) into a series
of nose types. Narrow noses,
said Topinard, characterized the Europeans (types 1 through 5); medium noses
characterized the “yellow races” (type 6); and broad noses belonged to Africans
(type 7) and Melanesians and native Australians (type 8). (Paul Topinard, Éléments
d’anthropologie générale, 1885)
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deeper ties that might bind a religion, a caste, or a regional community
together. Ranade could describe how social reforms would benefit the
“chosen race” of the Hindus as easily as Arya Samajis could describe
the rituals through which Muslims and/or Untouchables might reenter the “Aryan race” (Bayly 1999, 175).
By the late 19th century, the linkage of “race” and “nation” was
commonplace, with both British and Indians referring interchangeably
to an Aryan or Hindu “race” or an Aryan or Hindu “nation.” But at the
turn of the century some Indian leaders, beginning with Tilak in Pune,
began to place this more general sense of a Hindu race/nation in a deliberately and more explicitly political context, linking anticolonial
protests to a Hindu communal identity (race/nation) through the religious language and symbols of Hinduism. Contemporaries labeled
Tilak, along with such men as Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) in the Punjab
and Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932) in Bengal, as “extremists,” not for
their evocation of a Hindu cultural identity, but because they questioned the inevitability of Indian self-government and were willing to
use a variety of means, including violence, to bring Indians closer to
self-rule.
Hindu Revivalism
Up to the 1890s Western-educated Indians had supported social and
religious reforms. They founded movements such as the Brahmo Samaj
in Bengal or the early Arya Samaj in north India and used such organizations to move contemporary caste practices and Hindu customs
regarding women’s education and social behavior closer to the norms of
British colonial modernity. But at the turn of the century, even as such
adaptations became well integrated into middle-class urban lifestyles,
a renewed interest emerged in what contemporaries called “Hindu
revivalism,” that is, the maintenance of extant Hindu beliefs and practices and the defense of such practices from further erosion.
In Calcutta young English-educated men turned away from the
“male” worship of the Brahmo Samaj churches to become fascinated
with the mystic visions of Ramakrishna, a semi-illiterate priest in a
north Calcutta temple. In novels and newspaper pieces writers discovered anew the inspiring bravery and devotion of the sati. Women’s literature and manuals denounced the denaturalizing effect of higher
education on women—for, as one manual writer noted in a common
joke of the period, “If a girl can become a ‘bachelor’, what else does she
need to become a man?” (Gupta 1885, 23). The Arya Samaj had long
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Ramakrishna
and Vivekananda
T
he Hindu saint Sri (meaning “respected”) Ramakrishna (1836–86)
was a Brahman priest at a temple of the goddess Kali in north
Calcutta. Ramakrishna had no formal education and could read and
write only in Bengali. He attained mystical ecstasies by worshipping the
goddess through a variety of religious forms and idioms: as the Mother
Goddess, as Krishna, as Muhammad, and as Jesus Christ. Discovered by
the Brahmo Samaj leader Keshab Sen, Ramakrishna became popular
among young men from Calcutta’s Indian elite in the 1870s and 1880s.
To these Westernized followers, Ramakrishna’s mystic bhakti (devotion)
to the Mother Goddess was more vibrant than the Westernized worship of Brahmo “churches.” Ramakrishna’s religious teachings and mystical experiences seemed to demonstrate the “oneness” of all religions
and the inherent superiority of a Hinduism that could acknowledge this
universality.
Narendranath Datta (1863–1902) was one of the middle-class men
who visited Ramakrishna in his temple. Datta came from a family of
Calcutta lawyers, was Western educated, and had joined the Brahmo
Samaj. He was planning to study law abroad when he first went to visit
Ramakrishna in 1882. By 1886, the year of the saint’s death, Datta had
dedicated himself to the life of a religious holy man, a sannyasi. Under the
name Vivekananda, he became Ramakrishna’s best-known disciple. In 1893
in a famous speech at the First World Parliament of Religions in Chicago,
Vivekananda spoke of Hinduism as the mother of all religions, a religion
that could recognize and incorporate within itself the truths of all religions.Vivekananda saw his religious movement as a contemporary form
of Vedanta. His Chicago speech gained him an international audience that
kept him traveling and lecturing in the United States and England for the
next four years. Returning to India in 1897, he founded the Ramakrishna
Mission in Calcutta, an institution of Hindu monks dedicated to
Ramakrishna’s religious insights and teachings and to social service.
stood uncompromisingly for social and religious reform in northern
India. Now it split in the 1890s. One sect continued the old work of
education and reform, but a second and larger group committed itself
instead to the revival of the “Aryan race,” to proselytizing for Hindi and
the Sanskritic Devanagari alphabet in north India, and for the protection of the cow.
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Cow Protection Riots
Cow protection riots, pitting Hindus against Muslims, occurred repeatedly across northern India during the 1880s and 1890s, from Bombay
and Maharashtra in the west to the Bengal in the east. The earliest riots
were in the Punjab in 1883, followed by large-scale communal riots
from 1888 to 1893 in the United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal, and even
Rangoon. In 1893–95 violent riots broke out in the city of Bombay and
in the wider Maharashtra region.
At issue was the Muslim slaughter of cows for meat, particularly as
part of religious festivities such as Bakr-Id (the festival in the last month
of the Islamic calendar). This conflict demonstrated to Hindu revivalists how contemporary society failed to protect Hindu religious practices and the Hindu way of life. Linked with cow protection were
campaigns to replace Urdu written in the Perso-Arabic script with
Hindi written in the Sanskrit-based Devanagari script and to use new
“purification” rituals to return Muslim converts and Untouchables to
the Hindu fold.
The founder of the Arya Samaj, Dayananda Sarasvati, had himself
written a pamphlet urging the protection of cows in 1881. From the late
1880s cow protection societies appeared among Hindu populations in
northern India. These societies emphasized long-standing Hindu customs venerating the cow, held meetings protesting cow slaughter, and
even petitioned the government to prohibit this slaughter on hygienic
grounds. They were funded by a range of local elites, including zamindars, middle-class lawyers, and even, in Bombay, a Gujarati mill owner.
Regional politicians, such as Tilak in Bombay, helped organize such
meetings and participated in their protests.
Bitter competition between local Hindu and Muslim elites for government employment helped fuel the communal riots that grew out of
cow protection conflicts. In different regions, class and cultural conflicts helped the violence to escalate. In the Punjab the cow protection
riots built on long-standing conflicts between Muslim peasants and
Hindu traders and moneylenders. In the United Provinces multiple
social tensions supported the riots: in rural regions conflicts between
Muslim landlords and Hindu peasants and in urban towns between
Hindu bankers and Muslim artisans and workers.
Cow protection conflicts merged easily with more general violence
over religious festivals and processions. Although in prior decades
Hindus and Muslims had participated in each other’s religious festivals,
by the late 19th century the two communities were openly split along
religious lines. “What boon has Allah conferred upon you,” went one
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
turn-of-the-century Maharashtrian song, “That you have become a
Mussalman today? The cow is our mother, do not forget her” (Sarkar
1983, 60).
Age of Consent Act, 1891
Controversy over the 1891 Age of Consent Act gave public expression
to the feelings of many middle-class Hindus that the protection of
Hindu customs and a Hindu identity was now of much greater urgency
than the reform of social customs. The immediate cause for the act was
the death in Calcutta of an 11-year-old girl, Phulmoni Bai, from lacerations caused by intercourse with her 35-year-old husband. As the law
set the age of statutory rape at 10 for girls, the husband could not be
prosecuted. The Age of Consent Bill raised the age of statutory rape for
girls from 10 to 12 years old. Although proposed by the government,
the reform had long been sought by Indian reformers, and the act was
supported by an Indian National Congress dominated by its moderate
faction.
In both Bengal and western India, however, opposition to the bill
was virulent. By custom Hindu marriages were consummated immediately following the wife’s first menstruation. Under the bill, for girls
who menstruated before the age of 12 the custom would now be criminalized. “The Hindu family is ruined,” wrote the Bangabasi, the conservative Bengali newspaper that spearheaded opposition in Calcutta
(Sarkar 2002, 234). In west India, Tilak opposed the bill in his newspaper Kesari. In both regions opponents of the bill held mass meetings and sent petitions. In Pune young Hindu men broke up a meeting
attended by social reformers and wrecked the hall in which they met.
The bill became law in 1891 despite substantial Indian opposition.
In the aftermath of the controversy social reformers were vilified in
Bengal and Bombay as Western turncoats who had betrayed their own
religion. Every year since its founding in 1887, Ranade’s Indian
National Social Conference had held its annual meetings at the same
time as the Congress session and under Congress auspices. Now in
1895 Hindu revivalists threatened to boycott the next meeting of
Congress if Ranade’s conference met under the Congress banner. To
pacify the revivalists, Ranade’s conference was barred from the session.
Disagreements over social reform issues would not be allowed to divide
the Congress. Congress would include, said its president Surendranath
Banerjea, both “those who would reform their social customs and those
who would not” (Wolpert 1989, 263).
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Although they lost their struggle, opponents of the Age of Consent
Bill still profited from their efforts. Bengali newspapers that supported
the protests turned from weekly to daily papers on the strength of their
increased circulation. In Pune, Tilak’s opposition to the act made him a
hero to lower-middle-class Hindus in Deccan towns and mofussil
regions and gained him increased financial support from wealthy Hindu
conservatives.
The Marriage of Religion and Politics
The Age of Consent controversy showed Bal Gangadhar Tilak the role
religion might play in political organizing. In the decade after 1891
Tilak and others organized two festivals that used Hindu religious icons
and images for political ends: In 1893 a new festival began celebrating
the birthday of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh, and in 1895 a
second festival celebrated the memory of Shivaji. Both festivals became
Hindu community events, with songs, dances, scriptural readings, and
(in the Shivaji celebration) a religious procession led by huge portraits
of Shivaji and his Brahman guru. The Ganesh festival was deliberately
timed to draw Hindus away from the Muslim festival of Mohurram,
which both communities had previously celebrated. Both new festivals
encouraged Hindus to see themselves as a distinct community separate
from Muslims or Christians: By 1895, Tilak’s opposition to the Age of
Consent Act combined with his role in organizing the new festivals had
made his faction strong enough to take over Pune’s political association,
the Sarvajanik Sabha.
Tilak encouraged his followers to use violence against social reformers, Muslims, and the British. He himself had ties to revolutionary societies now organized in Maharashtra. His supporters threw rocks at
Pune social reformers; his followers paraded noisily in paramilitary
fashion past Muslim mosques; in Kesari Tilak used references to the
Bhagavad Gita to justify the use of violence, arguing that violence committed with no thought of gain or reward was not morally wrong.
“Shrimat Krishna,” he said in comments at the time of the Shivaji festival of 1897, “preached in the Gita that we have a right even to kill our
own guru and our kinsmen. No blame attaches to any person if he is
doing deeds without being actuated by a desire to reap the fruit of his
deeds” (Wolpert 1962, 87).
In June 1897 bubonic plague spread through Maharashtra. Pune’s
plague commissioner, Walter Charles Rand, took drastic measures to
combat it. Rand ordered British troops to fumigate and lime all houses
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Ganesh (Ganapati), Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. Ganesh (Ganapati in western India) is the elephantheaded son of the Hindu gods Shiva and Parvati. He is widely worshipped throughout India as
a god able to overcome (or to help his worshippers overcome) obstacles in life. His image is
frequently found installed in stores and businesses. The celebration of Ganesh’s birthday
became a central religious/political festival of western India beginning in the late 19th century.
(Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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TOWARD FREEDOM
where plague was suspected. The soldiers forced all inhabitants
(including women in purdah) out of their homes and took anyone
thought infected to an isolation camp outside the city. Often family
members only saw their relatives when told to come and collect their
dead bodies. The measures provoked fury among Pune’s residents and
failed to contain the plague. As the plague raged, Pune’s Anglo-Indian
elite organized an elaborate gala to celebrate Queen Victoria’s jubilee.
Two brothers, Damodar and Balkrishna Chapedar, assassinated Rand
and one other officer as they left the celebrations. Both the Chapedar
brothers were subsequently caught and hanged.
The brothers were followers of Tilak, and rumors linked him with
the assassinations. Based on articles written for Kesari Tilak was
arrested in July and tried for sedition. The six Europeans on his jury
found him guilty; the three Indians said he was innocent. Tilak was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment in Bombay but released after one
year on grounds of ill health. From this time on Tilak acquired the
unofficial title of “Lokamanya” (revered of the people).
Bengal Partition
If the Age of Consent controversy revealed deep divisions among elite
Hindu communities, the British government’s partition of Bengal in
1905 overrode many of those divisions. Bengal’s partition provided the
context for India’s first national protest against British actions and
united many in support of the nationalist cause.
The partition was planned during the 1899–1905 viceroyalty of
George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925). In some ways Curzon was fortunate, taking office as new government procedures brought the 19thcentury mass famines under control and as a more stable Indian rupee
began to lower the growth rate of “home charges.” During his term as
viceroy, Curzon oversaw the overhaul of government bureaucracy, the
building of 6,000 miles of new railroad tracks, and the passage of several land measures designed to protect cultivators from eviction for
debts (including the Punjab Land Alienation Act in 1901).
Curzon’s imperious and autocratic character, however, created conflicts. His resignation in 1905 resulted from an internal political dispute
in which he ultimately refused to follow orders from his superior in
London, the secretary of state for India. His arrogance and racism made
him contemptuous of English-educated Indians—he once called the
Indian National Congress an “unclean thing”—and his government
took a number of actions that antagonized elite Indians (Sarkar 1983,
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
104), including reducing the number of Indians on the municipal
boards of cities and passing the Universities Act in 1904, a series of
measures that tightened government controls over universities and
their affiliated colleges in order to control student protests.
Curzon’s most provocative government action, however, was
undoubtedly the partition of Bengal. With 78.5 million people Bengal
was India’s largest province and an unwieldy administrative unit. Its partition, which was planned for one and one-half years, created an eastern
province with 38 million people, mostly Bengali Muslims, and a western
province with 55 million people. The western province incorporated the
Bengali-speaking regions north and west of Calcutta along with Hindispeaking Bihar and Oriyan-speaking Orissa. One benefit of the plan was
that it offered Muslims a separate province in which they were a majority.
A second advantage was that in both new provinces Bengali-speaking
Hindus were in the minority, thus enabling the government, as one official wrote in a private memo, to “to split up and thereby weaken a solid
body of opponents to our rule” (Sarkar 1983, 107).
Swadeshi
British officials anticipated mass meetings and memorials to protest the
division, but they were unprepared for the sustained political protest
that occurred or for the new forms that protest took. Partition protests
lasted several years, spreading beyond Bengal to Bombay, the Punjab,
and Madras and involving substantial numbers of English-educated
students, professionals, and their families. Initially even Congress moderates supported the protest, although as violence broke out, they
quickly withdrew their support. Antipartition leaders called for the
boycott of British goods and the support of swadeshi (the native country’s) products. Schools and shops closed. Public bonfires burned
imported cotton goods. Schoolchildren sang “Bande Mataram” (“Hail
to the motherland”)—a slogan and song from an 1880s Bengali novel.
Processions chanted the slogan and shouted out in unison the names of
the three most popular “extremists” who led them: “Lal, Bal, Pal”—Lala
Lajpat Rai from the Punjab, “Bal” Gangadhar Tilak from Pune; and
Bipin Chandra Pal from Bengal. Terrorist cells sprang up in Bengal, as
they had in Maharashtra earlier, and their members planted bombs and
attempted the assassination of several British officials.
The swadeshi boycotts were surprisingly effective, demonstrating the
degree to which Indian middle-class tastes had already shaped British
imports. By 1906 Calcutta customs officials had noted substantial
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“Bande Mataram”
T
he poem that became the song and slogan of the 1905 Bengal partition protests was written in 1875 by the popular Bengali novelist
Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838–94) and later incorporated into his
1882 novel, Anandamath (Monastery of bliss). Set at the end of the 18th
century, Anandamath told the story of a band of patriotic, armed sannyasis, devoted to the Mother Goddess (Durga/Kali), who traveled the
region fighting local Muslim rulers and the East India Company for the
protection of Bengal’s 70 million people. In Chatterji’s novel, the “Mother”
stood for both the goddess and the land of Bengal, a land ruled illegitimately by foreigners. Sedition laws were part of the reason Chatterji
made Muslims rather than the British the villains in his novel.The novel
used vivid Hindu imagery and strong anti-Muslim rhetoric. Modern 20thcentury enthusiasts have often wished Chatterji’s novel had a more
“national” focus. At least one recent translation has accomplished this by
removing the original novel’s regional and anti-Muslim references, turning
Chatterji’s Bengali motherland into “Mother India” and morphing his
long-bearded Muslim kings into the British (Chatterji 1992, 38–41).
“Bande Mataram” (Bow to the Mother)
Bow to the Mother!
Watered by swiftly flowing rivers,
Rich with abundant fruits,
Cooled by lovely southern breezes,
Dark with harvest crops, the Mother. . .
When 70 million voices roar out your call,
And twice 70 million hands hold sharp, unwavering swords,
Why, Mother, do they call you weak!
. . . In every temple it is your image enshrined.
For as Durga, with ten weapons in ten hands,
As Lakshmi, dallying in the lotuses,
As Saraswati, the giver of wisdom,
I bow to you. . .
Bow to the Mother,
Dark-hued, guileless, smiling, bejeweled and adorned,
The earth that supports us, the succor of us all, the Mother
(Chatterji 1989, 674, translation by Judith E. Walsh).
decreases in imported products: a 22 percent decrease in cotton fabrics,
a 44 percent decrease in cotton threads, a 55 percent fall in imported
cigarettes, and a 68 percent drop in imported boots and shoes. By 1908
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
imports were down overall by 25 percent. Indian merchants and textile
producers raised both prices and profits. In Bombay, the Tatas, a Parsi
industrialist family loyal to the British, launched India’s first indigenous
steelworks, thus reducing the Indian government’s need for imports of
Belgian steel.
The government attempted to stop the protests by arresting middleclass students, banning public meetings, and imprisoning protest leaders.
In London, the new Liberal government considered offering constitutional reforms in the hope that this would undercut further protest.
Muslim League
Whether and to what extent elite Muslims would join the Indian
National Congress was an open question throughout the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. As early as 1869 the prominent Muslim leader
(and British loyalist) Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan had declared Hindus and
Muslims to be two separate communities and urged Muslims to work
independently on their own society. For Ahmad Khan, the different
“nationalities of India—the Muslims, the Marathas, the Brahmins, the
Kshatriyas, the Banias, the Sudras [sic], the Sikhs, the Bengalis, the
Madrasis, and the Peshawaris” could never become a single homogeneous nation (De Bary 1958, 747).
Nevertheless, by 1887, largely due to the efforts of Allan Octavian
Hume, Muslim attendance at Congress sessions had risen to 14 percent
of the delegates. But in the 1890s as communal conflict escalated in north
India, as revivalist Hindu groups demanded cow protection and the Hindi
language, and as political festivals in Maharashtra defined Hindus as a
separate communal and political entity, Muslim willingness to support a
Hindu majoritarian institution such as the Indian National Congress
declined. Beginning in 1893 Muslim participation in Congress dropped
to 7 percent of the delegates, where it remained up to 1905. Protests
against the partition of Bengal only alienated Muslim leaders further as
many east Bengali Muslim leaders could see great benefits for themselves
and their communities in a separate Muslim majority province.
In 1906 at the height of partition conflicts, as rumors circulated of
possible new British constitutional reforms, a deputation of 35 elite
Muslims, most from landed United Province families, met the viceroy,
Gilbert John Elliot-Murray-Kynynmond, Lord Minto (1845–1914), at
Simla. Their leader was Aga Khan III (1877–1957), the spiritual head
of the Bombay Ismaili Muslim community and one of the wealthiest
men in India. If there were to be reforms involving elections to the
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Legislative Councils, the deputation told Minto, they must include separate electorates for Muslims. (Separate electorates gave a community a
special electoral category in which only that community could vote.)
Only separate electorates could guarantee Muslims a voice among
elected representatives, the delegates insisted. As the Hindus were the
majority, they would vote only Hindus into office. Neither Muslim
interests nor the Indian Muslim population, the Simla delegation
insisted, could be adequately represented by non-Muslim candidates.
Many scholars have pointed to the 1906 Simla conference as the
beginning of an explicit British policy of “divide and rule” in India. By
encouraging Muslims to see themselves as a separate political entity—
one defined in opposition to Congress—the British hoped to prolong
British rule. In 1906 the viceroy assured the Simla deputation that
Muslim interests would be considered in any new reforms. Encouraged
by this support, the Simla delegates and an additional 35 Muslims from
all provinces in India met at Dacca several months later and founded
the All-India Muslim League. Only Muslims could become members of
this league, whose specific purpose was defined as the advancement of
Indian Muslims’ political rights. Modeling themselves on the Indian
National Congress, the Muslim League met annually over the
Christmas holidays. With its inception Muslims had a nationwide political organization that paralleled that of the “Hindu-dominated”
Congress.
The Surat Split
The credibility of Congress moderates was badly damaged by their inaction during the swadeshi movement. While Gokhale (Congress president in 1905) initially supported the boycott, he and other moderates
withdrew their support within a month from fear of government
reprisals. Instead the moderates hoped that the new Liberal government
in Britain, and especially its pro-Indian secretary of state, John Morley,
would withdraw the partition.
In 1906, however, as protests continued, the moderates maintained
control over the Congress session only by endorsing (if somewhat
belatedly) the swadeshi movement. Even the 81-year-old Dadabhai
Naoroji now declared that swaraj (self-rule) was the goal of Congress.
In 1907 at Surat, however, the extremist faction was again frustrated in
their attempt to elect Lajpat Rai as Congress president. Someone threw
a shoe at the moderate president-elect as he attempted to speak, and the
session dissolved in chaos. The moderates walked out of the meetings
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
and in the aftermath of the Surat debacle effectively shut the extremist
faction out of Congress.
In 1907 the Liberal British government and its India appointees escalated their efforts to shut down the swadeshi movement. Police attacked
and arrested student picketers. Officials threatened colleges supporting
the protests with the withdrawal of their grants, scholarships, and affiliations. Public meetings, assemblies, and strikes were banned; swadeshi
committees became illegal; even schoolchildren were prohibited from
singing “Bande Mataram.” Extremist leaders were arrested, charged
with sedition, or exiled. In 1907 Lajpat Rai was deported without trial
to Mandalay in Burma. In 1908 the Bengali extremist Aurobindo
Ghosh, who had led Bengali protests through his English-language
weekly, Bande Mataram, was jailed and charged with sedition. (Two
years later, in 1910, fearing further imprisonment Ghosh would flee
Calcutta for the French colony of Pondicherry where for 40 years he
would head a religious ashram.) In Pune the government arrested Tilak
in 1908, charging him with sedition on the basis of editorials supporting Bengali terrorism. Tilak’s sentence to six years’ imprisonment
prompted a violent general strike in Bombay that left 16 people dead.
The arrest and imprisonment of extremist leaders gave the moderates
full control over Congress but no access to the substantial Indian public now in sympathy with extremist aims.
Minto-Morley Reforms
Long-rumored constitutional reform became official in 1909 with the
announcement of the Minto-Morley reforms, officially known as the
Indian Councils Act of 1909. Although written by Liberal officials in
London, the act was announced by the viceroy, Lord Minto, in
Calcutta to give a great impression of government unity. The reforms
put additional Indian members on the Legislative Councils, both at
the center and in the provinces, and more important, they changed
the method of selection for the councils to “direct elections” from the
various constituencies—municipalities, district boards, landowning
groups, universities, and so forth—from which recommendations for
the councils had come since 1892. The act also established separate
electorates for Muslims: six within the landlord constituencies of the
Imperial Legislative Council and others in the provincial councils.
The Imperial Legislative Council was not a voting body: Its members
only commented on government policies when official (British) members of the council introduced them for discussion. The 1909 act,
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however, gave council members greater freedom to ask questions during such discussions.
Morley himself, the Liberal secretary of state for India, denied that
the reforms would in any way lead to self-government in India. In the
context of Indian nationalist politics where extremist calls for swaraj
were now common, the Minto-Morley Act offered little. But to moderates, who had long interested themselves in elections and appointments, the reforms were attractive.
In 1911, two years after the Minto-Morley reforms became law, the
British celebrated a great durbar (the Persian name for a grand court
occasion) in Delhi to celebrate the coronation of the British king
George V. At a spectacle calculated to demonstrate the permanence of
British rule, the British made their real concession to the power of the
swadeshi movement. They revoked the 1905 partition and reunited
Bengali-speaking Indians with a smaller, new province of Bengal. (At
the same time Bihar and Orissa became separate provinces and Assam
a separate territory.) At the same durbar, however, the British also took
their revenge on Bengal and Bengalis: The viceroy announced the transfer of the capital to Delhi. The government would now be closer to the
summer Simla capital and further from the troublesome political activities of Bengali babus (gentlemen). “New Delhi,” the British section of
Delhi, would be designed by the architects Edward Lutyens and Herbert
Baker.
Bengal’s reunification embittered Indian Muslims without satisfying
Indian nationalists. “No bomb, no boons” was one Muslim slogan in
Dacca and eastern Bengal (Wolpert 1989, 286). At the 1912 ceremonies
to open the new capital, the viceroy, Charles Hardinge (1858–1944),
was almost killed by a bomb. His assailants were never found, and terrorist violence continued in the Punjab. In 1913 the Muslim League
moved significantly away from its former loyalist position when it
adopted self-government as its goal.
World War I
When Great Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, the
Indian viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was at once informed that India was also
at war. Indian nationalists of all factions supported Great Britain in
World War I, assuming that support for Britain in a time of crisis would
translate later into significant self-government concessions. Tilak,
released from prison in 1914, raised funds and encouraged enlistment in
the army. The lawyer and nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948),
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
in England on his return to India from South Africa, also urged support
for the war.
During World War I the Indian army expanded to more than 2 million men, and more than 1 million Indian soldiers and noncombatants
served overseas. Indian casualties were high. Within two months of the
war’s start 7,000 Indian troops were listed as dead, wounded, or missing in action in Europe. Fighting in 1916 in the Persian Gulf, thousands
of Indian soldiers died from lack of adequate food, clothing, mosquito
netting, and medicines.
Within India the war brought increased income taxes, import duties,
and prices. From 1916 to 1918 Indian revenues (the home charges sent
to Great Britain) increased 10–15 percent each year. Increased amounts
of Punjabi wheat were shipped to Great Britain and its Allies during the
war, with the result that in 1918, when the monsoon failed, food shortages increased and food prices rose sharply. The war also cut off India
from its second largest export market; prewar Indian exports to
Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 had a value of £24 million.
Products from the Central Powers (the countries allied with Germany)
were also among India’s most popular imports. The war was a boon,
however, to indigenous Indian industries such as cotton cloth, steel,
and iron. In all these industries production grew more quickly in the
absence of European competition.
Lucknow Pact, 1916
Anticipating possible constitutional concession at the end of the war,
nationalist leaders looked for ways to renew the movement. In 1916
both Annie Besant in Madras and Tilak in Pune founded “home rule
leagues,” organizations that argued for Indian self-government (on the
model of Canada) within the British Empire. Within a few years the
movement had hundreds of chapters and 30,000 members. In 1916 at
a meeting at Lucknow, the newly reunited Indian National Congress
joined with the Muslim League in the Lucknow Pact (otherwise known
as the Congress-League Scheme of Reforms). The joint pact called for
constitutional reforms that would give elected Indian representatives
additional power at the provincial and the central levels. All elections
were to be on the basis of a broad franchise. The principle of separate
electorates for Muslims was accepted, and the percentage of such electorates was specified province by province. Half the seats on the
viceroy’s Executive Council were to be Indians. India Office expenses
were to be charged to British taxpayers.
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New Leaders
Both the reunification of Congress and the Lucknow Pact were made
somewhat easier by the natural passing of an older generation of
nationalist leaders and the rise to prominence of younger ones.
Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta died in 1915, Lokamanya Tilak in
1920, and Surendranath Banerjea in 1925. Two younger men appeared
who would dominate Congress throughout the 1920s–40s: Mohammed
Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), a successful Muslim lawyer and Congress
politician, joined the Muslim League in 1913; and Gandhi, already
known in his homeland for leading Indian protests against the British
in South Africa, returned to India in 1915.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah
Jinnah was born and educated in Karachi, the son of a middle-class
merchant of the Muslim Khoja community who had migrated to Sind
from Gujarat. Sent to England for university and law education in 1892,
Jinnah was drawn into nationalism in London at the age of 18 when he
worked for the parliamentary election of Dadabhai Naoroji. Back in
India, he rapidly established a successful law practice in Bombay,
became a delegate to the 1906 Congress, and was elected (under MintoMorley provisions) to the Imperial Legislative Council in 1910. Jinnah
impressed Indian politicians and British officials alike with his intelligence, his skill in argument, his anglicized habits, and his fastidious
dress and appearance. When the Muslim League declared its goal to be
self-government in 1913, Jinnah joined. He initially hoped to bring the
Muslim League and the Indian National Congress into unified opposition to the British rule.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Gandhi, like Jinnah, was born in western India, in the small Princely
State of Porbandar, where his father had served as dewan (minister)
before moving on to another small state nearby. Also like Jinnah,
Gandhi was educated first in India and then sent in 1887 by his family
to study law in London, an experience that anglicized him, too. When
Gandhi returned to India in 1890 he wore British-style frock coats and
trousers, insisted that his wife and children wear shoes and socks, and
wanted his family to eat oatmeal regularly. Unlike Jinnah, however,
Gandhi did not succeed as a lawyer, either in Gujarat or Bombay. After
several years of trying to establish himself in practice there, he accepted
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Mohandas K. Gandhi in South Africa, 1903. Gandhi lived and worked as a lawyer in South
Africa from 1893 until 1914, eventually (by 1907) developing his ideas on nonviolent protest
and on religion. Here he is seated in front of his South African law office with several
employees. The woman is Miss Schlesin, a Russian; to his right is his clerk, H. S. L. Polak.
(Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
a legal assignment with an Indian Muslim business firm in Natal, South
Africa.
From 1893 to 1914 Gandhi lived and worked in South Africa. It was
in South Africa that he discovered his avocation as a political organizer
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and his religious faith as a modern Hindu. The diverse South African
community was made up of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians
who came from regions as different as Gujarat and south India. Gandhi
led this multiethnic, multireligious community in a variety of protests
against British laws that discriminated against Indians. He developed
the nonviolent tactic of satyagraha (literally “truth-firmness” or “soul
force”) that he would later use in India. “I had . . . then to choose,” he
would later remember, “between allying myself to violence or finding
out some other method of meeting the crisis and stopping the rot, and
it came to me that we should refuse to obey legislation that was degrading and let them put us in jail if they liked” (Hay 1988, 266). He led
nonviolent campaigns in 1907–08 and 1908–11 and a combined strike
and cross-country march in 1913–14.
It was in South Africa that Gandhi developed the religious and ethical ideas that merged the Western education of his youth with the
beliefs and principles of his family’s Hindu religion. By the age of 37,
Gandhi had simplified his diet according to strict vegetarian rules, had
taken a Hindu vow of celibacy (brahmacharya), and had exchanged his
Western dress for a simpler Indian costume, a dhoti (a long cloth
wrapped around the lower body), shawl, and turban. In South Africa
and later in India Gandhi’s political philosophy would rest equally on
the Jaina principle of ahimsa (nonviolence) and on the conviction that
the means by which a political goal was achieved was fully as important
as its end result. In India Gandhi would undertake fasts to the death on
several occasions, a form of personal satyagraha by which he hoped to
win over the hearts of his opponents.
In 1915, when Gandhi returned to India, he was already famous
there. The diversity of the South African Indian community had given
him a broader background and experience than that of most nationalist leaders with their more limited regional bases. Nevertheless, Gandhi
was not an immediate success in India. His simple dress of dhoti, shawl,
and turban made him seem idiosyncratic to Westernized audiences. He
spoke too softly and tended to lecture his listeners on the need for
Indian self-improvement. His initial speeches to Congress and the
Home Rule League were not well received.
After his return to India, Gandhi made his base in the city of
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, founding there an ashram and traveling by thirdclass railway coach throughout British India. In the first years of his
return he organized a satyagraha against indigo planters in Champaran
district in the foothills of the Himalayas, campaigned for a reduction of
land revenues in Kheda district in Gujarat, and fasted to compel his
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
friends and financial supporters, the industrialist Sarabhai family, to pay
their workers higher wages. These campaigns gained Gandhi visibility
and sympathy within India. But to the more anglicized nationalists he
may still have seemed as incomprehensible as he did to Edwin Montagu
(1879–1924), the British secretary of state for India, who met Gandhi
on a tour in 1917. He “dresses like a coolie,” Montagu wrote in his
diary, “forswears all personal advancement, lives practically on the air,
and is a pure visionary” (Wolpert 1989, 295).
The Amritsar Massacre
The end of World War I brought with it a new offer of constitutional
reforms from the British government, but the reforms themselves were
broadly disappointing to almost all factions of Indian nationalists. The
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms (or the “Montford reforms,” as they are
sometime abbreviated) were promised as a move toward responsible
government. They were announced in 1917 and implemented two
years later in the Government of India Act of 1919. The Montford
reforms offered Indians “dyarchy,” a plan under which the government
would turn over responsibility for some areas of government—for
example, health and education—to provincial legislatures and Indian
ministers, while reserving other departments—for instance, police, revenue, and law—for the British central government. Indian legislative
members would continue to be elected into these provincial governments through the various constituencies established in earlier reforms.
From the British perspective the Montford reforms had the advantage of bringing elected Indian officials into collaboration with the
existing British Indian government, even as they cut off those same officials from the more extreme wing of the nationalist movement. From
the nationalist perspective, the reforms ceded little if any real power to
Indians. They gave Indian ministers the responsibility for traditionally
underfunded departments, while giving them no control over or access
to the revenues through which the departments were funded. Congress
leaders split over how to respond. Jinnah proposed rejecting Montford
outright. Tilak and Besant feuded over the wording and extent of their
rejections. The remnants of the old moderate faction considered founding a separate party to allow them to accept the reforms.
But the unity that factions in the Indian National Congress could not
find among themselves, British officials created for them. During World
War I the Defense of India Act (1915) had created temporary sedition
laws under which, in certain circumstances, political cases could be
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tried without juries and suspects interned without trials. In 1918 when
the Rowlatt Committee recommended that these laws become permanent, the Indian government immediately passed the Rowlatt Acts,
ignoring the unanimous objections of all Indians on the Imperial
Legislative Council. Jinnah resigned his council seat in 1919 when the
acts became law. Gandhi called for a nationwide hartal (strike) to
protest them.
When the strikes in Delhi and north India turned into riots and
shooting, Gandhi immediately ended the hartal, calling it a “Himalayan
miscalculation” (Fischer 1983, 179). But in Amritsar, the sacred city of
the Sikhs in the Punjab, the government responded to the city’s hartal
by deporting Congress leaders and prohibiting all public meetings. On
April 13, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer (1864–1927), the commander in charge of the city, heard that a gathering was to take place at
Jallianwalla Bagh (Jallianwalla Garden). Dyer posted his troops at the
entrance to the walled garden where some 10,000–20,000 people had
already gathered. Without warning, he ordered his troops to fire. A later
parliamentary report estimated that 1,650 rounds of ammunition were
fired, killing 379 people and wounding another 1,200. In the months
following the Amritsar massacre, Dyer maintained rigid martial law. At
one site where a British woman had been attacked, he ordered Indians
who passed to crawl. Those who refused were to be publicly flogged.
Dyer was subsequently forced to resign from the military, and the
Indian Hunter Commission condemned his actions. But in Great
Britain he was a martyr. The pro-imperial House of Lords refused to
censure Dyer, and on his return to England a British newspaper raised
£26,000 for his retirement.
In India, public outrage brought Indians together in opposition to
the British. Rabindranath Tagore, who had been knighted after receiving the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, renounced his knighthood.
The 1919 session of Congress was moved to Amritsar. The 38,000 people attending demonstrated that Congress was united as never before.
In the 1920s Gandhi would move nationalism to a new level. By building up the Congress organization in Indian villages, Gandhi would
make the Congress Party a mass movement.
177
7
Gandhi and the
Nationalist Movement
(1920–1948)
Even a handful of true satyagrahis [followers of soul force], well organized
and disciplined through selfless service of the masses, can win independence
for India, because behind them will be the power of the silent millions.
■
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Satyagraha:Transforming Unjust Relationships Through the
Power of the Soul” (Hay 1988, 269–270)
M
ohandas K. Gandhi led India’s nationalist movement from the
1920s to his death in 1948. Gandhi made nationalism a mass
movement in India bringing rural Indians into the Congress Party
through his unique combination of Hindu religiosity, political acumen,
and practical organizing skills. Between 1920 and 1948 Gandhi led a
series of campaigns against the British—the 1920–22 noncooperation
movement, the 1930 Salt March, the 1942 Quit India movement—successfully mobilizing masses of urban and rural Indians in opposition to
British rule. Gandhi’s 1920 campaign was a coalition of Hindus and
Muslims, but in the late ’20s and ’30s communal violence, conservative
Hindu intransigence, and Congress’s own misjudgments split Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League from the Congress movement.
In the end, it was as much the expense of World War II as Gandhi’s
nationalist campaigns that ended British rule in India. But neither the
British nor Congress or the Muslim League was able to devise a government scheme for a free India that would maintain a strong central government (an essential Congress demand) and yet provide protection
within a majoritarian democratic system for India’s Muslim minority
(the Muslim League demand). This failure meant that with indepen178
GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
dence in 1947 also came partition. The division of British India into
India and Pakistan caused 1 million deaths and made 10 million Indians
refugees. Even as other Indian leaders participated in the detailed negotiations of Britain’s 1947 transfer of power, Gandhi worked tirelessly to
stop Hindu-Muslim violence. He was assassinated in 1948 by a rightwing extremist who believed Gandhi to be too pro-Muslim.
The Economic Aftermath of World War I
World War I created economic hardships in India that lasted into the
1920s and were worsened by a poor monsoon in 1918 and an influenza
outbreak that killed more than 12 million Indians. Prices rose by as much
as 50 percent in the immediate aftermath of the war. During 1920–22,
rural conditions grew so bad that the Indian government passed legislation capping rents to protect large landowners from eviction. Poorer
farmers received little help. Villagers on the edges of the Himalayas set
forest preserves on fire in protest. Throughout the Ganges River valley
peasants founded Kisan Sabhas (Peasant Societies) through which they
organized protests and rent strikes against landlords. Congress took no
action in these matters, unwilling to intervene in conflicts that might
prove internally divisive while at the same time fearing to antagonize a
middle landlord constituency that was a major source of support.
Labor strikes were also frequent in the early 1920s. Congress
founded the All-India Trade Union in the years after World War I at
about the same time as the Communist Party of India (founded by
Manabendra Nath Roy [1887–1954] in 1920) began to organize unions
in India’s cloth, jute, and steel industries. There were more than 200
strikes in 1920 and almost 400 in 1921. By 1929 there were more than
100 trade unions in India with almost a quarter million members.
Gandhi and the Khilafat Movement
The noncooperation movement of the 1920s marked the start of
Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian nationalist movement. After his
return to India, Gandhi had attended Congress sessions annually, but
his real entrance into Indian nationalist politics came only after the
Amritsar massacre, the British violence that followed it, and with his
support of the Khilafat movement in the 1920s.
The Khilafat movement began after World War I. British (and Allied)
plans to carve up the old Ottoman Empire gave rise to a worldwide panIslamic movement to preserve the Ottoman sultan’s role as caliph (that
is, as leader of the global Islamic community) and Islamic holy places
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
in the Middle East. In India, the leaders of the Khilafat (the name
derived from the Arabic word for “Caliphate”) movement were the Ali
brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat. The younger, Mohammed Ali
(1878–1931), had graduated from Oxford in 1902.
By 1920 Gandhi was president of the Home Rule League. He and other
Congress leaders had reluctantly agreed to participate in the elections
mandated by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, only to be outraged by
the Amritsar massacre and the subsequent British violence in the Punjab.
In 1920 the release of a British report on that violence further offended
Congress leaders, offering, as Gandhi put it, nothing but “page after page
of thinly disguised official whitewash” (Sarkar 1983, 196). When an
Indian branch of the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement formed in 1920,
Gandhi was interested. At a meeting in June 1920 with Gandhi and several nationalist leaders in attendance, the Khilafat leaders adopted a plan
for noncooperation with the British government in India. The plan called
for the boycott of the civil services, the police, and the army and for the
withholding of tax revenues. Gandhi was ready to put his Home Rule
League behind it. “I have advised my Moslem friends,” he wrote the
viceroy, Frederic John Napier Thesiger Lord Chelmsford (1868–1933),
“to withdraw their support from Your Excellency’s Government and
advised the Hindus to join them” (Fischer 1983, 189).
The noncooperation movement began without the sanction of
Congress. At an emergency September session of Congress held in
Calcutta, delegates overrode the objections of longtime Congress leaders
such as Jinnah and Chitta Ranjan Das (1870–1925) from Bengal, to
approve a modified noncooperation plan that included the surrender of
titles and the boycott of schools, courts, councils, and foreign goods. By
the regular December Congress session, only Jinnah—who preferred constitutional and moderate forms of protest—remained opposed. His objections were shouted down, and he quit Congress in disgust. Congress, now
firmly under Gandhi’s leadership, declared its goal to be “the attainment
of Swaraj [self-rule] . . . by all legitimate and peaceful means” (Brecher
1961, 41). Against the background of a worsening economy, widespread
kisan (peasant) protests, and labor strikes—all of which contributed to the
general sense of upheaval and change—noncooperation began.
Reorganization and Change
Under Gandhi’s leadership the 1920 meeting reorganized Congress,
making it a mass political party for the first time. The new regulations
set a membership fee of four annas (1/16 of a rupee) per person. A new
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350-person All-India Congress Committee (AICC) was established
with elected representatives from 21 different Indian regions. The election system was village based, with villages electing representatives to
districts, districts to regions, and regions to the AICC. The 15-person
Working Committee headed the entire Congress organization.
Organizing for noncooperation brought new and younger leaders to
prominence, the most important of whom was Jawaharlal Nehru
(1889–1964). Nehru was the son of Motilal Nehru, an Allahabad
(United Provinces) lawyer and Congress member who had grown so
wealthy and anglicized from his profession that, it was sometimes
joked, his family sent their laundry to be washed in Paris. The son was
raised at Allahabad within the aristocratic Kashmiri Brahman Nehru
family and educated in England at Harrow and Cambridge. He returned
to India in 1912 after being called to the bar in London.
Nehru was drawn to Congress as the Mahatma (a title meaning
“great soul”) took control in the 1920s, deeply attracted to Gandhi’s
philosophy of activism and moral commitment. Nehru’s second great
political passion, socialism, also began about this same time. In the
early 1920s Nehru spent a month traveling with a delegation of peasants through a remote mofussil region of the United Provinces. The
experience, probably Nehru’s first encounter with rural poverty, filled
him with shame and sorrow—”shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life,” he later wrote, and “sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India” (Brecher 1961, 40).
Nehru shared his leadership of younger Indian nationalists with a contemporary, Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945). Bose was also the son of
a wealthy lawyer, although his Bengali father practiced in Cuttack,
Orissa. Unlike Nehru, Bose had a stormy educational career. He was
expelled from an elite Calcutta college in 1916 because he and his friends
beat up an Anglo-Indian professor said to be a racist. Bose had finished
his college education in a Calcutta missionary college and was then sent
to England by his family to study for the ICS examinations. In 1921, having passed the exams and on the verge of appointment to the service,
Bose gave it all up. “I am now at the crossways,” he wrote to his family,
“and no compromise is possible” (Bose 1965, 97). He resigned his candidacy to return to India and join the Congress movement full time.
Working under the Bengal politician C. R. Das and supported economically for most of his life by his lawyer brother Sarat, Bose (along with
Nehru) became the leader of a young socialist faction in Congress. In
1921 during the noncooperation movement he was imprisoned, released,
and then deported to Burma, accused by the British of connections with
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Bengali terrorists. In 1927 on his return to Calcutta, he was elected president of Bengal’s branch of the Congress Party.
A third young man, Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), later known as
Maulana Azad, also joined the Congress movement at this time.
Maulana Azad came to India at the age of 10, the son of an Indian father
and an Arab mother. He received a traditional Islamic education but
turned to English education after being convinced of the value of
Western education by the writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He took the
pen name Azad (which mean “freedom”) while publishing an Urdu
journal in his youth. Interned by the British during World War I, he
joined both the Khilafat movement and the Congress during the 1920s.
He would become one of the staunchest Muslim supporters of Congress
in the years leading up to and following independence and partition,
serving as Congress president in 1940 and as minister of education after
independence.
Noncooperation Campaign (1921–1922)
Gandhi predicted at the 1920 Nagpur Congress session that if noncooperation was carried out nonviolently, self-government would come
within the year. By July 1921 the movement was fully under way, with
Congress calling for the boycott of foreign goods and supporters burning foreign clothes in public bonfires. Only 24 Indians turned in their
awards and titles, Gandhi among them, and only 180 lawyers, including
Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, gave up their legal practices. But support
among students was very strong with almost 100,000 students dropping
out of government-controlled colleges to attend new nationalist schools.
The boycott of British goods was also effective: The value of imported
British cloth dropped by 44 percent between 1922 and 1924.
Gandhi traveled the country by rail for seven months, addressing
public meetings, overseeing bonfires of foreign cloth, and meeting with
village officials to organize new Congress branches. He wrote a weekly
column in English for Young India and in Gujarati for Navajivan (New
life). Everywhere he went he urged supporters to spin and wear khadi
(hand-loomed cloth)—hand-spun and hand-loomed cloth would
replace foreign imports—and he designed a Congress flag with the
charkha (spinning wheel) at its center.
The combined Khilafat and Congress movement brought British India
to the edge of rebellion. By the end of 1921 more than 20,000 Indians
had been jailed for civil disobedience. The government had banned all
public meetings and groups. The Ali brothers and all major Congress
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Gandhi’s Social Vision
S
pinning and wearing khadi were part of a broader belief Gandhi held
that India should abandon all aspects of Western industrialization.
He first expressed this view in Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), a book
he wrote in South Africa in 1909. In it Gandhi described his vision of an
India stripped of all the changes brought by the West—no railroads,
telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, or doctors.As he wrote to a friend in that
same year,
India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during
the past fifty years.The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper classes
have to learn to live conscientiously and religiously and deliberately
the simple peasant life, knowing it to be a life giving true happiness (Gandhi 1909, 130).
India, Gandhi believed, would be revitalized by a return to village society, although the village societies he wanted would be shorn of communalism and discriminatory practices against Untouchables. In India
Gandhi emphasized the wearing of khadi. He himself spun for some
time each day, and he urged all nationalists to do the same. Such acts
would help free Indians from an overreliance on the West and its industrial technology and would revitalize Indian national culture.
leaders, old and young, were under arrest, including C. R. Das, Motilal
Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Subhas Bose.
Gandhi still remained at large, but he was no longer in control of the
movement. By 1921–22 the combined force of noncooperation protests,
worker and peasant strikes, and communal riots had moved India close
to a state of absolute upheaval. Muslim Khilafat leaders began to talk of
abandoning nonviolence. On the Malabar Coast, Muslim Moplahs
declared a jihad to establish a new caliph, attacked Europeans and
wealthy Hindus, and forced poorer Hindu peasants to convert to Islam.
Edward, the Prince of Wales’s visit to India was boycotted by Congress,
and everywhere he went he was met by strikes and black flags. In
Bombay city riots broke out on the occasion of the prince’s visit and
lasted five days. Although pressed by Congress leaders, Gandhi refused
to sanction a mass civil disobedience campaign, agreeing only to a small
demonstration campaign in Bardoli, a Gujarati district of 87,000 people.
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But before even that could start, a crowd in Chauri Chaura (United
Provinces), seeking revenge for police beatings, chased a group of police
back to their station house, set it on fire, and hacked 22 policemen to
death as they fled the blaze.
Gandhi immediately suspended the Bardoli movement and to the
disbelief of Congress leaders, declared noncooperation at an end. “I
assure you,” he wrote to an angry Jawaharlal Nehru, still in jail, “that if
the thing had not been suspended we would have been leading not a
non-violent struggle but essentially a violent struggle” (Nanda 1962,
202). Congress leaders watched helplessly as their movement collapsed
around them. “Gandhi has pretty well run himself to the last ditch as a
politician,” the viceroy Rufus Daniel Isaacs, Lord Reading, wrote to his
son with satisfaction (Nanda 1962, 202–203).
One month later Gandhi was arrested and tried for sedition. He made
no attempt to deny the charges against him: “I am here. . .,” he told the
court, “to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can
be inflicted upon me. . . . I hold it an honor to be disaffected towards a
government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any
previous system” (Fischer 1983, 202–203). The judge sentenced him to
six years’ imprisonment.
Both during and immediately after the noncooperation campaign,
British officials authorized several reforms that had long been sought by
urban middle-class Indians. The India Act of 1921 made the viceroy’s
Legislative Council a bicameral parliament with elected membership.
The Tariff Board in New Delhi gave the Indian government the beginnings of fiscal autonomy. And in 1923, for the first time, the ICS examinations were simultaneously held in India and England. In the
provincial and municipal elections of 1923–24 Congress candidates
gained control of provincial ministries in Bengal and Bombay. A number of Congress leaders became mayors of towns and cities: C. R. Das
became mayor of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru of Allahabad, and a west
Indian Gandhi supporter, Vallabhbhai (Sardar) Patel (1875–1950),
became the mayor of Ahmedabad.
Gandhi was released from jail in 1924 for an appendicitis operation
but refused to consider further campaigns against the government.
Although he accepted the presidency of the 1925 Congress session, his
focus was on relief projects and village work. “For me,” he said in this
period, “nothing in the political world is more important than the spinning wheel” (Fischer 1983, 232). He traveled for much of 1925, now by
second-class carriage, raising funds for Congress, promoting spinning
and hand-loom weaving, and leading a campaign in Travancore to open
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Gandhi’s “Experiments
with Truth”
M
ahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with
Truth, was one of the most influential nationalist books of the
20th century.Written in 1925, when Gandhi was 56, the autobiography
appeared in weekly installments in a Gujarati newsletter and was subsequently translated into English by Gandhi’s nephew. Its chapters covered
episodes Gandhi knew would resonate with young Westernized Indians,
recalling Gandhi’s early “experiments” with eating meat, his exploration
of an anglicized lifestyle while living in England, and his return to Hindu
religious practices (celibacy, strict vegetarianism) in South Africa.
Gandhi’s quest for a personal and religious identity demonstrated to
readers the ultimate “truth” of Hindu religious principles and practices
even for Indians living in the modern 20th-century world.
a temple road to Untouchables. In 1926 he began a practice he would
continue to the end of his life: For one day in the week he maintained
complete silence. It was not until 1928 that he would again be willing
to reenter active political life.
Post-Khilafat Communal Violence
The worldwide Khilafat movement ended in 1924 when the modernizing ruler of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, abolished the Ottoman caliphate. In
India, Hindu-Muslim unity did not survive the end of the movement.
With the collapse of Khilafat, local Muslim leaders in several provinces
declared themselves “caliphs” and led movements to protect Islam,
organize Muslim communities, and spread religious propaganda among
them. Both Hindu and Muslim groups escalated their provocations of
each other in these years, Hindu groups demanding an end to cow
slaughter and Muslim groups responding violently when processions or
loud music disturbed prayers at a mosque. Electoral politics also contributed to communal tensions in these years; separate electorates
heightened the awareness of religious divisions. And elections encouraged Hindu candidates to court the majority Hindu vote. In Bengal even
leftist Calcutta politicians, such as Subhas Bose, took strongly prozamindar positions to the irritation and disgust of Muslim peasants and
tenants.
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Between 1923 and 1927 communal riots erupted across northern
India. The United Provinces had 91 communal riots in these years. The
cities of Calcutta, Dacca, Patna, Rawalpindi, and Delhi all had riots. As
the violence increased, the last remnants of Hindu-Muslim political
unity vanished. The Khilafat leader Mohammed Ali had campaigned
with Gandhi during the noncooperation movement and served as
Congress president in 1923, but by 1925 Ali had broken his association
with Gandhi. In the same vein, the Muslim League met separately from
Congress in 1924 for the first time since 1918.
The Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS
In the years after 1924, communal associations flourished in northern
India linking religious populations across class lines and allowing economic and social tensions to be displaced onto religion. The north
Indian Hindu association Mahasabha had been founded in 1915 by
United Provinces. Congressite Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946)
and was originally a loose alliance of Hindu revivalists working for cow
protection, language reform, and Hindu social welfare in the United
Provinces and the Punjab. The Mahasabha had been inactive during the
Khilafat and noncooperation movements, but in the hostile communal
atmosphere of 1922–23 it revived. The organization gained new members in the northern Gangetic regions of United Provinces, Delhi, Bihar,
and the Punjab. In a shared front with the older Arya Samaj it used
many of the older society’s tactics, forming Hindu self-defense corps,
demanding that Hindi replace Urdu, and using purification and conversion to bring Untouchables and Muslims into Hinduism.
By 1925 the Mahasabha had spawned a paramilitary offshoot and
ally: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Force, or
RSS). Founded at Nagpur in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the
RSS was a paramilitary religious society along the lines of an akhara (a
local gymnasium where young men gathered for wrestling and bodybuilding). RSS members took vows before the image of the monkey-god
Hanuman, drilled in groups each morning, often in uniform, and
pledged themselves to serve the RSS “with [their] whole body, heart,
and money for in it lies the betterment of Hindus and the country”
(Jaffrelot 1996, 37). By 1940 the RSS had spread from Nagpur into the
United Provinces and the Punjab; its membership numbered 100,000
trained cadres.
Congress leaders maintained friendly relations with Mahasabha
members during the 1920s, and in this period prominent politicians,
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V. D. Savarkar
and “Hindutva”
V
inayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) became the Hindu
Mahasabha’s most prominent spokesman during the 1930s and is
today considered the ideological founder of Hindu nationalism. By 1911,
because of his associations with terrorist groups from his native
Maharashtra, Savarkar had received two life sentences and had been
transported to the Andaman Islands. By 1922, through the intervention
of Congress leaders, Savarkar was back in India in a prison at Ratnagiri
in Maharashtra.There he wrote Hindutva:Who Is a Hindu? Written as a
response to the pan-Islamicism of the Khilafat movement, Savarkar
defined “Hindutva,” or Hindu-ness, as the ethnic and racial ties binding
Indians together. Hindu-ness rested on the three pillars of India’s geographical unity (from the Indus River to the Bay of Bengal), Indians’
shared racial heritage, and Indians’ common culture. The Hindus,
Savarkar wrote, were not merely citizens of an Indian state united by
patriotic love for a motherland.They were a race united “by the bonds
of a common blood,” “not only a nation but a race-jati” (Jaffrelot 1996,
28). Only Indian Muslims and Christians were not part of this “race-jati.”
They were foreign invaders who shared in no part of Hindu-ness.
Released from prison in 1924, Savarkar was kept under house arrest
until the 1930s. Once free he became the president of the Mahasabha
for seven years in a row.“We Hindus,” he told a Mahasabha convention
in 1938, “are a Nation by ourselves” (Sarkar 1983, 356).
such as Malaviya himself, were members of both organizations. But in
1926 Malaviya and Lajpat Rai organized the Independent Congress
Party, a political group through which Mahasabha candidates could
contest for election. In the 1926 provincial elections Congress candidates lost badly to Mahasabha candidates. And in Muslim separate electorates, where Congress Muslim candidates had previously been able to
win, in 1926 they won only one Muslim seat out of 39 contested.
All Sons of This Land
In 1927 the British government appointed Sir John Simon (1873–1954)
as head of a parliamentary commission that would tour India and make
recommendations for future political reforms. From the start, however,
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the Simon Commission provoked opposition because it included no
Indians. Demonstrations followed its members wherever they went,
and Congress, the Muslim League, and all but two minor Indian political groups boycotted its inquiries.
To counter any Simon Commission proposals, Motilal Nehru headed
an All-Parties Conference in 1928 to which Congress, the Muslim League,
and the Hindu Mahasabha sent members. The conference was to develop
a separate, Indian plan for constitutional reform. Its members agreed that
the overall goal should be commonwealth status within the British
Empire, But they could not agree on how minorities would be represented
within this government. Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, was
willing to give up separate electorates for Muslims; in return, however, he
wanted one-third of the seats in the central legislative government to be
reserved for Muslim candidates, and he also wanted reserved seats in the
Muslim majority provinces of Bengal and the Punjab in proportion to the
Muslim percentage of the population in each. (Reserved seats were seats
set aside for candidates of a single community but voted on in elections
by all Indians.) The Hindu Mahasabha delegates, however, led by the
Bombay lawyer Mukund Ramrao Jayakar (1873–1959), absolutely refused
seat reservations in the Muslim majority regions. In desperation Jinnah
took his proposal to the December session of Congress. “If you do not settle this question today, we shall have to settle it tomorrow,” he told the
Congress meeting. “We are all sons of this land. We have to live together.
Believe me there is no progress for India until the Musalmans and the
Hindus are united” (Hay 1988, 227–228). Again Hindu Mahasabha delegates blocked the proposal, refused all pleas for compromise, and
Congress leaders ultimately yielded to them.
The constitutional plan that resulted from these debates was not itself
significant. Within a year it had been overturned. Gandhi, who had
finally yielded to Congress entreaties and reentered political life,
arranged to have Jawaharlal Nehru elected President of Congress in
1929. Nehru and Subhas Bose had formed the Socialist Independence
for India League in 1928, and Gandhi wanted to draw Nehru and his
young associates back into the Congress fold and away from the growing socialist and radical movements. Under Nehru’s leadership, however,
Congress abandoned the goal of commonwealth status, replacing it with
a demand for purna swaraj (complete independence). Preparations
began for a new civil disobedience movement that would begin under
Gandhi’s leadership the next year.
But the Congress’s acquiescence in the Mahasabha’s intransigence in
1928 was significant for the effect it had on Jinnah. Jinnah left the
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
Congress session and immediately joined the parallel All-India Muslim
Conference meeting in New Delhi. The Muslim Conference then declared
its complete and irrevocable commitment to separate Muslim electorates.
Muslim political leaders were now split off from the Congress movement.
By 1930 Mohammed Ali, Gandhi’s former ally, would denounce Gandhi as
a supporter of the Hindu Mahasabha. Indian Muslims would remain on
the sidelines in the 1930s civil disobedience movement. It was, as Ali told
a British audience in London in 1930, “the old maxim of ‘divide and rule.’
. . . We divide and you rule” (Hay 1988, 204).
Non-Brahman Movements in South and West India
During the 1920s and 1930s, even as Hindu Muslim conflicts in northern
India split the nationalist movement, lower-caste and Untouchable leaders in south India were defining Brahmans as their main political opponents. In Madras, E. V. Ramaswami Naicher (later called “Periyar,” or “the
wise man”) founded the Self Respect Movement in the 1920s. Periyar’s
movement rejected Sanskritic Aryan traditions, emphasizing instead
samadharma (equality) and the shared Dravidian heritage of Tamils. For
Periyar and his followers the British were a force for samadharma, while
the Brahman-dominated Congress stood for social oppression.
Another leader who rejected high-caste Sanskritic traditions was
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), an Untouchable leader from
the Mahar community of Maharashtra. Ambedkar had received a law
degree and a Ph.D. through education in both England and the United
States. Returning to India in the 1920s he organized a Mahar caste association and led regionwide struggles for the rights of Untouchables to
use village wells and tanks and to enter temples. For Ambedkar caste
was not a racial system. It was a socially mandated system of graded
inequalities whose internal divisions kept lower castes from opposing
the top. “All,” Ambedkar wrote, “have a grievance against the highest
[caste] and would like to bring about their downfall. But they will not
combine” (Jaffrelot 2003, 21). By the late 1920s Ambedkar and his followers were publicly burning copies of the Laws of Manu to symbolize
their rejection of high-caste practices and traditions.
The Great Depression and Its Effects
The worldwide depression that began in 1929 with the stock market
crash destroyed India’s export economy and changed Great Britain’s economic relationship with India. Before 1929 Indian imports to Great
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Britain were 11 percent of all British imports. Indian exports, in fact, were
so lucrative that they maintained Britain’s favorable balance of trade in
world markets. At the same time private British-run businesses in India
remained strong, particularly in the mining, tea, and jute industries.
But the Great Depression cut the value of Indian exports by more than
half, from 311 crores (1 crore = 10 million rupees) in 1929–30 to 132
crores in 1932–33. Indian imports also fell by almost half, from 241
crores to 133 crores. (Within India, agricultural prices were also devastated, falling by 44 percent between 1929 and 1931 and increasing tax
pressures on peasant landlords, particularly at the middle levels.) The
Indian government could no longer pay the home charges through revenues drawn from Indian exports; it now had to pay these charges
through gold. Private British companies found direct investment in India
less profitable than before 1929 and began to develop collaborative agreements with Indian businesses instead. Yet India’s economy remained tied
to the empire: The value of the Indian rupee was still linked to British
sterling, and India continued to pay home charges—the old nationalist
“drain”—to the British government throughout the 1930s.
If the worldwide depression weakened older imperial business structures, it strengthened Indian capitalists. In the 1930s Indian industry
spread out from western India to Bengal, the United Provinces, Madras,
Baroda, Mysore, and Bhopal. By the 1930s Indian textile mills were producing two-thirds of all textiles bought within India. The growth in
Indian-owned business enterprises even affected the nationalist movement, as new Indian capitalists contributed money (and their own business perspective) to Congress in the 1930s.
Despite the gains of Indian industrialists, stagnation and poverty characterized the Indian economy in the late 1930s. The global depression
produced agricultural decline and increased India’s need to import food
from other countries. Even though the Indian population grew slowly
between 1921 and 1941, from 306 million to 389 million, food produced
for local consumption in those years did not match this growth. The per
capita national income (the yearly income for each Indian person) was
estimated at 60.4 rupees in 1917 and 60.7 rupees in 1947. Over 30 years,
the average Indian income had grown less than one-half of a rupee.
Salt March
Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March was the most famous of all his campaigns. It
drew participants from cities, towns, and villages all across British India
and gained India’s freedom struggle worldwide attention and sympathy.
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
Salt March crowds, 1930. Gandhi’s second nationalist campaign drew huge crowds in India and
worldwide attention.This photograph was taken on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Gujarat
as Gandhi spoke to a crowd. (AP/Wide World Photos)
At its end, by Congress estimates, more than 90,000 Indians had been
arrested. Despite these successes, however, the Salt March did not
achieve Indian independence.
Congress leaders, such as Nehru, were initially dismayed at Gandhi’s
choice of focus for the campaign—the salt tax—but salt was necessary
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
for life, and British laws made it illegal for any Indian to manufacture
salt or even pick up natural sea salt on a beach without paying the tax.
The salt tax touched all Indians, the poor even more aggressively than
the rich. It illustrated the basic injustice of imperial rule. This focus on
an issue that combined the political and the ethical was characteristic
of Gandhi’s best campaigns.
The march began on March 12 when the 61-year-old Gandhi and
more than 70 satyagrahis (practitioners of satyagraha) left Gandhi’s
ashram at Sabarmati on foot. It ended on April 6 after marchers had
walked 240 miles over dusty dirt roads and reached Dandi on the
Gujarati seacoast. “Ours is a holy war,” Gandhi told one of many
crowds that gathered along the way:
It is a non-violent struggle. . . . If you feel strong enough, give up
Government jobs, enlist yourselves as soldiers in this salt satyagraha, burn your foreign cloth and wear khadi. Give up liquor.There
are many things within your power through which you can secure
the keys which will open the gates of freedom (Tewari 1995).
When the march reached the coast, Gandhi waded into the sea, picked
up some sea salt from the beach, and by so doing broke the salt laws.
He urged Indians throughout the country to break the salt laws and
boycott foreign cloth and liquor shops.
Civil disobedience now occurred in all major Indian cities. In
Ahmedabad, 10,000 people bought illegal salt from Congress during
the movement’s first week. In Delhi a crowd of 15,000 watched the
Mahasabha leader Malaviya publicly buy illegal salt. In Bombay
Congress workers supplied protesters with illegal salt by making it in
pans on their headquarters’ roof. Nehru, the Congress president, was
arrested on April 14; Gandhi on May 4. The former Congress president
Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) took Gandhi’s place leading a march of
2,500 nonviolent volunteers against the Dharasana Salt Works. Row
after row of marchers advanced on police guarding the works, only to
be struck down by the policemen’s steel-tipped lathis (long bamboo
sticks). “Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the
blows,” reported a United Press reporter (Fischer 1983, 273–274).
In some places the campaign grew violent, but this time Gandhi,
who had perhaps learned from the disastrous end of his earlier campaign, made no effort to stop it. In Bombay Gandhi’s arrest led to a textile workers’ strike, and crowds of protesters burned liquor shops and
police and government buildings. In eastern Bengal, Chittagong terrorists seized and held the local armory through five days of armed com192
GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
bat. In the Northwest Frontier Province, peaceful demonstrators in
Peshawar were killed by police fire, and the army had to be called in to
stop the rioting that followed.
The 1930 campaign was much larger than the earlier noncooperation
movement, reflecting the larger mass basis developed by Congress during the 1920s. The campaign involved fewer urban middle-class Indians
and more peasants. Participation in it was also a greater risk. Police violence was brutal, even against nonviolent protesters, and property confiscations were more widespread. Nevertheless the movement saw
between three and four times as many people jailed as in 1921, 90,000
by Nehru’s estimate, the largest numbers coming from Bengal, the
Gangetic plains, and the Punjab.
Organizing Women
Women were active participants in the 1930 civil disobedience movement. Women’s visibility in the campaign was itself a testament to the
changes that had reshaped urban middle-class women’s lives over the
past century. Women’s active involvement also demonstrated that support for independence was not limited to male family members. Sarojini
Naidu was arrested early in the campaign, and Gandhi’s wife, Kasturbai,
led women protesters in picketing liquor shops after her husband’s
arrest. In Bombay, where the numbers of women protesters were the
greatest, the Rashtriya Stree Sangha (National Women’s Organization)
mobilized women to collect seawater for salt, picket toddy shops, and
sell salt on the street. In Bengal middle-class women not only courted
arrest but also participated in terrorist activities. In Madras the elite
Women’s Swadeshi League supported spinning, the wearing of khadi,
and the boycott of foreign goods, if not public marches. In the north
Indian cities of Allahabad, Lucknow, Delhi, and Lahore, middle-class
women, sometimes 1,000 at a time, participated in public demonstrations, even appearing in public on occasion without veils. Not all husbands approved their wives’ activities, however. In Lahore one husband
refused to sanction the release of his jailed wife; she had not asked his
permission before leaving home.
The Round Table Conferences (1930–1932)
Civil disobedience coincided with the opening of the first Round Table
Conference in London. Facing a new Congress campaign and under
pressure from a new Labor government, the viceroy Edwin Frederick
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Lindley Wood, Baron Irwin (1881–1959), later known as Lord Halifax,
invited all Indian political parties to a Round Table Conference in
London in 1930. Gandhi and the Congress refused, but 73 delegates
came, including the Indian princes, Muslim leaders, Sikh leaders, and
representatives of the Hindu Mahasabha. British officials thought that a
federated Indian government with semi-autonomous provinces might
still allow the preservation of substantial British power at its center.
Federation and provincial autonomy also appealed to many constituencies attending the first Round Table Conference. For the Indian
princes (who controlled collectively about one-third of the subcontinent), such a federated government would allow the preservation of
their current regimes. For Muslim leaders from Muslim majority
regions (the Punjab or Bengal, for instance), provincial autonomy was
an attractive mechanism through which they might maintain regional
control. Even the Sikh representatives and those from the Hindu
Mahasabha saw provincial autonomy as an opportunity to preserve
local languages and regional religious culture—although whose languages and which religious cultures was never debated.
Only Jinnah of the Muslim League at the conference and Congress
leaders jailed far away in India were opposed to the plan. Jinnah wanted
a strong centralized Indian government, but one within which Muslims
(and he as their representative) were guaranteed a significant position.
Congress was entirely opposed to federation. They wanted to replace the
British in India with their own government, not struggle for political
survival in provincial backwaters while the British ruled at the center.
Gandhi and Nehru (in separate jails but in communication) had previously refused to end the civil disobedience movement, but now
Gandhi suddenly reversed himself, perhaps from fear that the Round
Table talks might resolve matters without the Congress or perhaps
because enthusiasm was waning by 1931 both among demonstrators in
the field and within the Indian business community. Gandhi met Irwin
and reached a settlement: the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Civil disobedience
would end; he would attend the Round Table Conference; jailed protesters would be released; and Indians would be allowed the private
consumption of untaxed salt. Indian business leaders—the Tatas in
Bombay, the Birlas in Bengal—approved the agreement. For Nehru,
Subhas Bose, and the Congress left wing it was a betrayal, an abandonment of the campaign in exchange for no constitutional gains at all. Still
if Gandhi’s pact with Irwin won no concessions, his meeting with the
viceroy served to irritate British conservatives and proimperialists. In
Britain Winston Churchill (1874–1965), then a member of Parliament,
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
expressed his disgust at the sight of “this one-time Inner Temple lawyer,
now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s
palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor” (Fischer 1983, 277).
The second Round Table Conference, however, made it clear that no
Indian government could be designed without an agreement over how
power at the center would be shared. The delegates deadlocked (as in
1927–28) over the question of how and to whom separate electorates
should be awarded. In 1932 Gandhi returned to India to rekindle a
dispirited civil disobedience movement. The new Conservative viceroy
Freeman Freeman-Thomas, Lord Willingdon (1866–1941), however,
immediately ordered the movement shut down. The Congress Party
was declared illegal, its funds confiscated, and its records destroyed.
Within months 40,000 Indians, including Gandhi and the entire
Congress leadership, were in jail. The leadership would remain in jail
for the next two years.
The Poona Pact
With no agreement from the Round Table Conference and with
Congress leadership in jail, the British made their own decision on communal awards. They awarded separate electorates to Muslims, Sikhs,
Indian Christians, Europeans, women, and the “Scheduled Castes” (that
is, Untouchables). At the second Round Table Conference, Gandhi had
refused to consider such awards. Ambedkar, a delegate to the conference, had been willing to accept reserved seats for Untouchables, but
Gandhi had been adamant. Untouchables (or Harijans—”children of
god”—as Gandhi had taken to calling them) were Hindus and could not
be split off from the Hindu community.
When the 1932 awards were announced, Gandhi began a fast to the
death in protest. Between September 18 and September 24 he took neither food nor water, as Congress leaders, Ambedkar, and British officials
scrambled to define a new agreement before Gandhi died. The Poona
Pact, signed on September 24, replaced separate electorates with reserved
seats for Untouchables. Ambedkar, who had held out against great pressure and had feared that all Untouchables might be blamed for causing
Gandhi’s death, now commented only that if Gandhi had accepted seat
reservation at the Round Table Conference, “it would not have been necessary for him to go through this ordeal” (Fischer 1983, 317).
After the Poona Pact Gandhi increased his interest in and activity on
Hindu Untouchability. He founded a weekly newspaper, Harijan, toured
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Untouchable communities in 1933–34, and encouraged his followers to
work for the opening of wells, roads, and temples to Untouchable communities. His 1932–34 speeches to Untouchable groups were disrupted
by Sanatanists (orthodox Hindus), and in Pune there was a bomb attack
on his car. Gandhi’s relations with members of the Hindu Mahasabha
also cooled in this period, particularly with Malaviya with whom he
had been close in the 1920s. In the longer term his increased involvement with Untouchable concerns created loyalties toward Congress
among Untouchable communities that lasted well into the postindependence period.
Government of India Act, 1935
In Great Britain, Parliament passed the Government of India Act of
1935, in spite of opposition from both sides: Conservatives such as
Churchill thought it a covert attempt to grant India dominion status;
Laborites such as Clement Attlee saw it as an effort to invalidate the
Indian Congress. The act continued British efforts to preserve their
power over India’s central government, even while ceding Indian
provinces almost entirely to elected Indian control. It created a
Federation of India made up of 11 provinces, all the princely states, and
a small number of territories. The provinces were to be run by elected
Indians and the princely states by the princes. At the act’s center was
the “steel frame” that would preserve British control over India: The
viceroy and his administration remained in control of the central government with a separate, protected budget and authority over defense
and external affairs (Jalal 1985, 17). Two central legislative houses were
also included in the act but never functioned, rejected for different reasons by both the princes and the Congress. Provincial autonomy, however, began in 1937 after nationwide elections that enfranchised 35
million Indians (about one-sixth of India’s adult population).
Congress in Power
The Congress Party swept the provincial elections of 1937, winning 70
percent of the popular vote and the right to form governments in eight
out of 11 provinces: Madras, Bombay, Central Provinces, Bihar, United
Provinces, Northwest Frontier, Orissa, and Assam. Regional parties
won control of three out of the four Muslim majority provinces: Bengal,
Punjab, and Sind. (Congress had won the fourth, the Northwest
Frontier.) The Muslim League, in contrast, won only 5 percent of the
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
total Muslim vote—109 seats out of 482 Muslim contests—and none of
the Muslim majority provinces.
In their provincial governments and coalitions, winning Congress
politicians made few concessions either to Muslim representatives or to
Muslim sensibilities. In the United Provinces, Congress officials told
Muslim League representatives that they could participate in the government only if they left the league and joined the Congress Party.
Congress-dominated provincial assemblies sang “Bande Mataram,” and
regional Congress discourse extolled the virtues of the cow, the Hindi
language, and the Devanagari script. For Jinnah, working later in the
1940s to rebuild the Muslim League, Congress provincial governments
provided a clear illustration of the dangers Islam and Indian Muslims
would face in an India ruled by a Hindu-dominated party.
On the national level, Gandhi and the Congress “old guard” faced a
challenge from the party’s left wing. In 1938 Subhas Bose won election
as Congress president, supported by leftist and socialist Congress members. He was opposed by Gandhi, Congress businessmen, and more
Birla Mandir, New Delhi.The Lakshmi Narayan Temple (commonly known as the Birla Mandir,
or “temple”) was built by the industrialist B. D. Birla in the late 1930s.The Birlas were major
financial supporters of Mohandas Gandhi, and Gandhi himself dedicated the temple at its
opening in 1938.The ornate, pink-colored temple was dedicated to Vishnu (Narayan) and his
wife Lakshmi. Among the marble designs on its inside are panels illustrating the Bhagavad Gita.
(Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
moderate Congress politicians. Bose and Gandhi had been opponents
within the Congress, disagreeing on economic policies and political tactics. Unlike Nehru, however, Bose was unwilling to yield to Gandhi’s
overall leadership. Gandhi tolerated Bose as Congress president for the
first term, but when Bose narrowly won reelection the following year,
Gandhi engineered the resignations of most Working Committee members. Bose worked alone for six months before giving up and resigning
the presidency. He and his brother Sarat resigned also from the
Congress Working Committee and returned to Bengal to form their
own party, the Forward Block, a left-wing coalition group.
Pakistan
After the losses of the 1937 election, Jinnah had to rebuild the Muslim
League on a more popular basis. To do so, by the 1940s he was advocating the idea of “Pakistan” and stressing the theme of an Islamic religion in danger. At the 1940 Lahore meeting of the Muslim League,
Jinnah declared—and the league agreed—that Muslims must have an
autonomous state. “No constitutional plan would be workable in this
country or acceptable to the Muslims,” the League stated in its 1940
Lahore Resolution, unless it stipulated that “the areas in which the
Muslims are numerically in a majority . . . should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be
autonomous and sovereign” (Hay 1988, 228). The idea of a separate
Islamic Indian state had been expressed 10 years earlier by the Urdu
poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938). The imagined state had even been
given a name by a Muslim student at Cambridge in 1933: He called it
“Pakistan,” a pun that meant “pure land” and was also an acronym for
the major regions of the Muslim north (P stood for the Punjab, a for
Afghanistan, k for Kashmir, s for Sindh, and tan for Baluchistan).
The difficulty with the idea of Pakistan was that it did not address
the political needs of most Indian Muslims. Most Muslims were scattered throughout India in regions far from the four northern Muslim
majority provinces. Minority Muslim populations needed constitutional safeguards within provincial and central governments, not a
Muslim state hundreds, even thousands, of miles from their homes.
Jinnah himself had worked throughout his career to establish just such
safeguards within a strong centralized government. Some scholars
have suggested that his support for Pakistan in the 1940s began as a
political tactic—a device to drum up Muslim support for a more popularly based Muslim League and a threat to force concessions from
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Congress leaders, particularly from Gandhi for whom the idea of a
divided India was anathema.
The idea of a state ruled by Islamic law where the Muslim culture
and life ways could reach full expression had great appeal to Indian
Muslims. Muslims in majority regions imagined Pakistan as their own
province, now transformed into an autonomous Muslim state. Muslims
in minority provinces (always Jinnah’s strongest constituency) thought
of Pakistan less as a territorial goal than as a political identity—a
Muslim national identity—that would entitle Indian Muslims to a protected position within any central Indian government. Even as late as
1946–47, Muslims in minority provinces supported the idea of Pakistan
with little sense of what it might mean in reality. As one Muslim, a student in the United Provinces at that time, later recalled,
Nobody thought in terms of migration in those days: [the
Muslims] all thought that everything would remain the same,
Punjab would remain Punjab, Sindh would remain Sindh, there
won’t be any demographic changes—no drastic changes anyway—the Hindus and Sikhs would continue to live in Pakistan
. . . and we would continue to live in India (Pandey 2001, 26).
Quit India!
On September 3, 1939, the viceroy, Victor Alexander John Hope, Lord
Linlithgow (1887–1952), on orders from Britain, declared India at war
with Germany. This time, however, the Indian National Congress offered
cooperation in the war only on condition of the immediate sharing of
power in India’s central government. In April 1942, in an attempt to win
over Congress leaders, the British government flew Sir Stafford Cripps (a
personal friend of Nehru’s) to India. With British prime minister
Churchill completely opposed to any concessions to Indian independence, even as a possible Japanese invasion loomed on India’s eastern
borders, Cripps offered Congress leaders only a guarantee of dominion
status (a self-governing nation within the British Commonwealth) at the
end of the war. Gandhi called Cripps’s offer “a post dated cheque” on a
failed bank (Brecher 1961, 109).
With Cripps’s mission a failure, Gandhi and the Congress opened a
new civil disobedience campaign: “Quit India!” The government immediately imprisoned all major Congress leaders; nevertheless, in 1942–43
an uncoordinated but massive uprising spread throughout the country.
Protests were marked by sporadic violence and included attacks on railways, telegraphs, and army facilities. The British responded with police
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shootings, public floggings, the destruction of entire villages, and, in
eastern Bengal, by aerial machine-gun attacks on protesters.
Beginning in 1942 and lasting through 1946 a terrible famine
erupted in Bengal. The famine was caused not by bad weather but by
the conjunction of several other factors: the commandeering of local
foods to feed the British army, the wartime stoppage of rice imports
from Burma, profiteering, and perhaps also a rice disease that reduced
crop yields. By 1943 tens of thousands of people had migrated into
Calcutta in search of food. Between 1943 and 1946 an estimated 3 million people died from famine-related causes.
Independence
At the end of World War II, with a new Labor government in place,
huge war debts to repay, and a country to rebuild, the British wanted to
exit India. The combined costs of war supplies and of an Indian army
mobilized at 10 times its normal strength had more than liquidated
India’s debt to Great Britain. Instead of home charges, it was now Great
Britain that was in debt to India. British officials in both London and
New Delhi knew Britain could no longer maintain its empire in India.
The biggest obstacle to British withdrawal, however, was the politicized communal identities that had grown up over the 20th century,
fostered by Indian nationalists and politicians and by the British themselves through their “divide and rule” tactics. Such identities divided
Muslims and Hindus, but they also existed among Sikhs, south Indian
“Dravidians,” and Untouchables. The problem was how to reunite all
these political groups within the majoritarian electoral structures of a
modern democratic state, while simultaneously protecting their minority interests.
The Congress Party won 91 percent of all non-Muslim seats in the
winter elections of 1945–46 and was returned to power in eight
provinces. By the 1940s Congress had built an all-India organization
with deep roots throughout the country and with a unity and identity
developed over its more than 50 years of struggle against British rule.
The Party’s goal was a strong, centralized India under its control. For
Congress socialists, like Nehru, such centralization would be essential
if India was to be rebuilt as an industrialized, prosperous state.
Minority groups’ fears over such centralization, meanwhile, were an
irritant for Congress. From the Congress perspective political differences between Hindus and Muslims could wait for resolution until
after independence.
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
Bose’s Indian
National Army
I
n 1941 Subhas Bose’s arrest for sedition was imminent in Calcutta,
and he fled India, seeking sanctuary with the Nazi government in
Germany. In 1942 he was taken to Japan by the Germans and then to
Singapore, now under Japanese control. In Singapore, Bose formed the
Indian National Army (INA), drawing his recruits from the 40,000 Indian
prisoners of war interned in Japanese camps. His new army fought with
the Japanese against the British in Burma.
Many Indians identified with the INA and saw it as a legitimate part
of the freedom struggle against Great Britain. In 1945, the same year
that Bose died in a plane crash, the British government put several hundred captured INA officers on trial for treason in New Delhi. Both
Congress and the Muslim League protested against the trials, but it was
only after two students were killed by police in Calcutta riots against
the trials that charges against most defendants were dropped.
In contrast to Congress, Jinnah’s Muslim League existed mostly at
the center. The league was a thin veneer that papered over a wide range
of conflicting Muslim interests in Muslim majority and minority
regions—a veneer that Jinnah used, nevertheless, to justify the league’s
(and his own) claims to be the “sole spokesman” of Indian Muslims
(Jalal 1985). By 1945 Jinnah’s advocacy of an independent Muslim state
and his campaign of “Islam in danger” had rebuilt the Muslim League.
It had also completely polarized the Muslim electorate. In the winter
elections of 1945–46 the Muslim League reversed its losses of eight
years earlier, winning every Muslim seat at the center and 439 out of
494 Muslim seats in the provincial elections. The politicized atmosphere of the 1940s destroyed long-established communal coalition parities and coalition governments in both Bengal and the Punjab,
replacing them with Muslim League governments. For Muslims, religious identity was now the single most important element of political
identity. For the league (and more broadly for the Muslim electorate)
that identity needed political protection through constitutional safeguards before independence arrived.
A British cabinet mission, sent to India after the 1945–46 elections,
was unable to construct a formula for independence. Jinnah refused to
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Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mohandas K. Gandhi both joined the Indian nationalist movement
around the time of World War I. They would be political opponents for the next 30 years, differing
not only on issues of political substance but also (as the photo shows) on questions of style and
personal demeanor. By 1948 both men would be dead: Gandhi from an assassin’s bullet and
Jinnah from disease and ill health. This photo dates to 1944 and a meeting at Jinnah’s house
on September 9 to discuss Hindu-Muslim conflicts in Bombay city. (AP/Wide World Photos)
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
accept a “moth eaten” Pakistan, a Muslim state that would consist of
parts of Bengal and parts of the Punjab (Sarkar 1983, 429). Congress
refused a proposal for a loose federation of provinces. Plans for an
interim government foundered on arguments over who would appoint
its Muslim and Untouchable members. As the Congress left wing organized railway and postal strikes and walkouts, Jinnah, intending to
demonstrate Muslim strength, called for Muslims to take “direct
action” on August 16, 1946, to achieve Pakistan.
Direct Action Day in Calcutta triggered a series of Hindu-Muslim
riots throughout northern India unprecedented in their ferocity and
violence. Between August 16 and 20 Muslim and Hindu/Sikh mobs
attacked one another’s Calcutta communities killing 4,000 people and
leaving 10,000 injured. Rioting spread to Bombay city, eastern Bengal,
Bihar, the United Provinces, and the Punjab. In Bihar and the United
Provinces Hindu peasants and pilgrims massacred at least 8,000
Muslims. In the Punjab Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs turned on one
another in rioting that killed 5,000 people.
As public order disintegrated, Clement Attlee, the British prime minister, declared the British would leave India by June 1948. When Lord
Louis Mountbatten (1900–1979), India’s last British viceroy, reached
India in March 1947, the transfer of power had already been advanced
to August of that year. The British moved peremptorily to make their
final settlement of political power. When Nehru privately rejected “Plan
Balkan”—so named because it transferred power to each of the separate
Indian provinces much as had occurred in the Balkan States prior to
World War I—the British settled on a plan that granted dominion status
to two central governments, India and Pakistan (the latter to be composed of a partitioned Bengal and Punjab, plus the Northwest Frontier
Province and Sind). Congress, the Muslim League, and Sikh leaders
agreed to this plan on June 2, 1947. The British Parliament passed the
Indian Independence Act on July 18 for implementation August 15.
India became independent at midnight on August 14, 1947. The transfer of power took place at Parliament House in New Delhi. “Long years
ago we made a tryst with destiny,” Nehru said in his speech that night,
and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not
wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of
the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life
and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age
ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed finds utterance (Brecher 1961, 137).
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru,1947. Newly installed as prime minister, Nehru holds a gold
mace presented to him on the evening of Indian independence, August 14, 1947.The white
markings on his forehead were made by a priest during an earlier puja (prayer service).
(AP/Wide World Photos)
Nehru became India’s first prime minister. Lord Mountbatten, at the
invitation of Congress, served as governor-general of the Indian
Dominion through June 1948. Regulations governing the new state
devolved from the Government of India Act of 1935.
Partition
Two secret British commissions, directed by the British barrister Sir
Cyril Radcliffe, drew the boundaries that would separate India from
east and west Pakistan. The boundaries were not announced until
August 17, two days after independence. It was only then that the real
impact of partition began to be felt, as majority communities on both
sides of the border attacked, looted, raped, and murdered the remaining minorities. Within a month newspapers were reporting 4 million
migrants on the move in northern India. One nine-coach train from
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GANDHI AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
The Princes
T
he British made no provision for the Indian princes in the transfer
of power, the viceroy simply informing the princes that they must
make their own arrangements with one or another of the new states.
Vallabhbhai (Sardar) Patel oversaw negotiations for India with the
princes, offering generous allowances in exchange for the transfer of
their states. By 1947 all but three states—Junagadh, Hyderabad, and
Kashmir—had transferred their territories, most to India. Both Junagadh
on the Kathiawad peninsula and Hyderabad in the south were Hindu
majority states ruled by Muslim princes. By 1948 the Indian government
and its army had forced both princes to cede their states to India.
Kashmir, in contrast, was a Muslim majority state bordering both
India and Pakistan but ruled by a Hindu king, Hari Singh. In October
1947, faced with a Muslim uprising against him, Singh ceded his kingdom
to India. At this point Kashmir became the battleground for Indian and
Pakistani invading armies. A January 1949 cease-fire, brokered by the
United Nations, drew a boundary within the province, giving India
administrative control over two-thirds of the region and Pakistan the
remaining one-third. Under the terms of the cease-fire India agreed to
conduct a plebiscite in Kashmir that would determine the region’s political fate. India’s subsequent refusal to conduct the plebiscite caused
Kashmir to remain in turmoil and a source of Indian and Pakistan conflict into the 21st century.
Delhi, crammed with refugees, crossed the border into Pakistan with
only eight Muslim survivors on board; the rest had been murdered
along the way (Pandey 2001, 36). More than 1 million people lost their
lives in partition violence. The entire population of the Punjab was
reshaped in the process. By March 1948 more than 10 million Muslims,
Hindus, and Sikhs had fled their former homes on either side of the
border to become refugees within the other country.
Gandhi’s Last Campaign
During 1945–47 Gandhi took no part in the final negotiations for independence and partition. He could neither reconcile himself to the division of India nor see an alternative. Instead he traveled the villages of
eastern India attempting to stop the spreading communal violence. In
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Calcutta in 1947 Gandhi moved into a Muslim slum, living with the
city’s Muslim mayor and fasting until the city’s violence ended. In
January 1948 he conducted what would be his last fast in Delhi, bringing communal conflict to an end in the city and shaming Sarkar Patel,
now home minister of the new government, into sending Pakistan its
share of India’s prepartition assets. On January 27, 1948, Gandhi
addressed Delhi Muslims from a Muslim shrine. Three days later, on
January 30, 1948, the elderly Mahatma was shot to death as he walked
to his daily prayer meeting. His murderer, Naturam V. Godse, was a
right-wing Hindu with ties to the paramilitary RSS. Gandhi’s assassination had been planned by a Brahman group in Pune that thought
Gandhi dangerously pro-Muslim. Godse was ultimately tried and executed for his act. Revulsion against Gandhi’s assassination provoked
anti-Brahman riots in the Mahasabha strongholds of Pune, Nagpur, and
Bombay and caused the RSS to be banned for a year.
Gandhi had not attended the ceremonies marking independence and
partition, nor had he asked for or accepted any role in the new government. The nationalist movement he had led since 1920 concluded with
India’s independence but also with a division of Indian lands, homes,
and people more terrible than anything imagined. Yet Gandhi had
raised no objections to the final settlement. The viceroy, Lord
Mountbatten, hearing that Gandhi opposed partition, had called for a
meeting. “It happened to be a day of silence [for Gandhi],”
Mountbatten later recalled, “for which I was grateful. In retrospect I
think he chose to make that a day of silence to save him the embarrassment of accepting the Partition. For he had no other solution”
(Brecher 1961, 141). Less than a year later Gandhi was dead, the most
famous victim of partition violence and upheaval. It would now be his
heirs and successors in the new government of India who would take
on the responsibility of shaping the newly independent Indian state.
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8
Constructing
the Nation
(1950–1991)
WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India
into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and
to secure to all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all
FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and
integrity of the Nation;
IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November,
1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS
CONSTITUTION.
■
Preamble to the Indian Constitution, 1949, and as amended in 1976
(Hay 1988, 335–336)
A
fter independence and partition came the work of creating the new
Indian nation. For more than 50 years the Congress Party had
fought India’s British rulers; now Congressites had to re-create themselves and their party and build a modern state within the context of a
free and independent country. Almost 30 years of provincial elections had
already accustomed Indian leaders to competing for power through the
ballot box. Not surprisingly then, the Indian Constitution, written in
1949, defined India as a democratic republic. India’s first leaders would
also define the new republic as both socialist and secular. Years of British
imperialism had convinced Jawaharlal Nehru and many like him that
only a socialist state, with a commitment to social and economic justice
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
and an emphasis on centralized state planning, could ameliorate the deep
poverty of India’s people. The need for a secular state, a second absolute
commitment of the early Indian republic, had been underscored by partition’s violent communal conflicts. For almost 20 years, from 1947 to his
death in 1964, Nehru worked with his Congress colleagues to build India
within these three defining rubrics: democratic, socialist, and secular.
The decades from Nehru’s death to the beginning of the 21st century,
however, would see substantial challenges raised to all three of these early
commitments. Socialist state planning was challenged as early as the late
1960s and 1970s as it became clear that neither central economic planning nor the absence of home charges would immediately transform
India’s economy. Similarly, in the decades after 1947, events demonstrated
that electoral politics, far from uniting Indians, also had the potential for
tearing them apart. With Indira Gandhi’s (1917–84) defeat at the polls in
1977 and the subsequent defeat of her opposition in 1980, it also became
clear that the voters of the largest democratic system in the world would
not always necessarily return elected officials to power. Finally, the
decades after independence, and particularly the last 20 years of the 20th
century, demonstrated frequently and dramatically the difficulties inherent in fitting India’s castes, religions, regional cultures, and linguistic divisions into the conceptual framework of a secular state. The 1980s in
particular would see the rise of an aggressive Hindu nationalist movement that challenged the very premise of Indian secularism.
From Dominion to Republic
The caretaker dominion government of 1947 was headed jointly by
Nehru as prime minister and Sardar Patel as deputy prime minister.
Nehru’s public pronouncements reflected his and the Congress left
wing’s secular and socialist convictions; however, Patel, who came from
the more conservative and communalist wing of Congress, said less in
public but controlled the Congress organization. By 1948 Patel and his
faction had forced all socialists out of Congress, causing them to form
the Praja Socialist Party in 1952. Patel’s sudden death in 1950 left
Nehru back at the center of government functions and essentially
unopposed.
The work of writing the new constitution was directed by B. R.
Ambedkar, now minister of law in the cabinet, and approved by the
Constituent Assembly in 1949. The constitution became law on
January 26, 1950. Its preamble guaranteed all Indian citizens justice,
liberty, equality, and fraternity. A section on “fundamental rights”
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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION
granted citizens a wide range of basic civil liberties (such as freedom of
speech, assembly, travel) and abolished the practice of Untouchability
“in any form” (Hay 1988, 336–337). Under British Indian law, separate
legal codes had existed for the personal law of both the Hindu and the
Muslim communities. At Patel’s insistence the constitution left these
separate legal codes intact.
The constitution established a parliamentary form of government,
modified by the addition of an independent Supreme Court modeled on
that of the United States. Asked by Gandhians in the Constituent
Assembly why the government was not based on indigenous village systems, Ambedkar bluntly replied, “village republics have been the ruination of India. . . . What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of
ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?” (Hay 1988, 341).
The Republic of India was a federation of regional state governments joined together within a central union government. The union
government was parliamentary. It had two houses: The Lok Sabha
(People’s Assembly) was the lower house, based on proportional representation with no more than 550 members directly elected to fiveyear terms; the Rajya Sabha (States’ Assembly) was the 250-member
upper house elected by provincial legislative assemblies for six-year
terms. In the Lok Sabha, a prime minister and cabinet headed a government that was formed by whichever party could command an
absolute majority of the elected seats. In addition, a president and vice
president, whose powers were largely ceremonial, were elected
through an electoral college.
The state governments included the nine former provinces of British
India, nine former princely states, 10 other states administered by the
center, and five new administrative territories. Relations between the
union government and the states were based on the Government of
India Act of 1935 with specific lists defining the areas over which each
might legislate and 47 areas of shared jurisdiction. The union government controlled (among other areas) foreign affairs, defense, and communications, while provinces controlled the police, law courts, health,
and education.
Under the constitution all Indians, male or female, over the age of 18
had the right to vote. The constitution eliminated separate electorates
but maintained a provision of the Government of India Act of 1935 that
allowed the reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes (Untouchables)
and Scheduled Tribes. When the first elections were held for the Lok
Sabha in 1952, 45.7 percent of India’s 173.2 million eligible voters participated in elections.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Nehru Era
Nehru traveled more than 30,000 miles in campaigning for the 1952 elections. Congress won overwhelmingly, taking 362 of 489 seats in the Lok
Sabha, winning 45 percent of the popular vote, and forming India’s first
government under the new constitution with Nehru as prime minister.
During its years as a nationalist movement Congress had sought to incorporate as many Indian constituencies within it as possible. It had the support of wealthy professionals in the cities and a strong grassroots
organization among the upper levels of the rural peasantry. Its dominance
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of national elections for the first 10 years of the republic was so strong
that the party always won a majority of Lok Sabha seats and most of the
time controlled the state legislatures as well. At the state level, Congress
bosses used the support (and votes) of upper-level peasants to dominate
the state party apparatus. As a result, in the first decades after independence, important political and policy struggles took place within the
Congress Party itself rather than among competing political parties.
Language Politics
During the nationalist movement Gandhi and the Indian National
Congress had emphasized and encouraged the use of indigenous languages, seeing them as more authentic expressions of Indian culture
than the foreign language of English. After independence it was natural for regional groups to agitate for provincial reorganizations on a
linguistic basis. Nehru himself hated the idea of linguistic divisions,
which he believed encouraged the kind of separatism seen in partition
violence and Hindu communalism, but when a leader from the Teleguspeaking region of Madras Presidency died during a protest fast in
1952, the government immediately agreed to carve a new Teleguspeaking state—Andhra Pradesh—out of the old Madras Presidency.
In 1956, on the recommendation of a commission, linguistic divisions were carried further, dividing India into 14 language-based states:
Kerala was created for Malayam speakers, Karnataka for Kannada
speakers, and Madras (present-day Tamilnadu) for Tamil speakers. In
1960 the old Bombay Presidency was divided into a Gujarati-speaking
Gujarat and a Marathi-speaking Maharashtra, with the city of Bombay
going to Maharashtra. The movement of refugees during partition had
given the Sikhs, a religious community who spoke Punjabi, a majority
presence in the western Punjab. In 1966 the old province of the Punjab
was also divided into a Punjabi-speaking (Sikh) Punjab and two smaller
states, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana.
Secular Law
Hindu customary law (as codified by the British and carried over into
Indian law) made marriages between castes illegal and women’s status
before and after marriage dependent on the male heads of their families.
In 1949 the Hindu Marriage Validating Act removed intercaste barriers
to marriage. Ambedkar wanted a broader reform, but Nehru, whose personal commitment to secularism was absolute, deferred to more conservative Hindus in the cabinet, and Ambedkar quit the cabinet in disgust
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A Buddhist Solution
I
n 1951 after resigning from Nehru’s cabinet, B. R.Ambedkar returned
to Aurangabad in western India to work locally on social reform and
education for his community. Five years later he turned his back on
Hinduism forever and converted to Buddhism.“Even though I was born
in the Hindu religion, I will not die in the Hindu religion,” Ambedkar said
at his conversion on October 14, 1956, recalling a vow he had made earlier to himself. Buddhism, which removed Untouchables from the obligations of Hindu dharma, offered an alternative escape from Hindu
customary obligations and restrictions. “There is no equality in the
Hindu religion,” Ambedkar said on the same occasion. “Only one great
man spoke of equality, and that great man is the Lord Buddha” (Hay
1988, 348). At the Nagpur ceremony, the oldest Buddhist monk in India
initiated Ambedkar into Buddhism, and Ambedkar in turn converted
other Untouchables, by some estimates as many as 500,000 people.
Ambedkar died within two months of his conversion, but Buddhism
drew an estimated 4 million Indian converts over the next few years,
most from Untouchable communities.
Mass conversions to Buddhism, New Delhi, November 2001. A Buddhist monk shaves
off the mustache of Ram Raj, chair of the All India Confederation of Scheduled Castes
and Tribes, as part of a ceremony in which he converted to Buddhism. Ram Raj and
the thousands of other low-caste Hindus who chose Buddhism in this mass ceremony
were following a practice initiated more than 40 years earlier by the famous
Untouchable leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. (AP/Wide World Photos)
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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION
in 1951. The 1955 Hindu Marriage Act subsequently raised the minimum age of marriage to 18 for men and 15 for women and gave women
the right to divorce polygamous husbands. A year later the Hindu
Succession Act and the Adoption and Maintenance Act gave women the
same claim as men over paternal property and equalized the adoption
status of female children. Finally, in 1961 it became illegal to demand a
dowry. All these laws, however, applied only to Hindu women because
Muslim personal law was defined by a separate legal code.
In 1955 the government also passed the Untouchability (Offences)
Act, providing penalties for discrimination against Untouchable individuals or communities. At the same time the government established
quotas for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, reserving seats in
the Lok Sabha and provincial legislature, educational institutions, and
government departments for these groups.
Central Planning
From the early 1920s, despite his wealthy background, Nehru had been
a socialist, believing that government ownership of crucial industries
combined with state planning for economic growth were the keys to
Indian economic progress and social justice. Beginning in 1950 Nehru’s
government used the newly formed National Planning Commission
(headed by the prime minister himself) to design three successive fiveyear plans, economic blueprints for government and private activity
over each five-year period.
The goal of the First Five-Year Plan (1951–55) was economic stability. The costs to the Indian government of World War II, the wartime
famine in Bengal, the violence and upheaval of partition, as well as the
costs of the political and economic changes brought by independence
had almost destabilized India’s economy. Severe food shortages forced
the Indian government to begin importing food grains in 1951, imports
that would continue for the next 20 years. The plan directed 37 percent
of its modest 20-billion-rupee expenditure toward agriculture and irrigation, 26.5 percent to transport and communications, and only 2.8
percent to industrialization. The Planning Commission established
government controls over a range of business activities: industrial
licensing, foreign exchange, imports, exports, food prices, and food
grain movements. By 1956 the Indian economy had recovered from the
worst instabilities of the late 1940s. National income had risen 18 percent. Good monsoons and new irrigation works had increased the agricultural production of food grains from 52 to 65 million tons. During
this first period, India also secured international aid and was able to
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
draw on the funds owed to it by Great Britain. The gains of the First
Five-Year Plan were modest, but in contrast with the disrupted economic conditions of the late 1940s, they appeared dramatic.
Rural Reform
The Kisan Sabhas (Peasant Assemblies) and peasant agitations had
played major roles in nationalist protests before independence, and
from the 1930s the left wing of Congress had advocated major land
reform. As absentee zamindars and landlords were thought responsible
for the inefficiency of rural agriculture, politicians in the United
Provinces and the Telegu-speaking (Andhra) region of Madras had produced plans, even before 1947, to abolish zamindari holdings and
restrict lands held by landlords. In the years immediately following
1947 many state governments abolished the rights of absentee landlords and gave increased security to tenant farmers.
The new Congress government, however, showed little interest in
far-reaching land reform. The abolition of large landholdings was supported by the First Five-Year Plan, but its implementation was made
voluntary. In place of land reform, the plan authorized the
Community Development program (which continued in the second
and third five-year periods) to help villages reorganize and to provide
technical assistance for agricultural improvements. The officials
responsible for overseeing rural development programs were those of
the old ICS, now renamed the Indian Administrative Service. In 1959
the government launched a new rural development program, the
Panchayati Raj plan. Under it, Panchayats (five-person village councils) were to organize agricultural and village development work and
send representatives (through a hierarchy of elections) to a district
committee. By 1964 the Panchayats had spread to most Indian states.
They were successful in involving dominant landed castes in each
region in development work but tended to funnel available funds and
programs to these same caste communities. In general both the
Community Development programs and the Panchayats were most
successful at helping wealthier, upper-caste peasants, while doing relatively little to improve the lives and working conditions of the poorest rural inhabitants.
In a related effort the Gandhian disciple Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982)
began his Bhoodan (gift of land) movement in 1951. Bhave traveled by
foot through rural India, asking wealthier peasants and rich landlords
to donate lands to landless laborers. Over the years Bhave’s movement
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collected more than 1 million acres for landless laborers, although the
acreage donated was sometimes scrubland that could not be farmed.
Second and Third Five-Year Plans
The First Five-Year Plan’s success encouraged planners to be more
ambitious in subsequent ones. Believing that the key to long-term economic growth was industrialization, the Second (1956–61) and Third
(1961–66) Five-Year Plans divided industries into the public and private sectors and focused aggressively on developing key public-sector
industries, such as electricity, iron, and steel. Import substitution—that
is, the substitution of goods produced in India for those imported from
abroad—was also emphasized to make the Indian economy more selfsufficient and protect Indian businesses from foreign competition.
The second and third plans produced substantial industrial development. Indian industrialization grew 7 percent annually between 1950
and 1965, making India the world’s seventh most industrially advanced
country in 1966. By 1966 steel factories produced 7 million tons annually; electrical plants, 43 billion kilowatt-hours a year; Indian cement
factories, 11 million tons of cement; and chemical factories, 0.5 million
tons of chemical fertilizers every year.
The second and third plans emphasized industry at the expense of
agriculture. Farming production lagged in these years, not only behind
industrial growth, but in relation to India’s now rapidly growing population. Although total food-grain production rose from 50.8 million
tons in 1950 to 82 million tons in 1960, in the same period the Indian
population grew from 361 to 439 million people. As population growth
negated most of the increased food production, India was forced to
import more food. Food-grain imports rose from 4.8 million tons in
1950 to 10.4 million tons in 1960. By 1965 India was importing more
7.5 million tons of food from the United States alone. In the 1950s India
had had to import more than 8 percent of the food grains its citizens
consumed, but during 1965–68, as severe droughts increased scarcity
and drove food prices higher, India was forced to import more than 11
percent of the food grains its people consumed.
Nonalignment
Rather than commit India to the United States or the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) at the start of the cold war. Nehru advanced
a plan for “nonalignment” at a 1955 Indonesian meeting of Asian and
African nations. He envisioned a coalition of “third world” countries,
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
newly emerging from colonization and with India at its head, whose
members would pledge themselves to peaceful coexistence and mutual
territorial respect. A year earlier India and China had signed a treaty
that Nehru hoped would be the model for such relations; the treaty recognized Tibet as part of China and pledged the two countries to respect
each other’s territorial integrity. “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” (India and
China are brothers) was the slogan in India when it was signed.
The treaty, however, did not determine the actual boundary between
the two countries, in part because much of the 2,640-mile-long border
was remote and unmapped. Between 1955 and 1959 the Chinese made
repeated military incursions into territories claimed by India. In 1959
India granted political asylum to Tibet’s Buddhist religious leader, the
Dalai Lama. In fall 1962, after repeated talks had failed to resolve the
boundary disputes, Nehru ordered the Indian army to take back the territories held by China. The Chinese easily defeated India’s army: They
took and kept the Karakoram Pass in the north, a route to Tibet that lay
through Indian Kashmir, and marched into Assam virtually unimpeded
before withdrawing on their own in November.
In May 1964, after a year of serious illness, Nehru died of heart disease. On the international scene his nonaligned policy was in tatters,
damaged by India’s invasion and seizure of Portuguese Goa in 1961 and
then destroyed by the China-Indian war of 1962. The defeat of India’s
army by the Chinese had also badly damaged his prestige at home. In
India evidence was mounting that the three five-year plans had failed to
remake the Indian economy. It was a sad ending to the career of a dedicated freedom fighter and statesman.
Lal Bahadur Shastri
Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–66), a former Gandhian and political moderate from the United Provinces, had served in Nehru’s place during the
prime minister’s last illness. In 1964, on Nehru’s death, Shastri was
elected head of the Congress Party and became prime minister. Shastri’s
brief tenure in office (1964–66) was marred by an escalating food crisis
as poor monsoons produced increasing food shortages and prices
soared. His government also faced south India protests against a government plan to make Hindi the official language of India; his government ended the protest by resolving that each province could use three
languages: English (as an associate language), a regional language, and
Hindi. Finally, a three-week war with Pakistan over India’s refusal to
conduct a plebiscite in Kashmir saw Indian troops victoriously driving
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back Pakistani forces almost to Pakistan’s capital at Lahore. A 1966
truce, mediated by the USSR at a meeting in Tashkent, returned
Kashmir to the status quo before the fighting started.
Indira Gandhi
Prime Minister Shastri died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1966
just at the conclusion of the Tashkent meetings. The “Syndicate,” the
nickname for the four Congress bosses from different states who had
controlled the Congress Party since Nehru’s last years, chose Jawaharlal
Nehru’s only child, Indira Gandhi (1917–84), to be the next prime minister. At the time Indira Gandhi was a 48-year-old widow with two sons.
Her husband, Feroze Shah Gandhi, who was not related to Mohandas
Gandhi, had died suddenly in 1960. Indira Gandhi had spent much of
her adult life, even while her husband was alive, as her father’s hostess
and housekeeper. The Syndicate bosses chose her over Morarji Desai
(1896–1995), the irascible 70-year-old leader of Congress’s right wing,
because of her family connections and because they believed they could
more easily bend her to their will.
A Woman in Office
F
or more than 15 years Indira Gandhi was India’s prime minister,
holding her country’s highest political office at a time when many
village women were still not allowed to read or write. Gandhi was made
prime minister by Congress Party bosses (the so-called Syndicate) who
believed that, as a woman, she would be pliable and easily managed.
Syndicate bosses soon learned otherwise. Gandhi also learned, as she
matured as a politician, how to use her age and gender to advantage
with Indian voters, presenting herself, on occasion, as a compassionate,
self-sacrificing mother struggling to maintain peace within a fractious
extended family. As she told one crowd during the 1967 election,
Your burdens are comparatively light, because your families are
limited and viable. But my burden is manifold because crores
[tens of million] of my family members are poverty stricken and
I have to look after them. Since they belong to different castes
and creeds, they sometimes fight among themselves, and I have
to intervene especially to look after the weaker members of my
family, so that the stronger ones do not take advantage of them
(Frank 2002, 303).
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The Green Revolution
Indira Gandhi came to power in 1966 as successive monsoon failures
and severe droughts brought sections of the country to near famine conditions. To gain food aid from the United States and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) she had to agree to devalue the rupee and to
loosen government restrictions on foreign investment. Dependence on
foreign grain and foreign aid limited her government’s ability to plan
long term, and for three years (1966–69) the five-year plans were abandoned, and budgets were only year to year. Even after 1969 the ambitious centralized planning of the Nehru years was largely abandoned.
By the mid 1960s new strains of wheat (and later rice) had been
developed in Mexico and the Philippines that when used with intensive
irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides produced much higher
crop yields. Beginning in 1965 these new strains of wheat were used in
northern India from the Punjab and Haryana to western Uttar Pradesh.
Over the next four years India used loans from the IMF and the United
States to fund an intensive program of investment in new agricultural
technologies. Crops increased dramatically, particularly in the Punjab,
and by 1970 India was growing five times as much wheat as in 1960. By
the 1970s Indian food production had made the country a net exporter
of agricultural products. In the 1980s new strains of high-yield rice
were introduced into India, doubling production of that crop.
The “Green Revolution,” as the switch to high-yielding crops was
called, made Punjabi farmers the wealthiest in the nation. By the 1970s
Punjab’s peasant families earned twice as much as peasant households
Food Production Growth, 1950–2000
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
Food grain production
(in millions of tons)
50.8
82.0
108.4
129.6
176.4
201.6
Food grain imports
(in millions of tons)
4.8
10.4
7.5
.8
.3
Food grain reserves
(in millions of tons)
–
15.5
20.8
Population
(in millions)
361
2.0
439
Source: INSA (2001, 215)
218
–
548
683
846
–
40.0
1,000
CONSTRUCTING THE NATION
in other parts of India. The increase in Indian food production was
dramatic. Nevertheless, the Green Revolution had some disadvantages.
It increased Indian dependence on chemical fertilizer dramatically and
made farmers rely on strains of wheat and rice that later showed themselves to be more susceptible to disease and drought. Nor could Green
Revolution innovations be used throughout India; only regions where
landholdings were relatively large and peasants prosperous enough to
invest in new technologies could use the new crops. Finally, the overall benefits for Indians consumers were somewhat undercut by continuing population increases, which used up much of the greater availability
of food.
Indira Gandhi Moves Left
Despite the Syndicate’s belief that she would defer to their advice and
leadership, Gandhi quickly emerged as a powerful and independent
politician. In the election of 1967, held as India’s food crisis worsened,
Congress retained its majority by its smallest margin ever: 20 seats. It
lost seats to opposition parties on the right—the free-market Swatantra
Party and the Hindu communalist Jana Sangh—and on the left—communist parties in West Bengal and Kerala. In Madras an anti-Brahman
party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Party for the Progress of
Dravidam, or DMK), took power. In the new (1966) state of the
Punjab, the Sikh party Akali Dal took control. In Uttar Pradesh (formerly the United Provinces), Chaudhuri Charan Singh withdrew from
Congress, formed a new peasant-oriented party, and became chief minister of the state.
To regain political popularity and against the advice and wishes of
Syndicate leaders, Gandhi moved to the left. Between 1967 and 1973
she gathered around her a “Kashmiri mafia.” These new advisers were
leftist in their political convictions, often from Kashmiri Brahman
backgrounds and, as former supporters of her father, saw her as his
successor (Frank 2002, 312). Chief among these was her private secretary and longtime friend, Parmeshwar Narain (P. N.) Haksar. With
Haksar’s help, Gandhi proposed an ambitious economic plan that
included land reform and ceilings on personal income, property,
and corporate profits. In 1969 she nationalized 14 of the country’s
private banks—among them the Bank of India—an immensely
popular move in rural areas where private banks had long refused to
open branches. In 1970 she used a presidential order to abolish the
privy purses awarded to former Indian princes at independence.
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The End of the Princes
I
n 1970 there were 278 princes in India collecting annual tax-free
privy purses ranging from $25 to $350,000 but totaling altogether
more than $6 million. Indira Gandhi’s first attempt at ending the
princes’ purses passed the Lok Sabha but was defeated by one vote in
the Rajya Sabha, Parliament’s upper house. She then used a presidential
proclamation to strip the princes of their purses, privileges, and titles.
In 1971 the courts declared the proclamation illegal, but by then Gandhi
controlled Parliament. She had the Lok Sabha amend the Indian
Constitution to give the lower house the power to alter the fundamental rights granted to citizens under the constitution and to exclude
such alterations from judicial review. The Lok Sabha then passed
another constitutional amendment, the 26th, abolishing the princes’
privy purses and their privileges.
Like Gandhi’s nationalization of the private banks, the abolition of
the privy purses was enormously popular and enhanced her standing
with left-wing groups but carried little political risk. Neither princes nor
bank owners commanded sufficient political constituencies to act
against her.
When state ministers opposed her proposals for land reforms, Gandhi
called for elections.
By the elections of 1971 Gandhi had been expelled from the old
Congress Party, which split into the Congress (O), led by Morarji
Desai, and her own Congress (R). (The R stood for “requisitioned.”
Gandhi had inaugurated her branch of Congress by sending around
a requisition asking her supporters to meet. The O in Desai’s
Congress stood for “organization”—the assumption being that the
Syndicate controlled the original regional Congress organization.)
Gandhi ran for elections under her own party against the old
Congress bosses. Her platform consisted of a leftist program of goals
and economic reforms. One campaign slogan was “Garibi hatao”
(Abolish poverty) (Frank 2002, 325). Her election speeches called
for slum clearance, the building of better dwellings for slum residents, and the settlement of landless laborers on their own property.
Her campaign was a spectacular success, giving Gandhi’s Congress
(R) Party 325 seats in the Lok Sabha and an overwhelming twothirds majority of the popular vote.
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Bangladesh and the 1971 Indo-Pak War
By 1970 Pakistan had discovered that religion alone was not sufficient
to hold together two regions 1,000 miles apart with opposing economic
interests, different languages, and distinct cultural traditions. East
Pakistan had 60 percent of the country’s population but found itself
dominated economically and politically by West Pakistan. These conflicts came to a head in 1970 when the East Pakistani leader Mujibur
Rahman (1920–75) and his political party won Pakistan’s first parliamentary election but was not allowed by Pakistan’s president, Agha
Mohammed Yahya Khan (1917–80), to form a government. President
Yahya Khan imposed martial law on East Pakistan, so on March 25,
1971, Sheikh Mujib, as he was called, declared independence for East
Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh (Bengal country). West Pakistani
troops entered East Pakistan and burned, looted, and murdered its citizens in cities, university centers, and bazaars across the province.
Sheikh Mujib was arrested and jailed. By December 1971, 10 million
East Pakistanis had fled across the border into India.
The U.S. government under President Richard Nixon supported
West Pakistan. To gain support against the United States, Prime
Minister Gandhi broke India’s tradition of nonalignment to sign a 20year treaty with the USSR in which each country agreed to aid the other
in case of attack. At the same time India covertly supported the
Bangladeshi uprising with funds, training, and equipment. In retaliation Pakistan declared war on India in December, bombing Indian airfields in the west. The Indian army entered East Pakistan, completely
overwhelming the Pakistani army, which surrendered on December 15,
1971. India then declared a cease-fire, and Bangladesh was declared an
independent country. Gandhi’s military victory over Pakistan was
wildly popular in India. In the 1972 state assembly elections the
Congress (R) Party won 70 percent of the seats; her party was now
incontestably dominant in both the center and the states.
The Emergency
Gandhi’s political fortunes reached their zenith in the 1971 elections.
The years following 1972 brought economic disasters and with them
political crisis. Three years of monsoon failures (1972–74) again
brought food shortages, rising food prices, and near famine to many
Indian regions. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 raised the cost of oil-based
chemical fertilizers and, with it, the price of Indian foods. Inflation
reached 20 percent per year. The government imposed curbs on salaries
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and incomes and cut expenditures. Strikes became commonplace, and
factories closed throughout the country. In 1974 Gandhi received an
emergency loan from the IMF but only on condition that the government retreat from its aggressive economic policies and curtail government expenditures even further. Not only had Gandhi not abolished
poverty in her years in power; under her government economic conditions had worsened for virtually all classes of Indian citizens.
Even before the crises of 1972–76, Gandhi had wanted absolute loyalty from the members of her central government and from Congress
(R) ministries in regional states. Over the years since 1967 she had
abandoned internal party democracy, filling party positions by appointment from above rather than by elections. She had undercut her party’s
grassroots organization by systematically replacing regional Congress
state leaders who had their own independent local networks with people loyal to and dependent only on her. She created a pyramid-like decision-making structure both in Congress and the government to ensure
that all matters, even if regional, would be decided in New Delhi. A provision from the 1935 Government of India Act allowed the central government to take over a state under emergency conditions. By 1972
Gandhi was routinely using this provision to proclaim “president’s rule”
in any state that opposed her. By 1976, as one observer noted at the
time, all dissent, whether outside Congress or within, was interpreted
as “anti-party, anti-national, and traitorous, or even foreign-inspired”
(Kochanek 2002, 100).
Gandhi’s centralization of Congress worked against her in several
ways. It made her programs more difficult to implement at state and
local levels because her appointees there had only weak local support.
Centralization also put government patronage and licensing regulations
directly into the hands of Gandhi’s close associates, making her government more vulnerable to corruption. Government corruption was
among the main complaints against her government; Gandhi’s younger
son, Sanjay (1947–80), was among those most frequently rumored to
be using government influence and connections to obtain quasi-legal
loans and land deals.
Opposition to Gandhi and her government in 1973–74 crystallized
around food shortages, rising prices, and corruption. Not even the detonation of an underground nuclear device on May 18, 1974, which
made India the world’s sixth nuclear power, could distract the Indian
public from escalating inflation, strikes, and protests. In Bihar,
Jayaprakash (J. P.) Narayan (1902–79), a Gandhian and founder of the
Socialist Party, came out of retirement to take over a growing protest
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movement and invite peasants to join in protests against official corruption and Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. In Gujarat students rioted over
the 30 percent annual inflation rate and government corruption. A massive strike of railway workers paralyzed the nation for 20 days in mid1974, ending only after the government jailed 30,000–40,000 striking
workers. By 1975 Narayan’s movement had become national as he and
Desai brought protesters together with opposition parties—among
them Congress (O), the Jan Sangh, and the Swatantra Party—to form
the Janata Morcha (People’s Front).
In June 1975 the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh found
Gandhi guilty (on a technicality) of corrupt elections practices in the
1971 elections; the court invalidated her election to Parliament and
barred her from office for six years. In New Delhi as Sanjay Gandhi
tried to organize rallies in his mother’s defense, the Janata Morcha held
a mass rally at which Narayan urged the police and the army to join in
a national satyagraha against government corruption. “We intend to
overthrow her,” Gandhi’s old enemy Desai had told an interviewer some
days before, “to force her to resign. For good. The lady won’t survive
this movement of ours” (Frank 2002, 374).
Faced with the imminent loss of both her office and her political
career, Gandhi had the president of India issue an official proclamation
“that a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances” (Jayakar 1993, 199). Using Article 352
of the Indian Constitution, which authorized the government to suspend civil rights and take all necessary steps to preserve order, Gandhi
declared a national emergency on June 25, 1975. She jailed her opponents and took complete control of the government. Narayan, Desai,
600 opposition members of Parliament, and tens of thousands of local
party workers were detained without trial. Censorship laws closed all
news outlets. Parliament, now composed only of Gandhi’s supporters,
nullified the election charges against her, and Gandhi postponed scheduled parliamentary and state legislative elections indefinitely.
The Emergency, as it is referred to, lasted until January 1977.
Gandhi banned the Hindu nationalist RSS group—which had provided
strong local support for the Janata movement—along with a range of
communalist and terrorist groups. The Maintenance of Internal
Security Act (MISA) and the Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act
gave the government broad powers to arrest and detain individuals.
Strikes were banned, bureaucrats were ordered to work harder, blackmarket operators and smugglers were jailed, tax evaders were arrested,
and in rural areas the power of the wealthiest landlords was curbed.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Industrial production grew an average of 8 percent per year. “She stood
between Chaos and Order,” declared one of many Emergency posters
(Wolpert 1982, 399). Between 1975 and 1977, stringent government
policies (with help from a good monsoon) brought the prices of essential commodities down to 1971 levels.
During the Emergency Sanjay Gandhi, the prime minister’s younger
son, became her closest adviser and an active political figure. A college
dropout with a reputation for using threats, smears, and organized violence in his business dealings, Sanjay Gandhi resurrected the Youth
Congress (now made up, according to one contemporary, of “dropouts,
drifters, and roughnecks”) to help implement his plans (Malhotra
1989, 177). He pursued what his supporters called urban beautification
and family planning among the poorest Indians in urban slums and
rural villages. Under his program the bustees (slums), small shacks, and
storefronts of the poor—the very Muslims, minorities, and low-caste
voters who had been his mother’s strongest supporters—were bulldozed in urban cities such as New Delhi, Calcutta, and Varanasi and
their tenants forced to move elsewhere. In the Turkaman Gate section
of Old Delhi the destruction of 150,000 shacks and the forcible relocation of 70,000 slum dwellers caused riots that put the area under a 24hour curfew. Sanjay Gandhi’s family planning initiatives were equally
harsh. Government workers were given sterilization quotas to meet in
order to collect their salaries. Vasectomy tents were set up in cities, and
sterilization vans roamed the countryside. Over two years more than 10
million sterilizations were performed, many, according to rumors,
under compulsion.
Janata Government
In January 1977 Prime Minister Gandhi suddenly announced that new
elections for Parliament would be held in two months. She ordered
well-known political prisoners released and suspended press censorship. Narayan and Desai reformed the Janata coalition to fight in the
election. Shortly before the voting began, Jagjivan Ram, an
Untouchable politician who was Gandhi’s minister of irrigation and
agriculture, resigned his office, left Congress (R), and joined the Janata
coalition.
Observers later speculated as to why Gandhi called for elections,
whether in the mistaken belief that Emergency reforms had restored her
earlier popularity or because she could no longer endure her role as a
dictator. In any event Congress (R) lost the elections. In Uttar Pradesh
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both Gandhi and her son Sanjay were defeated. Janata candidates won
299 seats (with 40 percent of the popular vote), while Congress (R)
won 153 seats (and 35 percent of the vote). Gandhi resigned as prime
minister immediately, and in March 1977 Desai became India’s first
non-Congress prime minister. Charan Singh (1902–87), whose peasant
proprietor constituency had joined Janata, became home minister; Atul
Bihari Vajpayee of the Jana Sangh was foreign minister; and Jagjivan
Ram became minister of defense. The Janata government appointed the
Shah Commission (named for former Supreme Court justice J. C. Shah
who headed it) to investigate the Emergency, and by 1978 the commission had produced a three-volume catalogue of Emergency abuses.
Over the next two years the Janata government filed 35 criminal cases
against Sanjay Gandhi. In 1978 when Indira Gandhi won election to
Parliament from Karnataka, the Janata majority expelled her from the
Lok Sabha and jailed her for one week.
Apart from their pursuit of the Gandhis, however, Janata leaders had
no unified political program. Prime Minister Desai showed interest in
promoting his own personal Brahman regimen (which included complete vegetarianism and the drinking of his own urine daily), and Desai
had his government pass laws banning alcohol and the eating of beef.
The Janata government also endorsed programs for encouraging
Gandhian village industries. But otherwise Janata leaders did little more
than feud with one another, in the process revealing the corruption of
some of them. The end of the Emergency, meanwhile, brought rising
prices and black marketeering. Inflation rates again reached double digits by 1978. The surplus of food grains and the $3 billion foreign
exchange built up during the Emergency were gone within two years.
In 1979 the socialists abandoned the coalition, and the government fell.
Indira Gandhi’s Communal Turn
Indira Gandhi was returned to power in the elections of 1980 under the
slogan “Elect a Government that Works!” (Wolpert 1989, 410). Her
Congress (I) Party (I for “Indira”) won 351 seats, or two-thirds of the
Parliament, and both she and her son Sanjay won election to
Parliament. Sanjay Gandhi had selected almost half of Indira Gandhi’s
Congress (I) members of Parliament and was now widely viewed as the
newest addition to the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, but in June
1980 Sanjay died in a private airplane accident in New Delhi. Within a
year of his death, Sanjay’s elder brother, Rajiv Gandhi (1944–91), an
airline pilot for Indian Airlines with an Italian-born wife and no prior
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
interest in politics, had yielded to his mother’s wishes, entered politics,
and won a seat in Parliament.
Indira Gandhi returned to power shorn of the left-wing “Kashmiri
mafia” that had guided her before the Emergency. She no longer presented herself as the secularist, socialist fighter for the Indian poor. Her
government offered few new legislative initiatives and no longer
showed interest in central state planning. Unchanged, however, was
loyalty, Gandhi’s highest priority in political associates. Was she to
blame, she asked in an interview of the time, if she entrusted sensitive
jobs not to bureaucrats who would not “move a little finger to help me”
but to “men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely?”
(Malhotra 1989, 228).
As the ideological difference between Congress (I) and most opposition parties narrowed in these years, Gandhi turned to communal
and/or religious appeals to maintain herself in power. She courted the
Hindu vote and in her relations with regional parties adopted whatever
communalist strategy—whether anti-Hindu, -Muslim, or -Sikh—
seemed likely to benefit her. In Kashmir her government attempted to
weaken a regional Kashmiri party by appealing to the fears of Hindus
in southern Kashmir. In Assam, where large numbers of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh now outnumbered indigenous Assamese
Hindus, Gandhi courted the Muslim vote. One effect of Gandhi’s turn
toward communalism, political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has suggested, was that communal themes replaced secular themes as the
accepted language of political discourse.
In the Punjab Gandhi’s communal manipulations produced disaster.
The main Congress opponent in the Punjab was the Akali Dal, a relatively moderate Sikh party that had supported Janata during the
Emergency and that wanted the Punjab to become the autonomous
Sikh state of Khalistan (land of the Sikh khalsa). To undercut the Akali
Dal, Sanjay Gandhi and his associates had promoted the rise of a militant Sikh holy man, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947–84); however,
by 1983 Bhindranwale and his followers were carrying on a campaign
of assassination and terror designed to drive non-Sikhs out of the
Punjab. To avoid capture they barricaded themselves in the Sikh community’s holiest site, the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Bhindranwale
refused to leave the temple until the Punjab became completely
autonomous. In June 1984 Indira Gandhi approved “Operation
Bluestar”; the army invaded the Sikh temple, killing Bhindranwale and
1,000 Sikhs in a two-day battle that destroyed the sacred inner sanctum
of the temple and its library of ancient Sikh scriptures.
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Hindu Society Under Siege
As Gandhi’s political manipulations and communal campaigns fueled
tensions in several Indian states, the conversion of a large number of
Untouchables to Islam raised fears of a Hinduism in danger. In 1981
1,000 Untouchables in Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu, converted to
Islam in a ceremony organized by the Muslim League. In the next several months numbers of Untouchables, estimated between 2,000 and
22,000, also converted to Islam. These conversions, like those in the
1950s to Buddhism, were motivated both by the converts’ desire to
escape the stigma of untouchability and by the attraction of Islamic
egalitarianism and freedom from caste distinctions. Press reports at the
time, however, claimed that the conversions had been funded by
Muslim organizations in the Arab states and focused on the danger
such conversions posed to the Hindu majority within India.
“International Islamic Conspiracy for Mass Conversion of Harijan
[Untouchables]” was the headline of a 1981 Times of India story, while
an RSS newspaper ran a story titled “Hindu Society under Siege”
(Jaffrelot 1996, 341, 343). One Indian newspaper published statistics
showing that Hindus could become a minority community in India by
as early as 2231.
The Sangh Parivar and Its Members
The desire to increase Hindu solidarity against the possible threat of
future Muslim conversions spurred the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh) nationalist group into increased activity during the years of
Indira Gandhi’s return to power. After independence, the RSS had created several affiliated organizations, and all these groups were known
collectively as the Sangh Parivar (Association Family, or RSS Family).
Now RSS added several new organizations to the Sangh Parivar and
revitalized others. In the 1980s the Sangh’s chief organizations were the
RSS itself, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Party),
the Bajrang Dal (Strong and Sturdy Faction), and the BJP (Bharatiya
Janata Party, or Indian People’s Party). Allied with the Sangh Parivar in
the 1980s but not technically one of its members was the
Maharashtrian political organization, the Shiv Sena (Shiva’s or Shivaji’s
Army).
Unlike modern religious organizations labeled as “fundamentalist”
today, the goal of these RSS organizations was not to revive Hinduism
as it had existed in the past but to adapt, modernize, and politicize it
for the future. The RSS groups wanted to create a unified Hindu religion
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
to compete with the world religions of Islam and Christianity and
wanted a mobilized Hindutva-oriented Indian public that would vote
cohesively and function effectively in the political arena. “Hindus must
now awaken themselves,” said Balasaheb Deoras, head of the RSS, in
1979 so that “the politicians will have to respect the Hindu sentiments
and change their policies accordingly” (Jaffrelot 1996, 346). But if RSS
organizations were not fundamentalist, they were nevertheless communalist. Their targets were two: (1) Indian Muslims and Christians,
demonized by RSS propaganda as “foreigners” whose ways of life were
alien to the Hindu-ness shared by other Indians; and (2) secularism, an
idea and set of practices that, in the view of Sangh Parivar groups, kept
India’s Hindu nationalism in check and made it impossible to create a
strong India.
The RSS
The RSS was the key organization of the Sangh Parivar and often provided directions for and lent its members to other organizations.
Founded in 1925 as a paramilitary organization of “volunteers”
(swayamsevaks) dedicated to the protection of Hinduism and Hindus,
the RSS by the 1980s had a single head presiding over an elite corps of
celibate pracharaks (preachers), who in turn supervised a larger number
of full-time swayamsevaks. At the end of the 1980s there were 700,000
full-time party activists, or swayamsevaks, working throughout India.
The VHP
The VHP was initially founded in 1964 as the religious and social wing
of RSS activity. It was revived in the 1980s with the task of transforming
Hinduism into a unified world religion, one that could compete successfully for converts with the more centralized religions of Christianity
and Islam. Hinduism was to be given theological unity by having a central sacred text (the Bhagavad Gita). Its organizational unity would come
through two related groups—a council of spiritual leadership (the
Central Margadarshak Mandal) and a religious parliament (the Dharma
Sansad), both of which were to guide the development of the religion,
its practices, and of VHP activities. During the 1980s the VHP organized
movements for counterconversions into Hinduism, a symbolic pilgrimage for Hindu Oneness (the 1983 Ekatmata Yatra), and the many activities around the 1984–92 Ramjanmabhoomi campaign to recapture the
god Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya.
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Bajrang Dal
The Bajrang Dal (Strong and Sturdy Faction) was founded in 1984 specifically to mobilize young people for the Ayodhya Ramjanmabhoomi campaign. Bajrang Dal members did not undergo the same discipline or daily
drills as RSS volunteers but were expected to attend training camps
where they would learn “how to be bold” (Jaffrelot 1996, 363). The
group, which operated under different names in several Indian states,
was implicated in communal violence during and following the
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign.
The BJP
The Jana Sangh political party came under RSS control in the mid-1950s
and functioned as the political wing of RSS efforts through the 1970s. The
Jana Sangh was part of the Janata coalition, and in the 1980s in an effort
to maintain Janata’s popular appeal and to lose the party’s negative communalist identity, the Jana Sangh was dissolved and subsequently reborn
as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The new party was headed by Atul
Bihari Vajpayee (c. 1924– ), a former RSS member who had worked his
Daily Rituals of the RSS
F
rom 1990 to 1995 Vijay Moray was in charge of recruiting and training new RSS members in the tribal Dang region of Gujarat. Moray
subsequently left the RSS, and he described his recruits’ daily rituals in
1999:
It happened from 6:00 A.M. to 7:00 A.M. daily. There could be
fifteen to 150 boys at a time, as young as pre-school children,
ages five and six, up to college age and above. We did prayers.
We stood in a circle and gave statements.We talked about preindependence Hindu politicians. We also taught pride to the
children. “We are Hindu, we have to protect our nation,” things
like that. Then we sang patriotic songs and performed a sun
prayer.Then we did training with lathis [batons] and training on
how to protect the Hindu nation. Outside of the meetings, the
trainers would say that the Christians are toeing the American
line, that Muslims are toeing the Pakistan line, and that eventually Hindus would be kicked out of their own country. “There
is no other Hindu country for us to go to,” they would say
(Human Rights Watch 1999).
(continues)
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Daily Rituals of the RSS (continued)
RSS daily rituals, 2000.Volunteers at a three-day camp held at the RSS National
Security Camp in Agra demonstrate the daily drills and paramilitary practice that are
a regular feature of RSS life.This camp was organized in celebration of the 75th
anniversary of the RSS, and more than 75,000 volunteers were said to have
attended. (AP/Wide World Photos)
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way up through the ranks. The BJP focused more on social and economic issues—”Gandhian socialism”—and less on Hinduism—the
word Hindu did not appear in the party’s constitution—and forged coalitions and alliances with other opposition parties. These tactics, however,
did not bring the BJP much electoral success. In the 1984 elections the
party won only two Lok Sabha seats, and in the state assembly elections
after 1984, its seat total fell from 198 to 169. These election reversals
raised questions about the party’s new identity. As a result Lal Krishna
Advani (c. 1927– ), another RSS leader, replaced Vajpayee as the party’s
head and returned the BJP to a more aggressive Hindu communalism.
Shiv Sena
Although not part of the RSS-controlled Sangh Parivar, the Shiv Sena in
Maharashtra was allied with it in ideology and tactics. The Shiv Sena originated as a Maharashtrian Bombay political party in the 1960s. It grew to
regional power by combining a reputation for violence in dealing with
opponents with a strong grassroots organization that offered local constituents job bureaus, unions, and access to local social workers. In the
1980s a new leader, Bal Thackeray, redefined the party giving it a Hindu
nationalist ideology and harshly anti-Muslim rhetoric. Allied with the BJP
in elections after 1990, the Shiv Sena won seats in the Bombay region in
both the central and state elections up to 2000. Its members were repeatedly involved in communal riots and conflicts in the Bombay region.
The Ramjanmabhoomi (Rama’s Birthplace) Campaign
In 1983 the VHP organized a spiritual pilgrimage for Hindu Oneness
(the Ekatmata Yatra) that crisscrossed India, north to south and east to
west, to the accompaniment of huge crowds. At the meeting of the
VHP’s religious parliament following this event, members decided that
the Babri Masjid issue should become the organization’s next focus. The
Babri Masjid was a mosque in Ayodhya said to have been built in 1528
on Babur’s order atop an earlier Hindu temple. Today many scholars
question whether such a temple ever existed, but from at least the late
18th century, Hindu pilgrims traveled to the mosque to worship at what
they believed was the site marking the Hindu god Rama’s birthplace.
Conflict over the site had erupted several times during the 19th century
and again in 1949. From 1949 to 1984 the mosque was locked, as a lawsuit over which religious community was entitled to worship on the site
remained unresolved.
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The VHP’s decision was to campaign to restore the site as a holy place
marking it as the birthplace of Rama. Their militant youth wing, the
Bajrang Dal, was to be the main strike force in this campaign. On July
27, 1984, a VHP procession set off from Bihar to Ayodhya in Uttar
Pradesh, with carts carrying statues of the god Rama and his wife Sita.
After Ayodhya the procession marched to the state capital, drawing a
crowd of 5–7,000 people, and from the capital it headed for New Delhi.
The organizers planned to arrive in New Delhi just before the January
1985 elections. Instead they arrived in the midst of the violence and
chaos that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Rajiv Gandhi
On October 31, 1984, two of Indira Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards, Beant
Singh and Satwant Singh, shot her to death as she walked from her residence to her offices in New Delhi. Her son Rajiv, already the head of
the Congress (I) Party, was immediately sworn in as prime minister in
her place. For three days, with the collusion of officials and the police,
mobs attacked New Delhi’s Sikh population, killing at least 1,000, burn-
“Mr. Clean,” 1984. Running for reelection in 1984, shortly after his mother Indira Gandhi’s
assassination, Rajiv Gandhi stressed his own incorruptibility and his ability to maintain order,
as this hand-painted New Delhi sign indicates.The Congress (I) symbol was the open hand
pictured on the sign. (Courtesy of Philip Oldenburg)
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ing businesses and homes, and forcing 50,000 Sikhs to flee to refugee
camps outside the city. The army was called out to end the violence
only on November 3, the day of Gandhi’s funeral.
Rajiv Gandhi immediately called for new elections. In the election
campaign, in order to undercut the appeal of Hindu nationalist groups
like the new BJP, Gandhi courted the Hindu vote, refusing either to criticize or disavow the RSS or its support. Campaign ads played on Hindu
fears of Sikhs and portrayed opposition parties as weak and antinational: “Between order and chaos, Give Order a Chance” was one
Congress ad (Manor 2002, 456). In the December 1984 elections
Congress won 400 out of 500 Lok Sabha seats.
In Rajiv Gandhi’s initial months as prime minister he reached political agreements that seemed to resolve regional conflicts in the Punjab,
Assam, and in the tribal region of Mizoram. In the Punjab Accord, for
example, signed with the Akali Dal in 1985, Gandhi agreed to give the
Punjab the disputed city of Chandigarh and greater access to river
waters shared with Haryana. In Assam and Mizoram, Gandhi’s government gave leaders of rebellious regional political parties control over
their regions, making them chief ministers virtually overnight.
Mizoram became a state in 1987.
Gandhi and his government preferred free-market rhetoric and faith
in technocratic expertise to the socialist rhetoric and faith in government planning of his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru’s era. Transfer permits and licensing procedures were cut short to allow the entrance into
India of computers, televisions, and videocasette recorders (VCRs).
Taxes on wealth and inheritance were cut with the argument (borrowed
from followers of U.S. president Ronald Reagan) that these would lead
to faster economic growth.
During the 1980s the Indian economy began to grow at a faster rate,
although economists still disagree on why. From 1950 to 1980, the Indian
economy grew at an average rate of 3.5 percent per year, a rate of growth
considerably undercut by population growth, which averaged 2.2 percent
each year. In the years between 1980 and 1988, however, the economy
grew by an estimated 5.2 percent per year, most of the growth coming
from industry, which itself was growing at a rate of 7.6 percent. Some
economists suggest the 1980s growth was the long-term result of investments in industry, roads, and electricity begun in Nehru’s time. Others
attribute the growth rate to the rise of a consuming Indian middle class
and/or to the lowering of food prices because of the Green Revolution.
Whatever the cause, from the 1970s through the 1980s the percentage of
poor people in India unable to afford basic food and shelter declined.
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Despite the good economic news, within three years of Rajiv
Gandhi’s installation as prime minister, his early political agreements
had begun to fall apart. Violence forced the government to send Indian
troops back into Assam in 1990. Punjabi Sikh terrorists expanded their
attacks on Hindus and moderate Sikhs beyond the Punjab into
Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and New Delhi. Within the Punjab
520 civilians were killed in 1986, 910 in 1987, and 1,949 in 1988. By
1987 the Punjab was under president’s rule and close to civil war.
In 1985 Gandhi, faced with demands from conservative Muslims on
one side and Hindu nationalists on the other, attempted to conciliate
each constituency in turn—a “package deal,” as one adviser called it.
That year the Indian Supreme Court had awarded alimony to a divorced
Muslim woman in the Shah Bano case, a decision that was contrary to
Islamic custom and against the Muslim personal law code. Gandhi
appeased conservative Muslims and had Parliament pass the Muslim
Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, which made sharia,
until then only orthodox Muslim practice, secular law.
At the same time, Gandhi’s government yielded to the VHP’s new
Babri Masjid demands and orchestrated a court decision to allow the
Babri Masjid grounds to be opened for Hindu worship. The decision
inflamed the Ayodhya situation further. A national Muslim committee
was established to contest the opening of mosque grounds. On the
Hindu side the VHP demanded the right to build a giant Hindu temple
at the Babri Masjid site. The VHP began a worldwide campaign to raise
funds for the new building, inviting donors to fund Ram shilas, or
bricks for the building inscribed with the name of Rama. At the third
VHP religious parliament in 1989 a crowd of 50,000 heard a resolution
pass to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
During the late 1980s Gandhi’s government also tried unsuccessfully
to intervene in the civil war of Sri Lanka, an island off the southeastern
coast of India. In 1986 war had broken out between the island’s two
largest communities, the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the
Tamil/Hindu minority. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE),
funded covertly by Hindu supporters in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu,
were demanding a separate Tamil eelam (nation) in the north and east
of the island. In July 1987 Sri Lanka’s president, Junius Richard
Jayewardene (1906–96), signed the Indo–Sri Lanka Peace Agreement
with India, allowing the Indian army to enter northern Sri Lanka as a
peacekeeping force. From 1987 to 1990 the Indian army fought against
the Tamil Tigers, losing almost as many soldiers as the guerrilla group
and finally withdrawing in 1990 without having achieved a resolution.
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Bhopal Disaster
O
n December 3, 1984, just before the Indian elections, a gas tank
at a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh,
burst, spreading a combination of lethal gases through a city of 1 million
people. The Bhopal gas explosion was the worst industrial accident in
world history. Between 3,400 and 5,000 people died, some immediately,
some shortly after from illness or from injuries in stampedes as people
tried to escape. Later deaths from the aftereffects of exposure may
have ranged as high as 20,000 people.
The plant had been built in 1977 and operated under a joint agreement between the multinational corporation Union Carbide and its
local Indian affiliate, Union Carbide India Ltd. Union Carbide denied
responsibility for the accident but ultimately settled all lawsuits by paying $470 million to the Indian government.The Indian government distributed settlements to some families of victims, most for $550 (the
minimum award under Indian law), but as late as 2001 the government
was said to retain $240 million of the settlement.
V. P. Singh’s Anticorruption Campaigns
Although Gandhi had based his 1984 election campaign on his personal reputation for uncorruptibility (“Mr. Clean”), between 1987 and
1989 his government was besieged with charges of corruption. The
most damaging came from V. P. Singh (1931– ), Gandhi’s defense minister and the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Singh found evidence that kickbacks had been paid by the Swedish firm Bofors to gain
a 1986 $1.3 billion government weapons contract. Gandhi forced Singh
to resign in April 1987 and subsequently expelled him from the
Congress (I) Party. Singh founded a new opposition party, the Janata
Dal (People’s Faction). It was modeled on the earlier Janata coalition
and founded with the hope that it, too, could use allegations of corruption to topple a government.
In the by-elections of 1988 voters defeated Congress in four out of
six state elections: Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat, and Uttar
Pradesh. By 1989, in an effort to win Hindu votes, Gandhi’s government
allowed the VHP to hold a foundation ceremony for the proposed new
temple at the Babri Masjid site. Nevertheless, in the November 1989
general elections, in which 55–60 percent of India’s 498 million registered adults voted, Congress (I) lost its majority in Parliament, winning
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
This villager from western Uttar Pradesh squats in front of a wall bearing a poster for the
Janata Dal in the 1989 election.The man pictured in the poster is Ajit Singh, son of Charan
Singh, whose peasant constituency supported the Janata Dal coalition. (Courtesy of Philip
Oldenburg)
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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION
only 197 seats of 529 seats in the Lok Sabha (down from its 1984 tally
of 415 out of 542). The National Front, meanwhile—composed of
Singh’s Janata Dal and four minor parties—won 143 seats in the Lok
Sabha. Singh became prime minister with support from the various
communist and socialist parties and with 85 seats from the BJP. In little
more than a year, however, Singh’s coalition would fall apart in the
midst of growing caste and communal conflicts.
End of a Dynasty
By May 1991 Singh’s government had collapsed, and Rajiv Gandhi was
campaigning for reelection in Tamil Nadu. A young woman, later
thought to be a member of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, bent at his feet
in a traditional gesture of respect and exploded a bomb concealed
around her waist, killing herself, Gandhi, and 16 bystanders. In the
aftermath of Gandhi’s death, the Congress Party found itself for the first
time without an adult heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Congress (in
one form or another) had governed India for more than 40 out of the 44
years since independence, and Nehru or his progeny had ruled the governing Congress Party for all but two of those 40 years. For better or for
worse India had become a mature modern democratic state under the
joint tutelage of the old nationalist party and the Nehru-Gandhi family.
By the 1980s and 1990s, however, both Indian political parties and
Indian voters had changed. Congress, which had so easily dominated
elections during the early years after independence, had lost much of
its grassroots base during the centralizing regimes of Indira Gandhi and
her son Rajiv. In the years following 1947, Congress had also contained
within itself most important political factions in the country, but by the
1980s Congress was just one among an endlessly proliferating series of
combining and dissolving political parties. Parties formed and dissolved as their leaders (and their aggregates of supporters) switched
allegiances or left one coalition to join another. Few parties had defining ideologies by the 1980s—the Communists in Bengal and Kerala and
the Jana Sangh–BJP–RSS network being major exceptions. Voters, too,
were now more willing than in the republic’s early years to switch from
party to party. And, by the late 20th century Indian voters had become
much more willing to vote incumbents out of office than to reelect
them.
Amidst this fluid political scene, two new political movements
would emerge in the 1990s to dramatically redefine political issues
and conflicts. The BJP, already a growing force in the 1980s, would
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challenge the assumption of secularism at the core of the nation as
first imagined by Nehru and his colleagues. The second political
movement would come from the bottom of society, from the bahujan
(the many people, the masses), those who made up India’s low caste
and Untouchable communities. Politicians would discover, with
something of a shock, that these communities made up much more
than half of the Indian electorate.
These new political parties and their conflicts, however, also had
their origins in the many changes that reshaped Indian society of the
decades between 1947 and the 21st century. These changes, demographic, social, and cultural, and established the foundation for the
movements of the 1990s.
238
9
Bollywood and Beyond
(1947–2004)
When the koel birds sing in the spring, it’s time again for memories
When the koels sing in the spring, it’s time again for memories
It’s time for swinging under the boughs,
Come home, stranger, your country calls you back
Come home, stranger, your country calls you back.
■
“Ghar aaja pardesi” (Come home, stranger), Hindi song from the film Dilwale
Dulhania Le Jayenge (The lover will carry away the bride), 1995
I
n the years between 1947 and 2004 Indian society changed greatly,
not only politically but in terms of numbers of people, where they
lived, the forms of their popular culture, and that culture’s influence,
even on older religious festivals and holidays. While the India of 1900
was almost entirely rural and agricultural, by 2004 India had a mixed
economy and, if still agricultural, was growing steadily more urban.
Urban India had been defined by an office-centered lifestyle since the
19th century, but in the years after 1947 its hybrid cultural mix
became even more diverse. By the 21st century both urban and rural
India were tied into a countrywide and globally connected economy. In
rural areas older service relationships among village castes shifted into
money exchanges, and in urban cities displays of caste commensality
rules or pollution practices all but disappeared from public life. The
consumer-oriented middle class that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s
(estimated at between 100 and 300 million Indians) was at least as
willing to define itself by its possessions as by its jati or varna classifications.
Life in Indian cities and villages was now shaped by refrigerators,
buses, bicycles, and scooters. Indian culture throughout the country
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was knit together by new forms of popular culture—by movies,
records, and, after the 1980s, cassette tapes and television. Initially
these new media were highly centralized and their range of cultural
expression limited. But by the end of the 20th century cheap cassette
technology and a growing number of satellite networks gave regional
and local popular culture new avenues for expression.
Population Growth
Although India’s population began to increase in the 1920s and 1930s,
the country’s greatest population growth occurred in the decades after
1947. In the 1920s, as inoculations and new medicines began to take
effect, India’s population grew slowly, about 10 percent per decade in
the 1920s, then 13 percent in the 1930s, and 14 percent in the 1940s.
But from 1951 to 2001 the Indian population grew much faster: from
361 million people to 1.28 billion people, a rate of increase of more
than 23 percent every 10 years.
In the years between 1951 and 1971 the greatest population growth
was seen in Green Revolution regions and large urban centers. In the
1990s the heaviest growth occurred in the cities of central and southern India, where almost 20 cities more than doubled in size. Today,
India’s most heavily populated states are West Bengal, Bihar, Kerala,
Uttar Pradesh, the Punjab, and Tamil Nadu. In contrast, regions such as
Population Growth
Year
Total Population
(Rounded to Thousands)
Growth over Preceding
10 Years (%)
1881
250,160,000*
1901
283,870,000*
1951
361,108,000
1961
439,235,000
+21.64
1971
548,160,000
+24.80
1981
684,329,000
+24.66
1991
886,362,000
+23.86
2001
1,028,610,000
+21.34
* Population figures for the years 1881 and 1901 are for prepartition India.
Sources: Schmidt (1995, 131) and “Provisional Population Totals” (2001, 4)
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India’s Urbanization
Year
Percent of
Urban Population
Percent of
Rural Population
1881
9.3
90.7
1951
17.3
82.7
1991
26.0
74.0
2001
27.8
72.2
Sources: Schmidt (134–135) 1995, and Census of India, 2001
the northeastern Himalayans and the hills of the Deccan peninsula
remain sparsely populated.
Urban India
From 1881, when census tabulations first give reliable information on
urban and rural populations, to the present, India has slowly and
steadily been growing more urban. Whereas in 1881 less than 10 percent of the population lived in towns and cities, in 2001 27.8 percent
did so. (Since 1881 the Indian census has defined an urban area as one
with a population of at least 5,000 inhabitants, a density of population
of at least 1,000 people per square mile, and with at least 75 percent of
its male workers in nonagricultural labor.) India’s urban towns and
cities (as a percentage of the whole) increased 18.5 percent between
1881 and 2001, from 9 percent in 1881 to almost 28 percent in 2001.
If India’s overall urbanization has been slow but steady, the growth of
her largest cities has been more dramatic. Cities with more than
100,000 people in the 19th century have grown the fastest: Bombay
(officially renamed Mumbai in 1995), for instance, had a population of
only 821,764 in 1891 but by 2001 had grown to 11,914,398. The same
migrations from the countryside that brought people into the large
cities, also created those cities’ large urban slums. In the 27 Indian cities
with populations greater than 1 million in 2001, almost one of every
four Indians (23 percent) was a slum dweller. That same year almost
half of Mumbai’s 12 million people lived in slums; in contrast,
Bangalore, a city whose growth as India’s new software and computer
center has been more recent, had a population well over 4 million people, but only about 345,000 were slum dwellers.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Urban shack, c. 1978. Modern Indian cities (like cities everywhere) offer sharp contrasts
between rich and poor. Here a family makes its home in a makeshift shack along a street in
northern Calcutta. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
Urban India dominates the country, spreading its lifestyle even into
rural India through movies, radio, cassettes, and now television.
Western visitors might find India’s urban apartment buildings, shopping malls, traffic jams, bicycles, scooters, taxis, buses, superhighways,
crowds, and slums familiar. Wealthy and middle-class urban Indians
may maintain caste and food restrictions within their homes, but in the
daily coming and going of urban city life—people shopping or jammed
into buses, encounters between office clerks and people they wait on—
older caste restrictions and pollution practices are rarely if ever seen. As
in the West, however, Indian cities can offer stark contrasts between
rich and poor. Luxury hotels, high-rise apartments, and walled or gated
compounds house the wealthiest residents of the cities of New Delhi,
Mumbai, or Calcutta (officially named Kolkata in 2001), while burlapcovered huts or the streets themselves are the homes of the poor.
Secularization of Caste
Caste relationships and practices have changed from the early decades
after independence, particularly (although not exclusively) in urban
towns and cities. Castes have become what sociologist D. L. Sheth
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terms de-ritualized, separated from the religious rituals, beliefs, customs, and practices that in the past organized caste communities and
their interactions. Desirable occupations are more likely to be defined
by income rather than by ritual purity or appropriateness to one’s varna
status. In urban areas caste rules regarding food are now virtually inoperable outside the family home. Within caste communities economic
differences have increased. Households of the same caste but with different occupations, educations, and/or income levels often identify
more easily across caste boundaries with others from the same economic and social status, even if from different castes.
At the same time castes that previously held the same ritual status
(such as Brahmans) but were divided ritually and/or by marriage rules
into smaller jatis and subcategories are now more willing to see themselves as a single community. Marriages, for instance, which were earlier performed only within endogamous caste groupings, now more
frequently occur either within much more broadly defined caste communities or by matching brides and grooms by educational, professional, or economic status. Caste communities have also broadened
their self-definitions by links with wider ethnic or linguistic identities,
such as “Dravidian” in south India, or through political and electoral
categories, such as “Scheduled Castes” (Untouchables, or Dalits) or
“OBCs” (other backward classes). Hindu nationalist groups (in theory)
have offered the broadest reclassification of caste categories—at the
expense of Muslim and Christian Indians—by suggesting that the most
meaningful category within which Indians should see themselves is as
Hindus.
Village India
Despite the growth of urban areas and the dominance of urban
lifestyles, India remains today overwhelmingly rural and agricultural.
In 2001, 72 percent of India’s population lived in 638,588 small villages; in fact, even in the 21st century 58 percent of all Indian workers
live by farming—32 percent by cultivating their own lands and 27 percent by working as laborers on the lands of others.
As has been true since independence, most Indian villages are small,
with less than 1,000 residents. Village homes are nucleated (that is,
crowded together, often sharing walls with adjacent houses) and within
easy walking distance of surrounding farmlands. Although most villages in northern and central India are multicaste, the homes of different jatis are usually built close together. Untouchable homes, however,
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are often located apart, in separate neighborhoods or on the outskirts of
the village. In south India, where many villages often have only
Brahman and non-Brahman castes, Brahman homes are likely to be set
apart.
In 2001 most rural families (61 percent) had from six to nine members. The homes of these 138,271,559 village households were simple.
Most families (70 percent) lived in one- or two-room homes with mud
floors, thatch or tile roofs, and walls of baked or unbaked brick. Fancier
homes had cement floors and metal or concrete roofs. Amenities were
basic: As late as 2001 less than 25 percent of village households got
their drinking water from a tap. Almost all homes were lit with either
kerosene or electricity, with the majority using kerosene. More than 75
percent of rural households had no bathroom or latrine facility within
their homes.
Rural Caste Relations
In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s economic relations between different village castes (particularly in north India) were structured by the jajmani system, a hereditary system through which castes exchanged
goods and services. Members of the dominant landowning caste in a
village might enter into jajmani relationships with members of local
service castes—with a barber, for instance, carpenter, sweeper, or
washerman. In exchange for agricultural goods, usually provided at
harvest time, the service caste member would provide his services to
a specific landowning household. These relationships were hereditary, and their obligations were mutual (neither side could break
them simply at will).
Even if jajmani relations existed among a variety of village castes—
and although most villagers farmed in addition to whatever services
they performed for others—it was the dominant village caste, the caste
that owned most of the village lands, that used most of the services provided through jajmani relationships. Dominant landownership gave
such power to the village caste that all other castes deferred to that
caste. In villages where a non-Brahman caste owned the majority of
land—such as in northern Indian villages dominated by the Jats, a
major peasant caste—even Brahmans deferred to that caste. And other
castes who wanted to raise their ritual status within the village might
do so by imitating the customs and practices of whichever caste dominated their village, a variation on Sanskritization in which economic
power trumped ritual (varna) status.
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Dominant castes in a village used their economic power (and
sometimes physical force) to resolve village conflicts and to maintain
lower castes in their subordinate status. Castes also policed their
own members, for if families in a village caste did not maintain
proper caste customs, fellow caste members in other villages might
not marry their daughters or loan seeds, when needed, at planting
time. The threat of being outcasted was powerful: Individuals or families without caste connections had no means of earning their food,
marrying their children, or burying their dead. Thus a complex system of economic dependence and hierarchy maintained order among
village castes and tied each village into a system of interdependence
with other villages.
Changes in Rural Relationships
Rural castes and their relationships changed a great deal during the
final three decades of the 20th century. Villages became economic units
within an all-India (and global) network of food production and distribution and were increasingly defined by state and central government
tax and administrative structures. Religious, service, and trading caste
communities now often served rural villages from residences in nearby
towns. Older complex jajmani relations therefore have been increasingly simplified into economic and monetary exchanges between
landowners (or their overseers) and laborers.
Conflicts over the maintenance of older social obligations and
forms of deference owed by lower castes and/or Untouchables to
higher castes have often sparked violence in recent years. In the 1960s
the authority of dominant rural castes was unlikely to be challenged
by lower-caste villagers, but in recent decades, as low-caste and
Untouchable communities have become more politicized and more
assertive, rural intracaste violence has increased. Between 1990 and
1995 the Untouchable political party Bahujan Samaj (Majoritarian
Party) became increasingly visible and active in Uttar Pradesh, raising
statues of B. R. Ambedkar in villages throughout the state. Atrocities
against Untouchables also dramatically rose in Uttar Pradesh from
1,067 in 1990 to 14,966 in 1995. (Some of this intercaste violence
occurred between Untouchables and lower-caste groups immediately
above them in the village hierarchy.) Despite the increased violence,
Uttar Pradesh Untouchables experienced the change from earlier
years as overwhelmingly positive. As one villager told a reporter in
2003, “When I was young, no Dalit could wear a shirt. We didn’t have
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
More than 80 percent of Indians own bicycles, and this one commodity is found in almost
equal numbers in rural areas and urban cities. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
shoes. We would be beaten up if we tried. . . . Today our children go
to school. And they have to comb their hair, wear clean clothes, put
covers on their books” (Sheth 2004, 50–51).
Urban vs. Rural
However much caste and economic relations have changed within rural
India in recent years, the economic differences between town and village have grown ever sharper. Urban India has been the largest beneficiary of the economic prosperity that came with the globalization of
Urban and Rural Amenities, 2001
Percent of
Urban Population
Percent
of Rural Population
Electricity
87.6
43.5
Tap water
68.7
24.3
Latrine
70.4
22.8
Basic Amenities
Source: Census of India, 2001
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India’s economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Life in present-day India’s
53,692,376 urban households looks particularly good when compared
with life in its far more numerous (138,271,559) village households.
Urban families are slightly smaller than rural families, with most
households (64 percent) having between four and eight members. Most
urban families (65 percent) live in one or two rooms and in homes with
cement or tiled floors, baked brick walls, and concrete, metal, or tiled
roofs. Almost 88 percent of urban homes, are lit by electricity, 69 percent get their water from a tap (although only 75 percent have that tap
in their home), and 70 percent have latrines inside their homes. It is
worth noting that while almost one-quarter of the residents of India’s
largest cities are classified as slum dwellers, the overall conditions of
urban life are significantly better than those in rural India.
The New Consumer Indian Middle Class
In the 1990s the rapid growth of India’s economy led to the expansion of its middle class. In the 19th and early 20th century this term
referred to a tiny elite, representing less than 1 percent of Indian
society in the 1880s. By the 1990s, however, it referred to between
Mama Mia’s ice cream parlor. Middle-class suburbs, such as this one in south Delhi, were
centers for consumer purchases of all kinds in the 1970s and 1980s. Even larger malls have
now sprung up in urban centers such as New Delhi. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Defining the Middle Class
I
n 1996 the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in
New Delhi surveyed 9,614 Indian men and women drawn from
every state except Jammu and Kashmir.The survey assumed an individual was middle class if he or she met the following criteria: 1) The individual identified him- or herself as “middle class,” and 2) the individual
also possessed two of the following four characteristics: (i) 10 years or
more of formal education; (ii) ownership of three out of four specified
assets (a motor vehicle, a television, an electric generator or pump, and
nonagricultural land property; (iii) residence in a house built of brick
and cement; (iv) a “white-collar” job.
By these standards approximately 20 percent of the CSDS’s interview subjects were “middle class.” Members of the upper castes (the
three highest varnas) or dominant landowning castes made up 25 percent of those surveyed but were nearly 50 percent of the survey’s “middle class.” The other 50 percent came from the lower castes,
Untouchables, tribals, or religious minorities. Low ritual or religious status had not stopped these respondents from either acquiring middleclass assets or thinking of themselves as middle class.
100 and 300 million people (10–30 percent of India’s population).
This enlarged middle class was defined not by caste or location but
by its consumption. Middle-class Indians had sufficient wealth to
purchase refrigerators, cars, motor scooters, or color television sets.
During the 1980s and 1990s sales of these consumer products escalated in India. The number of new cars sold each year increased five
times in the 1980s. Sales of televisions went from 2 million in 1981
to 23.4 million in 1990. Packaged consumer goods increased 220
percent between 1984 and 1990.
The 2001 census tabulations show that it was urban Indians, not villagers, who bought most of the consumer products made possible by the
1990s prosperity. Bicycles were almost equally present in city and country households, but in the ownership of all other assets city dwellers
trumped villagers. While 65 percent of urban households owned a television and 45 percent a radio, in the villages only 19 percent had a television and 32 percent some type of radio. While 30 percent of urban
households had some kind of motor conveyance (a car, scooter, or
moped), in the villages only 8 percent of households owned any at all.
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Assets in Urban and Rural Households, 2001
Percent of
Urban Households
Percent of
Rural Households
Radio, transistor
Television
Telephone
44.5
64.3
23.0
31.5
18.9
3.8
Bicycle
Scooter, motorcycle, moped
Car, jeep, van
46.0
24.7
5.6
42.8
6.7
1.3
None of these assets
19.0
40.5
Assets
Source: Census of India, 2001
Village India was also home to many more of India’s most impoverished
citizens. Some households had no major assets whatsoever: 19 percent
of urban households and 40.5 percent of village households.
Indian Popular Culture
It was after independence and in the context of rapid population
growth, an urbanizing society, and (in the late 1980s and 1990s) a
growing consumer-oriented middle class that Indian popular culture
took its current form. A vibrant hybrid of old and new characterizes
today’s Indian films, television serials, and audiocassette music. This
new popular culture has also marked India’s festivals and religious
cycles; in their new urban, middle-class forms, Indian holidays can
seem as much about consumerism as about religion.
For most of the 20th century Indian popular culture was dominated
by domestic films and film music. Indian radio began in 1927 but as a
government monopoly used mostly for educational programs. Only in
1957 did All-India Radio (AIR) develop a new (and immediately
immensely popular) channel on which film songs were played. The
Indian record industry was too expensive to serve more than a tiny
minority who could afford its record players and albums. Television
(also founded as a government monopoly in 1959) offered only a limited schedule, mostly of news and educational programs, until 1982.
Cinema tickets were much cheaper than televisions, record players,
or even radios. Films became the entertainment medium of choice for
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Indian men in the decades after 1947. (Poor or lower-class Indian
women particularly from rural areas did not go to see films although
they knew the songs from radio broadcasts.) Films were shown in theaters in towns and cities and in traveling screen shows in villages. Even
the tiny television system broadcast a Hindi film each week. For 40
years, from the 1930s to the 1970s, film and film music dominated
Indian popular culture, influencing musical tastes, fashion, speech, and
the worldviews of several hundred million viewers. Film songs were the
major—virtually the only—popular music in India.
The expansion of Indian television began in 1982–83:
Doordarshan, the government’s television organization, began to use
Indian communication satellites to broadcast in color a new set of
programs, including the Asian Games of 1982 and the National
Programme, sent from New Delhi to stations throughout India. In
1982 Doordarshan’s 16 transmitters reached less than 8 percent of
Indian people, but in 1983 the Sixth Five-Year Plan committed 869.5
million rupees to increase transmission facilities. By 1991
Doordarshan had 523 transmitters broadcasting programs to 35 million TV sets and with the potential to reach almost 80 percent of the
population. The expansion of Indian television added a new video
culture to that of Indian films. Portable black-and-white TVs (selling
for 3,500 rupees) became a growing consumer product. By 2001 more
urban Indian households (64 percent) owned televisions than owned
radios (45 percent). Even in rural India, almost 19 percent of households owned a television by 2001.
At the same time a new and inexpensive medium—audiocassette
tapes and players—suddenly made many different kinds of music and
audio programming cheaply available to Indian consumers. This new
technology created what ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel calls the “cassette culture” of the 1980s and 1990s. Cassettes were produced for a
great variety of regional, local, and genre music, from regional folk
music to religious bhajans (Hindu devotional songs), popular ghazals
(Urdu poetry), obscene Punjabi truck driver songs, women’s liberation
songs, and Hindutva organizing songs. By the 1990s Hindi film songs
had plummeted from 90 percent of Indian recorded music to less than
40 percent.
Bollywood
Film was first introduced in India in 1896 when six silent motion pictures were shown in Bombay. But only after 1931, when the first
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Film posters compete for space on the wall of Mumbai’s (Bombay’s) Victoria Station. Films (and
film music) were virtually the only form of national popular culture until the advent of television
serials in the 1980s. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
Indian sound film was produced, did the commercial Indian film
industry begin. The movies were made in Bombay production studios—called Bollywood, a combination of Bombay and Hollywood—
and in regional film centers in southern and eastern India.
(Technically the largest number of films are made in Chennai; however, the south Indian languages used in these films limit their distribution.) Bollywood films are shown in cities, towns, and villages
throughout India. As of 2002, according to one estimate, Indian filmmakers produced 800 feature films each year, making the Indian film
industry the largest in the world. On average, 11 million Indians
attend the cinema every day, down from 15 million in 1993 due to
competition from satellite television and TV serials. Still on average,
4 billion Indians go to the movies each year.
Most Bollywood films are musicals and follow a well-established
format, with naturalistic dialogue scenes interspersed with five or six
song sequences and at least three dance numbers. The song and dance
numbers make the films popular with viewers even outside the north
Indian Hindi language belt. Most stories are contemporary and
domestic; only about 10 percent are mythological. Beginning in the
mid-1970s Bollywood began to produce action-oriented films, filling
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
A Masala Hit
T
he 1975 film Sholay (Flames) was so unusual in style and content
for Bollywood that its failure was widely predicted. Instead, the
movie became one of Bombay’s most successful. Released during the
early days of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, its stylish cinematography and
story of violence and social disorder struck a chord in receptive Indian
audiences. Sholay introduced the concept of the masala (spicy) film, a
genre that added action, adventure, and violence to the basic Bollywood
formula of romance and family conflict. Set in the harsh plateau lands of
the northern Deccan, Sholay was one of Bollywood’s first “curry
Westerns” (Lutgendorf 2002). In a relatively dark parable of the erosion
of traditional order, its story followed two outlaw adventurers, Veeru
and Jai, as they struggled to take revenge against a villainous dacoit (bandit) who had maimed their patron, a local thakur (landlord/official), and
killed his sons.
Sholay sold out movie houses in major cities for more than two
years and set ticket records for profitability that held for almost 20
years. Not just its songs, but even its dialogues were sold on audiocassettes and memorized by devoted fans throughout India.
them with murder and mayhem, but most plots still contained conflicts with romantic love set in the Westernized, modern upper-class
world of urban India. Characters frequent night clubs, drive sports
cars, drink alcohol, and wear Western clothing (if men) or fashionable versions of traditional Indian clothing (if women). They struggle
to resolve conflicting attachments to romance on the one hand and
family obligations and loyalties on the other. Although for many years
censorship rules barred kissing in films, filmmakers circumvented
these restrictions with voluptuous dance sequences and the famous
“wet saris” sequences. Endings are virtually always happy as romance
triumphs over misunderstandings, family, dowry, and caste or class
distinctions.
Indian filmmakers deliberately strive to create a fantasy world in
Bollywood films, a rich, upper-class Indian world in which all types of
consumer products are lavishly displayed. As one lower-class village
youth told an interviewer, “Ninety percent of the people I know want
everything they see in films” (Manuel 1993, 266). Critics complain that
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this Bollywood fictional world not only is elitist and upper middle class
but also is one in which the fairness of basic economic relationships in
Indian society is never questioned (nor, for that matter, is the dominance of men within Indian families). Peasant characters, even when
impoverished, appear clean, well fed, and well clothed. Rural settings
bear little relation to actual villages. Bollywood films have yet to
approach the realistic (and empathetic) portraits of village India drawn,
for example, in the 1950s–80s films of the world famous Bengali director Satyajit Ray.
Even though Bollywood production studios turn out a large number of films each year, Bollywood’s “star system” ensures that only a
small number of producers, directors, actors, and singers work on
these films. Bollywood films have involved fewer than 70 such
“stars” since the 1940s. The fees for these men and women can make
up 65 percent of a film’s budget, and films can sometimes take three
years to complete because stars may work in as many as 50 films at
one time.
Bollywood Abroad
T
he 1995 hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The lover will carry away
the bride) uses London, Europe, and the Punjab as the backdrop
for its story of middle-class romantic love thwarted by family elders. In
it Baldev Singh, an Indian émigré to London, returns home to the Punjab
to marry his daughter (betrothed at birth) to the son of his best friend.
She, unknown to him, is already in love with a brash but decent Indian
boy from England who follows her to the Punjab to win her as his bride.
The film explores the conflicts of elders in the Indian diaspora who long
to return home—the song “Come home, stranger, your country calls
you back” is frequently reprised—and of a younger expatriate generation eager to make its own way in life.
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge sold out not only in India but among
Indian diasporic communities in Great Britain and North America.
Economically Bollywood’s interest in the nonresident Indian (NRI) audience made sense, for although the NRI community is small by Indian
standards (approximately 4 million potential viewers), ticket prices are
much higher in Great Britain and North America and the resulting profits substantial.
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Film Music
Hindi film songs dominated the Indian music industry from the 1940s
to the 1970s. Unlike the West where popular music has long been generated by independent artists in concerts or in recordings, in India the
only popular music until very recently was film music. Older Indian
folk music had a wide range of subjects and styles; it wove regional culture into its songs through references to local customs, costumes,
foods, jewelry, and spices. In contrast, Hindi film songs presented a
homogenized all-India culture shorn of regional characteristics. Tunes
had to be “so simple they can be hummed by everybody,” in the words
of one music director (Manuel 1993, 50).
Film music was (and is) studio art. Songs are performed in the studio by “playback singers,” whose singing provides the vocals while film
actors mouth the words on screen. As in Bollywood more generally,
only a small number of musicians work in film songs. In the 1980s and
1990s some seven or eight music directors produced virtually all
Bollywood film music; an equally small number of musicians wrote the
scores and between five and six “playback” singers recorded them. The
most famous of these singers was (and is) Lata Mangeshkar, whose
high-pitched falsetto has been featured in more than 6,000 films from
the 1940s to today. Mangeshkar and her sister Asha Bhosle together
established the female style of film singing that dominates Bollywood
films even today.
As Hindi film music grew in popularity over the 20th century, Indian
folk songs began to make use of its music, style, and even of the songs
themselves. Hindu festivals such as the yearly Ramlila (the celebration
of the god Rama’s victory over the evil Ravana) have used both film
tunes and the style of the singers in their celebrations. In 1991 Peter
Manuel found local snake charmers using a theme song from a popular
1950s film to call their snakes (1993, 267).
“Cassette Culture”
In the 1980s the low-cost technology of audiocassette tapes and players
ended the hegemony of Bollywood film music and allowed the emergence of a cottage industry in cassette recordings, one that catered to
the specific interests of local and regional markets. This cassette culture
allowed different forms of popular music to emerge, from regional folk
music and nonfilm “pop” music to devotional music and music used
for consciousness raising or political organizing.
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Women’s Lib and Hindutva
I
n the 1990s two specialized but very different producers of cassette tapes were the women’s liberation organizations of India and
the Hindutva Ramjanmabhoomi organizers. In 1990 the New Delhi
women’s organization Jagori distributed three tapes of songs and
speeches on women’s issues. Jagori was one of perhaps 100 women’s
groups that worked on issues such as women’s education, domestic
abuse, dowry murder, and female infanticide by organizing at the grassroots level in urban and rural settings. The songs Jagori taped were set
to folk tunes, film song melodies, and Muslim religious music, and the
tapes were either directly distributed or were used by organizers in
workshops and song sessions. One such song, set to a Rajasthani folk
tune, began
Hear how together with other women we can gain our rights
Brother got freedom, we got the four walls
Why don’t we smash these walls?
First we’ll demand our rights at home, and then outside as well
(Manuel 1993, 240).
In the same period organizers for the Ramjanmabhoomi movement published four tapes of songs, chants, poetry, and speeches as
part of their campaign to build support for the demolition of the
Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Officially the tapes were banned, but they
were still easily available in north Indian cities. One tape featured
Uma Bharati, a woman BJP member of Parliament, urging followers to
embrace violence to build both the Ram temple and a stronger
Hindu India:
May our race not be blamed, and may our mothers not say that
when we were needed, we weren’t ready.
If there must be a bloodbath then let’s get it over with
Because of our fear of a bloodbath before
Our country was divided [in partition]
Since their [the Muslims] arrival until today, they have killed so
many Hindus
We tried to appease them, but there was bloodshed after all
Instead of having it simmer slowly, it’s better to have it burst
with a big flame
If they don’t understand our words, then we’ll make them
understand with kicks;
If there must be a bloodbath, then let it happen! (Manuel
1993, 253–254).
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
By 1989, 500 indigenous Indian companies were involved in the consumer electronics industry. Cassette music sales boosted sales of Indian
recorded music from $1.2 million in 1980 to $21 million in 1990. Indian
consumers were purchasing 2.5 million cassette players each year by the
1990s. In 1991 Indian-made cassettes sold 217 million per year, making
India the second largest producer of cassette tapes in the world.
Doordarshan
Doordarshan’s new television programming gained Indian television a
large audience in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning in 1982, Doordarshan’s
National Programme included sponsored shows and new entertainment
serials. The serials were set in India and focused on the conflicts and situations faced by modern Indians in the course of their lives. The first serial broadcast was Hum Log (We people), a family drama that told the
story of a lower-middle-class urban family struggling to survive. Another,
Buniyaad (Foundation), followed a postpartition family of middle-class
Punjabi refugees as they began new lives in India. The series Param Veer
Chakra (Medal for highest military heroism) told tales of nationalist and
military martyrs. By 1987 40 serials had been telecast. These serials were
so immediately popular that movie attendance was ultimately cut in half;
in New Delhi between 1984 and 1985 money from movie ticket sales
declined by 25–30 percent.
After the success of Hum Log, Bollywood professionals also began to
produce serials for Doordarshan. Among the television serials later produced by Bollywood directors were the made-for-television versions of
the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana was shown in 78
weekly episodes that ran from January 1987 into 1988. The Mahabharata
was televised from September 1988 through July 1990. Both shows drew
enormous audiences: 80–100 million for the Ramayana and 200 million
for the Mahabharata.
Hum Log and Maggi Noodles
Hum Log (We people) was the first Hindi-language television serial to
be broadcast on Doordarshan. It centered on the struggles of an alcoholic carpenter, his long-suffering wife, and their five children in a
small two-room flat in a lower-middle-class urban neighborhood. The
series consisted of 156 episodes that ran over 17 months during
1984–85. Each episode ended with a commentary by the elderly Hindi
film star Ashok Kumar pointing out that episode’s moral and answering
viewers’ letters.
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Consuming Dowries
I
t was in the mid-1980s that newspapers worldwide reported on the
increasing incidence of “dowry deaths” in India. These were deaths
in which a young woman was killed by her husband or in-laws (often in
a kitchen fire made to look like an accident) because the dowry she had
brought to the marriage was considered too small. In the late 1980s
dowry deaths were reported mostly in northern India, but by the 1990s
they were being reported throughout India. In 1986 the government of
India made dowry deaths a new kind of crime in order to facilitate prosecutions. In 2000, according to a UNICEF (United Nations Children’s
Fund) report, dowry deaths numbered 5,000 a year.
Some observers have linked the growing incidence of dowry murder
to the rise of a consumer-oriented culture in India. Dowry has long
been a feature of Indian marriage, with gold jewelry, saris, and other traditional objects accompanying a bride to her in-laws’ home. But in
recent decades dowry demands have escalated, leading even lower-middle-class families to expect refrigerators, electric generators, cars, and
color televisions on the marriage of their sons. Dowry deaths occur
most often among lower-middle-class urban families in which the desire
for the consumer goods or the need for cash can be acute.As one New
Delhi working-class Muslim woman told an interviewer in 1992, “We
Muslims never had dowry deaths. . . . Now our culture is changing.
People see all sorts of things on TV; people are getting greedy; people
are losing respect for women” (Mankekar 1999, 45).
Escalating dowries may also be the reason for the declining birth
rate of girls relative to boys on the subcontinent. In 2001 the Indian
gender ratio was 92.7 girls aged 0–6 for each 100 boys in the same
group. This ratio, while higher than that of girls to boys in countries
such as China, was a significant decline from 1991 when the Indian
ratio had been 94.7:100. Furthermore, in some Indian states, such as
the Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, and Gujarat, the 2001 ratio of girls to boys
was much lower, between 79.3 and 87.9 for every 100 (Sen 2001).
Although abortion because of gender is illegal in India, ultrasound
tests to show the fetus’s gender have become common. If the fetus is
female, the pregnancy may be aborted. As one advertisement for an
ultrasound test reportedly put it: “Spend 500 Rupees Now, Save Five
Lakhs [50,000 rupees] Later” (Rajan 2003).
Hum Log’s plots were didactic, emphasizing the importance of family
planning, the dangers of alcohol, the damage done by dowry demands,
the danger of disobedience to elders, and the importance of education.
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One story line, for instance, detailed the fall of the second daughter,
Majhli, whose efforts to become a Bombay starlet (against her parents’
wishes) led to her sexual exploitation. The series’ moral hero was the
family patriarch, the grandfather, a traditional and sympathetic old man
whose continued efforts to help his family made a sharp contrast with
the selfish behavior of his modern, alcoholic son.
Hum Log was not only a success with audiences, it was also successful
in promoting its main sponsor’s new product, Maggi Noodles, a foreign
food being manufactured in India by a subsidiary of Nestlé. To give its
product greater visibility, the subsidiary underwrote the serial’s production
costs. During Hum Log’s 1984–85 run, Maggi Noodles commercials were
shown to an estimated audience of 50 million people. Noodle sales
jumped from 1,600 tons in 1983 to 5,000 tons in 1984. The product’s success changed Indian advertisers’ minds about television commercials. By
1985 there were 15 potential advertisers for every prime-time
Doordarshan slot. Between 1985 and 1988 Doordarshan raised its advertising charges three times. In 1990 one estimate put Doordarshan’s advertising revenues at the equivalent of $104 million.
Satellite Networks
Competition to Doordarshan’s monopoly on television came in the form
of transnational satellite television. In 1991 the U.S. Cable News
Network’s (CNN) satellite broadcast of the Persian Gulf War spurred
wealthy Indians to purchase satellite dishes for their homes. By 1992 an
estimated 1.28 million middle- and upper-class urban households were
watching Star TV (Satellite Television for the Asian Region). By 1997
many transnational satellite networks were available to Indian homes,
among them Star and Star Plus, Zee TV, the BBC, Jain TV, Sun TV, Asianet,
and ATN. Households in cities such as New Delhi had as many as 76 channels available to them with a total 1,800 hours of broadcasting every day.
As Doordarshan began to lose its core middle-class audience to the
satellite networks, it expanded the channels it offered to provide more
programming and more regionally focused programs. It also added 11
vernacular language channels to broadcast in regional languages and
focus on regional politics and issues.
Festivals
As India is a secular society, its three national holidays are secular and
celebrate days or heroes significant in India’s struggle for independence:
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Durga Puja pandal, New Delhi.The Bengali regional celebration of Durga Puja now takes place
in India wherever Bengali people have settled.This pandal (clay tableau) from a New Delhi
celebration in 1978 shows the 10-armed goddess Durga with her lion as she slays a demon.The
pandals are first worshipped in temples or community halls, then paraded around the city
before being brought to a local river (here, the Yamuna River) and immersed. (Courtesy of
Judith E.Walsh)
Republic Day on January 26 was first declared a holiday in 1930 by the
Indian National Congress. Today it is the occasion for a televised parade
in New Delhi, a showcase for both Indian military units and for floats
celebrating the cultural traditions of the many regions that make up the
Republic of India. Independence Day on August 15 celebrates the date
on which India gained independence, and Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday
on October 2 is a day set aside for tributes to India’s greatest nationalist.
Traditional religious festivals are celebrated by all of India’s major
faiths and have many regional forms and variations. Over the last 50
years, however, the Hindu festivals of northern India have become
more standardized in their forms and practices, as regional celebrations are adapted to the forms and festivities are described in the news
media or shown on television. Older festival formats—the pilgrimage
to a holy site, the procession of a deity in a chariot around a village’s
perimeter—have been widely used in political organizing in recent
years, particularly by the BJP and the VHP. And even decisions about
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public holidays now become the occasion for communal sniping in the
highly politicized atmosphere that currently surrounds all religious
observances.
Traditional Hindu Festivals
Traditionally Hindu festivals occurred either at harvest or planting
times within the agricultural cycle. They marked the seasonal appearances of epidemic diseases (which they were held to ward off), celebrated events in the lives of gods and goddesses, or marked significant
astronomical changes such as the phases of the Moon, eclipses, and solstices. The major Hindu festivals widely celebrated across northern
India are the 10-day celebration of Dassehra (“tenth”), the festival of
Diwali (“lights”), and the spring festival of Holi. Dassehra occurs during the first 10 days of the Hindu month Asvin (October) and coincides
with the harvest of the summer crop. The festival celebrates the victory
of the god Rama over the evil demon Ravana, and its celebration is
often marked—in larger villages and in urban centers—by performances of the Ramlila, a dramatic presentation of major episodes from
the god Rama’s life, held over several evenings.
Sarasvati Puja, Calcutta. A priest worships the goddess of learning, Sarasvati, in an outdoor
pandal as onlookers watch. (Courtesy of Judith E.Walsh)
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Diwali, which is celebrated in November, is an end-of-harvest celebration and a festival for the worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of
wealth. In some regions it is also a festival celebrating the return of
Rama and Sita to their Ayodhya kingdom. Traditionally Diwali is celebrated by placing lit lamps and candles throughout the village or
locale. Gambling with dice is also traditionally associated with
Diwali.
Holi takes place in the spring, in Phalgun (March), the last month in
the traditional Hindu calendar. Scholars identify Holi as a spring harvest festival and fertility rite. It is celebrated with bonfires and the roasting of grain. It is also the occasion for licentious behavior and
cross-class, cross-caste abuse; members of lower castes and/or younger
members of families splash red-colored water on caste superiors or family elders.
Many more local, regional, and communal festivals are still common
in India but too numerous to detail at length. The two major Muslim
festivals are the Id (feast day), which falls in the last month of the
Muslim calendar year and at which animals are sacrificed and food
shared within the community, and the second Id feast that follows the
monthlong dawn to dusk fasting of Ramadan. In western India, since
the 19th century, Maharashtrians have celebrated the birth of the elephant-headed god Ganesh in August–September. In Tamil Nadu the
harvest festival of Pongal occurs in mid-January.
Political Yatras and Raths
In the 1980s and 1990s Hindu nationalists frequently adapted traditional Hindu ritual and festival forms for use in their campaigns. Yatras,
journeys or pilgrimages to a religious site, are a common form of Hindu
religious worship. Raths, the chariot processions of a god’s image
around a village, town, or city, are also common. The chariots themselves (raths) also carry associations with the Hindu gods and heroes of
the Hindu epics, particularly since the appearance on television of versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
The VHP’s first and most successful use of the yatra was the
Ekatmata Yatra (pilgrimage for oneness) in 1983. This yatra was to
demonstrate the unity of Hinduism, which it did symbolically by having three separate processions simultaneously crisscross India, visiting
all of Hinduism’s major pilgrimage sites before converging in the city of
Nagpur at the end. One procession traveled from Nepal to Tamil Nadu;
a second, from Bengal to Somnath in Gujarat; and a third, from Uttar
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Pradesh to Tamil Nadu. The yatras brought holy water, collected from
all the religious sites and carried in jars along the way by members of
the Sikh, Jaina, and Untouchable communities. The separate processions met at Nagpur, the center of India (and not coincidentally the
home city of the RSS in India), where the waters were all intermingled—the ultimate symbol of Hindu oneness. This first yatra brought
together 312 separate processions, convened 4,323 meetings and rallies, and reached all but three of India’s districts. RSS swayamsevaks, or
volunteers, numbering 50,000 oversaw the logistics of the campaign
and the processions’ movements.
The processions also carried images of goddesses representing the
Ganges and Mother India installed on raths and encouraged devotees to
worship these images as they moved. The yatra was hugely successful
and became the model for a number of later yatras and raths organized
by both the VHP and BJP. The yatra was also a commercial success: In
one procession alone 6,000 images of Mother India and 70,000 bottles
of holy water were sold to devotees.
In 1990 L. K. Advani, leader of the BJP, used a different kind of procession, the rath yatra (chariot procession), to demonstrate the BJP’s
support for the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign. Advani traveled 10,000
kilometers (6,200 miles) through eight states in a Toyota decorated to
look like an epic chariot, with the election symbol of the BJP and the
Hindu symbol “Om” painted on its side. Saffron-clad associates dressed
to look like the monkey god Hanuman accompanied the rath, as did
women performing religious dances. Advani’s speeches and Hindu militant songs were broadcast by loudspeakers atop the car, urging supporters to action. In Ahmedabad, Advani was met by a member of the
Bajrang Dal who used his own blood to put a tilak (symbolic religious
mark) on Advani’s forehead.
Politicized Holidays
Modern religious holidays in India are often the occasion for public
contention. State and local governments publish lists of the general holidays they recognize and the “restricted” holidays when their employees may choose not to work. (Government workers may generally
choose two restricted holidays a year from the list offered them.)
Restricted holidays will include most religious festivals—Dassehra,
Diwali, and Holi for Hindus, Id for Muslims, Christmas for
Christians—although Hindu holidays are also likely to be among the
general holidays given to all workers. Restricted lists, however, can be
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used for political purposes and communal division. Just before national
elections in 2004, for example, the BJP chief minister of Gujarat,
Narendra Modi, removed a number of holidays for Christians, Muslims,
Parsis, and Sikhs from the restricted list in what was probably intended
as a bid for communal Hindu support.
“Pop” Diversification
Over the decades since independence, India became not only a more
populous society but a more urbanized one. Indian popular culture
developed along with and as a result of city life and a new consuming
middle class. Initially the popularity of films and film songs gave
Bollywood a monopoly over Indian audiences and guaranteed that its
version of popular culture would dominate. Television, as first developed through the government-controlled Doordarshan, also seemed to
offer another medium for the transmission of a centrally produced popular culture. But in the 1980s and 1990s, cheap cassette tapes and new
satellite networks broke Bollywood’s and Doordarshan’s control over
popular culture. Indian music now ranges from film songs to religious
tapes, and from regional bawdy songs to virulent communalist propaganda. Television also now offers regional channels in the vernacular
for the discussion and display of local issues and culture. Urban Indian
culture still dominates India, and with 20 percent of villagers now owning TV sets, rural areas have grown increasingly conscious of the many
forms of popular culture produced in the cities.
Village Indians, as it turned out in the elections of 2004, have also
become more aware of other aspects of urban life. Not only have rural
residents participated in the religious and political movements of the
past 15 years, they have also made clear that they are aware, as perhaps
never before, of the vast economic gulf that still separates urban and village ways of life.
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10
India at the Turn
of the Century
(1991–2004)
Hindutva is not a slogan for us. It is the Bharatiya Janata party’s ideological
mascot, the most distinctive feature of its identity and approach. It has
been the hall mark of the party well before Ayodhya and will continue to
be so even after a magnificent Rama Temple at the birth place of Rama in
Ayodhya becomes a fact of life.
■
L. K. Advani, head of the Bharatiya Janata Party, 1994 (Jaffrelot 1996, 534)
T
he rise of a Hindu majoritarian party in the 1980s and 1990s again
highlighted the difficulties of democratic “majority rule” in a country with distinct minority populations. This had been at issue in debates
of seat reservations and separate electorates before 1947. In the 1990s it
reemerged as the VHP and BJP provoked riots over the Babri Masjid and
as the BJP came to power in 1998. The beginning of the 21st century saw
Hindutva’s organizers sanctioning communal violence in Gujarat (2002)
on a scale of ferocity (if not numbers) that rivaled partition violence.
In the 1990s, however, strong low-caste and Untouchable political
movements arose in northern India. The parties added a new dimension
to Indian political contests as politicians (particularly in the BJP) had
to balance demands from their mainly upper-caste supporters against
the possibility that low-caste and Untouchable voters (more than half
the population) might vote against them. An unexpected Congress
Party victory in the 2004 central government election, even as the BJP
touted economic gains that, it claimed, had left “India Shining,” suggested that rural Indian voters might no longer be content to subsidize
urban prosperity at their own expense.
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V. P. Singh and the OBCs
V. P. Singh’s Janata Dal coalition took office in 1989, but only with the
aid of 85 seats from the BJP. Whereas the BJP wanted to organize
(Hindu) Indians into a cohesive Hindu majority, Singh’s party, a coalition of smaller socialist and peasant-oriented groups, had pledged itself
to help lower-caste communities in their struggle against the Hindu
upper castes. Singh had committed his party, if elected, to attend to the
“special needs of the socially and educationally backward classes” by
immediately implementing the 1980 Mandal Commission reforms
(Jaffrelot 2003, 337).
From the early 1950s Indian officials had repeatedly considered
actions to improve the economic and social conditions of communities
that were neither Untouchable nor tribal but were, nevertheless,
extremely poor. The means for improvement was to be the extension of
government reservations to the “Other Backward Classes,” or OBCs, as
these communities were called. In 1978 the Janata government, under
Morarji Desai, appointed B. P. Mandal, a low-caste leader, to head a commission to review the issue. At the time, OBC communities held only
12.5 percent of central government jobs. The 1980 Mandal Commission
Report identified “3,248 castes or communities comprising 52.4 percent
of the population of India, roughly 350 million people” who should be
given preferential treatment in order to improve their economic and
social conditions (Brass 1994, 251). It recommended reserving 27 percent of civil service posts for these communities, reservations that would
have raised quotas for government and public-sector employment to
almost 50 percent. (In absolute terms, however, the number of jobs
reserved for OBCs would have totaled slightly more than 55,000.)
No action was taken on the Mandal report until 10 years later when
Singh’s government came to power. Believing that positive discrimination
would improve the conditions of OBCs (who were among Singh’s
strongest supporters) and that intercaste conflict might damage the growing popularity of the BJP’s Hindu nationalism, Singh announced in
August 1990 that the Mandal recommendations were going to be implemented. “We want,” he said in an interview at the time, “to give an effective [voice] here in the power structure and running of the country to the
depressed, down-trodden and backward people” (Jaffrelot 2003, 338).
Mandal Protests
Opposition to the reforms from upper-caste Hindu communities was
widespread and dramatic. In north India, upper-caste students and
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Caste in the Indian Census
T
he Census of 1931 was the last Indian census to publish statistics
on caste.After 1947 government officials rejected caste categories
as too divisive. Information on religious communities continued to be
collected, but the only data collected on caste was information on
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. From the 1950s, however, all
commissions that studied the Other Backward Class (OBC) issue
pointed out the need for caste statistics. During the 1980s and 1990s
debates on the Mandal Commission reservations, Untouchable and
OBC leaders charged that the “government unwillingness to collect
caste data [was] a deliberate move to preserve the status quo” (Sundar
2000, 117). Nevertheless, as late as the Census of 2001 caste information was still not included in census tabulations.
professors at such schools as Delhi University organized opposition to
Mandal. More dramatic were the attempted suicides of a number of
young people. Graphic news magazine coverage reported the efforts of
more than 300 young upper-caste students to kill themselves, 152 by
setting themselves on fire. Legal challenges postponed the implementation of the Mandal reforms for several years. The 27 percent reservations were finally put into effect in 1993, long after Singh’s government
had fallen. By then the Indian economy had already begun its dramatic
recovery, opening new private-sector jobs for upper-caste employment
and dampening opposition to the reservations.
Mobilizing for Hindutva
The majority of the BJP’s support in 1990 (as today) came from the
upper castes, so Prime Minister Singh’s decision to implement the
Mandal reforms put the party, as part of the Janata Dal coalition, in a
difficult position. L. K. Advani was a BJP member of Parliament from
New Delhi, where a number of suicides and attempted suicides had
taken place. According to him, “Parents used to come to my place daily:
‘Why are you supporting this government? Withdraw your support!’”
(Jaffrelot 1996, 416). The BJP could not support the Mandal recommendations, but neither could it afford to alienate 52 percent of Indian
voters. The BJP leaders chose to move aggressively to support the VHP’s
new Ayodhya campaign; they could then use Singh’s opposition to the
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Ramjanmabhoomi campaign as their justification for withdrawing from
his government’s coalition.
After months of unsuccessful negotiations with Muslim groups and
Singh’s government, the VHP had declared that construction of the Ram
temple at Ayodhya would start in October 1990. In September of that
year Advani began a 6,200-mile rath yatra from the Somnath temple in
Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh to demonstrate BJP support for the
Ayodhya campaign. In October the BJP announced it would withdraw
from V. P. Singh’s government if the government attempted to stop the
temple movement. Singh at that point ordered the chief minister of
Bihar to arrest Advani in Bihar, halting his procession before it could
reach Ayodhya. With Advani’s arrest the BJP withdrew its support from
the coalition government, new elections were called for May–June
1991, and construction plans were halted.
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991 left Congress without a
Nehru-Gandhi family leader for the first time since independence. Even
so Congress (I) won 220 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, achieving a
plurality that enabled it to form a coalition government with the support
of Tamil Nadu’s non-Brahman DMK party, Muslim League representatives, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI (M). P. V.
Narasimha Rao (1921– ), who had been foreign minister in both Indira
Gandhi’s and Rajiv Gandhi’s governments became prime minister.
The BJP, which had campaigned aggressively on Hindutva and Babri
Masjid issues, became the second largest party at the center, with 120
seats. The party had losses in regional elections in Bihar, Haryana, and
Maharashtra, although it maintained control over state governments in
Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. In Uttar Pradesh
the BJP won the elections and formed the next state government.
Globalization of India’s Economy
Even as the Mandal crisis grabbed headlines and the VHP’s
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign gathered support, the Congress (I) government of 1991 authorized the liberalization of India’s economy. The
United States’s Persian Gulf War in 1991 had caused oil prices to rise in
India (and worldwide), sending food prices higher and forcing many
Indians working in Gulf states to return home unemployed. When
India almost defaulted on its international debt in 1991, Prime Minister
Rao appointed Manmohan Singh, a Harvard- and London-educated
economist, as finance minister. Singh made severe cuts in government
spending and devalued the Indian rupee in return for several billion
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dollars in World Bank and IMF loans. He aggressively courted foreign
investment and cut bureaucratic restrictions on foreign businesses. The
short-term effects of these changes were an increase in unemployment
and a 15 percent inflation rate, which weakened Rao’s coalition government severely.
Within five years, however, Manmohan Singh’s economic program
was being hailed as an economic miracle. India’s economy grew as
much between 1991 and 1996 as it had in the previous 40 years.
Foreign investment totaling more than $10 billion poured into India,
and exports grew by 20 percent per year. Western companies long
banned in India—Pepsico, IBM, Xerox, Kentucky Fried Chicken—
opened businesses in urban centers. The city of Bangalore flourished as
India’s computer science and software center. By the end of 1995 inflation had fallen to below 6 percent per year and urban middle-class
Indians were experiencing a surge in prosperity. Meanwhile the contrast
between the 30 percent of India’s population experiencing the new
prosperity and the 30 percent of the population who were landless
laborers and urban slum dwellers was as stark as at any time in the past.
Demolition of the Babri Masjid
The BJP’s 1991 victory in Uttar Pradesh left the party caught between
its role as a state government (whose voters wanted stability and order)
and its commitment to Hindu nationalism (whose supporters wanted
the Babri Masjid razed and the Ram temple built). The situation
remained stalemated through 1991 as negotiations between the VHP,
the Congress (I) central government, the Uttar Pradesh government,
and Muslim protest groups failed to reach any agreement. In October
1992 the VHP announced that construction would start on December
6. The Supreme Court declared the construction illegal and the Rao
government moved 195 paramilitary companies into the Ayodhya
region. At the same time armies of VHP kar sevaks (volunteer workers)
from different parts of India began to converge on Ayodhya. By
December their numbers were estimated at 150,000.
On December 6, 1992, with Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and
numerous other RSS and VHP leaders present, volunteers broke into
the Babri Masjid grounds and began to dismantle the mosque. Neither
the state police nor the central government’s paramilitary forces
attempted to stop them. (Observers later attributed the central government’s failure to act to the general reluctance of the already-weak prime
minister, Rao, to interfere with a popular Hindu movement.) Within
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Demolition of the Babri Masjid, 1992.Volunteers of the RSS and related Hindu nationalist
groups climb onto one of the three domes of the Babri Masjid after breaking into the mosque
grounds on December 6. In hours the ancient Muslim house of worship had been razed to the
ground. (AP/Wide World Photos)
five hours the three domes of the mosque had fallen and the building
was in ruins. A temporary temple for Hindu religious images was constructed on the mosque site by the kar sevaks. As the demolition was
under way volunteers attacked press crews and local Muslims, and
Muslim homes in Ayodhya were burned. The BJP later officially
described the events as an “uncontrollable upsurge of [a] spontaneous
nature” (Jaffrelot 1996, 455), but some observers at the time thought
Sangh Parivar leaders had planned the demolition in advance.
Rioting began in Ayodhya during the mosque demolition and continued through December and January in north Indian cities. On some
occasions riots were started by Muslims protesting the mosque demolition; more often they were sparked by Hindu nationalist victory celebrations and aided by complicit local police. In the first week after the
demolition 1,200 people were killed, most in Maharashtra, Gujarat,
Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh and somewhat fewer in Delhi and
Rajasthan. In Bombay rioting lasted into January 1993, instigated by
Shiv Sena and BJP activists and aided by police. Shiv Sena processions
chanted “Pakistan or kabristan” [Pakistan or the cemetery], a reference
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Two BJP Leaders
L
al Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee are often presented as
holding opposing positions within the BJP and RSS hierarchies:
Advani the “hard-liner” versus Vajpayee the “moderate.” Yet the two
men had worked together in the Jana Sangh and the BJP for years without major ideological disagreements.Their more recent differing political stances, some observers suggest, are more tactical than substantial.
Vajpayee (c. 1924– ) was born in Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. He
had earned an M.A. in political science at DAV College in Kanpur before
dropping out of law school to join the RSS as a swayamsevak (volunteer)
in the early 1940s. A dedicated pracharak (preacher) Vajpayee was
assigned in the 1950s to organize and develop the Jana Sangh party
along RSS lines. He became general secretary of the Jana Sangh in Uttar
Pradesh during that decade, was first elected to Parliament in 1957, and
served as foreign minister in the Janata government in 1977. He helped
found the BJP in 1980 and was its first president before being replaced
by Advani when the BJP’s election results proved disappointing. In 1992
he was one of the few Sangh Parivar leaders to denounce the Babri
Masjid demolition. In 1996 and again in 1998 he became prime minister
in BJP coalition governments.
Like Vajpayee, Advani (c. 1929– ) also rose through the RSS ranks.
Born in the port city of Karachi in Sindh, he joined the RSS in 1942,
becoming a pracharak in the Karachi RSS in 1947. During Partition
Advani and his family (along with 1 million other Sindhi Hindus) fled to
India. In India Advani worked for the RSS in Rajasthan and then in New
Delhi, becoming secretary of the Delhi Jana Sangh in 1958, president of
the national Jana Sangh in 1973, and minister of information and broadcasting in the Janata government of 1977. Advani was also one of the
BJP’s founders and became its president in the late 1980s as the party
turned from accommodation to a more militant political stance.
to where Muslims should now go (Jaffrelot 1996, 459). In Bhopal a
week of riots led by Bajrang Dal and VHP activists forced almost 17,000
residents (two-thirds of them Muslim) to flee to refugee camps.
In Bihar there was little violence. The state’s OBC chief minister, Laloo
Prasad Yadav (1948– ), had demanded quick action from local district
magistrates and police. Outside the north Indian Hindi belt, riots were
fewer and less deadly: 73 people died in Karnataka; 35 in West Bengal; 100
in Assam; 12 in Kerala; 12 in Andhra Pradesh; and two in Tamil Nadu.
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If the Ayodhya demolition showed the potency of Hindutva issues, it
also created new difficulties for a BJP that wanted to present itself as a
responsible political party. Advani resigned as leader of the opposition
in Parliament and Kalyan Singh as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, a BJP leader who was not in Ayodhya on December 6,
1992, described the demolition as his party’s “worst miscalculation”
(Jaffrelot 1996, 457). The Congress (I) prime minister, Rao, widely criticized for failing to defend the mosque, ordered the arrest of six prominent Hindu nationalists, among them Advani and the head of the VHP,
on charges of inciting communal violence. Rao’s government banned
the RSS, the VHP, and the Bajrang Dal, sealed their offices, and prohibited any further activities. The Congress (I) imposed president’s rule in
Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh, dismissing all their BJP state governments.
But Rao’s coalition government was already weak, and his determination to punish participants in a popular Hindu cause had only a limited duration. All the Hindu nationalist leaders were released by
mid-January 1993. Fewer than 4,000 Sangh Parivar participants were
arrested nationally, among them 1,500 RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal members in Uttar Pradesh and almost 1,000 in Madhya Pradesh. Within
weeks of the center’s orders banning the Sangh Parivar groups, state
courts began to modify them. In 1993 the Delhi High Court lifted the
ban on the RSS and Bajrang Dal (while maintaining it on the VHP for
two years because of its members’ inflammatory speeches). By January
1993 the Allahabad High Court was allowing Hindu worshippers to
enter the mosque grounds to view images in the makeshift temple
there. A nationwide opinion poll in January 1993 showed that among
north Indians more than 52 percent approved the mosque’s demolition.
In south India, in contrast, only 17 percent approved the demolition,
while 70 percent approved the arrest of the BJP leaders and the banning
of their organizations.
Upward Caste Mobility
In the 1980s and 1990s a new type of upward caste mobility appeared
in the north Indian Hindi belt region. This mobility had appeared first
in south India during the late 19th and early 20th centuries: NonBrahman castes changed their social status through ethnicization, that
is, by moving outside narrow, endogamous jati definitions to establish
a broader ethnic identities. The caste associations of the 1880s–1930s
were often the vehicles for such new identities in south India. Some
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
associations even replaced Sanskrit varna classifications with the
regional and ethnic identity of Dravidians. In the 1920s and ’30s the
Tamil leader Periyar had used the idea of Dravidian identity to organize
his Self Respect Movement. Even before 1947 a strong non-Brahman
movement in Tamil Nadu had forced its members into the region’s
English-language schools and had gained control of the regional
Congress movement.
In contrast, in northern India Sanskritization had long been the preferred method for upward caste mobility. Even as late as 1947 the
English-educated elite of north India came mostly from the upper
castes, and these upper-caste members provided the leadership for most
of the north’s social and political movements. In the 1980s and ’90s,
however, north Indian social and political groups began to organize low
castes and Untouchables outside the rituals, customs, and practices of
Brahmanic Hinduism and into politicized ethnic identities analogous to
those of the south.
Rising Power of Lower Castes
That upper-caste mobilizations against the Mandal Commission
reforms had produced counter-organization among low-caste and Dalit
(Untouchable) communities became clear in Lok Sabha and state elections in the 1990s. The two parties that benefited most from this politicization were the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, an organization founded
in 1992 that focused on OBCs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and the
Bahujan Samaj Party (Party of the Majority, or BSP), an Untouchable
party that had worked on organizing coalitions of low castes and Dalits
since its founding in 1984. Two OBC leaders from the regional, lowcaste Yadav community—Mulayam Singh Yadav (1939– ) in Uttar
Pradesh and Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar—used the Mandal reservations and the more politicized lower-caste climate for the benefit of
their own OBC Yadav community in these states.
The BSP was founded by Kanshi Ram (1932– ), a Punjabi from a
low-caste family. During the late 1960s Kanshi Ram had cut himself off
from his family, vowed never to marry, and dedicated himself full time
to the organization of low-caste people. Inspired by the writings of
Ambedkar and Phule, Kanshi Ram believed that the future of low castes
lay in political unity. Between 1989 and 1991 the BSP averaged almost
2 percent of the vote in national elections and had won several seats in
the Lok Sabha. By 1999 the BSP was averaging 4 percent of the national
vote and had been certified as a national party. In national elections the
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INDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
party won 11 seats in 1996, five in 1998, and 14 in 1999. Its greatest
strength was in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and the Punjab.
OBCs in Government
By 1999 more-politicized OBC communities had made significant gains
in both Lok Sabha and state assemblies in the Hindi belt states of Uttar
Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar. In 1989 the percentage of OBCs
in Parliament had been only 10.6 percent in Uttar Pradesh, 7.5 percent
in Madhya Pradesh, and 18.5 percent in Bihar. Ten years later, however,
OBCs were 25 percent of the members of Parliament from Uttar
Pradesh; 23 percent from Madhya Pradesh; and 29 percent from Bihar.
At the same time, the percentage of upper-caste members of Parliament
from the three states had also fallen, from an average of 48 percent in
1989 to only 33 percent by 1999.
In general the Lok Sabha had become much less upper caste in the
decades between 1952 and 2002. Where in 1952 66 percent of all Lok
Sabha members were from the upper castes, in 2002 only 33 percent
were. OBCs’ overall parliamentary presence had also increased. Where
in 1977 OBCs had made up 10 percent of the Lok Sabha’s members, in
2002 they made up 25 percent.
In 1996 a BSP coalition took control of the state government of Uttar
Pradesh, and Mayawati (1956– ), an Untouchable convert to
Buddhism, became the state’s chief minister. Her government lasted less
than five months, although she returned again in 1997 with a second
coalition. In her first five-month term, however, Mayawati demonstrated the possible benefits of political power for low-caste and
Untouchable communities in the state. She put BSP supporters into key
administrative posts throughout the state, appointing Untouchable district magistrates in almost half of Uttar Pradesh’s districts. A village
redevelopment scheme was expanded to include Untouchable villages
and to locate its roads, pumps, and houses within Untouchable neighborhoods. Grants were increased to allow Untouchable and Muslim
children to attend primary school; 20 percent of police inspector posts
were reserved for Untouchables. Muslims were also made eligible for
reserved seats in the state administration. An Indian Express reporter
wrote in 2003 of the changes,
Check with the Dalits of these [Uttar Pradesh] villages.They will
tell you this was God’s forsaken country.They tilled the land of the
upper castes, looked after their animals, washed their clothes,
shaped their pots, made their shoes and cleaned their mess. In
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
The Bandit Queen
T
he dramatic life of Phoolan Devi (1963–2001) made Indian newspaper headlines in the 1980s and 1990s, offering Indian readers an
illustration of rural low-caste women’s lives and of the growing visibility of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Phoolan Devi was the second daughter of a lower-caste peasant in a small Uttar Pradesh village.
By age 20 she had became the mistress of Vikram Mallah, leader of a
local dacoit (bandit) gang. When Mallah was killed by a treacherous
friend, Phoolan Devi was kidnapped, raped, and humiliated by high-caste
thakur men from the village of Behmai. In revenge, on Valentine’s Day
1981, she and her dacoits massacred 22 thakur men from Behmai, later
said to be the same men who had raped her. She escaped capture for
two years, becoming famous as one of India’s most hunted dacoits,
before surrendering under a plea agreement in 1983.
During her 11-year imprisonment Phoolan Devi was befriended by
a journalist who published her story as India’s Bandit Queen, a best-selling book and then a Bollywood film of the same name. After release
from prison in 1964, Phoolan Devi married and converted to Buddhism;
in 1996 she ran for Parliament as a Samajwadi Party candidate in Uttar
Pradesh, defeating an upper-caste candidate for the Lok Sabha seat, part
of the rise to power of OBCs in that state. In 2001 Phoolan Devi was
killed outside her New Delhi home by three masked gunmen.The man
accused of her murder, Sher Singh Rana, claimed he had killed her to
avenge the death of high-caste Uttar Pradesh men, but other reports
suggested Phoolan Devi’s husband had been involved in her murder.
turn, they were declared untouchable and unclean—and forced
to live in the dirtiest quarters of the village. . . . “There was a time
when we were scared to speak out, even look up [one villager told
the reporter]. Now we go and meet the tehsildar, the thanedar
[government officials] and they listen to our complaints.” . . .
Everyone concedes that there can be no comparison between the
old days and the present (Sheth 2004, 50–51).
Fragmented National Power
In the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and violence, the BJP
dropped its emphasis on Ayodhya and attempted to widen its constituency by focusing on an economic and social agenda. In 1996 the party
won 161 seats in Parliament and tried for 13 days to form a government
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INDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
BJP poster, New Delhi, 1996. An unofficial poster for the BJP urges (in Hindi) “‘Time for a
Change’— Your Decision” and “Come! Let’s go with Bhajpa” (a colloquial name for the BJP).The
lotus, the election symbol for the BJP, is the central image of the poster. (Courtesy of Philip
Oldenburg)
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
1984
1989
1991
1996
1998 1999
2004
119
161
182
138
Seats in Lok Sabha
2
85
Percent of
national vote
7.4
11.5
20.1
20.3
25.5
182
23.8
22.16
Source: Hasan (2002, 478–480 and 509)
with Vajpayee as prime minister but failed to find coalition partners
because of its aggressive Hindutva stand. Congressite H. D. Deve Gowda
(1930– ) became prime minister instead, heading a new coalition government made up of 13 leftist, regional, and low-caste parties and supported by Congress (I) seats.
Gowda was the first regionally based prime minister in India’s history.
He came from a peasant proprietor background and had been chief minister of Karnataka. He spoke Kannada, the regional language of
Karnataka, and knew little English or Hindi. Within 10 months of
Gowda’s becoming prime minister, Congress (I) had forced his resignation, replacing him with Inder Kumar Gujral (1919– ), a relatively
obscure party member who had served in Congress governments since
the 1960s. Gujral headed the fourth coalition government to be formed
within the year. In November, however, when a government commission
identified the DMK party from Tamil Nadu (one of Gujral’s coalition
partners) as secret funders of the Tamil group responsible for Rajiv
Gandhi’s assassination, Congress withdrew its support from the coalition and Gujral’s government fell.
The BJP in Power
National elections in 1998 gave the BJP the largest block of votes in
Parliament—182 seats, and 25.5 percent of the popular vote—and the
BJP successfully formed a coalition government with 20 other parties,
including the Tamil non-Brahman DMK, and the tiny Bahujan Samaj
Party (BSP). The BJP gained these coalition partners, however, only by
abandoning substantial sections of its Hindutva agenda. The party’s 1998
National Agenda for Governance dropped several long-standing goals:
the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, a uniform civil code (a covert
attack on the separate Muslim personal law), and ending the special constitutional status of the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir.
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INDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
The BJP coalition remained in power under Vajpayee as prime minister for 13 months, until April 1999. Violent attacks against Indian
Christians during 1998–99 raised fears that such violence would be tolerated by a Hindu nationalist government, but the BJP’s fall in 1999 was
caused by internal coalition politics. Squabbling led to the defection of
both the DMK and the BSP. In the general elections of 1999 the BJP
emerged with the same number of Lok Sabha seats (182) but with a
much stronger coalition (294 seats out of the Lok Sabha’s 543).
Congress (I), now under the presidency of Sonia Gandhi (the Italianborn wife of Rajiv Gandhi) won only 114 seats. Vajpayee’s return as
prime minister, however, marked the first time in 27 years an incumbent prime minister had been voted back into office.
The BJP’s new National Democratic Alliance, a coalition of 23 political parties, was strong enough to remain in power for five years. Chief
among its goals was a pledge to continue the globalization reforms
begun by the Congress Party in 1991. These reforms had brought prosperity to India’s urban middle classes and were backed by the business
classes, whose support the BJP was courting. Over the next five years
the BJP introduced probusiness policies that further liberalized and privatized India’s economy. The government cut taxes on capital gains and
dividends. It began the privatization of state-controlled companies. It
A Campaign of Hate
T
he years 1998 and 1999 saw 116 attacks against Christians in India,
more than at any time since independence.The violence was worst
in the tribal areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa. In Orissa
members of the Bajrang Dal were implicated in inciting a mob attack
that killed an Australian missionary and his two young sons. In Gujarat
attacks reached their peak during Christmas week 1998 into January
1999. A rally on December 25 in a tribal region of southeastern Gujarat
was organized by a local Hindu extremist group. Anti-Christian slogans
were shouted by 4,000 people, some of which were recorded on tape.
“Hindus rise Christians run,” the mob shouted. “Whoever gets in our
way Will be ground to dust . . . Who will protect our faith? Bajrang Dal,
Bajrang Dal” (Human Rights Watch 1999). The rally was followed by
forced conversions of Christian tribals to Hinduism and attacks on
churches, missionary schools, and Christian and Muslim shops.
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eased limits on the percentage of Indian companies that could be controlled by foreign investors. It removed import restrictions on more
than 700 types of goods. New labor laws were proposed to make it easier for companies to fire employees and contract out work. But
although a commitment to improve rural water supplies, housing, and
education had been part of the BJP’s initial agenda, the party offered
reform proposals in these areas only in its 2004 (election-year) budget.
Nuclear Strategy
Although the BJP had had to give up parts of its agenda to form the governments of 1998 and 1999, the party was determined to make good on
long-standing pledges to strengthen India militarily and as a world
power. The government’s budget in 2000 increased defense spending by
28 percent, an increase justified by the “50 day war in Kashmir” the
preceding year.
Relations with Pakistan and in Kashmir had worsened again in 1998
when Vajpayee’s government, only two months in office, authorized the
explosion of five underground nuclear tests. Pakistan immediately
exploded its own nuclear device, but in fall 1998 world pressure forced
both countries to declare moratoriums on nuclear tests and to open
talks on Kashmir. Again in April 1999 both nations tested ballistic missiles in a new round of saber-rattling. In July 1999 the Indian army
drove Pakistan-supported insurgents back across the Line of Control
drawn up by the United Nations in 1972 for a cease-fire in Kashmir. By
1999 as many as 12 militant Muslim groups were fighting to free
Kashmir from India’s control, most supported economically and militarily by Pakistan. Among these groups were also Kashmiri separatists,
groups that wanted to establish Kashmir as an independent state.
In December 2001 a Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba,
attacked New Delhi’s 17th-century Red Fort, killing one soldier and
two civilians. In October 2002 Kashmiri militants killed 38 people in
Kashmir’s parliament, and two months later, on December 13, five
armed terrorists attacked New Delhi’s Parliament complex, killing eight
people.
Vajpayee’s government increased the Indian army presence on
Kashmir’s border, and Pakistan did the same. By 2002 the two countries
had 1 million soldiers mobilized on the border. By January 2003 each
country had expelled the other’s political envoy, and both were threatening retaliation if the other side began a nuclear conflict. If Pakistan
used nuclear weapons against India, said the Indian defense minister
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INDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
George Fernandez at the time, Pakistan would be “erased from the
world map” (Duff-Brown 2003). By 2003 deaths in the Kashmir insurgency were estimated to have reached 38–60,000.
Then in 2004, as the BJP called for new elections, Prime Minister
Vajpayee called for the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan. On May
8, shortly before voting began, Vajpayee announced the restoration of
both diplomatic and transportation ties between India and Pakistan and
said a new round of peace talks would begin soon.
Gujarat Violence
The BJP distanced itself from the VHP in the election cycles that followed the demolition and violence of the Babri Masjid campaign. The
VHP also found its activities curtailed after 1992 by various government restrictions and bans on its activities. But by the late 1990s the
VHP had again returned to its earlier themes, the building of the Ram
temple at Ayodhya and the dismantling of Muslim religious structures
in places such as Kashi (Benares) and Mathura.
In 2002, amidst the increased tensions of the India-Pakistan standoff
and in the aftermath of Muslim terrorist attacks on the parliaments in
Kashmir and New Delhi, the VHP put forward plans for the celebration
of the 10-year anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition. It set March
15 as the deadline for stone pillars to be brought to Ayodhya. Although
the Supreme Court ordered construction stopped two days before the
deadline, activists continued to travel between Ayodhya and the west
Indian state of Gujarat (among other places). In February 2002 a clash
between Hindu volunteers returning from Ayodhya and Muslim vendors at the Godhra rail station in Gujarat led to the train being burned;
58 Hindus died, many women and children.
The conflict began the worst Hindu-Muslim riots seen in India since
partition. In Gujarat more than 1,000 people died, mostly Muslims, in
violent clashes that occurred almost daily for the next several months.
The violence included rapes, murder, and burned homes. In Gujarat’s
state capital, Ahmedabad, more than 100,000 Muslims fled their homes
for refugee camps.
Reports suggested that police did little to stop the violence, much of
which was not spontaneous but planned and carried out under the
direction of local Hindu nationalist groups. The BJP had controlled the
Gujarat state government since 1998. It had “saffronized” (appointed
Sangh Parivar supporters to) district and regional boards and removed
an earlier prohibition against civil servants joining the RSS. The state’s
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Muslims in India
after Partition
T
he 2001 census identified more than 138 million Muslims in India,
accounting for 13.4 percent of the population. Indian Muslims live
in all of India’s states and union territories but constitute a majority in
none. In northern and central interior India, rural Muslims work as small
farmers or landless laborers; in towns and cities, as artisans or in middle- and lower-middle-class urban occupations. On the western and
southwestern coasts, in contrast, numerous prosperous Muslim business communities and sects are found. Urdu is the first language of
almost half of India’s Muslims; the rest speak regional languages such as
Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, and Tamil, among others. Most Indian
Muslims belong to the Sunni sect of Islam.
To date, a separate Muslim personal law code from before independence regulates Indian Muslims’ lives. This code was first challenged in
1985 by an Indian Supreme Court ruling that awarded alimony to a
divorced Muslim woman, Shah Bano Begum. Protests by orthodox
Muslims at the time forced the government to reverse the court’s ruling
and to guarantee that sharia (orthodox Islamic customary practices)
would remain secular law for Indian Muslims. But since the Shah Bano case
Hindu nationalists have repeatedly demanded a uniform civil law code,
arguing that a separate Muslim code amounts to preferential treatment.
Communal violence is probably the single greatest concern of Indian
Muslims today, particularly in northern India. Before 1947, communal
riots were “reciprocal,” equally harming Hindus and Muslims. Since
1947, however, riots have become more one-sided, with “the victims
mainly Muslims, whether in the numbers of people killed, wounded or
arrested” (Khalidi 1995, 17). Starting in the late 1980s and continuing to
the present, Hindu nationalist campaigns have precipitated communal
violence on a scale not seen since partition. Rioting across northern
India occurred in 1990–92, in Bombay in 1993, and in Gujarat in 2002.
In the same period armed conflict between India and Pakistan over
Kashmir, as well as Muslim terrorist attacks within India itself, only compounded communal tensions.
As India’s largest and most visible religious minority, it seems likely
that Indian Muslims will remain the target of Hindu nationalist rhetoric
and agitation for the foreseeable future. The defeat of the BJP government in 2004, however, and the rise of low-caste political movements in
the late 20th and early 21st centuries may offer poor rural and urban
Muslim Indians an alternative path to political influence—one that may
be used without compromising their religious identities.
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INDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
chief minister at the time was Narendra Modi (1950– ), an RSS
pracharak and protégé of BJP leader Advani. Newspaper reports after
the riots suggested the state had systematically kept its Muslim police
officers out of the field and that 27 senior officers who had taken action
against the rioting had been punished with transfers. Before the Gujarat
riots political observers had predicted that the BJP’s ineffective running
of the state would cost them the government, but in the December 2002
state elections, after campaigning aggressively on a Hindutva platform,
Modi was returned to office with a large state majority.
Elections of 2004
Prime Minister Vajpayee called for early national elections in May 2004
hoping to benefit from the momentum of the 2003 state elections,
which had produced victories for the BJP in three out of the four contested states, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. Congress
(I), still the BJP’s major rival in the coalition politics of the last 20 years,
had won only the state of Delhi. Campaigning for the 2004 elections
the BJP focused on India’s strong (now globalized) economy, on
improved relations with Pakistan, and on its own competent government. The main theme of the BJP’s campaign was “India Shining,” a
media blitz on which the BJP alliance spent $20 million and which
emphasized the economic prosperity and strength India had achieved
under BJP rule. One glossy poster showed a smiling yellow-sari-clad
woman playing cricket: the caption read, “You’ve never had a better
time to shine brighter” (Zora and Woreck 2004). Later commentators
suggested that rural Indians, who had shared in little of the recent economic growth, might have been surprised to learn that India had
already achieved prosperity. During the campaign Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party and widow of Rajiv Gandhi, criticized the
BJP’s waste of money on the campaign. Gandhi pointed out that the
majority of India did not share the lifestyle lauded in the BJP ads, and
she instead campaigned on a platform promising employment and economic betterment for India’s poor.
Most political pundits predicted a BJP victory, but the party lost
badly the 2004 elections. The BJP had, post-election, 138 Lok Sabha
seats (down from 182 in 1999) and only 22 percent of the national vote.
Meanwhile, the Congress Party, whose demise many had thought imminent, won 145 Lok Sabha seats and 26 percent of the national vote. The
BJP was voted out of power in Gujarat, the state where its communal
policies had been victorious only two years before.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Approximately 390 million votes were cast in the 2004 election, 56
percent of India’s 675 million registered voters. Later analyses of the
Congress victory pointed out that in India the poor vote in greater proportions than the country’s upper and middle classes. Vajpayee, who
resigned as prime minister immediately, would later call the India
Shining campaign a major mistake.
Gandhi, whose campaigning was seen as a major factor in the
Congress victory, refused to become prime minister. (BJP members of
Parliament had campaigned vigorously against the idea of a person of
“foreign origin” holding the prime minister’s office.) Instead
Manmohan Singh, the Sikh economist responsible for starting India’s
globalization in 1991, became India’s first non-Hindu prime minister.
The new government pledged to review the privatization of companies
on a case-by-case basis. In the 2005 budget Singh’s government placed
a 2 percent surcharge on all taxes, proposed a defense budget increased
Modi’s Pride Yatra, Gujarat 2002. Black Cat Indian commandos (members of India’s elite
National Security Guard) protect Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s “chariot” north of
Ahmedabad. Modi’s “Pride Yatra”—a procession that traveled throughout Gujarat—was part
of an election campaign calculated to appeal to Hindu nationalist sentiments in the aftermath
of the state’s worst Hindu-Muslim riots since partition. (AP/Wide World Photos)
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INDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Congress victory celebration, New Delhi 2004. Jubilant Congress supporters parade images of
three Gandhis—Sonia, Rajiv, and Indira—in a victory procession following the May national
elections. But while Italian-born Sonia Gandhi was widely credited with bringing about the
Congress victory, a virulent anti-foreign campaign by BJP leaders prevented her from accepting the
office of prime minister. Instead Manmohan Singh, an internationally known economist and
second in authority within the Congress, became India’s prime minister. (AP/Wide World Photos)
by 18 percent, and pledged an additional $2.2 billion for education,
health care, and water and infrastructure programs in rural India.
Conclusion
The Congress victory in 2004 underscored once again the effectiveness
of election campaigns that promise to improve the lot of India’s poorest
voters. Since 1947 politicians had won elections on this basis—campaigning for a new socialist order, for the abolition of poverty, or for an
end to government corruption. The difficulty came after the election, as
politicians voted into power on platforms of economic reform found
they had neither the will nor the political support to carry forward
broad-based plans, particularly for rural economic reform. The emergence of low-caste and Untouchable political parties in the 1990s—and
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
what was widely seen as a decisive rural vote against the BJP in 2004—
added new elements into an already complex Indian political and social
equation.
Although the BJP had lost the 2004 election it still polled 20 percent
of the vote. Core BJP support came from middle-class but primarily
upper-caste voters in the north. It was to this economic and social constituency—and to the RSS organization that had created it—that the
BJP seemed likely to return. “After six years of ideological and organizational flip-flop,” BBC News remarked, “the BJP [is] ready to return to
its pre-1996 status of being an appendage of the RSS” (“India’s BJP Eyes
up Poorer Voters” 2004).
India in the early years of the 21st century seemed poised on a dramatic knife-edge of change. On the one hand were communalist
Hindutva leaders with their 20 percent of the electorate; on the other
hand, the new politically energized low-caste and Untouchable communities and a newly awakened rural electorate. The Indian political
system, the world’s largest democracy, still remained in 2004 as it had
throughout the 20th century: a problematic vehicle for meeting the
needs of Indian minorities. Yet democratic majority rule may well serve
as a vehicle for change for India’s newly conscious majorities—the lowcaste and Untouchable communities that were much more than half the
voting Indian public and the 72 percent of Indians living in the country’s long-neglected rural villages.
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APPENDIX 1
Basic Facts about India
Official Name
Republic of India
Government
Since the late 1970s, India’s constitution has defined its government as
a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.” Suffrage is universal, with all Indians over the age of 18 eligible to vote in governmental elections.
The government is a federated mixed parliamentary-presidential system. The central government has two houses: the Lok Sabha (People’s
Assembly), the lower house, based on proportional representation with no
more than 550 members directly elected to five-year terms; and the Rajya
Sabha (States’ Assembly), a 250-member upper house elected by provincial legislative assemblies for six-year terms. Within the Lok Sabha, a
prime minister and cabinet (the Council of Ministers) head the government and must retain the support of a majority of Lok Sabha members to
remain in power. The central government’s administrative powers are
exercised in the name of a president and vice president elected by a special electoral college for five-year terms; the president’s duties, however,
are largely ceremonial. India also has an independent judiciary headed by
the Supreme Court made up of a chief justice and 25 other judges, all
appointed by the president on the advice of the prime minister.
India’s 29 state governments are run by chief ministers responsible to
state legislatures, some of which are bicameral. In addition, India’s president appoints a governor for each state who may take over the state’s government in times of emergency. The central government has greater
authority over the republic’s union territories. The relative powers of central and state governments are specifically defined in the Constitution of
1950. Since 1985 a special act has given village panchayats (councils)
considerable authority over local social, health, educational, and developmental issues.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Political Divisions
Capital
New Delhi
States
There are 28 states: Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar,
Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and
Kashmir, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra,
Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan,
Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh, and West
Bengal.
Union Territories
The seven union territories are Andaman and Nicobar Islands,
Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Delhi,
Lakshadweep, and Pondicherry.
Geography
Area
India covers an area of 1,269,345.6 square miles (3,287,590 sq. km). It
is the largest country on the South Asian subcontinent, approximately
three-quarters the size of Europe (including Russia), and about onethird the size of the United States.
Boundaries
India’s triangular-shaped landmass is bounded by water on two sides: the
Arabian Sea on the west and the Bay of Bengal on the east. (These seas
merge into the Indian Ocean to the south.) Immediately to the east of
India’s southernmost tip lies the country of Sri Lanka. In the northwest
India shares a long border with Pakistan; in the north and northeast it
shares borders with China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.
Topography
India is made up of four topographical regions: 1) The mountain rim to
the north, including the Himalayan and the Karakoram ranges and the
Hindu Kush; 2) the rich Indo-Gangetic alluvial plain across the north,
cut by the Indus River to the west and the Ganges River system to the
east; 3) the Deccan Plateau and the highlands of peninsular India; and
4) the narrow strips of the coastal fringe regions that run along India’s
southwestern and southeastern coastline.
Climate
India’s climate is determined by its basic topography. The relative flatness of Indian lands south of the high northern mountain ranges
286
APPENDIX 1
draws in air currents from the surrounding seas to the south, while
the extreme height of the northern mountains keeps airstreams from
moving further north into the main Asian continent. The pattern of
seasons throughout most of India includes a cool, dry winter from
October to March; a hot season with temperatures well above 100°
Fahrenheit (38° Celsius) between March/April and June/July; and a
rainy season that lasts into September, caused by the southwestern
monsoon.
Highest Elevation
India’s highest elevation is at Mount Kanchenjunga, the world’s thirdhighest mountain, measuring 28,169 feet (8,586 m).
Demographics
Population
India is the second most populous country in the world after China.
Although India occupies less than 2 percent of the world’s land area, it
supports more than 17 percent of the world’s population.
India’s population was estimated in 2007 at 1,129,866,154. In the
last Indian census (2001) the population was 1,028,610,328.
Urban v. Rural Populations
According to the 2001 census, 72.2 percent of India’s population lives
in more than 638,588 villages; 27.8 percent lives in India’s 5,161 cities
and towns.
Major Cities
According to the 2001 census, India has 27 cities with populations above
1 million. The three largest cities are Mumbai (Bombay), with 12,622,500
residents; Delhi, with 10,400,900 residents; and Kolkata (Calcutta) with
4,852,800 residents. After these three, the next 10 largest cities are
Bangalore, Chennai (Madras), Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune, Kanpur,
Surat, Jaipur, Lucknow, and Nagpur.
Literacy Rates
According to the 2001 census, 64.8 percent of the Indian population is
literate: 75.3 percent of the male population is literate and 53.7 percent
of the female population.
Languages
The 16 spoken languages officially recognized in India are Assamese,
Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Telugu, Malayalam,
Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, and Urdu.
287
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Religions
According to the 2001 Indian census, major religions in India are practiced among the population as follows: 80.5 percent Hindus, 13.4 percent Muslims, 2.3 percent Christians, 1.9 percent Sikhs, 0.8 percent
Buddhists, 0.4 percent Jains. (Census figures for 2001 included population figures for the states of Jammu and Kashmir and Assam, two
heavily Muslim regions, for the first time since 1971).
Economy
Gross Domestic Product
For 2006 India’s gross domestic product (GDP) was estimated at $4.156
trillion (when measured by purchasing power). The Indian economy
has had an average growth rate of more than 7 percent since 1996.
Currency
The Indian currency is the rupee.
Agricultural Products
Major food products are sugarcane, rice, wheat, pulses, tea, potatoes,
bananas, maize, coconuts, soybeans, coffee, and cocoa beans; meat
products are cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats, poultry, and fish. Major
nonfood products are cotton, tobacco, oilseeds, and jute. India also has
major stands of timber, including oak, pine, sal, teak, ebony, palms, and
bamboo.
Minerals
Major mineral resources include coal, zinc, iron ore, copper, lead, bauxite, manganese, and phosphates. Although India imports petroleum, it
has oil resources in Assam, Gujarat, and offshore oil fields.
Industrial Products
Indian industries traditionally focused on agricultural processing and
light manufacturing, including cotton, woolen, and silk textiles; jute; and
leather products. India now also produces iron and steel, as well as electronics, armaments, machine tools, transportation equipment, chemicals,
and cut diamonds. In addition, it has developed a large computer software industry. The large India film industry is located in Mumbai,
Kolkata, and Chennai. Since the globalization of India’s economy in the
1990s, international call centers have also been located in India.
Trade
In the early years of Indian independence and up to the break up of the
Soviet Union, the USSR was India’s largest trading partner as well as its
288
APPENDIX 1
biggest supplier of defense weaponry. Since the liberalization of India’s
economy in the 1990s, India’s largest trading partner for both imports
and exports has been the United States. Other important partners for
imports were Belgium, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Japan; and
for exports, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, and Germany.
289
APPENDIX 2
Chronology
Prehistory
50 million years ago
30,000–4,000 B.C.
7000
2600–1900
1700–1400
1500–900
Tectonic plate movements bring an island into
collision with the main Asian continent forming the Himalaya Mountains, Tibetan plateau,
and the South Asian subcontinent
Stone Age communities live in Gujarat,
Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh,
and Bihar
Agriculture and domestication of animals
begins at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan
Harappan civilization develops in the Indus
River valley region
Indo-Aryan tribes inhabit Afghanistan and the
Punjab
Composition of the Rig-Veda
The Hindu World Order
1200–300
c. 600
600–500
c. 500
c. 486–355
c. 468
c. 350
Indo-Aryan tribes and culture spread into
Ganges River valley, and urban culture develops
Composition of three other Vedas and the
major Upanishads
Sixteen mahajanapadas (great clan’s territories)
form in Gangetic region
Composition of core texts of the Mahabharata
and Ramayana
Range of date of death of Siddhartha Gautama,
founder of Buddhism.
Death of Mahavira Vardhamana, historical
founder of Jainism
Mahapadma Nanda establishes political control
of Magadha region and other Gangetic states
290
APPENDIX 2
327
Alexander of Macedonia crosses Indus River
and invades India
320
Mauryan dynasty founded by Chandragupta
Maurya
c. 268–233
Ashoka rules Mauryan Empire
c. 250
Third Buddhist Council convenes under auspices of Ashoka
200–100
Scythian tribes settle in northern India
200–50
Bactrian Greek kingdoms are established in
north India; King Menander rules c. 160–130
Shunga dynasty overthrows Mauryan dynasty
185 B.C.
Composition of major Hindu law codes (Laws
c. 100 B.C.–A.D. 100
of Manu) and of the Bhagavad Gita (incorporated into the Mahabharata)
Trade routes established between Roman
100 B.C.–A.D. 800
Empire (and its successors) and Indian coasts
1st–3rd centuries A.D. Kushana tribes defeat Scythians in northern
India; Kushana leader Kanishka rules c. A.D. 78
or 144
Satavahana dynasty rules Deccan region
Chola, Chera, and Pandya dynasties compete
for regional power in southern India
1st–5th centuries
Spread of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism
along with Sanskrit-based culture into southern and western India
A.D. 52
St. Thomas is martyred on Malabar Coast
according to legend
320–550
Gupta dynasty establishes empire across north
India
6th–9th centuries
Southern Indian dynasties of Chalukyas
(Karnataka), Pallavas (Kanchipuram), Pandyas
(Madurai), and Cholas (Tanjore) compete for
power
c. 500
Composition of the major Puranas
500–530
Hunas (tribes) occupy western India
569–632
Muhammad, founder of the Islamic religion,
in Saudi Arabia
606–647
Harsha establishes empire across north India
Turks, Afghans, Mughals
7th–10th centuries
Bhakti religious sects appear in south India;
63 Shaivite saints (the Nayanars) and 12
291
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
7th–12th centuries
c. 8th–9th centuries
700–1000
712
850–1279
971–1030
c. 1017–1137
1151–1206
1206–1526
1258
1299–1308
1335–42
1336–1565
1347–1518
1398–99
15th–18th centuries
1469–1539
1510
1526–30
Vaishnavites (the Alvars) are associated with
these bhakti sects
Persecution of Jaina and Buddhist communities in southern India
Shankara founds Vedanta school of philosophy
Arab traders settle on Malabar Coast and in
Konkan region
Arabs seize Sind and Baluchistan
Chola dynasty rules southern India and Sri
Lanka
Mahmud of Ghazni rules Afghan empire and
invades India between 1001 and 1027
Ramanuja, south Indian Brahman founder of a
school of Vedanta emphasizing the importance
of bhakti
Ghurid dynasty rules Afghan region and
northern India
Dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate rule northern
India; major dynasties are the Slave dynasty
(founded 1206), Khalji dynasty (1290), Tughluq
dynasty (1320), Sayyid dynasty (1414), and
Lodi dynasty (1451)
Mongol armies destroy caliphate at Baghdad
Mongol armies make four successive invasions
of India
Famine kills residents in Delhi and surrounding regions
Vijayanagar kingdom rules the southern
peninsula of India
Bahmani Sultanate rules the Deccan
Timur (Tamerlane) invades India and sacks
Delhi
Bhakti religious sects appear in northern
India; among the saints associated with these
sects are Kabir (born c. 1440), Chaitanya
(born c. 1486), Surdas and Mirabai (c. 15th
century), Tulsidas (b. 1532), and Tukaram
(b. 1598).
Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh religion
Portuguese establish a settlement at Goa
Babur founds the Mughal Empire (1526–1857)
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APPENDIX 2
1530–56
1542
1556–1605
1600
1605–27
1612–90
1627–58
1627–80
1650
1658–1707
1660s
by defeating the Lodi sultan in battle at
Panipat
Humayun rules the Mughal Empire
Jesuit St. Francis Xavier travels to Goa
Akbar rules the Mughal Empire
Founding of the East India Company in
England
Jahangir rules the Mughal Empire
English establish warehouses (“factories”) at
Surat, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta
Shah Jahan rules the Mughal Empire
Shivaji Bhonsle, founder of Maratha power in
Maharashtra
Dutch establish control over the spice trade
from bases in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka
Aurangzeb rules the Mughal Empire
French establish settlements at Surat and
Pondicherry and in Bengal
The British Raj
1746–63
c. 1750s–1818
1757
1764
1767–70
1769–99
1773
1784
Three Carnatic Wars are fought between the
French and English in India
Maratha Confederacy rules from Pune
East India Company armies defeat the nawab
of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey
English armies defeat a coalition led by the
Mughal emperor at the Battle of Buxar
(Baksar); from 1765 the East India Company
is granted the diwani (right to collect land
revenues) in province of Bengal
Famine in Bengal kills an estimated one-third
of the region’s peasants
In the four Anglo-Mysore Wars, East India
Company fights and ultimately defeats the
Mysore rulers Haidar Ali Khan and his son
Tipu Sultan
British Regulating Act reorganizes East India
Company operations; Warren Hastings is first
governor-general appointed under this act
Sir William Jones founds the Asiatic Society
of Bengal
293
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1793
1802–18
1813
1816
1817
1820s
1828
1829
1833
1835
1836–1921
1845–49
William Pitt’s India Act is passed in England
to bring East India Company more directly
under parliamentary controls
Governor-General Cornwallis passes wideranging reforms of company operations, collectively called the Cornwallis Code
Cornwallis’s permanent settlement of Bengal
gives landownership to local zamindars in
perpetuity and becomes a model for company
land settlements in India
East India Company armies defeat Maratha
Confederacy and annex Maratha lands
Charter of East India Company is renewed by
Parliament; new charter provisions allow
private traders and missionaries to travel to
and work in company territories
Bengali Gazette, first newspaper published in
an Indian language, is founded in Calcutta
English-language Hindu College is founded in
Calcutta
Sir Thomas Munro develops ryotwari land
settlements in Madras Presidency, making revenue settlements with individual cultivators
(ryots) for fixed periods of time
Rammohan Roy founds the religious association the Brahmo Sabha (later Brahmo Samaj)
in Calcutta
Governor-General William Bentinck makes
sati illegal in company territories
Parliament’s Charter Act ends East India
Company’s commercial functions
Thomas Babington Macaulay writes his
“Minute on Education” arguing that English,
not Indian languages, should be the medium
for Indian education
Muslim Moplah communities along the
Malabar Coast carry out periodic rebellions
against Hindu landlords and British government
British armies defeat Sikh forces in two
Anglo-Sikh wars and annex the Punjab
294
APPENDIX 2
1849–56
1853
1854
1857–58
1858
1861
1866–78
1868
1869
1870–85
1871
1873
Governor-General Dalhousie’s government
annexes princely states in Bengal, Rajasthan,
the Punjab, and Oudh
India’s first passenger railroad opens in Bombay; major rail lines are laid up through the
1920s
Wood Dispatch authorizes creation of
university centers at Bombay, Madras, and
Calcutta for English-language college education in India
Appointments to the Indian Civil Service
(ICS) are made on the basis of competitive
examinations held in England
Rebellion begins with sepoy (soldier) mutiny
near Delhi and develops into a widespread,
but not united uprising against British rule;
put down by the British with great difficulty
British government in England passes laws
abolishing East India Company and placing
the Indian empire under direct Crown rule;
two-thirds of India is ruled directly by the
British; princely (or native) states (totaling
almost 600 princes) make up almost one-third
of Indian territories and are ruled indirectly
Indian Councils Act allows appointment of
between three and six Indian members to the
governor-general’s council
Famines spread across north and south India
Deoband Dar-ul-Ulum, a modernized Muslim
madrasa for the education of ulamas, is
founded at Deoband
Suez Canal opens, shortening trip from Great
Britain to India to less than three weeks
English-educated Indians form regional
political associations in cities such as Pune
(1870), Calcutta (1875), Madras (1878), and
Bombay (1885)
Start of the decennial (10-year) Indian census
Jyotirao Phule, a Pune Untouchable, founds
the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth-Rectification
Society) to unify lower-caste communities
295
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1873
1875
1875–77
1876
1878
1878–80
1880s–90s
1882
1883–84
In Pabna district, eastern Bengal, prosperous
peasants organize protest meetings, rent
strikes, and legal challenges to fight zamindar
rent increases
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan founds the
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at
Aligarh to provide elite Muslim students with
English-language education
Peasants protest falling cotton prices in the
Deccan cotton riots
Dayananda Saraswati founds the Arya Samaj,
a reform Hindu society, in western and northern India
Queen Victoria is proclaimed empress of India
Vernacular Press Act requires Indian-language
presses (but not those published in English)
to post bonds for their conduct with the government; English-educated Indians in major
Indian cities organize to protest the act
British fight a war against the Afghan regime
to their northwest to gain protection against
possible Russian encroachments into Afghanistan and India
Cow protection riots between Hindu and
Muslim communities over issues of the
slaughter of cattle for meat erupt across
northern Indian
Theosophist Society establishes its Indian
headquarters at Madras
British Indian government proposes Ilbert
Bill, an act that would allow Indian judges to
try cases involving Europeans; public protests
by the Anglo-Indian community force the
altering of the bill
Toward Freedom
1885
1887
First meeting of the Indian National Congress
is held in Bombay, attended by 75 delegates
from every British Indian province
M. G. Ranade founds the Indian National Social
Conference, a meeting of social reformers
296
APPENDIX 2
1891
1892
1893–95
1896–97
1897
1899–1900
1905
1906
1907
1911
1914
Government’s Age of Consent bill raises the
age of statutory rape of girls from 10 to 12
and provokes mass meetings and protests
from Hindu communities in Bengal and
Maharashtra
Indian Councils Act provides for indirect
elections of candidates to the central and
regional Legislative Councils in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras
Maximum age for taking the Indian Civil
Service exams is raised to 23
Bal Gangadhar Tilak inaugurates two political
Hindu festivals in Maharashtra: one celebrating the birthday of the Hindu god Ganesh; the
other celebrating the Marathi hero Shivaji
Famine causes 5 million deaths across India
Swami Vivekananda founds the Ramakrishna
Mission in Calcutta
Damodar and Balkrishna Chapedar assassinate
Pune’s unpopular plague commissioner, Walter
Rand; Tilak is imprisoned for sedition.
A second all-India famine causes another 5
million deaths
Birsa Munda leads Munda tribe members in
Bihar in a two-month rebellion against the
British government
Governor-General Curzon’s government partitions the province of Bengal; the partition is
protested through the swadeshi movement, a
widespread boycott of British goods, honors,
and institutions
All-Indian Muslim League is founded
Indian National Congress splits between its
older “moderate” members and its younger
“extremists” during its meeting at Surat
A Delhi durbar is held to celebrate the
coronation of the British king, George V
Partition of Bengal is rescinded
Transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi
is announced
British Indian government declares India at
war against Germany
297
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1915
1916
1916–24
1919
1920
Hindu Mahasabha is founded
A reunited Congress and the Muslim League
jointly propose the Lucknow Pact, a plan for
constitutional reforms to give elected Indian
representatives additional power at the
provincial and the central levels; the principle
of separate electorates for Muslims is accepted
and detailed in the pact
A worldwide pan-Islamic Khilafat movement
forms to preserve the Ottoman sultan’s role as
caliph and Islamic holy places in the Middle
East; it ends in 1924 when Kemal Atatürk,
ruler of Turkey, abolishes the Ottoman
caliphate
The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms propose a
new system called “dyarchy,” under which the
British Indian government would turn over
responsibility for some areas of government,
while reserving other departments; although
widely denounced as inadequate, most parties
participate in elections under these reforms
Rowlatt Acts make permanent (over Indian
protests) temporary sedition laws enacted
during World War I; Mohandas K. Gandhi
calls for a nationwide hartal (strike) that
turns violent
British general Reginald Dyer orders his
troops to fire without warning on a peaceful
crowd gathered at Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar; Dyer is forced to resign from the military
but becomes a hero to British imperialists
M. N. Roy founds the Communist Party of
India
Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement
c. 1920s
1921–22
Periyar founds the Self Respect Movement for
Dravidians in Madras
Gandhi and Indian Khilafat movement organize a national noncooperation campaign
against the British; 20,000 Indians are jailed
298
APPENDIX 2
1923
1925
1927
1928
1930
1931
1931–32
for civil disobedience; Gandhi abruptly ends
the campaign when violence erupts
Indian Civil Service examinations are held
simultaneously in England and India for the
first time
The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), a
paramilitary Hindu nationalist organization, is
founded at Nagpur
The British-appointed Simon Commission
tours India to recommend future political
reforms and is boycotted because it has no
Indian members
Indian radio begins under a government
monopoly.
At a Congress-sponsored All-Parties Conference,
Mahasabha members block Mohammed Ali
Jinnah’s compromise proposal for minority representation; Jinnah joins the All-India Muslim
Conference, which demands separate electorates
for Muslims in any future government
Gandhi and the Congress begin a new
campaign, the Salt March, against the British;
an estimated 90,000 Indians are jailed for
civil disobedience during this campaign
British government convenes the first Round
Table Conference, inviting all Indian
constituencies to debate future governmental reforms; Congress boycotts the first
conference
Gandhi and the British viceroy, Baron Irwin,
reach the Gandhi-Irwin pact, which ends civil
disobedience, releases protesters from jail,
and commits Gandhi to attend the Round
Table Conference in London
First Indian film with sound is produced in
Bombay
The second Round Table Conference, with
Gandhi attending, deadlocks over the question
of minority representation in a future central
government
299
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1932
1933
1935
1937
1939
1940
1942
1942–45
1942–46
1945–46
The Indian government awards separate
electorates to a number of Indian groups,
among them Untouchables; Gandhi begins a
fast-to-the-death in protest; Poona Pact,
between Gandhi and Untouchable leader
B. R. Ambedkar, replaces separate electorates
with reserved seats for Untouchables
Cambridge University Muslim student coins a
name for the future separate Islamic Indian
state: “Pakistan”
Government of India Act creates a federated
government in India in which the provinces
are run by elected Indian officials and the
center by the British Indian government;
Many provisions of this act carry over into
the government of independent India
Congress wins provincial elections and forms
governments in eight Indian provinces;
Muslim League fails to form a single government; as governors, Congress politicians make
few concessions to Muslim politicians
British government declares India at war with
Germany in World War II
Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution demands
an independent Muslim state
Cripps Mission offers Congress only a
guarantee of dominion status at the end of the
war; Congress rejects the plan, demanding an
immediate share in the central governing of
India
Congress launches the Quit India civil
disobedience campaign; all Congress leaders
are immediately jailed, but widespread protest
occurs nonetheless
Subhas Bose joins the Axis powers and leads
his Indian National Army against British
troops in Burma; Bose dies in a plane crash in
1945
Famine in Bengal kills an estimated 3 million
people
In central and provincial elections Jinnah and
300
APPENDIX 2
1946
1947
1947–49
1948
1949
the Muslim League campaign for an independent Muslim state in India; the league wins
most Muslim seats; Congress wins 91 percent
of all non-Muslim seats
British cabinet mission to India fails to find a
formula for granting independence because
Jinnah and Congress cannot agree on the structure of any future central Indian government
Jinnah calls for “Direct Action Day” to demonstrate Muslims’ commitment to Pakistan; violent communal rioting breaks out, killing
4,000 in Calcutta and spreading across northern India
Lord Mountbatten is appointed the last
British viceroy to India and brokers a final plan
to partition British India into two separate
countries, India and Pakistan
India and Pakistan become independent
dominions at midnight on August 14
Partition boundaries, announced August 17,
produce communal violence in which 10
million people become refugees
Most Indian princes agree to transfer their
states to either India or Pakistan. India seizes
control of the princely states of Hyderabad and
Junagadh
India and Pakistan go to war over the state of
Kashmir; United Nations cease-fire and a
temporary division of the disputed state ends
the war; India agrees to hold a plebiscite to
determine Kashmir’s future
Gandhi is assassinated in New Delhi by
Naturam Godse, a right-wing militant Hindu
Hindu Marriage Validating Act removes legal
barriers to intercaste marriage
Constructing the Nation
1950
1951–55
New Indian constitution becomes law, establishing India as a democratic republic
First Five-Year Plan successfully reestablishes
the stability of India’s economy
301
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1952
1955–56
1956
1956–61; 1961–66
1959
1962
1964
1965–85
1966
Congress Party wins the first elections held
under the new constitution and forms India’s
first government; Jawaharlal Nehru becomes
India’s first prime minister; Nehru remains
prime minister at the head of Congress
governments until his death in 1964
Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act,
and Adoption and Maintenance Act reform
marriage customs and equalize women’s
access to paternal property; Untouchability
(Offences) Act provides penalties for discrimination against Untouchables
Indian government creates 14 language-based
states
Untouchable leader B. R. Ambedkar converts
to Buddhism, as do many of his followers
Second and Third Five-Year Plans focus
economic efforts on industrializing the Indian
economy
Panchayati Raj Plan organizes agricultural and
village development work in Indian states
Indian television begins as a government
monopoly
India and China go to war over disputed
boundaries in the northeast, resulting in an
Indian military defeat and the loss of the
Karakoram Pass to China
Nehru dies after a long illness; Lal Bahadur
Shastri is elected prime minister
New strains of wheat and rice introduced into
the Punjab and other Indian regions produce
a “Green Revolution,” dramatically increasing
crop production, particularly in the Punjab
India’s refusal to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir
leads to a brief war with Pakistan in which
Indian forces dominate; truce mediated by the
Soviet Union returns Kashmir to its 1949
status; Shastri dies suddenly immediately
following the negotiations
In midst of escalating food shortages and
302
APPENDIX 2
1967
1969
1970–71
1971
1972–74
1974
1975
1975–77
1977
rising prices, Congress Party bosses choose
Indira Gandhi as prime minister
Congress wins reelection by its smallest
margin to date as India’s food crisis worsens;
anti-Brahman DMK party takes power in
Madras; Sikh party Akali Dal wins control of
the newly created province of the Punjab
Gandhi nationalizes 14 of India’s private banks
Gandhi abolishes the privy purses awarded to
former Indian princes
Gandhi, expelled from Congress, wins
election through her own Congress (R) Party
on a platform of abolishing poverty
War between East and West Pakistan leads
India into a brief war with West Pakistan; Pakistan surrenders, and East Pakistan
becomes the independent country of Bangladesh
Monsoon failures create food shortages, rising
prices, and near famine conditions; international loans restrict India’s economic plans
India detonates an underground nuclear device
Coalition of opposition parties protesting
government corruption and rising prices
becomes a national movement, the Janata
Morcha (People’s Front), against Gandhi’s government
High Court of Uttar Pradesh finds Gandhi
guilty of corrupt election practices and bars
her from holding office
Gandhi has the president of India declare a
national emergency, jails her political opponents, suspends civil rights, and takes control
of the government
Sanjay Gandhi leads efforts to raze urban slums
and effect birth control through sterilization
Indira Gandhi calls for new elections, ending
“the Emergency” and freeing her political
opponents; Janata coalition wins the election,
and Morarji Desai becomes prime minister
303
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1978–80
1980
1981
1982
1983
1983–84
1984
Janata government’s Mandal Commission
Report identifies more than 3,000 castes and
communities (“Other Backward Classes”) that
deserve preferential treatment in government
jobs and education
Janata coalition loses election to Indira Gandhi
and her Congress (I) Party; Sanjay Gandhi dies
in a plane crash; Rajiv Gandhi wins election to
Parliament
In Tamil Nadu mass conversions of Untouchables to Islam in ceremonies sponsored
by the Muslim League raise Hindu nationalist
fears of a threat to the Hindu majority in India
Doordarshan, the government television
station, adds programming and expands its
audience through satellites
The VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) organizes
the Ekamata Yatra (procession for oneness) to
demonstrate Hindu unity
Phoolan Devi, India’s “Bandit Queen,”
surrenders and is imprisoned
VHP begins a national Ramjanmabhoomi
campaign, an effort to restore the god Rama’s
birthplace in Ayodhya by destroying a 16thcentury Muslim mosque, Babri Masjid, said to
have been built over that site
RSS founds a new youth wing, the Bajrang Dal,
to work on the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign
and is involved in forming a new political party,
the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), out of the old
Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh party
Indian army in “Operation Bluestar” invades
the sacred Sikh temple at Amritsar to destroy
the Sikh militant leader Bhindranwale and his
followers
Indira Gandhi is assassinated by Sikh members
of her bodyguard. Rajiv Gandhi becomes
prime minister and calls for new elections,
which Congress wins overwhelmingly
Gas tank at a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal,
Madhya Pradesh, explodes, killing 3,000–5,000
304
APPENDIX 2
1985
1986
1987
1987–90
1989
1990
people and injuring tens of thousands more
Kanshi Ram founds the Bahujan Samaj Party
to organize low castes and Dalits (Untouchables) as a political majority
After a legal judgment in the Shah Bano case
antagonizes conservative Muslims, Gandhi’s
government passes a bill making sharia
practices the law for Indian Muslims
As the number of dowry deaths increases,
government makes such deaths a special
category of crime to facilitate prosecution
V. P. Singh exposes the Bofors scandal in the
Gandhi government and is expelled from the
Congress Party; Singh founds an opposition
party, the Janata Dal
Indian army unsuccessfully fights the Tamil
Tiger guerrilla movement in Sri Lanka
Singh’s Janata Dal and National Front defeat
Congress; the front forms a coalition government with support from the BJP; Singh
becomes prime minister.
Singh government’s decision to implement the
Mandal Report recommendations produces
upper-caste protests and student suicides
VHP announces that construction of its Rama
temple in Ayodhya will begin in October; BJP
leader L. K. Advani begins a party procession
from Gujarat in support of the campaign;
Prime Minister Singh orders Advani’s arrest in
Bihar, and the BJP withdraws from Singh’s
government
India at the Turn of the Century
1991
Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated in Tamil Nadu by
a member of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers
Congress wins enough votes in the elections
to form a coalition government with Narasimha Rao as prime minister
Rao’s finance minister, Manmohan Singh,
implements a strict economic program to
open India’s economy to global markets
305
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
1992
1996
1998
1998–99
1999
2000
2001–02
2002
VHP volunteers break into the Babri Masjid
grounds in Ayodhya and destroy the mosque;
communal rioting breaks out across northern
India; Prime Minister Rao arrests major
Hindu nationalists and temporarily bans the
RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal from further
activity
Samajwadi Party is founded to organize Other
Backward Classes (OBCs) in Bihar and Uttar
Pradesh
Elections give the BJP a plurality, but the
party is unable to form a coalition government;
coalition of small parties forms government,
first with Deve Gowda and then with Inder
Kumar Gujral as prime minister
Bahujan Samaj Party forms a brief coalition
government in Uttar Pradesh
Phoolan Devi wins election to Uttar Pradesh
seat as Samajwadi Party candidate
BJP succeeds in forming a coalition government
by abandoning key elements of its Hindutva
(Hindu nationalist) agenda
More than 100 violent attacks are made
against Christians in the tribal areas of several
states and in Orissa
Tensions worsen between India and Pakistan
as both countries explode nuclear devices and
as Muslims in India-controlled Kashmir
increase their attacks
BJP emerges from a new national election at
the head of a stronger coalition government
Dowry deaths are now estimated to number
5,000 per year according to UNICEF
Pakistan-based militants attack the Red Fort
in New Delhi, killing three people; armed
terrorists attack the Parliament complex
killing eight people
As VHP celebrates 10-year anniversary of
Ayodhya movement, Muslims kill 58 Hindu
nationalist volunteers on a train in Godhra,
306
APPENDIX 2
2002–03
2004
2005
2006
2007
Gujarat; communal riots rage in Gujarat
over several months
India and Pakistan withdraw political envoys
and mass soldiers on borders in Kashmir
BJP loses national election after running on a
campaign of “India Shining”; Congress Party
forms government with economist Manmohan
Singh as prime minister
India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany ask for permanent seats on the UN Security Council
A tsunami caused by an undersea earthquake
off the coast of Sumatra destroys coastal communities in South and Southeast Asia, killing
thousands in southern India and the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands
Bus service resumes, between the Indian and
Pakistani regions of Kashmir.
Kashmiri terrorist bombs in New Delhi kill 60
people; in Bangalore, Kashmiri terrorists fire on
a technology conference
India and the United States sign a nuclear cooperation agreement allowing India to buy
nuclear fuel in exchange for external inspection
of its civilian nuclear plants
Kashmiri terrorists explode bombs in eight
locations on a Mumbai commuter rail line,
killing 182 people; bombings result in a fourmonth suspension of India and Pakistan peace
talks
Terrorist bombs kill 68 passengers on an Indiato-Pakistan train, part of resumed rail service
between the two countries
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) wins a landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh, returning
Mayawati as chief minister; twenty-five die in
Rajasthan as the OBC Gujjar caste demands the
lowering of its caste status to gain access to
more reserved government jobs
307
APPENDIX 3
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University of Chicago Press, 1996.
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Béteille, André. The Backward Classes in Contemporary India. Delhi and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Brass, Paul R. The Politics of India since Independence. 2d ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Coleman, Denise Youngblood. “India: 2005 Country Review.”
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Politics in India. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1993.
Hasan, Zoya, ed. Parties and Party Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Human Rights Watch. “Politics by Other Means: Attacks against
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Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
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330
Index
Boldface page numbers indicate major treatment of a subject. Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations.
Page numbers followed by m indicate maps, by t indicate tables, and by c indicate the chronology.
A
Abdur Rahman 148
abortion 257
acculturation
decreasing importance of 152
and Indian elite 133–134
Adi Granth 81
administration
British practices in 126
by Indian Civil Service 114
by Kayasthas 55
Adoption and Maintenance Act
213, 302c
Advani, Lal Krishna 231, 264, 266,
267, 270, 305c
procession of 262
resignation of 271
advertising 258
al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 138
Afghanistan and Afghans 292c,
296c
Delhi Sultanate 69
Ghazni 62
Afghan kingdom 62
Afghan Wars 106, 148
Afzal Khan 85
Aga Khan III 168
Age of Consent Act (1891)
162–163, 297c
Agni (fire god) 23, 52
agriculture and farming 302c. See
also crops; famine; food
shortages
beginnings of 6, 290c
and bullock carts 13, 117, 117
under colonial rule 126
commercialization of 143–144
and export 156
and the Great Depression 190
Green Revolution 218, 219,
302c
and Harappan civilization 6–7,
9
as hereditary occupation 54
by Indo-Aryans 22
and Jainism 30
and land reform 214–215
Nehru era, production in 215
and price fluctuations 117
products 288
in rural India 142
in villages 243
Ahemedabad
and salt protests 192
textile production in 117, 118
ahimsa (nonviolence) 30
and Mohandas K. Gandhi 175
in Jainism 30
Ahmad Khan, Sir Sayyid 138, 168,
296c
AICC. See All-India Congress
Committee
AIR. See All-India Radio
Ajanta caves 42
“Ajita of the Hair Blanket” (sect)
28
Ajivakas (sect) 28
Akbar II 84
Akbar, Jalaluddin Muhammad xvi,
73–76, 293c
Mughal Empire, at the death of
79m
portrait of 74
and Rajputs 75
and religious freedom 77–78
and Sikhism 81
Alauddin 70–71
alcohol 225
Alexander the Great 35, 36, 291c
Ali, Mohammed 180, 189
Aligarh 138, 296c
alimony 234
Allah 60
All-India Congress Committee
(AICC) 181
All-India Muslim Conference 189,
299c
All-Indian Muslim League 297c
All-India Radio (AIR) 249
All-India Trade Union 179
All-Parties Conference 188, 299c
“all sons of this land” 187–189
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 245,
300c, 302c
and caste system 189
conversion to Buddhism of 212
on marriage 211, 213
on village system 209
amenities (basic), urban vs. rural
246t
Amritsar, Golden Temple at 226,
304c
Amritsar Massacre 176–177, 180,
298c
Anadamath (Chatterji) 167
331
ancient river valley civilizations
8m. See also Harappan
civilization
Andaman Islands 307c
Anglicists 105
Anglo-Indians 118–124
and caste xvii, 120–124
churches of 121
“civilizing mission” of 118–121
dress codes of 122–123
and Ilbert Bill 151–152, 296c
Rudyard Kipling 123–124
separation of 122
Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–99)
100, 293c
Anglo-Sikh Wars 106, 294c
animal sacrifice 22
Buddhism/Jainism and 30
Horse Sacrifice 23, 24, 24, 25,
41, 46, 55
Appar (Tamil saint) 64, 65, 65, 68
Arabic language 60
Arab-Israeli War (1973) 221
Arabs
settlement by 61–62
and spread of Islam 59–61
trade with 3, 61–62, 292c
Aranyakas 18
Arikamedu (ancient Indian port)
44
aristocrats 113, 114
Arjun (Sikh guru) 80, 81
Arjuna (prince)
in the Bhagavad Gita 50, 51
carving of 51
Arjurnand Bano Begam 83
army (colonial India). See also
soldiers
company 102
and governor-general 114
Indian soldiers in 108
and relations with the British
112
segregation of 122
sepoys in 97, 108, 109
during WWI 172
during WWII 200
Arthasastra 36–37, 56
artisans 86, 87
Aryan(s) 16–19. See also IndoAryan(s)
Brahmans as xviii, 15
and Harappan civilization 14
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Aryan(s) (continued)
and horses 17
origins of the term 14, 15
revival of race of the 160
society of the 17–18
and Untouchables 148
Aryanization 40–43
Arya Samaj 138–139, 159–161,
296c
Ashoka 37–41, 291c
and Buddhism 39
edicts of 37, 38, 39–41, 45m
and pillar at Sarnath 32
and toleration xvi
ashraf Muslims 86
ashram
for Brahmo converts 135
of Mohandas K. Gandhi 175
Asiatic Society 96, 97, 293c
assets, urban vs. rural 249, 249t
associations
Mahasabha 186, 187
regional political 125,
149–151, 295c
religious/social reform
134–139
Asvamedha. See Horse Sacrifice
Atatürk, Kemal 185, 298c
Atharva-Veda 18
atman (the self) 25
Attlee, Clement 196, 203
Aurangzeb 78–79, 83–84, 84–86,
293c
death of 88
Mughal Empire, at the death of
79m
and Rajputs 75
automobiles 248
Avesta 16
Ayodhya 266–269, 304c–307c
Ayyar, G. Subramaniya 150–151
Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam 182
B
Babri Masjid mosque xvii, 306c
demolition of 268–271, 269
Hindu temple at 234, 279
and Ramjanmabhoomi campaign 231, 304c
Babur (ruler of Kabul) 72–73,
292c–293c
The Baburnama (Thackston) 59
Bactrian-Greeks 291c
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
and jatis 55
kingdoms ruled by 44, 45
Bahadur Shah I 88
Bahadur Shah II 87, 106–107,
109–110
Bahmani Sultanate 72, 292c
Bahujan Samaj Party (Party of the
Majority; BSP) 245, 272, 305c,
306c, 307c
Bai, Phulmoni 162
Baji Rao II 101
Bajrang Del 229, 232, 304c, 306c
Baluchistan 292c
“Bande Mataram” (song) 166, 167,
170
“Bandit Queen.” See Phoolan Devi
Banerjea, Surendranath 151, 162,
173
Bangalore 241, 268, 307c
Bangladesh 221, 303c
banks 219, 303c
Bayly, Susan 157
bead-making 8, 9
Belvedere House (Calcutta) 128
“Benefits of British Rule” 133
Bengal 293c, 294c, 296c
famine in 95–96, 145, 200,
300c
hand loom industry 104
Hindu Renassiance in
128–131
land revenues from 94
Muslims in 86, 87, 171
partition of 165–168, 297c
regional political associations
in 151
revenue settlements in 98,
102–103
zamindars in 98
Bengal, Bay of 4
The Bengali Gazette (newspaper)
127, 294c
Bentinck, Lord William Cavendish
103–105, 294c
Besant, Annie 151
and “home rule leagues” 172
and Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms 176
Bhagavad Gita 291c
bhakti in 50, 51, 64
as justification for violence
163
bhajan maths (singing halls) 66
bhakti 291c–292c
beginnings of 64–67
in Bhagavad Gita 50, 51, 64
in different religions xvii
Mirabai and 67
in North India 66–67
Ramakrishna and 160
songs of saint Appar 64, 65,
65, 68
in South India 65–66, 291c
Vivekananda and 160
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 229,
231, 304c
and 1996 elections 306c
and 1999 elections 306c
and 2004 elections 281, 282,
284, 307c
Lal Krishna Advani 270
attempts to widen constituency
by the 274–276
challenge to secularism by
237–238
and Hindutva 266–267
leaders of 270
nuclear strategy of 278–279
poster for 275
in power 276–278
rise of the 276t
332
Atahl Bihari Vajpayee 229, 231,
270, 271, 277–281, 282
Bhave, Vinoba 214–215
Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh 226,
304c
Bhoodan movement 214–215
Bhopal gas explosion 235,
304c–305c
bicycles 246, 248
Birla Mandir (New Delhi) 197
Birsa Munda 146, 297c
birth groups 54, 55. See also jatis
BJP. See Bharatiya Janata Party
Black Cat Indian commandos 282
black pepper 43–44
“black town” 122
Blue Mutiny 116
Bodhi tree 32
Bofors scandal 235, 305c
Bolan Pass 3
Bollywood 250–254, 251, 263
film music 254
international appeal of 253
Sholay 252
and television series 256
Bombay (Mumbai) 241, 287, 299c.
See also Bollywood
peasant protests in 147
population of 241
railroads in 108
regional associations in 150,
295c
bonds 148, 296c
books 127, 128
borders
natural 1–4
porous 44
Bose, Subhas Chandra 188, 300c
and Congress 181, 197, 198
and Gandhi-Irwin Pact 194
Indian National Army 201
boundaries 286
China-Indian War 216, 302c
natural 1–4
boycott
of British goods 166–168, 182,
297c
and Khilafat movement 180
Round Table Conferences 299c
boys 257
Brahma (Hindu god) 28
Brahman (the creative force) 25
Brahmanas 18
Brahman bull 7
Brahmans. See also non-Brahman
movements
as Aryan interlopers xviii, 15
connections to society of 29
homes of 244
movement against 147–148
occupations of 26
as one of four varnas 54
and rituals 29
and rural caste relations 244
Brahmo Samaj 135, 136, 159, 294c
and Ramakrishna 160
Rammohan Roy 130
Britain. See Great Britain
INDEX
British. See also Anglo-Indians
and Indian “race” theory 15
ocean invasion by the 4
and religious identities xvii
view of caste system of xv
British colonial rule. See colonial
rule (British)
British East India Company 91,
293c–295c
abolishment of 112
Anglo-Mysore Wars 100
expansion of territories of
94–95, 99–102
famine under 144
and opium trade 94
and pacification of company
lands 102–103
and the palanquin 93
as paramount power 89,
99–102
Parliament and the 97, 112,
294c
taxation by 94–96, 103
trade of the 90, 94
British Indian Association 151
bronze 9
BSP. See Bahujan Samaj Party
bubonic plague 144, 163, 165
Buddha 212
awakening of 32
and Chadragupta Maurya 36
deer park 32
early years of 31, 32
Buddhism and Buddhists 31–33,
290c
and animal sacrifices 22
Ashoka and 39
cave paintings of 42
conversion to 39, 212, 212,
227, 302c
and cyclical time 28
geographic spreading of 41–43
Harsha and 57
and jatis 55
in North India 28–30
persecution of 68, 292c
in population 288
and reincarnation 26, 31, 33
spread of 291c
stupas/temples of 49
Buhlul Lodi 72
building projects
end of 84
of Shah Jahan 81, 81, 82
buildings, European-style 126
bullock carts 13, 117, 117
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Robert
(Lord Lytton) 145
Buniyaad (television show) 256
bus service 307c
bustees 224
Buxar, Battle of 293c
C
cabinet 285
cakravartin (universal ruler)
Ashoka 39
Guptas 48, 52
Harsha 57
Calcutta (Kolkata) 287, 294c, 297c
Hindu Renaissance 128–131
modernity in 126
railroads in 108
regional associations in 151,
295c
riots in 203
cankam poetry 29, 46
Canning, Lord Charles John
and reform 107
and Sepoy Rebellion 109, 111
as viceroy 113
cantonments 122
Carnatic Wars 91–92, 293c
cars 248
cartridges (rifle) 109
cassette tapes 249, 263
and “cassette culture” 240,
250, 254, 256
and urbanization 242
for women’s liberation 255
Caste Disabilities Act (1850) 108
caste system and caste(s) 54–55.
See also Brahmans; elites
(Indian); Untouchables and
Untouchability
and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
189
and Anglo-Indians xvii,
120–124
Brahmos as a 135
British “invention” of the 115
British view of xv
and coexistence xvii
de-ritualization of 243
as evidence of “backward culture” 134
history of xiv–xv
in the Indian census 266
lower castes xviii, 265,
272–276, 295c
maintaining restrictions of
242
non-Brahman movements
147–148, 189
and race 158
reforms of 108–109, 135–137
rising power of the lower
272–276
in rural India 142–143,
244–245, 245, 246
secularization of 242–243
and Sikhism 81
upper castes 265, 266, 305c
and upward mobility 271–272
vs. national identity xviii
cave paintings 42
Cawnpore
Sepoy Rebellion 109
well at 111, 112
celibacy 175
Celts 14
censorship 223
census 266, 295c
central planning
abandonment of 218
333
Five-Year Plans 213–215, 250,
301c, 302c
during Nehru’s rule 213–214
Chaitanya 66, 292c
Chalk Farm (Meerut) 119
Chalukyas 62, 63, 291c
Chandragupta (Guptan king) 47,
291c
Chandragupta II (Guptan king) 47
Chandragupta Maurya 35–37, 39
Chapedar brothers 165, 297c
Charia, M. Viraghava 151
charkha 182
Charter Act 294c
Chatterji, Bankim Chandra 167
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 125
Chelmsfort, Lord (Frederic John
Napier Tesiger) 180
Cheras 45m, 46, 47, 291c
child marriage 132, 135, 142
China
boundary disputes with 216
exports to 116, 118
and opium trade 94
China-Indian War 216, 302c
Chinggis Khan 69
chintz 120
Chitpavan Brahman 85
Cholas 46–47, 291c, 292c
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
and Puranic Hinduism 68
in South India (600–1300)
62–64
Christianity and Christians
attacks against 277, 277, 306c
conversion to 108
exclusion of xviii
missionaries 104, 131
in population 288
as RSS targets 228
St. Thomas and 46
Churchhill, Winston
on Gandhi-Irwin Pact
194–195
and Government of India Act
196
opposes Indian independence
199
citadels 13
cities. See also specific cities
population of 240, 241
trading 87
civil disobedience movement. See
noncooperation campaigns
“civilizing mission”
of Anglo-Indians 118–121
and domesticity 119, 120
civil liberties 209
Civil Lines 122
“civil lists” 122
civil rights 303c
civil service positions 265
Civil War, U.S. 144, 147
clans 290c. See also jatis
in Indo-Aryan societies 33
as jatis 54
Rajputs 75
cleanliness 119
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
climate 286–287
climate change 7, 9, 13, 14
Clive, Robert 91–93
clock time 126–127
cloth
khadi 182, 183, 193
machine-woven 104
clothing
burning of foreign 182
in Jainism 31
CNN satellite broadcast 258
coal industry 118
Code of Forty-eight Regulations.
See Cornwallis Code
coffee 116
Cohn, Bernard 4
on tributary system 52–53
on Untouchable class 54
coins (Roman) 44
cold war 215
Colebrooke, H. T. 96
collector 114
colleges, English-language. See
English-language colleges
colonial rule (British). See also
Anglo-Indians; British East India
Company; governors-general;
modernization; viceroys
1757–1885 89–124
and Anglo-Indians 118–124
Anglo-Mysore Wars 100
and caste system 115
and crown rule 112–124, 114,
295c
“divide and rule” 153, 169,
189, 200
as a drain on India 156, 190
and economics of imperial
expansion 115–118
expansion of territories under
94–95
and famine 144–145
land revenues and 102–103
Maratha Wars 100–102
and modernization 126–128
mutiny/rebellion against
109–112
opium trade 94, 116
Orientalists 96–97, 105
Battle of Plassey 92–94, 293c
and postal system 107
printing under 127, 128
and railroads 107, 108
reforms under 107–109
Regulating Act 95–96, 293c
and telegraphs 107
commensality laws 130
commercialization of agriculture
and famine 144
in rural India 143–144
commonwealth status 188
communalism, appeals to 225–226
communal violence 301c, 306c,
307c
and Hindu/Muslim clashes
185, 281
during partition of Pakistan
205–206
post-Khilafat 185–186
during Ramjanmabhoomi campaign 229
Communist Party 298c
companies (Western) 268
company lands 102–103
The Complete Indian Housekeeper
and Cook (Steel and Gardiner)
123
Congress-League Scheme of
Reform. See Lucknow Pact
Congress Party 304c, 305c
and 1937 elections 196–197
and 1952 elections 210, 302c
and 1967 elections 303c
and 1988 elections 235, 237
and 1991 elections 305c
and 2004 elections 281, 282,
283, 307c
and Amritsar Massacre 177
Subhas Chandra Bose and
181, 197, 198
calls for boycott by 182
concessions to Muslims by
197
consolidates control 200
declared illegal 195
demand for independence of
188
on federation 194
and Indira Gandhi 217, 303c
and Government of India Act
(1935) 196–198
loss of majority by 235, 237
and Lucknow Pact 298c
as a mass political party
180–181
moderates in 166, 169–171,
176, 297c
and Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms 176
Jawaharlal Nehru and 181,
188
and noncooperation plan 180
and provincial elections
196–198, 300c
Quit India! campaign 300c
reunification of 172, 173
Round Table Conferences
299c
splits in the 169–170, 220
and swadeshi boycotts 166
victories of 210, 211, 283
Congress (O) Party 220
Congress (R) Party 220–222, 224,
303c
Constitution, Indian 208–209
becomes law 301c
preamble to 207, 208
constitutional concessions 153
constitutional reforms 298c
disappointment in 176
Lucknow Pact 172–173
Minto-Morley reforms
170–171
consumerism
and Bollywood films 252
and dowry death 257
334
and middle class 248
rise of 247–249
conversion
to Buddhism 39, 212, 212,
212, 227, 302c
and Hinduism 108, 227,
304c
to Islam 61–62, 227
and property 108
of Untouchables 212, 227,
304c
“coolie” workers 116
copper 9
Cornwallis, Lord Charles 97–98,
294c
Cornwallis Code 97, 294c
coronation of king George V 171
corruption 222, 223, 235, 303c
cotton
burning of 166
export of 104, 116
prices 147, 296c
shortage of 144
textiles 78
cotton industries 117, 118
Council of Ministers 285
Court of Proprieters 91
cow fat 109
cow protection riots 161–162,
296c
cows
holiness of 21–22
and Indo-Aryans 17
protection of 77, 160–162,
168, 185, 296c
rock carving of 21
Cripps, Sir Stafford 199
Cripps Mission 300c
crops
cotton 78, 104, 116, 144, 147,
166, 296c
decrease in 144
for export 143, 144
failures 5
rice 218, 219, 302c
wheat 116, 172, 218, 219,
302c
crown rule 295c
and Anglo-Indians 118–124
beginning of 112–114
and caste system 115
and imperial expansion
115–118
princes and 113–114, 114
cultural diversity 4–5
culture
backward 134
“cassette culture” 240, 250,
254, 256
and Harappan civilization 8–9,
11, 13, 14
popular 240, 249–250
and Sanskrit 291c
urban 246, 246t, 247, 263,
290c
warrior 17
INDEX
currency 288
“curry Westerns” 252
Curzon, George Nathaniel
165–166, 297c
cyclical time 28
D
dacoits 274
Dalai Lama 216
Dalhousie, marquis of (James
Andrew Brown Ramsey) 295c
expansionist wars of 106
improvements under 107
and lapse 106
legacy of 109
and paramountcy 106
reforms/annexations of
105–106
Dalits. See Untouchables and
Untouchability
Dalitstan Organisation 15
The Dance of the Emancipated
Lady (G. Tagore) 140
Dara Shukoh 82–84
dar ul-Islam 60–61
Das, Chitta Ranjan
and Subhas Chandra Bose 181
as mayor of Calcutta 184
and noncooperation movement
180, 182
Dassehra (festival) 260
Datta, Narendranath 160
Deb, Gopimohan 128–129
Deb, Radhakanta 129–131
debt 200
Deccan region 286, 291c, 292c,
296c
Aurangzeb in the 85
famine in 145, 147
peasant protests in 147
deer park (at Sarnath) 32, 32
Defense of India Act (1915) 176
Delhi 171, 287, 292c
as capital 297c
Sepoy Rebellion 109
Delhi Sultanate 68–72, 292c
dynasties of 60–72
Mongols threat to the 68–69
democracy
and caste system xv
and national identity xviii
democratic republic 207, 208
demographics 287–288
Deoband Dar-ul-Ulum (madrassa)
137, 138, 295c
Derozio, Henry 129
Desai, Morarji 217
and Congress (O) Party 220
on Indira Gandhi 223
and OBCs 265
as prime minister 225, 303c
desire (and Buddhism) 32
Devi (Hindu goddess) 50
as bhakti god 64
and Puranic Hinduism 51
devotion (to the gods) 50, 51. See
also bhakti
Dharasana Salt Works 192
dharma 33
in Ashokan edicts 39
fulfillment of 26
as king 52
Dharmekh Stupa 32
dhimmis 61
in Delhi Sultanate 70
in Mughal Empire 77
dhoti 175
dice 8, 34
dietary laws 130
Digambara sect (Jainism) 31
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (film)
239, 253
discrimination 213, 265, 302c
disease
bubonic plague 144, 163, 165
under colonial rule 126
and famine 144
influenza 144, 179
in rural India 142
diversity
cultural 4–5
geographic xiii–xiv
of religions xv–xvi
in the Upanishads 25
“divide and rule” 153
Mohammed Ali on 189
and independence 200
and Muslims 169
obstacles created by 200
divorce 213, 234
Diwali (festival) 260, 261
diwani 293c
domestication of animals 6, 290c
domesticity 119, 120, 141
dominion status (government)
199, 203, 208, 300c
Doordarshan (government
television broadcaster) 250,
256, 258, 263, 304c
dowry
deaths over 257, 305c, 306c
illegality of demanding a 213
the “drain” 156, 190
Dravidian(s) 298c
as an ethnic identity 243
identity 272
and jatis 55
noses of 158
Dravidian languages
and Harappan writing 10
of Stone Age tribes 43
dress codes (Anglo-Indian)
122–123
durbar 171, 297c
Durga Puja pandal (New Delhi)
259
the Dutch 78, 293c
Dutt, Romeshchandra 156
dyarchy 176, 298c
Dyer, Reginald 177, 298c
dynasties. See also specific dynasties
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
Gupta Empire 47–48, 50
post-Mauryan 44–47
335
E
earthquake 307c
Eastern Ghats 4
East India Company. See British
East India Company; French
East India Company
East Pakistan 204, 221, 303c
economic miracle 268
economics of imperial expansion
115–118
economy 288–289
destabilization of the 213
Five-Year Plans 213–215, 250,
301c, 302c
under Rajiv Gandhi 233
globalization of 245–247,
267–268, 277, 305c
growth of the 233, 268
industrialization of the 302c
mixed 239
ties to empire of 190
and world markets 144
edicts, Ashokan 37, 38, 39–41,
45m
education
Deoband Dar-ul-Ulum 137,
138, 295c
English 105, 125, 131–132
Hindu College 129–131, 294c
and Muslims 137–138, 295c
question of Indian 105
and racism 134
reforms in 107, 108, 137–138
of women 142
Edward (prince of Wales) 183
Ekatmata Yatra (pilgrimage) 261,
304c
elections
of 1937 196–197, 300c
of 1945–46 200, 201
of 1952 210, 302c
of 1967 303c
of 1977 224–225
of 1980 225–226
of 1988 235, 237
of 1991 305c
of 1996 306c
of 1998 276
of 1999 306c
of 2004 281–283, 283–284,
307c
direct 170
Indira Gandhi and 225–226
indirect 297c
and Lucknow Pact 172
provincial 196–197, 300c
separate 195
village-based 181
voters in first 209
electorates, separate. See separate
electorates
elephants 8, 73
elites (Indian). See also Brahmans
acculturation of 133–134
in Calcutta 131
and George Curzon 165–166
desire to educate 105
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
elites (Indian) (continued)
English-educated 125,
132–134, 141, 142, 149,
272, 296c
and Hindu Renaissance 128
and independence movement
153
middle class as 133
and politics 149
training for wives of 141, 142
urban 152
elites (Muslim) 86, 87, 137, 138,
296c
the Emergency 221–224, 303c
emperors 52–53
empires (agrarian) 62
employment
changing labor laws 278
of English-educated elite 134
and English-language education 131
government 304c
England. See Great Britain
English-educated elites 125,
132–134, 296c
as middle class 133
and regional political associations 149
from upper-class 272
wives for 141, 142
English language
as associate language 216
as common background 133
increasing use of 126
as official language 105
English-language colleges 107,
125, 129–131, 294c, 295c
English-language education 105,
125, 131–132
English-language newspapers 127
English-language schools 131,
137, 138
enlightenment 32
epic poems 18
ethnic identities xvii
in British regiments 112
broadening definitions of 243
and caste system xv
and upward mobility 271–272
ethnicization 271–272
Europe. See also specific countries
land mass of xiv
languages of 14
European(s)
in India, (16th–17th centuries)
78
traders 3
Everest, Mount 287
examinations
college 132
for Indian Civil Service 114,
149, 184, 295c, 297c, 299c
Executive Council 114, 172
exports
of agriculture 156
of cloth 104
of cotton 104
crops for 143, 144
under crown rule 116–118
to Germany 172
and Great Depression 189,
190
growth in 268
raw material for 143
F
factories 92, 293c
family 162
family planning 224, 303c
famine 144–145, 293c, 295c, 297c,
300c, 303c. See also food
shortages
in Bengal 95–96, 145, 200,
300c
under colonial rule 126
in Deccan 145, 147
in Delhi 292c
and monsoons 144, 145, 218
in rural India 142, 145
farming. See agriculture and
farming
fasts (of Mohandas K. Gandhi)
175–176, 195, 300c
fatalism 5
Faxian (Chinese pilgrim) 32
federated government 194, 203,
300c
Fernandez, George 279
fertilizer, chemical 219, 221
festival(s) 258–260
for Durga Puja 259
for Ganesh 163, 164, 297c
Hindu 260, 260, 261
Muslim 163
pilgrimage 259–260
politics and 168, 259–262,
262–263
raths 261, 262
Sarasvati Puja 260
traditional religious 259–260
violence over 161–162
yatras 261–262
figurines
animal 9
of Harappan civilization 13
horse 17
film music 239, 249, 254, 263
film posters 251
films (movies) 249, 299c
Bollywood 250–254, 251,
256
shaping of culture by 240
and urbanization 242
fire rituals 23
Firuz Shah 71
Five-Year Plans 213–215, 250,
301c, 302c
folk music 254
food aid 218
food production
1950–2000 218t
global network of 245
and population growth 215
food shortages 5, 145, 302c, 303c.
See also famine in 1951 213
336
under colonial rule 126
increasing 216
“ford-makers” 30
foreign investment 218, 268
foreign relations 99
France 293c
Anglo-Mysore Wars 100
trading companies of 90, 92
Francis Xavier, St. 293c
freedom of thought 149
Freeman-Thomas, Freeman (Lord
Willingdon) 195
free-market rhetoric 233
French East India Company 91
G
gambling 34
Gandharan region 41, 42
Gandhi, Indira
and 1977 elections 224–225
and 1980 elections 225–226
assassination of 232, 304c
defeat of 208
emergency during rule of
221–224
jailing of 225
leftward move of 219–220
losing of election by 224–225
mother image of 217
and princes 220
reelection of 225–226
rule of 217–226
selected prime minister 303c
Gandhi, Kasturbai 193
Gandhi, Mohandas K. 202
arrest of 192
assassination of 206, 301c
and Subhas Bose 197, 198
calls for hartal 298c
early years of 173–176, 174
fasts of 175–176, 195, 300c
and hand-spinning 182–184
and the Khilafat movement
179–182, 298c–299c
last campaign of 205–206
and Muslims 205–206
and the nationalist movement
178–206
and Nehru 188
noncooperation campaign of
182–185
and nonviolent nationalism xvi
and Poona Pact 195–196
Quit India! campaign of
199–200, 300c
and Round Table Conferences
194, 195
and Rowlatt Acts 177
and Salt March campaign
190–193, 191, 299c
social vision of 183
The Story of My Experiments
with Truth 185
and Untouchables 183, 185,
195, 196
verse on meat-eating from 134
and WWI 171–172
INDEX
Gandhi, Rajiv 232–234
assassination of 237, 267,
305c
becomes prime minister 304c
campaign billboard for 232
enters politics 225–226, 304c
Gandhi, Sanjay 303c
and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
226
corruption rumors about 222
criminal charges against 225
death of 225, 304c
and Indira Gandhi 223, 224
policies of 224
Gandhi, Sonia 281, 282, 283
Gandhi-Irwin pact 194, 299c
Ganesh (Hindu god) 164
birthday of 261
festival for 163, 164, 297c
Ganges River 286
geography of 4
water from 5
Ganges River valley 290c
Gardiner, Grace 119, 122, 123
gas explosion 235, 304c–305c
gathering 6, 9, 146
Gaur (Bengal) 87
Gazni (Afghanistan) 62
General Service Enlistment Act
(1856) 108
geography 286–287
of the land 4–5
and natural borders/boundaries
1–4
river systems 4, 5
size and diversity of India
xiii–xiv
George V (king of Great Britain)
171, 297c
Germans 14, 15
Germany 297c, 300c
Ghaggar-Hakra River 7, 13
Ghanzi (Afghanistan) 62
Ghiyasuddin Tughluq 71
Ghosh, Aurobindo 170
Ghurids 62, 292c
girls
Age of Consent Act 162–163,
297c
ratio of boys to 257
globalization
continuing reforms for 277
of economy 245–247,
267–268, 277, 305c
of food production 245
GNP (gross national product) 288
Goa 216, 292c
Gobind Rai 81
Godse, Naturam V. 206, 301c
Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 149, 150,
173
gold 43, 44
Golden Temple (Amritsar) 226,
304c
goshalas 22
government 285
centralization 200, 222, 285
dominion 199, 203, 208, 300c
employment 304c
federated 194, 203, 300c
intervention 145
OBCs in 265, 273, 274
parliamentary form of 209
provincial 194, 197, 298c,
300c
secularism in 207, 208
state 209, 285
union 209
Government House (Calcutta) 99,
99
Government of India Act (1800s)
112
Government of India Act (1919)
176
Government of India Act (1935)
196–198, 209, 300c
governors-general 293c–295c,
297c. See also viceroys
Lord Bentinck 103–105, 295c
Lord Canning 107, 109, 111,
113
Lord Cornwallis 97–98, 294c
marquis of Dalhousie
105–106, 107, 109, 295c
Warren Hastings 96, 97, 100,
293c
powers of the 114
Lord Wellesley 99–102
Gowda, H. D. Deve 276, 306c
Granth Sahib 81
Great Britain 293c–297c, 299c. See
also governors-general; viceroys
Afghan war 106
Anglo-Mysore Wars 100, 293c
colonial rule by (1757–1885)
89–124. See also colonial
rule
as a drain on India 156, 190
Government of India Acts
112, 176, 196–198, 209,
300c
grants independence 200–201,
203–204
India Act 97, 184
and Indian empire 89
Maratha Wars 100–102
opium trade of 94, 116
Parliament 96, 97, 104–105,
112, 150, 294c
partition of Bengal by
165–168, 168, 297c
William Pitt 95, 97, 101, 294c
Battle of Plassey 92–94, 293c
preservation of control by 196
princely states and, c. 1947
113m
Regulating Act 95–96, 293c
response to nationalists by
153
Sikh war 106, 294c
Queen Victoria 89, 113, 296c
and WWII 178, 300c
Great Depression 189–190
Great Mughals 78–86
Green Revolution 218, 219, 302c
and economic growth 233
337
food production, 1950–2000
218t
and population growth 240
gross national product. See GNP
guerrilla fighters 85
Gujarat (state) 279–281,
306c–307c
Gujral, Inder Kumar 276, 306c
Gupta dynasty 47–48, 50, 291c
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
at its greatest extent, c. A.D.
375–415 48m
temples during 49
tributary system under the
52–53
gurumukhi 81
H
Haidar Ali Khan 100, 293c
Haksar, Parmeshwar Narain 219
Hali, Maulana Altaf Hussain 137
Halifax, Lord. See Irwin, Baron
handloom industry 104
hand-spun cloth. See khadi
Harappa (ancient city) 9, 11m
citadel at 13
discovery of 6
evidence of Aryans in 17
Harappan civilization 5–9, 11, 13,
15, 290c
and climate change 7, 9
culture of 8–9, 11, 13, 14
discovery of 6
the end of the 13–15
and Indo-Aryans 14
Indus script of the 10
map of 8m
“Priest-King” figure from 12,
13
sites of the 11m
as urban culture 5, 6
Harasha 56–57
Hardinge, Charles 171
Harihara I 72
Harsha 291c
Harshavardhana 57
hartal 177, 298c
Hasan Gangu 72
Hastings, Warren 293c
Anglo-Mysore Wars 100
as governor-general 96
resignation of 97
herding 9
hereditary system xv. See also caste
system and castes
heterodoxy
in North India 27–33
and Vedic social system 26
Himalayas 3, 286, 290c
Hindi language 216
Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule)
(Mohandas K. Gandhi) 183
Hindu Association for Dharma
130
Hindu College 129–131, 294c
Hindu Dharma Sabha 130
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Hinduism and Hindus
and Age of Consent Act 162
bhakti. See bhakti
conversion of 108
cow protection riots 161–162,
296c
cyclical time 28
fatalism of 5
Mohandas K. Gandhi and 185
during Gupta period 47, 48
and Harappan/Aryan race 15
karma. See karma
local opposition to 130
as mother of all religions 160
and national identity 157,
159
in population 288
Puranic 50–52, 58, 68
and purdah 88
reform of 134–137, 227–228,
296c
reincarnation 18, 26, 28
revival of 159–163
Rig-Veda 1, 16–19, 26, 34, 55,
290c
and RSS 227–228
separate legal codes for 209,
213
society of, under siege 227
spread of 291c
temples of 49, 49, 50
threat of conversions to 227
traditional festivals 260, 260,
261
Upanishads 18, 22, 25–26, 28,
55, 290c
value of a son in 27
Vedas 18, 290c
Vedic 23–26, 24, 28–29, 50,
51, 64
and vegetarianism 22
and the VHP 228
Hindu Kush 3, 35, 286
Hindu Marriage Act 213, 302c
Hindu Marriage Validating Act
211, 301c
Hindu-Muslim conflict
Babri Masjid mosque xvii,
231, 234, 268–271, 269,
279, 304c, 306c
communal violence 185–186,
205–206, 229, 280, 301c,
306c, 307c
cow protection riots 161–162,
296c
Gujarat riots 279, 281,
306c–307c
during independence 200–204
and partition of Pakistan xvi,
178–179, 204–206, 301c
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign
228, 229, 231–232,
266–267, 304c
Hindu nationalism 306c. See also
Hindutva
and Aryan race 15
and demolition of Babri Masjid
mosque xvii, 268–271
and exclusion of other religions xviii
and Harappan civilization
14–15
and mass conversions 304c
and “out of India” theory 15
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign
228, 229, 231–232,
266–267, 304c
rise of xvi
Hindu Renassiance 128–131
Hindu Succession Act 213, 302c
Hindutva 187, 306c
BJP and 266–267
and demolition of Babri Masjid
271
and women’s liberation 255
Holi (festival) 260, 261
holidays 262–263. See also festivals
holy men 27
home charges 102, 156, 165
as debt to India 200
and Great Depression 190
Home Rule League 172, 180
homes
in Harappan civilization 11
rural 243–244
urban 247
Hope, Victor Alexander John (Lord
Linlithgow) 199
horses 14, 15
first evidence of 17
and Indo-Aryans 17, 22
trade in 44
Horse Sacrifice 23, 24, 24, 25, 41
and the Satavahanas 46
women attending 55
Humayun 293c
Hume, Allan Octavian 168
Hum Log (television show) 256,
256–258
Hunas (tribes) 291c
hunters 6
hunting 9, 146
hymns
in the Rig-Veda 17, 18
in the Vedas 18
I
Ibn Battuta 61
ICS. See Indian Civil Service
Id (feast day) 261
identities
Dravidian 243, 272
Hindu 157, 159
Indian xvii–xviii
national xvii, 157, 159, 199
Pakistan as a 199
religious xvi
Scheduled Castes as a 243
idolatry
as evidence of “backward culture” 134
Rammohan Roy 130
Ilbert, Sir Courtney 151
Ilbert Bill 151–152, 296c
Iltutmish (sultan of Delhi) 70
338
IMF. See International Monetary
Fund
immorality 97
“imperial chintz” 119, 120
imperial expansion 115–118
imperialism
of the British 154
critique of 124
Imperial Legislative Council 170
imports
boycott of 166–168, 182
of food grains 213, 215
and Great Depression 189, 190
to pay for trade 94
removing restrictions on 278
from United States 215
INA. See Indian National Army
indebtedness (rural) 117, 144, 145
Independence Day (holiday) 259
independence movement. See also
nationalist movement
1885–1920 153–177
Age of Consent Act 162–163,
297c
Amritsar Massacre 176–177,
180, 298c
“Bande Mataram” 166, 167,
170
cow protection riots 161–162,
296c
demand for complete independence 188
Mohandas K. Gandhi
173–176, 174. See also
Gandhi, Mohandas K.
Great Britain grants independence 200–201, 203–204
Hinduism and 157, 159. See
also Hindu nationalism
Hindu race/Hindu nation, concept of 157, 159
Hindu revivalism 159–163
Indian National Congress
154–155, 157
Mohammed Ali Jinnah 173.
See also Jinnah, Mohammed
Ali
and Lucknow Pact 172
Minto-Morley 170–171
Muslim League 168–169. See
also Muslim League
partition of Bengal 165–168,
297c
Surat split 169–170
swadeshi movement 166–168,
169, 170, 297c
and WWI 171–172
Independent Congress Party 187
India. See also colonial rule;
independence movement; India,
republic of; nationalism;
nationalist movement
civil service examinations in
299c
map of 2m
partition of xvi, 178–179, 204,
205, 206, 301c
rural. See rural India
INDEX
and WWI 297c
and WWII 200, 300c
India, Republic of 307c
China-Indian War 216, 302c
creation of 208–209
demographics 287–288
Morarji Desai 225, 303c
economy 288–289
Indira Gandhi. See Gandhi,
Indira
Rajiv Gandhi 225–226, 232,
232–234, 237, 267, 304c,
305c
geography of 286–287
government of 285
Green Revolution 218, 219,
302c
Indo-Pak War 221
Janata government 224–225
and Kashmir 216–217, 278,
301c, 302c, 306c, 307c
map of 210m
Muslims in 280
Nehru era 210–211, 213–217.
See also Nehru, Jawaharlal
nonalignment 215–216, 221
and nuclear weapons 222,
278–279, 303c, 306c
partition of Pakistan xvi,
178–179, 204, 205, 206,
301c
political divisions of 286
population growth in 240,
240t, 241
P. V. Narasimha Rao 267
Lal Bahadur Shastri 216–217
Manmohan Singh 267–268,
282, 283, 305c, 307c
V. P. Singh 235, 237, 265, 266,
305c
as socialist state 207–208
in Sri Lanka 305c
urbanization in 241–243
Atahl Bihari Vajpayee 229,
231, 270, 271, 277–282
war with Pakistan 216–217,
221, 301c, 302c
India Act 97, 184
Indian Administrative Service 214
Indian Association 151
Indian Civil Service (ICS) 214
Anglo-Indians in 118, 122
examinations for 114, 149,
184, 295c, 297c, 299c
Indian Councils Act 114, 295c,
297c
Indian identities xvii–xviii
Indian Independence Act 203
Indian-language presses 148–149
Indian League 151
Indian National Army (INA) 201,
300c
Indian National Congress
154–155, 157, 296c, 297c
Mohammed Ali Jinnah 173
and Lucknow Pact 172
Muslims and 168
Indian National Social Conference
296c
India’s Bandit Queen (book/film)
274
“India Shining” campaign 280,
307c
“India’s Magna Carta” 113
indigo 78, 90, 116
Indo-Aryan(s) 290c. See also
Aryans
ancient settlements connected
to 17
clans 33
classes of 17
and cows 17, 21–22
enter India 14
kings 33–35
noses of 158
settle in Indo-Gangetic region
20, 22–23
Indo-European languages 96
Indo-Gangetic Plain
agrarian empires in 62
creation of 3
geography of 4
Indo-Aryans settle on 20,
22–23
Indo-Pak War (1971) 221, 221
Indo-Parthians 45m
Indra (warrior god) 17, 23, 52
Indus River
geography of 4
and Harappan civilization 5,
7
water from 5
Indus River valley 290c
Indus script 10
industrialization 215, 302c
industrial production 118
beginnings of 117
and central planning 213
during the Emergency 224
and WWI 172
industrial products 288
inflation 221, 225
influenza 144, 179
insects 30, 31
international loans 303c
International Monetary Fund
(IMF) 218, 222, 268
investments 233
Iran
and Aryans 16
languages of 14
link to Pallavas 64
iron-age technology 20, 22
irrigation
and desert region 5
in Harappan civilization 8
investment in 115
Irwin, Baron (Edwin Frederick
Lindley Wood; Lord Halifax)
193–194, 299c
Islam 291c. See also Muslims
and Arab settlement 61–62
conversion of Untouchables to
227, 304c
dar ul-Islam 60–61
enters India 59–61
jihad 61, 183
339
Mahmud of Ghazni 62
and Muslim society 86–88
purdah 87–88, 142, 165
sharia 60, 82, 84, 234, 305c
study of 137, 138
J
Jagannatha temple (Puri) 49, 50
Jagori 255
Jahangir 80, 81, 293c
Jainism and Jains 30–31, 290c
ahimsa 175
and animal sacrifices 22
cyclical time 28
on destruction of temple at
Shaivite 63
geographic spreading of
41–43
and jatis 55
and karma 30–31
in North India 28–30
persecution of 67–68, 292c
in population 288
and reincarnation 26, 28, 30
spread of 291c
Mahavira Vardhamana 30, 31
jajmani relationships 142–143,
244, 245
Jama Masjid mosque (New Delhi)
82
Janata Dal Party 235, 236, 305c
Janata government 224–225
Janata Morcha (People’s Front)
303c
Japan 118
jatis 54, 55, 62
Jayakar, Mukund Ramrao 188
Jayewardene, Junius Richard 234
jihad 61, 183
Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 173, 202,
299c
and All-Parties Conference
188–189
and Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms 176
and noncooperation movement
180
and Pakistan 198–199, 201,
203, 300c–301c
and provincial governments
194, 197
and Round Table Conference
194
and Rowlatt Acts 177
jiva (living soul) 30–31
jizya 77, 84
Jones, Sir William 96, 293c
Jorasanko Thakurbari (Calcutta)
129
judges 151, 152, 296c
jute industry 116, 118
K
Kabir 292c
Kali (goddess) 160, 167
Kali Yuga (the Black Age) 28
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Kanishka (king of the Kushanas)
46, 291c
Kanshi Ram 272, 305c
Karakoram Range 3, 286, 302c
karma 25–26
and bhakti 51
in Jainism 30–31
and rains 5
and reincarnation 28
in Rig-Veda 18
and Sikhism 81
kar sevaks 268, 269
Kashmir 306c, 307c
war over 216–217, 301c,
302c
worsening relations in 278
“Kashmiri mafia” 219
Kautilya 36
Kayasthas
and Mughal empire 79
rising status of 54–55
khadi 182, 183, 193
Khalji dynasty 69, 70–71, 292c
khalsa 81
Khilafat movement 179–182,
298c–299c
Khyber Pass 3
Kim (Kipling) 123
kingdoms
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
and “lapse” 106
kings 52–53
Ashoka 37–41
Bactrian-Greek 44, 45
from clan to 33–35
Gupta dynasty 45m, 47–48,
48m, 49, 50, 52–53
Kushanas 45m, 46
Mauryan 35–41
non-Kshatriya 55
Satavahanas 45m, 46
Scythians 45m, 46
tributary system of 52–53
Kipling, Rudyard 123–124
Kolkata. See Calcutta
Krishna (Hindu god)
in the Bhagavad Gita 50, 51
as bhakti god 64
carving of 51
devotion to 66
and Mirabai 67
Krita Yuga 28
Kshatriyas (class)
as an achieved status 34, 35, 55
occupations of the 26
as one of four varnas 54
religious founders from the
29, 30
Kumar, Ashok 256
Kurus 34
Kushanas 45m, 46
L
laborers (landless) 143, 214–215,
220, 268
Lahore Resolution 300c
Lakshmi (goddess) 261
Lakshmi Narayan Temple (New
Delhi) 51, 197
land
Bhoodan movement 214–215
loss of 144, 147
taxes 146
land ownership
and kings 53
rural 143, 244
and zamindars 98, 143, 294c
land reform 214–215
land revenues 293c
from Bengal 94, 96
in rural India 142, 143
and rural protests 145
and tribal rebellion 146
land settlements 143, 294c
language(s) 287, 302c. See also
English language; Sanskrit
Arabic 60
of Aryans 16
common base of 29
Dravidian 10, 43
Hindi 216
in India xiv
and politics 211
similarities of 14
Tamil 38, 43
Urdu 137, 280
vernacular language 29
lapse 106–107, 113
latrines 11
Lauriya-Nandangarh, Bihar 38
law codes 291c
Lawrence, Sir Henry 109, 110
Laws of Manu 18, 20, 291c
on role of the king 52
on women 55, 56
legal codes
separate 96, 209, 213, 234,
281
sharia 60, 82, 84, 234, 305c
Legislative Councils 297c
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE) 234
library (at Ghazni) 62
life (essence of) 25
lineages 54
Linlithgow, Lord (Victor Alexander
John Hope) 199
literacy rates 56, 287
loans (international) 303c
Lodi dynasty 72, 292c
Lok Sabha (People’s Assembly)
209, 285
Congress Party loss in 237
elections of 2004 281
lower castes in 273
London’s Truth (newspaper)
123–124
lower castes 295c. See also
Untouchables and
Untouchability
in the Lok Sabha 273
organization of 272
politicization of xviii
preferential treatment for 265
rising power of 272–276
340
LTTE. See Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam
Lucknow Pact 172, 173, 298c
Lucknow Residency (Oudh)
109–112
Lytton, Lord 145
M
Macaulay, Thomas Babington 105,
294c
Machiavelli, Niccolò 36
Mackenzie, Colin 97
Madras 294c
railroads 108
regional associations in
150–151, 295c
Madras Mahajan Sabha 151
Madras Mail (newspaper) 127
madrasa 137, 295c
Magadha (territory) 33
Maggi Noodles 258
Magna Carta 133
Mahabharata (epic poem) 18,
291c
carving of scene from the 51
composition of 22, 290c
and fulfillment of dharma 26
gambling in the 34
during Gupta period 47
as television series 256, 261
violence/change reflected in
33–34
on wives 56
Mahadaji Sindhia 101
mahajanapada (great-clan’s
territory) 33, 34, 290c
Mahapadma Nanda 33, 290c
Mahasabha (Hindu association)
186, 187, 188, 298c, 299c
Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday
(holiday) 259
Mahayana Buddhism 43
Mahmud of Ghazni 62, 63, 292c
Maintenance of Internal Security
Act (MISA) 223
Malabar Coast 146, 291c, 292c,
294c
Malaviya, Madan Mohan 186–187,
192
Malik Kafur 71
Mama Mia’s (ice cream parlor)
247
Mamluk dynasty 68–70
Mandal, B. P. 265
Mandal Commission Report 265,
266, 304c, 305c
Mandal protests 265, 266
Mangeshkar, Lata 254
mansabdars 76–77, 86, 92
Manuel, Peter 254
Marathas 293c, 294c
Mahadaji Sindhia 101
Mughal Empire and 84–86,
90
Shivaji Bhonsle 85, 163, 293c,
297c
Maratha Wars 100–102
INDEX
marriage 302c
Age of Consent Act 162–163,
297c
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar on
211, 213
broader range of partners for
243
child 132, 135, 142
dowries 213, 257, 305c, 306c
intercaste 301c
Jawaharlal Nehru on 211
remarriage 56, 57, 108, 132,
135, 136, 142
and secular law 211, 213
Marshall, John 9
“martial races” 112
Mauryans 35–41, 291c
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
the Arthasastra 36–37
Ashoka xvi, 32, 37–41, 38,
45m, 291c
dynasties following the 44–47
at its greatest extent, c.
269–232 B.C. 40m
and trade routes 41
maya 25
Mayawati 273
meat eating 134
banning of 225
in Buddhism 33
of Muslims 161
Mecca 60, 82
Medina 59
Megasthenes (Greek ambassador)
36
Mehta, Pherozeshah 150, 173
“Meluhha” 8, 9
Menander (Bactrian king) 42, 45,
291c
merchant(s)
as hereditary occupation 54
yavanas 43
Mesopotamia 8, 8m, 9, 10, 13
middle class
in Bollywood films 252
and caste restrictions 242
consumerism of 233, 239
defining the 133, 248
English-educated elite 133
prosperity for the 268, 277
rise of 247–249
suburbs 247
“Middle Way” of Buddhism 32
migration 4–5, 16
minerals 288
Minto, Lord 170
Minto-Morley reforms 170–171
“Minute on Education” 105, 294c
Mirabai 66, 67, 292c
Mir Jafar 92, 93
Mir Qasim 93
MISA. See Maintenance of Internal
Security Act
missionaries 294c
Buddhist 41–43
Christian 104, 131
Jainist 41–43
and sati 104
moderates (in Congress) 297c
and Minto-Morley reforms
171
and Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms 176
and Surat split 169–170
swadeshi movement 166
modernization (colonial) 126–128
1800–1900 125–152
Second Afghan War 148
colonial modernity 131, 135
English-educated elites
132–134
English education 125,
131–132
famine 144–145
Hindu Renassiance 128–131
Ilbert Bill 151–152
middle class 133
regional political associations
149–151
religious/social reform associations 134–139
Rammohan Roy 130
rural India 142–144
rural protests 145–148
Vernacular Press Act 148–149
the women’s question
139–142
Modi, Narendra 263, 281, 282
mofussil 92
Mohenjo-Daro (ancient city, Sind)
9, 11m
abandonment of 13
citadel at 13
as a planned city 11
“Priest-King” figure from 12,
13
Mohurram festival 163
moksha 26
in Vedanta philosophy 66
women and 55
monastic communities 29, 31, 33
moneylenders 143, 147
Mongols 292c
and Delhi Sultanate 69
threat of 69–70
monks 27, 29
monotheism 135, 136
Monserrate, Antonio 78
monsoon
failures 221, 303c
and famine 144, 145, 218
southwest 5
Montagu, Edwin 176
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms 176,
180, 298c
mopeds 248
Moplah rebellion 146, 294c
Moplahs 183
Moray, Vijay 229
“mother goddess” figures 13
motor scooters 248
mountain ranges 1–4. See also
specific names
Mountbatten, Lord Louis 203, 204,
206, 301c
movies. See films
341
“Mr. Clean” campaign 232, 235
Mughal Empire 72–73, 75–76,
292c–293c
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar
xvi, 73–78, 74, 79m, 81,
293c
attacks on Sikhism by xvi–xvii
Aurangzeb 75, 78–79, 79m,
83–84, 84–86, 88, 293c
at the death of Akbar and
Aurangzeb 79m
decline of 88, 89
the Great Mughals 78–86
imperial title of 106–107
Jahangir 80, 81, 293c
nawabs 89–93
peace during 103
and Rajputs 75
reigns of later 87
religious freedom in 77–78
Shah Jahan 81–84, 82, 83,
293c
war machine of 76–77
Muhammad (prophet) 59–60,
291c
Muhammad (Tughluq ruler) 71
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental
College 138, 296c. See also
Aligarh
Mujib, Sheikh 221
Müller, Friederich Max 14
Mumbai. See Bombay
Munda (tribal people) 146, 297c
Munro, Sir Thomas 103, 294c
murthi 51
music 263
cassette tapes 240, 242, 249,
250, 254, 255, 256, 263
film music 239, 249, 254, 263
musicals 251
musicians 254
Muslim League 168–169, 301c
and 1937 elections 196–197,
300c
and 1945–46 elections 201
at All-Parties Conference 188
and conversion of
Untouchables 227, 304c
Mohammed Ali Jinnah 173
and Lucknow Pact 172, 298c
self-government as goal of 171
Muslims. See also Hindu-Muslim
conflict; Mughal Empire
and alimony 234
in Bengal 86, 87, 171
call for independent state for
300c
and caste communities xvii
and conflicts with Hindus
185–186
and cow protection riots 161
and demolition of Babri Masjid
mosque 268–271
and “divide and rule” 169
education of 137–138, 295c
elite 86, 87, 137, 138, 296c
exclusion of xviii
festivals of 163
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Muslims (continued)
Mohandas K. Gandhi and
205–206
meat eating of 161
as minority in India 280
and Minto-Morley reforms 170
and partition of Bengal 166
in population 280, 288
as RSS targets 228
schools 137–138, 295c
separate electorate for 172,
188, 298c, 299c
separate legal codes for 209,
213, 234, 280, 305c
and Shah Bano case 305c
society of 86–88
and support for Pakistan
198–199
taxation by 61
terrorist attacks by 279, 280,
306c
ties to Arabian Peninsula of
60–61
as villains 167
Muslim Women’s Act 234
mutiny. See rebellion
N
nabobs 90, 91
Nadir Shah 89
Naicher, E. V. Ramaswami 189. See
also Periyar
Naidu, Sarojini 192, 193
nakedness 31
Nana Fadnavis 100
Nanak, Guru 81, 292c
Nana Sahib 109, 111
Nanda dynasty 33, 35, 36, 290c
Naoroji, Dadabhai 156, 156, 169
Narada (sage) 27
Narayan, Jayapraksash 222–223
Narmada River 4
nasal index 158
national emergency 223. See also
the Emergency
National Front 305c
national holidays 258, 259
national identity xvii
Hindu 157, 159
Pakistan as a 199
nationalism. See also Hindu
nationalism
and all-Indian identity
xvii–xviii
and democracy xviii
and Deoband madrassa 137
divisions of 153
English-educated elite 132
and Hinduism 157, 159
increasing importance of 152
new leaders for movement
173–176
and reclassification of castes
243
nationalist movement
“all sons of this land”
187–189
and communal violence
185–186
Mohandas K. Gandhi
178–206. See also Gandhi,
Mohandas K.
Government of India Act
(1935) 196–198, 209, 300c
independence granted
200–201, 203–204
Indian National Army 201,
300c
Khilafat movement 179–182,
298c–299c
and the Mahasabha 186, 187,
188
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms
176, 180, 298c
non-Brahman movements 189
noncooperation campaign of
1921–22 182–185
and Pakistan xvi, 178–179,
198–199, 204, 205, 206,
301c
Poona Pact 195–196, 300c
Quit India! campaign
199–200, 300c
Round Table Conferences
193–195, 299c
and the RSS 186
Salt March campaign
190–193, 191, 299c
and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
187
women in the 193
national power 274, 276
National Volunteer Force. See
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
nationhood 207–238
natural elements 18
nawabs 89–93, 293c
Nazism 15
Nehru, Jawaharlal
arrest of 192
becomes prime minister 204,
204, 302c
and central planning 213–214
and Congress movement 181
death of 216, 302c
elected president of Congress
188
and Indira Gandhi 217
and Gandhi-Irwin Pact 194
on independence of India 203
and linguistic divisions 211
and marriage laws 211
as mayor of Allahabad 184
and nonalignment 215–216
rule of 210–211, 213–217
and rural reform 214–215
and socialism 181, 207–208
Nehru, Motilal 181, 182, 188
New Delhi 171, 286, 307c
newspapers 127
Nicobar Islands 307c
nirvana 31, 32–33
Nixon, Richard 221
nonalignment 215–216, 221
non-ashraf Muslims 86, 87
342
non-Brahman movement(s)
of Jyotirao Phule 147–148
in South India 189
in West India 189
noncooperation campaign(s)
of 1921–22 182–185
Khilafat movement 179–182,
298c–299c
Poona Pact 195–196, 300c
Quit India! campaign
199–200, 300c
Round Table Conferences
193–195, 299c
Salt March campaign
190–193, 191, 299c
women in 193
nonviolent protest. See
noncooperation campaigns;
satyagraha and satyagrahis
North India 291c, 292c
bhakti in 66–67, 292c
famine in 295c
heterodoxy in 27–33
upward caste mobility in 272
North Indian Plain. See IndoGangetic Plain
noses, science of 158, 158
nuclear weapons 222, 278–279,
303c, 306c
nuns 29, 31
Nur Jahan 80
O
OBCs. See Other Backward Classes
occupations
hereditary 54
and income 243
ocean trade 4
oilseeds 116
“Operation Bluestar” 226, 304c
opium 94, 116
oral scriptures 18, 29
Orientalists 96–97, 105
“Orissa famine” 144–145
Other Backward Classes (OBCs)
243
in census data 266
Morarji Desai 265
in government 265, 273, 274
Phoolan Devi 274, 304c, 306c
V. P. Singh and 265, 266
Ottoman Empire 179, 185, 298c
“out of India” theory 14, 15
P
Painted Gray Ware (PGW) pottery
20, 22–23
paintings (cave) 42
Pakistan
and Bangladesh 221, 303c
campaign for 300c–301c
East Pakistan 204, 221, 303c
and India 307c
Mohammed Ali Jinnah and
198–199, 201, 203,
300c–301c
INDEX
as a national identity 199
and nuclear weapons
278–279, 306c
origin of name 198, 300c
partition of xvi, 178–179, 204,
205, 206, 301c
support for creation of
198–199
Atahl Bihari Vajpayee and
278–279
war with India 216–217, 221,
301c, 302c
West Pakistan 204, 221, 303c
palanquin 93
palki 93
Pallavas 291c
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
and Puranic Hinduism 68
in South India (600–1300)
62–64
Panchayati Raj Plan 302c
panchayats 285
Pandavas 34
Pandyas 46, 47, 291c
300 B.C.–A.D. 550 45m
and Puranic Hinduism 68
in South India (600–1300) 62,
63
Panini (grammarian) 29
Panipat, battle at 72–73, 293c
pan-Islamicists 138, 179–180, 298c
paramilitary organization 186,
228, 299c. See also Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh
paramountcy 106–107
Param Veer Chakra (television
show) 256
Parliament (British)
and British East India
Company 97, 112, 294c
Dabadhai Naoroji 150
Regulating Act 96
steps toward direct rule by
104–105
parliamentary government 209
parliaments, attacks on 279, 280,
306c
Parsis 150
partition
based on language 211
of Bengal 165–168, 171, 297c
and murder of Gandhi 206
of Pakistan xvi, 178–179, 204,
205, 206, 301c
Party of the Majority. See Bahujan
Samaj Party
passes 3
Pataliputra (city) 36
Patel, Vallabhbhai (Sadar) 184,
206, 208, 209
Pax Britannica 89, 102–103, 125
peasants 293c, 296c
in Bollywood films 252
cultivation of land by 143
effect of rural markets on 144
and the Green Revolution 218,
219
landless 214–215
protests 147
revenue settlements and 103
Periyar 189, 298c
Persians 14
peshwa 85, 100, 107
Phadke, Vasudeo Balvant 147
Phoolan Devi 274, 304c, 306c
Phule, Jyotirao 147–148, 295c
pig fat 109
pilgrimage(s)
festivals 259–260
political 261–262
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign
231–232
pillar
at Lauriya-Nandangarh 38
at Sarnath 32
Pitt, William 294c
and British East India
Company 95, 101
India Act 97
Plain Tales from the Hills (Kipling)
123
plantations 116
Plassey, Battle of 92–94, 293c
Pnachayati Raj plan 214
pocket watch 127
police violence 193, 199–200
political associations, regional. See
regional political associations
political behavior 97
political parties. See Bahujan Samaj
Party; Bharatiya Janata Party;
Congress Party; Janata Dal Party;
Samajwadi Party; Vishwa Hindu
Parishad
political unification xiv
politics
elites and 149
in Gangetic region, (1200–400
B.C.) 32
and holidays/festivals 168,
259–262, 262–263
and languages 211
and religion xvi–xvii, 163,
165
tributary system of 52–53
polygamy 213
Pondicherry (trading settlement)
92, 293c
Poona Pact 195–196, 300c
popular culture 240, 249–250
population
Christians in 288
Hindus in 288
Jains in 288
Muslims in 280, 288
Sikhs in 288
urban vs. rural 287
population growth 240, 240t, 241
and food production 215
and Green Revolution 219
Portugal and Portuguese 78, 216,
292c
postal system
improvements in, under
Dalhousie 107
under Mughal Empire 79
343
pottery
of Harappan civilization 9, 17
Painted Gray Ware 20, 22–23
trade in 44
poverty
abolishing 303c
assets of the poor 249
and economic reforms 268
Indira Gandhi and 220
and improving conditions 245,
246
slums 220, 224, 247, 303c
and socialism 208
urban 242
Prakrits (vernacular language) 29,
37
Prarthan Samaj (Prayer Society)
135–137
preamble to Indian Constitution
207
preferential treatment 265, 304c
president 285
Prevention of Smuggling Activities
Act 223
prices
of cotton 147, 296c
of food 221, 267
increasing 216, 303c
Pride Yatra 282
priest 54
“Priest-King” (figure) 12, 13
prime minister 285. See also
specific individuals
princely states 114, 295c, 301c
British India and, c. 1947
113m
and governor-general 114
and independence 205
and “lapse” 107
as state governments 209
princes
and crown rule 113–114, 114
end of rule of the 220
and independence 205
printing 296c
under colonial rule 127, 128
Vernacular Press Act 148–149
privatization 277, 278
privy purses 219, 220, 303c
processions 262, 304c, 305c
proclamation of Queen Victoria
(1858) 89, 113
profits 115–117
property rights 302c
Protection of Rights on Divorce Act
234
protests 296c. See also
noncooperation campaigns;
rebellion; rioting and riots
of Bengal partition 166–168
Mandal 265, 266
peasant 147
rural 145–148
provincial autonomy 194, 298c,
300c
puja (worship) 65
Pune (regional association)
149–150, 295c, 297c
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Punjab 294c
Afghan expansion in 62
cow protection riots in 161
Green Revolution in 218, 219,
302c
irrigation projects in 116
Muslims in 86
Punjab Accord 233
Puranas 47, 52, 291c
Puranic Hinduism 50–52
dynastic incorporation of 68
temples 50, 51, 58
purdah 87–88, 142, 165
purification rituals 161
Q
The Questions of King Milinda 41,
42
Quit India! campaign 199–200,
300c
quotas 213
Qur’an 60, 87–88
Qutbuddin Aibak (sultan of Delhi)
70
R
race
Hindu 157
Indian theory of 15
and science of noses 158,
158
racialization (of Indian army) 112
racism
and Anglo-Indians 118, 120
of the British 154
of George Curzon 165
English-educated elite and
134
and Ilbert Bill 152
institutionalization of 134
Radcliffe, Sir Cyril 204
radio 242, 248, 249, 299c
Rahman, Mujibur 221
Rai, Lajpat 169, 187
railroads 108, 295c
benefit of 156
improvements in, under
Dalhousie 107
investment in 115
rain 5, 144, 145. See also monsoon
Raj, Ram 212
Rajatarangini 52
Rajputs 75
Rajya Sabha (State’s Assembly)
209, 285
Rama (Hindu god) 64, 66, 260,
261, 304c
Ramakrishna 160
Ramakrishna Mission 297c
Ramanuja 292c
Rama temple. See Ram temple
Ramayana (epic poem) 18
composition of 22, 290c
and fulfillment of dharma 26
during Gupta period 47
as television series 256, 261
violence/change reflected in
33–34
Ramcaritmanas 66
Ramjanmabhoomi (Rama’s
birthplace) campaign 231–232.
See also Babri Masjid mosque
and the Bajrang Dal 229
BJP support for 266–267
and the VHP 228, 304c
Ramlila (dramatic presentation)
260
Ramsey, James Andrew Brown. See
Dalhousie, marquis of
Ram (Rama) temple 267, 279,
305c, 307c
Ranade, Mahadev Govind 149,
150, 296c
Rand, Walter Charles 163, 165,
297c
Randade, Mahadev Govind
135–137
Rani of Jhansi 109, 111
Ranjit Singh 106
Rao, P. V. Narasimha 305c, 306c
becomes prime minister 267
and demolition of Babri Masjid
271
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(National Volunteer Force; RSS)
186, 228, 299c, 304c, 306c
and Bajrang Del 229
banning of the 206
and the BJP 229, 231
daily rituals of the 229–230,
230
and Sangh Parivar 227–228
Atal Bihari Vajpayee 270, 271
raths 261, 262
Ravana 260, 261
Raziyya 70
rebellion. See also protests; rioting
and riots
against colonial rule 109–112
Moplah 146, 294c
Munda 146, 297c
non-Brahman movement
147–148
peasant protests 147
in rural India 145–148
Sepoy Rebellion 109–112,
295c
tribal 146
rebirth. See reincarnation
reform(s)
associations for 134–139
of Lord Bentinck 103–105
Lord Canning and 107
of the caste system 108–109,
135–137
constitutional 170–173, 176,
298c
of marquis of Dalhousie
105–106
in education 107, 108,
137–138
for globalization 277
of Hinduism 134–137,
227–228, 296c
344
land 214–215
Mandal 265, 266, 305c
Minto-Morley 170–171
Montagu-Chelmsford 176,
180, 298c
in religious practice 108–109,
135, 136
for rural India 214–215
social/educational 107, 108
Bal Gangadhar Tilak on 150
and the women’s question
139–142
refrigerators 248
regional political associations 125,
149–151, 295c
Regulating Act 95–96, 293c
regulations 95–96
reincarnation
and Buddhism 26, 31, 33
and Hinduism 18, 26, 28
and Jainism 26, 28, 30
and karma 28
link to varnas of 26
in Rig-Veda 18
and Sikhism 81
religion(s) 288
of Aryans 16
Buddhism. See Buddhism and
Buddhists
Christianity. See Christianity
and Christians
competition of 28–29
Indira Gandhi’s appeals to 226
heterodoxy in 27–33
Hinduism. See Hinduism and
Hindus
Islam. See Islam
Jainism. See Jainism and Jains
and politics xvi–xvii, 163, 165
shared assumptions of 27–28
Sikhism. See Sikhism and Sikhs
Sufism 60, 82
trade routes and the spread of
41–43
and violence xv–xvii
Zoroastrianism 16, 77, 150
“religion of the book” 59
religious duties 26
religious freedom
and Jalaluddin Muhammad
Akbar 77–78
and queen’s proclamation 113
religious identities xvi–xvii
religious practices 108–109
religious reform associations
134–139
remarriage 56, 57, 108, 132, 135,
136, 142
Republic Day (holiday) 259
reserved seats 188, 195, 300c
“restricted” holidays 262–263
revenge 111
rhinoceroses 8
rice 218, 219, 302c
Rig-Veda 1, 18
Aryan origins of 16
as collection of hymns 17
composition of the 290c
INDEX
on gambling 34
and Hinduism 18–19
and the varnas 26
women in 55
rioting and riots 296c. See also
communal violence; protests;
rebellion
communal 183
cow protection riots 161–162,
296c
at Deccan 147
and demolition of Babri Masjid
269, 270
during Prince Edward’s visit
183
Gujarat riots 279, 280,
306c–307c
Hindu-Muslim 203, 280
against Rowlatt Acts 177
student 223
Ripon, Lord (George Frederick
Samuel Robinson) 145
and Second Afghan War 148
Ilbert Bill 151, 152
Risley, H. H. 158
rituals
and Brahmans 29
Horse Sacrifice 23, 24, 24, 25,
41, 46, 55
purification 161
of the RSS 229–230, 230
in Vedic Hinduism 23, 24, 24,
25, 50, 51
rivers 7. See also specific names
river systems 4
Robinson, George Frederick
Samuel. See Ripon, Lord
rock carving 21
Roman coins 44
Roman Empire 3, 43–44, 291c
Round Table Conferences
193–195, 299c
Rowlatt Acts 177, 298c
Roy, Manabendra Nath 179, 298c
Roy, Rammohan 128, 129, 130,
131, 135, 294c
royal titles 106
RSS. See Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh
rulers (local) 99
rupee 218, 267
rural India 243–246. See also
villages
assets of 249t
caste in 142–143, 244–245,
246
changes in 152, 245, 246
under colonial rule 142–144
commercialization of agriculture in 143–144
conditions under colonial rule
126
famine in 142, 145
indebtedness in 117, 144,
145
land ownership in 143, 244
Jawaharlal Nehru and
214–215
protests in 145–148
reforms for, in Nehru era
214–215
relationships in 245, 246
urban vs. 246, 246t, 247, 263,
287
Rushdie, Salman xvi
rytowari 103, 143, 294c
S
sacred text 18
Sadharan Brahmo Samaj (People’s
Brahmo Samaj) 135, 136
saguna gods 66
Said, Edward 97
St. Mary’s church (Madras) 121
salt 43
Salt March campaign 190–193,
191, 299c
saltpeter 78, 90
Samajwadi (Socialist) Party 272,
306c
Sama-Veda 18
Sambhaji 85
Samudragupta (Guptan king) 47
sanghas (assemblies) 29
Sangh Parivar (Association of
Family; RSS Family) 227–231
Sanskrit
in Ashokan edicts 37
comparative study of 96
and culture 291c
culture based on 291c
English-educated elite 132
Guptas 47, 48
and Harappan civilization
14
in the Mauryan period 43
similarities to other languages
14
spread of 41, 43
use of 29
Vedic 17, 29
Sarasvati, Dayananda 161, 296c
Sarasvati Puja (Calcutta) 260
Sarnath, pillar at 32
Sarvajanik Sabha 149, 150
Satavahanas 45m, 46, 291c
satellite networks 258, 263, 304c
sati 56, 57
abolishment of 104
Lord Bentinck 104
in Hindu revivalism 159
made illegal 294c
Rammohan Roy 130
satyagraha and satyagrahis
development of tactic of 175
Mohandas K. Gandhi on 178
and the Salt March 192
Satyashodhak Samaj 295c
Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 187
Sayyid dynasty 71–72, 292c
Scheduled Castes (Untouchables)
as an identity 243
in census data 266
quotas for 213
reserved seats for 209
345
Scheduled Tribes (Tribals) 146
in census data 266
quotas for 213
reserved seats for 209
schools, English-language. See
English-language schools
schools, Muslim 137–138, 295c
science of noses 158, 158
scribes 55
script
Ashokan edicts 37, 38, 39–41,
45m
of Harappan civilization 10
Scythians 45m, 46, 291c
seals
of Harappan civilization 10, 15
Indus 14
script on 10
soap-stone 9
unicorn 10
zebu bull 7
seas 3
seat reservations. See reserved seats
Sebükitgin 62
secularism
BJP challenge to 237–238
and the caste system 242–243
during Nehru’s rule 211, 213
in new Indian government
207, 208
and Sangh Parivar 228
sedition 297c
Subhas Chandra Bose 201
Mohandas K. Gandhi tried for
184
laws 167, 176–177, 298c
Tilak charged with 170
Seleucid dynasty 35, 36
Self Respect Movement 189, 298c
semi-precious stones 43, 44
Sen, Keshab Chandra 135
separate electorates
Muslims 172, 188, 298c, 299c
for Untouchables 300c
Sepoy Rebellion 109–112, 295c
sepoys 97, 108, 109
servants (covenanted)
business conducted by 91
loyalty of 95
power of 92
private trade of 97
return to England of 93
servants, as hereditary occupation
54
sewage drains 13
shack (urban) 242
Shah Bano case 281, 305c
Shah Commission 225
Shah Jahan 81–84, 293c
Jama Masjid mosque 82
Taj Mahal 83
Shaivites 64, 291c
Shajahanabad (city) 82
Shakas 45m
Shankara 66, 292c
sharia 60, 234, 305c
during Aurangzeb’s reign 84
during Shah Jahan’s reign 82
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Shastri, Lal Bahadur 302c
death of 302c
as prime minister 216–217
shawl 175
Sher Ali 148
Sher Shah 73
Shiite Muslims 60
Shiva (Hindu god) 50, 52
as bhakti god 64
and Harappan civilization 14
and Puranic Hinduism 51, 52
Shivaji Bhonsle 85, 163, 293c,
297c
Shiv Sena 231
Sholay (movie) 252
Shudras 65–66
occupations of the 26
as one of four varnas 54
Shunga dynasty 41, 291c
Shvetambara sect (Jainism) 31
Siddhartha Gautama 31, 32, 290c.
See also Buddha
Sikhism and Sikhs
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar
and 81
Anglo-Sikh Wars 106, 294c
Arjun 80, 81
and assassination of Indira
Gandhi 232, 233, 304c
attacks on, by Mughal emperors xvi–xvii
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
226, 304c
and Indira Gandhi 226
Golden Temple 226, 304c
karma in 81
khalsa 81
Mughal attacks on xvi–xvii
Guru Nanak 81, 292c
in population 288
Manmohan Singh 267–268,
282, 283, 305c, 307c
strike of 177
wars of expansion against 106
silks 78, 116
Simon, Sir John 187–188
Simon Commission 188, 299c
Sind (kingdom of) 61, 292c
Singh, Ajit 236
Singh, Beant 232
Singh, Charan 225
Singh, Kalyan 271
Singh, Manmohan 305c
as finance minister 267–268
as prime minister 282, 283,
307c
Singh, Satwant 232
Singh, V. P. 305c
anticorruption campaigns of
235, 237
becomes prime minister 305c
and the OBCs 265, 266
Slave dynasty 292c
Slavs 14
slums
clearance of 220, 224, 303c
urban 247
smrti 18
social class. See also caste system
and castes; specific classes;
varnas
and Buddhism 33
caste and 54–55
and reincarnation 26
social duties 26
socialism
“Gandhian” 231
of Jawaharlal Nehru 181,
207–208
social reform associations 134–139
social reforms 107, 163
software 268
soldiers. See also army (colonial
India)
in Afghan/Sikh wars 106
company 99
ethnicity of 112
sepoys 97, 108, 109
service of 108
Somnath, temple at 63
songs (bhakti) 64, 65, 65, 68
sons 27
soul 30–31
South Africa 174–175
South Asia 290c, 307c
map of 2m
spread of Buddhism to 43
Southeast Asia 44, 307c
South India 292c
in 600–1300 62–64
bhakti in 65–66, 291c
famine in 295c
non-Brahman movements in
189
spread of Buddhism to 42
upward caste mobility in
271–272
Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR)
speech, freedom of 149
spices trade 43, 44, 78, 90, 293c
spinning
by hand 182–184
women’s support for 193
Sri Lanka 237, 292c, 305c
civil war in 234
spread of Buddhism to 42
sruti 18
statecraft 36
state governments 209, 285
state legislatures 285
states 286. See also princely states;
specific names
in India 286
language-based 302c
statutory rape 162, 297c
Steel, Flora Annie 119, 122, 123
steelworks 168
sterilization 303c
Stone Age communities 6, 290c
The Story of My Experiments with
Truth (M. K. Gandhi) 185
Strachey, Sir John 153
strikes 296c
during the Emergency 222
hartal 177, 298c
346
labor 116, 179
peasant 183
students
and noncooperation campaign
182
riot 223
suicides of 266, 305c
stupas 49
subcontinent (Indian)
borders/boundaries of 1–4
India as a 1
land mass of 4–5
map of 2m
“subsidiary alliance” 99
suburbs 247
succession 80
Suez Canal 295c
Sufism 60, 82
suicide attacks 146
suicides
sati 56, 57, 104, 130, 159,
294c
of upper-caste students 266,
305c
Sumatra 307c
Sunni Muslims 60, 82
Supreme Court, Indian 209, 285
Surat 293c
Surat split 169–170
Surdas (saint) 66, 292c
Surya (sun god) 23, 52
suttee. See sati
swadeshi movement 166–168, 169,
170, 297c
swaraj (self-rule) 169
swayamsevaks 228
T
Tagore, Debendranath 135, 136
Tagore, Dwarkanath 128
Tagore, Gaganendranath 140
Tagore, Rabindranath 177
Tagore family mansion (Calcutta)
129
Taj Mahal (Agra) 82, 83
Tamil language 38, 43
Tamil Nadu 304c, 305c
Tamils 65
Tamil Tigers 234, 237, 305c
Tara Bai 86
Tata Iron and Steel Company
(TISCO) 118
Tatas family 118, 168
taxation and taxes. See also
tributary system
in Bengal 94
by British East India Company
94–96, 103
Lord Cornwallis and 98
cuts in 233
failure of British East India
Company to pay 95, 96
under Rajiv Gandhi 233
on land 94, 96, 142, 143, 145,
146, 293c
in Mughal Empire 77, 86
by Muslims 61
INDEX
on salt 191–192, 194
“tax farming” 86
during WWI 172
tea 90, 116
technology
benefit of 156
iron-age 20, 22
tectonic plates 2, 3, 290c
Tegh Bahadur 81
telegraphs 107
television 249, 263, 302c, 304c
commercials 258
Doordarshan 256
expansion of 250
and middle class 248
satellite 258
shaping of culture by 240
and urbanization 242
temple(s) 49, 49, 50. See also
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign
destruction of Hindu 62, 84
Golden Temple 226, 304c
invasion of Sikh 304c
Jagannatha temple 49, 50
Lakshmi Narayan Temple 51,
197
in Puranic Hinduism 50, 51,
58
Ram (Rama) temple 267, 279,
305c, 307c
at Somnath 63
worship at 65
terrorism
in Bengal 192–193
Muslim attacks on parliaments
279, 281, 306c
and partition of Bengal 166
at Ram temple 307c
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
187
Tesiger, Frederic John Napier (Lord
Chelmsfort) 180
textile industry 117, 118
Thackeray, Bal 231
Theosophical Society 139, 151,
296c
Third Buddhist Council 291c
“third world” countries 215–216
Thomas, St. 46, 291c
thought, freedom of 149
Tibet 216
tigers 8
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 149, 150,
297c
and Age of Consent Act 161,
162
arrest/imprisonment of 170
and assassination of Walter
Charles Rand 165
and “home rule leagues” 172
and Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms 176
support for WWI by 171
Tilak, Lokamanya 173
time
clock 126–127
cyclical 28
Timur (Tamerlane) 69–70, 292c
Tipu Sultan 100, 293c
tirthankaras 30
TISCO. See Tata Iron and Steel
Company
Tod, James 97
toleration xvi
Topinard, Paul 158
topography 286
trade 288–289
with Arabs 3, 61–62, 292c
and Aryanization 41–43
British East India Company
90, 94. See also British East
India Company
early 3
and Harappan civilization 13
in horses 44
Indo-European 3, 78, 90
and land passes 3
and migration of Aryans 16
in Mughal Empire 80
ocean 4
opium 94, 116
with Roman Empire 43–44,
291c
spice 43, 44, 78, 90, 293c
and the spread of religion 41–43
trains, timetables for 127
trials 151, 152
tribal communities 43
tribal rebellion 146
Tribals 146
tributary system
changes in 68
under the Guptas 52–53
in Mughal Empire 77
troops. See soldiers
“trusteeship” 97
tsunami 307c
Tughluq dynasty 71, 292c
Tulsidas 66, 292c
turban 175
Turkaram 292c
Turks
conversion to Islam of 61–62
Delhi Sultanate 69
U
ulama 60, 61, 86, 137, 295c
Ulgulan uprising 146
unicorn seal 10
Union Carbide 235, 304c
union government 209
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) 215, 221, 288–289, 302c
union territories 285, 286
United Nations Security Council
307c
United States
and cold war 215
food aid from 218
imports from 215
as trading partner 288–289
unity
caused by British 154
in the Upanishads 25
347
universe 28
universities 107, 108. See also
English-language colleges
Universities Act (1904) 166
unorthodoxy (religious) 27–33
Untouchability (Offences) Act 213,
302c
Untouchables (Dalits) and
Untouchability 295c, 305c
abolishment of 209
Aryans and 148
changing status of 245, 246,
273, 274
Bernard Cohn on 54
conversion of 212, 227,
304c
discrimination against 302c
Mohandas K. Gandhi and 183,
185, 195, 196
homes of the 243–244
and loss of status 54
non-Brahman movements of
147–148, 189
opposition to “out of India”
theory of 15
political power of xviii, 238,
264, 272–276
and Poona Pact 195, 196
reserved seats for 209, 300c
Scheduled Castes 209, 213,
243, 266
separate electorates for 300c
Upanishads 18
and animal sacrifices 22
composition of the 290c
karma in the 25–26
and reincarnation 28
unity/diversity in the 25
women in 55
upper castes 265, 266, 305c. See
also Brahmans
urban beautification 224
urban culture
of Indo-Aryans 290c
rural vs. 246, 246t, 247, 263,
287
urban households, assets of 249t
urban India
and consumer products 248
elites in 152
population of 287
urbanization 241–243, 242
of Harappan civilization 5, 6,
8–9
India’s second 20, 22–23
urban planning 11
urban settlements (Anglo-Indian)
122
Urdu language 137, 281
USSR. See Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics
V
Vaishnavites 64, 292c
Vaishyas (class)
occupations of the 26
as one of four varnas 54
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA
Vajpayee, Atahl Bihari
and BJP 229, 231, 270, 277
on demolition of Babri Masjid
mosque 271
and elections of 2004 281, 282
and nuclear weapons 278–279
and Pakistan 278–279
Vardhamana, Mahavira 30, 31,
290c
varnas 54–55. See also Brahmans;
Kshatriyas
karma/reincarnation and the
26
in the Rig-Veda 18–19
and role of the king 52
in rural India 142
Shudras 26, 54, 65–66
Vaishyas 26, 54
Vedanta (philosophy) 66, 292c
Vedas 18, 290c
Vedic Hinduism
and bhakti 64
in North India 28–29
rituals in 23, 24, 24, 25, 50, 51
Vedic Sanskrit 17, 29
vegetarianism
in fifth century A.D. 30
Ashoka and 39
and Buddhism 30
and Morarji Desai 225
as evidence of “backward culture” 134
Mohandas K. Gandhi and 175
and Hinduism 22
and Jainism 30
“veil” 88
Vellalas 65–66
Vernacular Press Act 148–149,
151, 296c
VHP. See Vishwa Hindu Parishad
vice president 285
viceroys. See also governors-general
Lord Canning 113
Lord Chelmsfort 180
Lord Halifax 193–194
Lord Linlithgow 199
Lord Lytton 145
Lord Mountbatten 203, 204,
206
Lord Ripon 145, 148, 151, 152
Lord Willingdon 195
Victoria (queen of Great Britain)
as empress of India 89, 113,
296c
proclamation of 89, 113
Vijayanagra (kingdom of) 72, 292c
villages 243–246, 302c
assets in 249
caste relations in 244–245
Mohandas K. Gandhi and 183
in global food production 245
panchayats 285
village system 209
Vindhya Range 4
violence 298c, 306c. See also
rebellion
in Ashokan military campaign
39
Bhagavad Gita as justification
for 163
caste conflict 245
against Christians 277, 277,
306c
communal. See communal violence
in Gujarat 279–281,
306c–307c
against Muslims 280
over religious festivals
161–162
partition 179, 205
police 193, 199–200
and religion xv–xvii
in Salt March campaign
192–193
against social reforms 163
Vishnu (Hindu god) 50, 52
as bhakti god 64
and Puranic Hinduism 51
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)
228, 231–232, 305c, 306c
Vivekananda 160, 297c
voting 209
W
wall paintings 42
warehouses 293c
warrior 54
wars (trading) 78
water 5, 11
weaving 184
Wellesley, Lord Richard Colley 99
and Anglo-Mysore Wars 100
and Maratha Wars 100–102
rule of 99–102
Western Ghats 4
West India 189
West Pakistan 204, 303c
and Bangladesh 221
and conflicts with East
Pakistan 221
wheat 302c
export of 116, 172
and the Green Revolution 218,
219
“The White Man’s Burden”
(Kipling) 123–124
widows
and remarriage 56, 57, 108,
136, 142
and sati 56, 57, 104, 130, 159,
294c
Willingdon, Lord (Freeman
Freeman-Thomas) 195
wives. See also widows
Anglo-Indian 119–122
Hindu scripture on 56
for Indian elites 141, 142
and Mirabai’s devotion 67
woman’s journal (Gujarati
language) 141
women. See also widows; wives
Age of Consent Act 162–163,
297c
in ancient India 55–57
348
child marriage 132, 135, 142
The Dance of the Emancipated
Lady 140
dowry deaths 257, 305c, 306c
education of 142
English-educated elite and
132
film viewing by 250
Gujarati woman’s journal
141
and Hindu revivalism 159
and Hindutva 255
in Islamic society 87–88
in Jainism 31
Laws of Manu on 55, 56
liberation of 255
and marriage 132, 135, 142,
211, 213, 302c
organizing of 193
and the Prarthana Samaj 136
purdah 87–88
rights of 209, 213, 302c
and the Sadharan Brahmo
Samaj 135
treatment of 134
voting rights of 209
the women’s question
139–142
Wood, Edwin Frederick Lindley.
See Irwin, Baron
Wood Dispatch 295c
world markets 144
World War I 171–172, 179, 297c
World War II 300c
and Great Britain 178, 200
and India 199, 200
Indian National Army 201
Writers’ Building 126, 127
X
Xavier, Francis 78
Y
Yadav, Laloo Prasad 272
Yadav, Mulayam Singh 272
Yahya Khan, Agha Mohammed
221
Yajur-Veda 18
yatras 261–262, 282
yavanas 43
yogic pose 14
yugas 28
Z
zamindars
abolishment of holdings for
214
in Calcutta 128
and land ownership 98, 143,
294c
and rent 77, 296c
zebu bull seal 7
zenana 88
Zoroastrianism 16, 77, 150