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.
