A BRIEF HISTORY India has always been a melange of peoples. Apart from some pre-Ice Age hominids, the first settlers to arrive in India were Negritos and Proto-Australoids. Migrants of Mediterranean stock from the Middle East and Asia seem to have made up the Dravidians, now principally in the southern peninsula. In 4000 b.c. agriculturalists made their first appearance up in the hills of Baluchistan in the northwest. In the Indus river valley, improved techniques permitted the storage of wheat and barley beyond daily needs, and so the cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro emerged in the year 2300 b.c. , creating a civilization even more advanced than that of the Aryans who came later. The sewage system and houses outside the citadel were better constructed than their modern equivalents, and among their animals was a major Indian contribution to the world’s cuisine — the chicken. Modern archaeology suggests that this Indus Valley civilization was destroyed not by Aryan conquerors, but by floods, when the Indus river changed course, perhaps due to earthquakes, in about 1700 b.c. The Hindus’ Ancestors The Aryans arrived on the scene some 200 years later. Originally from Russia or Asia, they migrated to Mesopotamia first and then on to Iran before entering India. These fair-skinned cattle-breeders, who saw the cow as an especially sacred animal, cultivated agriculture in the Punjab after waging war against the Dasas, who then became their slaves. Early events surrounding the Indo-Aryans can be deduced from the later writings of the Rig-Veda (priestly hymns), Puranas (ancient tales of kings and gods), and the epic poems of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. These provided the basis for Hinduism; also, the epics’ heroic battles suggest there was a prolonged struggle for land rights over the fertile plains north and east of modern Delhi, followed by invasions and wars. If ancient writings give only a romanticized view, they do offer a more precise picture of Indo-Aryan society. Their long wars against the indigenous people established their leaders as kings with a hereditary divinity, which the Brahmins (the priests) exchanged for a privileged position of their own. The caste system was already taking shape. Before the conquests, the Aryans were organized in three classes: warriors, priests, and commoners. Then they established four distinct categories known as varna (literally, “color”). As possessors of magical power associated with ritual sacrifice and sacred utterance, Brahmins were the sole interpreters of the Vedic scriptures. They laid down a social pecking order with themselves in first place, followed by Kshatriyas (the warriors), Vaishyas (cultivators or traders), and Shudras (serfs and those of mixed blood). This organization became more elaborate as the division of labor became more complicated, so the growing number of occupational groups were subsequently defined as jati (subcastes), often living in separate villages. Each caste would preserve its “purity” by avoiding intermarriage and not sharing food with other castes. Outside these were the Untouchables, those of aboriginal descent. By 600 b.c. , the Indo-Aryans had formed monarchies in the Ganga plain, surrounded by smaller tribes resisting the Brahmanic orthodoxy and its authoritarianism. Within the monarchies, thinkers took to the asceticism which has characterized spiritual life in India. The Brahmins cannily countered this threat by absorbing the new ideas into their teachings. But the tribes were less amenable and so became the breeding ground for two new religions espousing non-violence, Jainism and Buddhism. While rulers fought for control of the Ganga valley, new invaders appeared at India’s frontiers; Cyrus, Emperor of Persia, crossed the Hindu Kush mountains into the Indus valley in 530 b.c. While Brahman and Persian scholars exchanged ideas, the Indians copied the Persian coin system. Rock inscriptions left by Emperor Darius probably inspired the pillar-edicts of Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century b.c. The spectacular invasion by Alexander the Great of Macedonia in 326 b.c. ended Persian presence, but apart from opening up trade with Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks left no lasting impact on India during the two-year campaign. Alexander’s dreams of a huge empire extending eastwards across the Ganga plain were blocked by mutinous troops fed up with upset stomachs, the harsh terrain, and the tough Indian military opposition. He returned to Babylon, leaving a few governors on the frontier. Ashoka’s Empire Meanwhile, in the Ganga valley power struggle, Magadha (modern Bihar) emerged as the dominant kingdom. Its ruler, Chandragupta Maurya (321–297 b.c. ), was also to become the founder of India’s first imperial dynasty with Pataliputra (modern Patna), the world’s largest city at the time, as its capital. Chandragupta extended his rule to the northwest with a rigorous campaign against the Greek forces of Seleucus Nikator. It ended in a profitable marriage alliance with the Greeks, but later Chandragupta turned to more sober thoughts: he converted to Jainism, and finally starved to death at the temple of Sravanabelagola. His son Bindusara combined his father’s ambition with a taste for the good life and philosophy. He expanded the empire as far down as Mysore and stunned the western world by asking King Antiochus for Greek wine, figs, and a sophist. The king was happy to send the wine and figs, but would not, however, consent to Bindusara’s last request. To control land and sea routes to the south, the Mauryas still needed to conquer the eastern kingdom of Kalinga (modern Orissa). The task was left to Bindusara’s heir Ashoka (269–232 b.c. ), admired by Indians as their greatest ruler, perhaps for his special combination of tough authoritarianism and a high sense of moral righteousness. Ashoka began by killing all his rivals before conquering Kalinga in 260 b.c. This left 100,000 dead, with even more dying from famine and disease, while 150,000 were taken captive. Famous inscriptions on rocks and pillars everywhere bore testimony to Ashoka’s reign. The inscriptions state how “he of gentle visage and beloved of the gods,” as he described himself, was filled with remorse and converted to the non-violent teachings of Buddha. But metaphysical implications seem to have interested him less than enforcing a moral example to unite his far-flung subjects in peace and fellowship, under him. To oversee this mass conversion, Ashoka turned the Brahmanic concept of dharma (righteousness) into an instrument of public policy, enforced by the Officers of Righteousness he had appointed for this purpose. The imperial administration for this undertaking demanded a huge bureaucracy, with superintendents, accountants, and clerks overseeing commerce, forestry, armory, weights and measures, goldsmiths, prostitutes, ships, cows and horses, elephants, chariots, and infantry. Southern India remained independent, but Ashoka had his hands full with a large empire that now extended as far north as Kashmir and east to Bengal. In the 50 years that followed Ashoka’s death, Mauryan power went into decline. Agriculture was not productive enough to finance the empire’s expansion. Also, the unwieldy bureaucracy couldn’t keep its loyalties straight, with the too-rapid turnover in rulers vying for Ashoka’s throne. Invaders Galore After the break-up of the Mauryan empire, new invaders appeared on the northwest frontier. The first to arrive were Bactrian Greeks left in the Afghan hills by Alexander’s successors. They were welcomed for their erudite ideas on medicine, astronomy, and astrology. Joined by Iranian kings known as Pahlavas, the Greeks were overrun in the first century b.c. by bands of Scythian nomads known as the Shakas. They moved on into the Ganga valley when other nomads, the Yueh-chi from Central Asia, swept across the frontier. Emerging victorious from the struggles between the Yueh-chi and the Shakas, King Kanishka of the Kushan established an empire from the northern half of India and into Central Asia. His reign was one of prosperity, making India a trade center between east and west. Kanishka was a champion of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) school, which attributed for the first time a quasi-divinity to Buddha; his active patronage of the arts led to the creation of the first bronze and stone sculptures of Buddha. Buddhist and Jain merchants prospered with the new east–west trade and so were able to finance the magnificently sculpted cave-temples in the Deccan, including those at Ajanta and Ellora. The arts also flourished in India during these early times. Madurai was the lively cultural center for Dravidian artists: poets, actors, singers, musicians, and also dancers who were the precursors of the Hindu devadasi temple prostitutes. Gupta Glory The Gupta dynasty, founded by the obscure Bihari landowner Chandra Gupta I, rose to power during the fourth century a.d. Marriage-alliance and conquest allowed the Guptas to create an empire from Bengal to the Punjab and from Kashmir to the Deccan. Samudra Gupta, the warrior of the clan, launched lightning raids through the jungles to snatch the gold of the south. The Guptas also captured the western sea ports and their trade with the Arabs. They turned their noses up at trade with the Romans, but China offered many bounties, such as silk, musk, and amber, in exchange for India’s spices, jewels, and perfumes — as well as parakeets for the ladies’ boudoirs and monkeys for their cooking pots. The Gupta empire began to crumble in the fifth century, with the onslaught of the so-called White Huns. They were not clearly linked to Attila’s Huns, but their harsh agenda of exterminating Buddhists does suggest an affinity. The White Huns seized the Punjab, Kashmir, and a large portion of the western Ganga plain before being chased out again. In the seventh century, one strong king, Harshavardhana, reigned for 40 years over northern India, and encouraged Buddhist monks and Brahman priests to participate in philosophical discussions. Sages developed the strict disciplines of yoga and profound metaphysical speculations of Vedanta. In southern India, power was shared by the Pallavas in Kanchipuram and the Pandyas and Cholas vying for control of Thanjavur (Tanjore). The bhakti movement of the Tamils brought a new warmth to the hitherto rigid Brahmanic ritual of Hinduism. The temples of Mahabalipuram were a high point in southern architecture, and it was the Pallavan artists who influenced — and may have helped to build — the temples at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur in Java. Islam Comes to India Arab trade with India had long since whetted the appetites of the Muslims; when Indian pirates plundered their ships off the coast of Sind in 711, it provoked the Governor of Chaldea (now Iraq) to send troops with 6,000 horses and 6,000 camels to conquer the Sind rajas and offer the alternative of converting to Islam or death. When it was revealed to the Governor of Chaldea that Hinduism was in fact a serious religion with too many faithful to treat in this way, another solution had to be found: Hindus, along with Parsis who had fled an earlier Muslim persecution in Persia, were given the privileged status of dhimmi, dues-paying non-believers. For nearly 300 years, Islamic conquest in India was confined to this trading community in Sind, but in the tenth century, tribesmen from Turkistan, driven west by Chinese expansion, set up a state at Ghazni and began raids across the border to plunder Hindu temples. Sweeping through the Punjab and Gujarat across to the western end of the Ganga valley, Mahmud of Ghazni (997–1030) used these raids more to finance his empire in Persia and Turkistan than to set up a permanent foothold in India. Mahmud smashed the infidels’ idols and destroyed their temples as he went, but was nonetheless cultured enough to use the booty to build a library, a museum, and a splendid mosque when he got back to Ghazni. If Muslims saw him as a righteous militant and Hindus as a brutal monster, neither denied him his title of “Sword of Islam. ” In order to understand his ambiguous image, compare him with Europe’s heroic crusaders who went on the rampage at about the same time. There was no concerted Indian response to the invasions because the various kingdoms were busy with wars of their own. The Rajput warrior clans fought each other for control in what is now Rajasthan, the Kathiawar peninsula, and as far east as Khajuraho. The Turco-Afghan invaders were regarded as a transient phenomenon that would either soon disappear or, just like others before them, be swallowed up by the great subcontinent. A Sultan for Delhi At the end of the 12th century, the Turks arrived: Sultan Mohammed of Ghur and his Mameluke (slave) General Qutb-ud-din Aybak seized Ghazni in 1173 and invaded India. The Rajputs made a belated alliance and fought valiantly from one desert fortress to another, but their elephants could not match their opponents’ fast horses and Afghan cavalry firing superior crossbows at the gallop. By 1193, the Turks were masters in Peshawar, Lahore, and Delhi. The sultan returned to Ghazni and, leaving Qutb-ud-din in charge, moved east to Bengal, destroying centers of Buddhism such as the University of Nalanda. After his master’s assassination in 1206, Qutb-ud-din proclaimed himself sultan of Delhi, head of India’s first Islamic dynasty. The sultanate lasted 320 years, but the new sultan ruled only four years: he died in a fall from his pony. After the shock of the invasion had passed, the Turks proved to be a shot in the arm for India. The Persian language spoken at court enriched Indian literature and combined with the Sanskrit-based dialects of northern India to create Hindustani. Painting and architecture were infused with life, roads were paved, and, in the 14th century, Delhi was pronounced by the Arab traveller Ibn Batuta to be the most magnificent city in the whole Muslim world. Conversion to the Islamic faith was seen as a means of advancement, and those Rajputs who didn’t take advantage of this offer were able to sharpen their martial skills in constant guerrilla warfare. The Turks adopted the Indian cuisine and costume as well as a modified form of the Hindu caste system. Highest were those of foreign extraction such as Turks, Arabs, Afghans, and Persians, known as ashraf (that is, “honorable”). Then came upper-caste converts from Hinduism, the “clean” castes of both merchants and artisans, and then the “unclean” occupations of scavengers. It’s worth noting that the first — and last — Muslim woman to rule in India was Qutb-ud-din’s granddaughter Raziyya. “ Wise, just, and generous,” a contemporary Muslim historian said of her, “but she was not born of the right sex and so all the virtues were worthless. ” Three years of her wisdom, justice, and generosity were all they could take before they murdered her. What they seemed to want was a despot like Ala-ud-din Khalji (1296–1316), who forced Mongol invaders back across the Afghan frontier and then moved through the peninsula to its southern tip. But Ala-ud-din’s successors did not assert control of the territory. The south remained dominated by the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar for the next 250 years. The Delhi sultanate under the Tughlaq dynasty could no longer hold its own in the north, and so Muslim kingdoms began to form in Bengal and the Deccan. The end was hastened by a man who made other Muslim invaders seem like pussy cats: the Mongol Timur the Lame, the “barbarous and bloody Tamburlaine,” later written about by Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. On the grounds that the sultans were too soft, he cut through Delhi in 1398, slaughtering thousands of Hindus and carrying off thousands more as slaves. He left behind him famine and pestilence. The Turks’ Indian empire in splinters, it passed into the hands of Afghan horse-breeders — the Lodi — who later succumbed to his descendants, the Mughals. Down on the Malabar coast, the great Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed in 1498, paving the way for his countrymen to form a settlement in Goa. The merchants wanted to divert trade away from the Arabs, fearing the enrichment of the North African Maghreb as a threat to Christian Europe. With them came the Catholic missionaries, who found the best subjects for their teachings among the low-caste Hindus. Around 1548 St. Francis Xavier began his mission among the pearl fishermen of Goa, before he set sail for Japan. To deal with the small communities of Jews and Nestorian Christian “heretics,” who had settled down on the Malabar coast in the mists of antiquity, the then Archbishop of Goa opened a local branch of the Holy Inquisition. The merchants at first tried the soft sell, offering cloth, wine, and necklaces for ivory and gold, but the traders of Calicut were insulted at being taken for “natives” who could be bought with cheap hooch and glass baubles. The Portuguese turned to the harder sell of naval batteries, driving off a trading fleet in the year 1509 in order to control the Malabar coast. With hardly any women present in the colony, the Portuguese soldiers took Indian wives. Many Goans are descended from them or from converts who took the name of their Portuguese sponsors. The Great Mughals The new conquerors of northern India did not come uninvited. The Afghan governors of the Sind and the Punjab, who were hoping for more autonomy than they had under the lofty sultan Ibrahim Lodi in Delhi, therefore called on Babur the Tiger, King of Kabul. Babur the Tiger, descendant of Timur the Lame and of Genghis Khan, accepted their welcome but made no promises. His men crushed sultan Ibrahim’s 50,000 with cannons, hitherto unknown in India, at Panipat, north of Delhi. It was the morning of 21 April 1526, the beginning of the empire of the Mughals —  the term used for descendants of Babur as distinct from those of Genghis Khan, who are referred to as “Mongols” even though the terms are etymologically the same. Babur fought resistance from the Rajputs and captured Delhi and Agra, then conquered the Afghan chiefs in 1529. He died a year later. His heir, Humayun, preferred opium and astrology to complex State affairs; he was driven out of India into Persia by General Sher Shah, who proved to be a much more able ruler. In five years, the General built new roads, created a royal postal service, and set the pattern of Mughal administration for the next two centuries before dying in battle and leaving the throne to a number of inept successors and, eventually, the return of Humayun. Straightened out for a while, Humayun came back in 1555 with his Persian army to recapture the Punjab, Delhi, and Agra, but the next year his opium habit caused his death (see page 64). He did, however, leave a son named Akbar. Jalal-ud-din Mohammed Akbar (1556–1605) was a real emperor. Typical of his genius was the new religion he offered his subjects: the Divine Faith (Din-Ilahi), intended to satisfy orthodox Muslims and those who, just like himself and the Hindus, appreciated the idea of a semi-divine ruler. Keen to win the allegiance of the Hindus, Akbar abolished most of the discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims, and recruited Rajputs for his army after marrying a daughter of Raja Bharmal of Amber, (though he did not flinch at massacring another 8,000 Rajput soldiers). But despite repeated efforts, Akbar could not extend his empire south. In 1565, the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan had taken the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar by means of slaughter, but they were not going to hand it all to Akbar. Although illiterate, Akbar had enormous intellectual curiosity. He preferred Sufi mysticism to orthodox Islam, and held debates with Brahmins, Jain monks, Parsi Zoroastrians, and Jesuits. The more orthodox Muslims were concerned that Islam was being abandoned, and rebellions sprang up in Bengal, Bihar, and the Punjab. While Akbar was fighting in the Deccan in 1601, his son claimed the throne. Akbar rushed back to reassert his power but he died soon after, poisoned, it is rumored, by his son. The new emperor called himself Jahangir (World Seizer) but once in power he left affairs of state to his wife Nur Jahan, as he was more interested in writing poetry, drinking a great deal of wine, and taking summer excursions up to Kashmir. Here, rich Persian culture dictated taste in dress, décor, manners, and morals, enriched by the Hindu culture of the Rajputs in literature, cuisine, and sexuality. If the peasants were squeezed by taxes to pay for the luxury of Mughal court life, it was a boon for the country’s artisans — goldsmiths, jewelers, and weavers. In such an atmosphere, incidents of highway banditry increased and the district governors shared the rich booty in exchange for a pardon when the bandits were captured. Jahangir’s son Shahjahan became the biggest spender of all the Mughals. He lavished millions on palaces and mosques, blowing at least one million pounds sterling on gold and jewels for his Peacock Throne. Despite this, the imperial treasury allotted only 5,000 rupees a week for the plague and famine victims of 1631. Of several hundred women in the emperor’s harem, his only love was the now legendary Mumtaz-Mahal (“Exalted of the Palace”), by whom he had 14 children. She died in childbirth and Shahjahan built her the most famous memorial a man ever offered to the woman he loved: the Taj Mahal. Shahjahan’s son was Aurangzeb (1658–1707), who overthrew his father and imprisoned him in the Agra fort for the last years of his life. A pious Muslim, puritanical in both clothes and personal tastes, he banished music from the court and burned the portraits of princes as breaches of the Islamic taboo on graven images. Gone, too, was any notion of religious tolerance. The Sikhs were slaughtered, the Hindu temples in both Varanasi and Mathura were destroyed, and the building of new temples was forbidden. Taxes on non-Muslims were brought back; Hindu merchants were forced to pay double duties on their goods. Aurangzeb streamlined the lax administration of his predecessors, but he almost bankrupted the realm with his campaigns to expand the empire down to the south, and his battles against rebels in the north. The most significant resistance came from Marathas, in today’s State of Maharashtra, around Mumbai. They were led by the fighter Shivaji (1627–1680), bandit, brave military commander, and an authentic Hindu folk hero. Starting out from Pune, Shivaji’s Marathas fought off the Deccan sultans at Bijapur and the Mughals at Purandar. Aurangzeb forced him finally to submit, but the humiliating reception he was given at court sent him back on the warpath again. Shivaji then had himself crowned King of the Marathas and, to pay his soldiers, plundered the country all the way east to Madras. The British Arrive Meanwhile, by the middle of the 17th century, Dutch and British armed merchant ships had broken through the Portuguese blockade to set up their East India Companies on both coasts. Arriving in 1608, the British took five years to get their foot in the Indian door, at the western port of Surat, north of Bombay. The Company destroyed the Portuguese fleet and took over the protection of the Muslim pilgrimage ships to Mecca, but there were no hard feelings; the Portuguese made a gift of Bombay to King Charles II in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza. The Indians were not consulted. The Company erected its east-coast installations in the year 1642 just down the road from the Dutch, at Mandaraz, pronounced “Madras” by the British. Further north, the British gradually gained the upper hand over their rivals, now including the French, for the Bengali trade that was to create Calcutta. The Mughal empire had five rulers in 12 years after Aurangzeb died. Bihar, Bengal, and Rajputana all went their separate ways. The Sikhs reacted violently to persecution, and the Marathas spread to Orissa, after which, in the year 1739, Nadir Shah of Persia invaded and carried off the Peacock Throne (broken up after his assassination). Meanwhile, the British clerk-turned-soldier Robert Clive won a long campaign against the French for Madras. Fearing the Europeans would start carving up Bengal, the nawab (Muslim prince) Siraj-ud-daula set up an attack on the British settlement in Calcutta on the hot day of 20 June, 1756. Those who did not flee to sea were thrown into Fort William’s prison, already known as the Black Hole. It’s still being debated whether 123 suffocated and 23 survived or “only” 43 died, leaving 21 survivors, but however many died, they were enough impetus for Clive to crush Siraj-ud-daula at the Battle of Plassey. Clive became governor and placed his own nawab on the throne, in exchange for £500,000 for himself and the Company. He then annexed about 2,330 sq km (900 sq miles) of land due south of Calcutta to provide rents for the British settlement and to guarantee himself an income of £30,000 per year for life. The rise of the British Empire in India had begun. Installing the Raj The arrival of Indian merchants, including Jains, Parsis, and Jews, turned Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta into large cities; the Company discovered a knack for large-scale administration. A high sense of integrity took the place of what Clive called “fighting, chicanery, intrigues, politics, and Lord knows what. ” In return for fixed payments to the emperor, Company officials collected revenue. With a well-paid civil service, Clive’s successors — Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis — avoided the collectors by padding their salaries with private deals. With the new title of Governor-General, Hastings and then Cornwallis were responsible to the British government rather than the Company. Britain began taking India more seriously. But this new high-mindedness had in it the seeds of future discontent. Indians were removed from key positions in the administration because Cornwallis considered them not yet up to the stricter ethical standards that were being introduced. It took a long time for them to be readmitted to positions of responsibility. Clive’s example in Calcutta set the pattern for territorial control around the country. In the south, Tipu Sultan of Mysore remained a menace to Madras until Governor-General Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, defeated him. Wellesley then turned on the Marathas, whose clans controlled the puppet Mughal emperor in Delhi and much of central India. A few brilliant victories gained control of Orissa and other territories for Britain, but London decided all that energy would be best directed at Napoleon, and called Wellesley home. When territory wasn’t acquired by conquest — Sind from Baluchi princes, Punjab and Kashmir from the Sikhs, Maharashtra and Delhi from the Marathas, or Assam from Burma — the British annexed it by so-called Principles of Lapse and Paramountcy. If a ruler died without direct heir, his state “lapsed” into British hands. If, after repeated warnings, a State was judged guilty of misgovernment, it was simply annexed by the Paramount Power — the British. Schools and colleges became established. Calcutta became the center of a vigorous free press and the intellectual capital of India. During 1834, regional rupees of differing value were minted with the portrait of the Mughal emperor. Then a national rupee of unitary value was issued, with the face of the king of England. In running the empire effectively, the British installed railways, better roads, the telegraph, and stamp-post. Indians also saw the other side of the Industrial Revolution as their cotton left for Manchester to come back as cloth cheaper than their own. Men such as Governor-General William Bentinck worked with missionaries and reformers such as Brahman Ram Mohan Roy to legislate against the practice of widows becoming sati by climbing onto the funeral pyres of their respective husbands. Other campaigns were launched against female infanticide, slavery, and the bands of Thugs (devotees of Kali) ranging the countryside. Although some Indians assimilated the language and behavior of the British, to most the imperialists were offensively aloof. The Indians had known other conquerors, but at least they had been able to gain a sense of them as human beings. The British Raj, though, was firmly entrenched in clubs, and remained resolutely separate. Mutiny and Reform The cause of the Mutiny of 1857, or The War of Independence as it is known to Indians, was symptomatic of British insensitivity. Indian troops were trained to bite the cartridges before loading their rifles, but some were greased with animal fat and the Indians felt they were ingesting either fat from the cow, sacred to the Hindus, or lard from the pig, abomination to the Muslims. As they had suffered slights of either incomprehension or contempt for their religious customs before, they simply could not believe it was not deliberate, and mutiny broke out at Meerut, 40 km (25 miles) north of Delhi. The cartridge blunder became a pretext for avenging other grievances, with troops rallying around the rulers dispossessed by Lapse or Paramountcy. The mutineers then invaded Delhi, Kanpur (Cawnpore), and Lucknow, looting treasuries, breaking open jails, and killing British men, women, and children. The British retaliated with equal savagery against the mutineers and against civilians in the country through which the relief columns passed. Finally, the last of the proud Mughals, the Emperor Bahadur Shah, was condemned to exile in Burma. Nothing could more aptly epitomize the Mutiny’s good and bad results, from an Indian point of view, than the name given to the legislation that was to follow: the 1858 Act for Better Government of India. The British evidently saw the need to improve things for the Indians, but also decided to tighten their imperial hold. The East India Company was replaced by a Government with a Viceroy answering to a Secretary of State for India in London. The bureaucracy was to be streamlined, and the army reorganized to raise the ratio of British to Indians. Indian education was greatly expanded, though less successfully in rural areas where people thought it better to be a good peasant than a bad clerk. Queen Victoria, who in the year 1876 would add the title Empress of India to her roll of honor, proclaimed that the Indian Civil Service would be open to “our subjects of whatever race and creed. ” Not a lot of Indians, however, could afford the trip to Britain to take the examination. Meanwhile, lawyers were at a premium — Indians love litigation and it was ideal training for future politicians — and politics had been clandestine, because it was so often fatal to express an opinion on the wrong (i.e. , losing) side. Now open political debate flourished, especially in Calcutta where Karl Marx was much appreciated. Indian entrepreneurs developed their own cotton mills in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, and Madras, but the new tea gardens were a strictly British affair. Indian agricultural products soon found new markets in Europe when the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. In the arts, architecture was often of the work of engineers, and huge sculptures were ordered from Victorian Britain rather than from local artists. The bright spot was the Archaeological Survey of 1871 to preserve ancient monuments. British soldiers hunting tigers in the jungle were finding temples and palaces many Indians no longer knew existed. Fighting for Self-Rule The Indian National Congress, the country’s f irst political party, held its inaugural meeting in Bombay in 1885. As a group of liberal Hindu and Parsi intellectuals, supported by a few progressive British, it was more national in purpose than in its representation. Lacking connection with the peasants, it was also distrusted by conservative landlords and by most Muslims. The goal of swaraj (self-rule), proclaimed in 1906, was seen by a moderate Left Center group as government within the British Empire, and by a breakaway revolutionary Extreme Left group as complete independence. After years of subservience to the West, artists returned to Indian themes in their literature, theatre, and music. Indians applauded the decision of Lord Ripon to allow Indian magistrates to try British defendants in criminal cases, but attempts at social reform such as protecting child brides against rape by their husbands were fought by traditionalist Hindus from Calcutta and Pune with cries of “religion in danger. ” Self assertion reigned again: After years of peace, hostilities broke out between the Hindus and the Muslims. In Maharashtra, a cult grew up around the Maratha leader Shivaji (see page 42) against the British and also the Muslims whom Shivaji had fought all his life. Fundamentalists took to the streets to protest against the Muslim slaughter of cows. There was a movement to convert Muslims and Christians back to the “national” religion. The Muslims tried to purify the Islamic practice of the Hindu rituals which had accrued over the years. The caste system was affected by this new spirit. Untouchables pressed for better treatment, but their cause was not helped by the activism of American missionaries and the Salvation Army, who gave other castes a good excuse to resist “foreign interference. ” Dynamic Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1905, was driven by a lofty imperial vision of the British role in India. His grandiose life in the viceregal residence in Calcutta or palace in Simla was worthy of the Mughal emperors. Highly active in excavating and restoring the temples and palaces, Curzon also did more than any of his predecessors, adding 9,000 km (5,500 miles) of new railway lines, working to modernize farming with an agricultural research institute, and building an irrigation system that would become a model for Asia and Africa. The Indians, however, resented his refusal to consult them, and rioted over an ill-considered partition of Bengal. In 1911, King George V became the first British monarch to visit India. He celebrated the fact by announcing that the capital would be moved from Calcutta to a whole new city to be built in Delhi. The Royal architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker created a monumental New Delhi with triumphal arches, palaces, gigantic government buildings, and sweeping avenues radiating from circles (for easy riot control) — the stuff of an empire meant to last forever. Without giving up demands for self-determination, India fought at Britain’s side in World War I, and more than one Prussian general blinked at Rajput and Sikh princes leading an Indian infantry through the trenches of France. In 1917 self-determination in India seemed nearer when London announced its plan for “the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the (British) Empire. ” The British were not letting go, but a new Government of India Act two years later promised Indians real executive power at the head of provincial ministries for education, public works, health, and agriculture. The moderate Indians were delighted, but revolutionaries saw it as a foot in the door, while many British officials retired rather than serve under Indian ministers. Riots over Bengal’s partition led to new laws for political trials without jury and also internment without trial. Popular protest in the big cities in 1919 at first took the non-violent form of a hartal, an Indian “strike” called when the soul is shocked by an injustice. This idea came from the new leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, dubbed Mahatma  (Great Soul) by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi returned in 1915 after working as a lawyer defending the rights of the Indian community in South Africa. The moral strength of his non-violent philosophy was immediately tested in the Punjab, where the hartal erupted into riots. In Amritsar, the troops of General Reginald Dyer fired on a prohibited mass meeting, leaving 379 dead and over 1,200 wounded. As a result, Gradualist reform became discredited and civil unrest a feature of everyday life. Declaring that “cooperation in any form with this satanic government is sinful,” Gandhi advocated the boycott of elections and the withdrawal of people from government office. Moderates held on, but the election boycott was at least 33 percent successful. Abandoning European dress for his now legendary white cotton dhoti (loincloth) and shawl, and drawing spiritual guidance from all the great religions of India, Gandhi became the simple but powerful symbol of India. He supported the Untouchables and defended the rights of village artisans and peasants, but his non-violent movement could not stop the escalating riots among the religious communities. Worried by the spread of his civil disobedience movement, the British jailed Gandhi in 1922 for two years. In jail at the same time, for “incitement to rebellion,” was Congress Party member Jawaharlal Nehru, who was British-educated but also a Brahman intellectual, as his honorary title of Pandit suggested. He was the Mahatma’s favorite to lead India to independence. Independence with Partition The British began to see India’s independence as inevitable; however, only a few seemed to understand the vital role of the religious groups. Britain prepared a parliamentary democracy with majority rule, but the majority were Hindus — and Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had been killing each other in war for many centuries. Nehru’s Congress Party, largely Hindu with a socialist leadership, wanted a parliamentary democracy. As counterweight, British legislation reserved parliamentary seats for religious minorities, but the Punjab and Bengal had such a complicated mixture of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that it was not possible to avoid fights over how separate constituencies were to be formed. The seeds of future trouble were sown. The legislation on reserving seats gave the Muslims the basis for an alternative to an India in which they were only a quarter of the population: Partition. In 1930, the poet Muhammad Iqbal proposed a separate Muslim homeland in the northwest of India. A small group of Indian Muslims at Cambridge came up with the name Pakistan, using the initials of the Punjab, Afghania (N.W. Frontier Province), Kashmir, and Sind (at the same time producing the word pak, meaning “pure”), and adding “stan,” the Persian suffix for the word “country. ” The Muslim campaign for Partition was led by London-trained Bombay lawyer, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Meanwhile, Gandhi vehemently opposed any dismemberment of the country, and tried to keep people united by fasting to uphold the spirit of love, and by focussing on the common adversary: the British. Advocating civil disobedience, he led his famous Salt March to the sea, to scoop up salt and circumvent the hated British salt tax. This put more than 60,000 in jail. Against this militancy, World War II did not elicit the solidarity of the first. Indians courageously fought alongside the British troops, in Burma, the Middle East, and Europe, but Gandhi saw the British as a provocation for Japanese invasion and was jailed yet again, for launching a “Quit India” campaign in the year 1942. Some anti-British extremists saw the Japanese as an Asian liberator. Winston Churchill didn’t want any Indian independence and so it was probably as well for India that he was defeated by Attlee’s Labor Party in 1945. With riots growing ever more bloody in Bengal, Bihar, and the Punjab, India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, kept a mandate to make the British departure as quick and as smooth as possible. Quick it was — six months after his arrival — but not smooth. Midnight, 14–15 August, in the year 1947, was a moment, in the words of Prime Minister Nehru, “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. ” Nehru got his Independence and Jinnah his Partition — a Pakistan whose eastern Bengali portion was to break away 24 years later to become Bangladesh. Bloodshed began as soon as the Partition boundaries were set. In east (Indian) Punjab, Hindus and Sikhs massacred Muslims; in west (Pakistani) Punjab, the Muslims massacred Sikhs and Hindus. This was followed by a mass exodus of millions from one country to the other but the convoys often ended in slaughter. Delhi itself was torn apart by communal rampages. The overall death toll came to at least 500,000 people. Mahatma Gandhi immediately rushed from Calcutta to Delhi to defend Muslims against further slaughter. In January 1948, he fasted for peace in the capital city in order to force the Indian government to pay Pakistan the monies due in the Partition’s division of assets. A Hindu fanatic, enraged by what he felt was an excessively fervent defense of the Muslim interests, assassinated Gandhi in a prayer meeting on 30 January. India Today Sensitive and sophisticated, Pandit Nehru was also the strongest ruler India had known since the great Mughals and, like them, he created a powerful dynasty. Rejecting his mentor Gandhi’s faith in a village-based democracy, Nehru worked to make India a fully industrialized society on the basis of democratic socialism. Established industries had their taxes raised but were not nationalized. Companies that were foreign had to accept Indian financial participation and management. He appropriated for the State much of the personal fortunes of the princes, but found it harder to curtail the power of land-owners who had extensive contacts with the more conservative elements in his Congress Party. Kashmir remained an unresolved problem of Partition. The Muslim majority in the Vale of Kashmir and Gilgit made it part of Pakistan, but the greater part of the eastern region around Jammu was Hindu, as was the maharaja. Backed by Pakistan, Pathan tribesmen invaded Kashmir in 1947 to force the issue, but were soon repulsed by Indian troops flown in when the maharaja hastily acceded to India. Kashmir was divided between both India and Pakistan, pending a plebiscite — which has never been held. An invasion by Pakistan in 1965 was aborted and has left the issue distinctly moot. Applying the principle of geographical integrity, Nehru regained French Pondicherry by negotiation after Independence, and Portuguese Goa by force in 1961. He was less successful in fighting China over territory on the Tibetan frontier. Egalitarian and agnostic, Nehru passed laws against the injustice of the caste system, child-marriage, and the treatment of women in Hindu households, but century-old customs die hard: before his death in 1964, he asked that his ashes be scattered in the Yamuna river at Delhi and the Ganga at Allahabad, and without ritual. The mourning crowds, though, ignored his last wishes, uttering prayers and crying: “Panditji has become immortal. ” Coming to power in the year 1966 after the brief ministry of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi proved strong enough in her own right for people to stop describing her as Nehru’s daughter or as “not related to Mahatma Gandhi. ” In fact, she learned much from both, the knack for power-politics of the one and the massive popular appeal of the other. She accelerated industrialization, in particular the nuclear power industry, including a first atomic explosion in the desert in 1974. Her proudest achievement, though, was the Green Revolution that modernized wheat and rice farming to give India, for the first time in its history, self-sufficiency in food production. Old entrenched conservatism hampered her birth-control programs to check the rocketing population growth. Indira Gandhi’s tendency toward tough authoritarianism was highlighted during the repressive state of emergency she declared in 1975, describing it as “disciplined democracy,” when she ordered mass arrests of opposition leaders who had charged her and her party with malpractice and corruption. The electorate punished her in 1977 with three years in the wilderness, then brought her back with a huge majority. But her second term was beset with the problems of regional unrest, most notably in Assam in the northeastern region of the country, where local massacres left 3,000 dead, and in the Punjab, where Sikh militants staged violent demonstrations for greater autonomy and even independence. It was her order to the Indian Army in 1984 to attack armed militants in the Sikhs’ sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar, resulting in 800 dead, that led to her assassination in Delhi five months later by two Sikh members of her security guards. Hindus then went on the rampage through Sikh communities, resulting in a round of communal violence. In the spirit of his grandfather and mother, Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party sought to improve the lot of the lower castes and minorities while modernizing India. In addition to a gas leak at the Union Carbide chemical plant that left thousands dead in Bhopal shortly after Gandhi’s election to office in 1984, numerous regional conflicts at home and a somewhat schizophrenic foreign policy troubled Gandhi’s term. As a result, Gandhi and his party were defeated in the elections of November 1989 by the National Front, composed of five parties including the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The National Front attempted to set up a new government first with V. P. Singh and later, in 1991, with S. Chandra Shekhar as Prime Minister. The Congress Party regained power, however, following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by a Tamil suicide bomber during election campaigns in 1991. P. V. Narasimha Rao, the new Prime Minister, adopted aggressive economic reforms to combat a looming financial crisis. The BJP’s role in provoking the 1992 demolition by Hindus of a mosque in Ayodhya, said to have been built on ground sacred to them, and the widespread racial violence which ensued caused PM Rao to ban the BJP. Though this party fell into disfavor for some time, their fundamentalist concerns, shared by members of the Shiv Sena party, increased in popularity in subsequent years. Accusations of corruption among officials in Rao’s administration in 1995 also paved the way for a comeback. The BJP defeated Congress in the general elections of May 1996, winning the largest number of seats in Parliament. Represented by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP was forced to cede its seat in less than two weeks, however, having failed in efforts to form a coalition government. The United front, composed of thirteen parties supported by Congress, placed H. D. Deve Gowda at the helm. With the backing of Congress, PM Gowda ruled until May 1997, when Congress unseated him and appointed Inder Kurnal Gujral in his place. Despite the instability of the nation’s government at this time, it is remarkable that in the year that India celebrated its 50th Anniversary of Independence, a Dalit (or member of an oppressed caste), K. R. Narayan, was appointed President for the first time. In early 1998, political volatility necessitated India’s first ever mid-term parliamentary elections, leading Congress to withdraw support from PM Gujral and to make Atal Behari Vajpayee of the BJP head of a multi-party coalition government. In May, Vajpayee announced the successful completion of nuclear tests, which, although touted by the Indians as a sign of their sovereignty, may complicate India’s relations with its neighbors and the West. Despite the strength of the BJP, the emergence of Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born widow, Sonia Gandhi, as Congress Party President suggests that the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is fa r from forgotten. Their goals remain influential as India approaches the new millennium while it continues to modernize its industry and increase its agricultural output. While facing the challenges of an ever-growing population that may outnumber even that of China by the beginning of the next century, India remains the largest democracy and one of the top ten industrial powers in the world.