The Xenophile Historian

1765 to 1906

	From Competitors to Conquerors
	The British Impact and the Sepoy Mutiny
	High Noon of the Raj
	The Growth of Indian Nationalism
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The company could have conquered all of India before 1800, but it avoided territorial acquisitions much of the time. The reason for this was that the British government was becoming more interested in ruling India directly, especially after the loss of the American colonies. However, neither the company nor the government wanted the responsibility of maintaining a large standing army. The company's first concern was always profit for its shareholders at home, and expensive military operations were bad for business; the government found that military action was politically unpopular unless done in reaction to threats from rivals like France or Russia. Communication was also a limiting factor; in the days before steamships and the Suez Canal, it took six months to sail between England and India, and often the company would make some move to increase British power in India, only to have it undone when London found out.

Despite all these restrictions British control of India continued to gradually increase. In 1773 all of the company's Indian territories were brought under the control of one man, a governor general appointed by London. The first to hold the job was Clive's successor in Bengal, Warren Hastings. His first challenge came when the Marathas and two south Indian leaders (the Nizam of Hyderabad and Hyder Ali of Mysore) formed an anti-British alliance. The result was the First Maratha War (1775-82), which was largely a stalemate; almost no territory changed hands, but the British broke up the coalition against them by persuading the Nizam to stay out of the fighting and by bribing the nearest Maratha chief to do the same. Hastings spent the rest of his term in office cleaning out the corruption that company agents had practiced previously.

Naturally Hastings made enemies with his housecleaning, and in 1784 they persuaded London to recall him. He was replaced by Lord Cornwallis of Yorktown fame. Cornwallis completed what Hastings had started with many reforms. He separated the company into commercial and political branches, and raised the salaries of his administrators, so they could make ends meet and be honest at the same time. To finance these changes he overhauled the revenue system and imposed a company monopoly on salt.

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte took an army to Egypt with plans to conquer India and everything on the way. He never got too far beyond Egypt,⁽¹⁾ but London was concerned enough to send a new governor general, Lord Wellesley, with orders to stop French agents on the subcontinent. He did it in a series of brilliant campaigns during his seven-year term in office, with the help of his younger brother, the future Duke of Wellington. He disarmed the Nizam, ousted Tipu Sultan (the openly pro-French ruler of Mysore), and seized the entire southeastern coast. In 1803 he annexed Delhi and half of Oudh; the Mogul emperor became a company pensioner. A second war with the Marathas (1803-5) ended with a friendly peshwa in charge of the confederacy. Still, his aggressive policy, denounced by company directors, led to his recall in 1805 and a new declaration of the policy of non-intervention.

During the next eight years Maratha soldiers became mercenaries and looters, and political anarchy and banditry spread all over India until it spilled over into company territory. When that happened the futile policy of isolationism was reversed, and Lord Hastings (no relation to Warren Hastings) was sent to restore law and order. He recruited sepoys until the company's army numbered 200,000 men, making it the largest modern army in Asia. A war in 1814-6 with a mountain tribe, the Gurkhas, stopped Gurkha expansion out of the Himalayas and created the nation of Nepal. The terms of the treaty that ended the Gurkha War kept Nepal independent on condition that Britain be allowed to hire Gurkha warriors; the Gurkhas are still in the British army today, with a reputation for being the bravest infantrymen anywhere.⁽²⁾ The Third Maratha War (1817-8) finished off the Marathas and the Rajputs, and a war with Burma (1824-6) gained Assam.

In the northwest, the greatest of the Sikh rulers, Ranjit Singh (1799-1839), ruled both the Punjab and Kashmir. He was friendly, but the British perceived a threat beyond him in Russia, which was moving into Central Asia. To keep the Russians at arms' length, the British mounted an expedition in 1842 to occupy Afghanistan. It was a disaster; 16,000 men marched north through the Khyber Pass, but only one survivor came back. As compensation for this blow to their prestige, the British annexed Sind and the Punjab in 1849.

The British Impact and the Sepoy Mutiny

The British felt it was their responsibility to introduce the benefits of Western civilization to the rest of the world (Kipling called this duty "the white man's burden"), and they did that in the parts of India they ruled directly. Lord William Bentinck, the idealist governor general from 1828 to 1835, abolished the customs the British found most objectionable, namely suttee, infanticide, and thuggee (the strangling of wayfarers as a sacrifice to Kali, Hindu goddess of death). Roads and irrigation works were built. More Christian missionaries arrived every year. Lord Bentinck also built lots of schools to teach the English language and Western culture (for women as well as men), because the British believed that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India & Arabia." Unknowingly, the British Raj was paving the way for its own downfall, as a generation of English-educated Indians grew up aware that the words and actions of British politicians were not always the same.

Lord Dalhousie (1848-56), a particularly aggressive governor general, nearly completed the task of bringing the subcontinent under British rule, either directly or through satellite monarchs. To tidy up the map and secure more revenue, he annexed still more territory, leaving only Baluchistan on the western frontier free from British influence (the Union Jack was finally raised there in 1877). By introducing the doctrine of "lapse," a local ruler or maharajah could lose his land if he had no legitimate son or if the British judged him to be depraved or otherwise unfit to rule. Most of the reforms violated traditional Indian beliefs in one way or another, but Dalhousie bulldozed ahead and carried them out without regard for what his advisors or what the Indians said. His successor, Lord Canning, made matters worse by passing a law that required any future recruit in the Bengal army to serve overseas if so commanded; in those days Hindus were forbidden to travel abroad for religious reasons. On top of all that, he passed another law allowing Hindu widows to remarry. Taken with the other reforms and the missionary work, it looked like Britain was trying to Christianize India.

Now it seemed like the British were asking for trouble; they started withdrawing British troops to use elsewhere (like in the Crimean War), until the ratio of British to sepoy troops was less than one in six. All kinds of wild rumors spread, and native holy men predicted that the British Raj would end in 1857, on the centennial of the battle of Plassey. The actual uprising broke out that year when new rifles were issued and an Indian worker allegedly told a sepoy that the rifles used cartridges greased with pork and beef fat. The ends of the cartridges had to be bitten off before they could be loaded, an act guaranteed to defile Hindu and Moslem alike. The abominable ammunition was recalled, but it was too late to prevent a mutiny. When landlords, peasants, and the last Mogul emperor rose up with the sepoys, it looked like the worst fears of the British were realized. Fortunately the Sikhs and the Gurkhas remained loyal; the mutiny was confined to the upper Ganges valley, and suppressed five months later. The feeble old Mogul, Bahadur Shah II, was exiled to Burma, where he died in 1862. Despite the British success, the shock of the mutiny had a permanent effect in that the British were now afraid of their subjects. Like the Moslem sultans, Hindus now regarded the British as a ruling caste which they could tolerate for the time being, but it was only a matter of time before that authority would cease.

High Noon of the Raj

Most of all, London threw out the idea of turning India into a Western nation, for now anyway. The maharajahs, who had largely remained loyal during the mutiny, now became partners in maintaining stability. The doctrine of lapse was also abolished, leaving a fourth of the Indian people under the rule of nearly 600 princes. Full toleration of India's customs and religions replaced the high-handed actions of officials like Lord Dalhousie. The missionaries were instructed to cut back on their proselytizing and put their efforts into education. Attempts to improve the economic livelihood of the people continued, but gradually, and they realized that a period of unknown duration would follow before they could lay down "the white man's burden."

Of all the public works undertaken, the biggest success was the railway system. Before 1860 only 435 miles of track had been laid; by 1900 about 25,000 miles covered the subcontinent. Alongside the railways telegraph lines went up, and millions of acres of farmland were gained from irrigation projects. Yet while the Indians benefitted from these works, the British benefitted even more. For example, the industrial revolution ruined India's handicraft industries when Indian cotton was shipped out, woven into cloth in England, sent back and sold for a lower price than the natives could afford to charge for their own work. The improved medicine of the West increased the life expectancy, resulting in a massive population boom, from 150 million in 1850 to 283 million in 1901. In the end, the long-term result of Britain's reforms was that it created an India that was impoverished and twice as crowded.

The Growth of Indian Nationalism

The first of these thinkers was a former East India Company employee and Hindu apologist, Ram Mohun Roy (1772-1835). Roy founded secondary schools and the first Indian-run newspapers, which would become forums for himself and later nationalists. Roy argued that while New Testament Christianity may be Hinduism's equal, it was not the same Christianity that the missionaries taught. He also claimed that Western science & thought originated in Asia, and that the only way the West could be called superior was in "the introduction of useful mechanical arts." Finally, Ram Roy stated that when the West criticizes Eastern cultures, it is criticizing itself as well, since Jesus and most of the other Biblical characters were Asians.

A series of religious reformers succeeded Ram Mohun Roy: Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), Dayananda Saraswati (1822-83), Shri Ramakrishna (1836-86), and Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). Although they disagreed on the details, these thinkers believed that original Vedic Hinduism, unburdened by all the corrupt practices added since 1000 B.C., such as untouchability, idol-worship, and suttee, was the true way to find God. They campaigned for a return to fundamental spiritual values.

After the Sepoy Mutiny, the next generation of Indian philosophers was more concerned with political reforms than with religious ones. Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1947, a Parsee), Surendrenath Bannerjee (1848-1925), Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), and Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901) were moderates who acknowledged the benefits the British Empire had given them, but argued that the Indians would much prefer a democracy like the British had at home over the enlightened despotism they were being ruled with now. These leaders formed political parties to express their views. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, (1856-1920), however, expressed a different opinion, advocating a violent expulsion of Moslems and British, no matter what the cost. Tilak's views were too radical to be accepted at this time, but they were important in giving India a sense of nationalism that transcended ethnic and cultural barriers.

The British themselves removed a major difficulty that had prevented Indian unity before; by teaching English extensively, they helped to break down native language barriers. The new railroads also helped the nationalists, by making communication easier. Soon the British gave the Indians a demonstration of what united action could do.

In 1883 the viceroy, Lord Ripon, tried to introduce legislation allowing Indians to try criminal cases against Europeans. The reaction was violent and blatantly racist. "Would you like to live in a country," demanded the editor of one English paper, "where at any moment would be liable to be sentenced on a false charge of slapping an ayah (Indian nurse or maidservant) to three days imprisonment, the magistrate being a copper-colored pagan who probably worships the linga, and certainly exults in every opportunity of showing he can insult white persons with impunity?" The answer was a hysterical "No!" The opposition was so strong that Ripon caved in, producing a compromise that kept Indians from playing any part in future trials with British defendants.

This gave the nationalists all sorts of ideas. If 100,000 Europeans could defeat the government with public protest, what could hundreds of millions of Indians achieve? They decided to find out. In 1885 73 delegates from all over India met in Bombay to form the Indian National Congress. Most of them were Hindu or Parsee lawyers, teachers, and journalists, and one British sympathizer, a former East India Company employee named Allan Octavian Hume. Only two Moslems were present, and no nobles came at all. This was important because it meant that there would be no room for both maharajahs and Moslems in India when independence finally came.

Islam stagnated under British rule at first, but eventually the Moslems developed their own sense of nationalism. Most Moslems had nothing to do with the British administration until Sir Seyed Ahmed Khan (1817-98) founded an "Anglo-Oriental college" at Aligarh that taught both Western subjects and traditional Moslem theology. Ahmed Khan believed that Islam was compatible with modern science, and that just as Moslems had learned useful ideas from non-Moslems in the past, so they should do so now. He also felt, however, that because democracy was based on majority rule, an independent and democratic India would oppress its Moslem minority. This was the beginning of Islamic nationalism as a separate political movement from Hindu nationalism.

As with Hindu nationalism, the first product of Islamic nationalism was religious reform, to defend the faith against Christian missionaries. In the Punjab, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1839-1908) used some of Sir Seyed Ahmed Khan's teachings: that Jesus died a natural death and did not undergo crucifixion or resurrection, and that the jihad "of the sword" was obsolete and had been replaced by the jihad "of the pen." Later he tried to unite Islam with Christianity and Hinduism, by declaring himself to be the Prophet Mohammed, the Second Coming of Jesus, and the Hindu god Krishna, among other claims. He did not announce, however, any new law or revelation.

Six years after Ghulam Ahmad's death, his followers, now known as the Ahmadiyah, split into two subsects over the issue of whether his prophetic claims were true. Both groups are now based in Pakistan and have done missionary work in the West and Africa. In Moslem countries, however, there is fierce opposition because most Moslems do not believe there can be a prophet after Mohammed.

In 1906 the Moslem League was founded, as a separate political party from the Indian National Congress. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists conveniently forgot the problems of their Moslem countrymen, so the political gap between Hindus and Moslems widened, while both called for an end to British rule. That would lead to the birth of Pakistan and Bangladesh as separate states from India in the twentieth century.

Discontent boiled over while Lord Curzon was the viceroy (1898-1905). An intense worker who personally oversaw every department under his command, Curzon added more than 6,000 miles of railroad tracks and 10 million irrigated acres to the subcontinent; he also launched a program to preserve the crumbling monuments of ancient India. Nevertheless, he was also a dedicated imperialist, who believed that Britain came to India by "the decree of Providence, for the lasting benefit of millions of the human race." In 1904 he sent an army to Tibet and forced the Tibetans to accept a British advisor on their soil. In other places--Malaya, for instance--this had been the first step toward eventual British domination. This time nothing came of it, but to the Indians it looked like Great Britain was using their taxes and labor to conquer all of Asia.

The trouble started in Bengal. With 80 million people and an area of 190,000 square miles, much of it swampland, effective government had always been hard. Curzon divided Bengal in two and linked the eastern half of it to Assam. He claimed he did this to make management easier, but it also had political advantages. The British knew from their own experience that whoever controlled Bengal could control all of India.

Divide and rule is just how the Bengal policy looked to the nationalists as well. The new province of East Bengal & Assam would have an uneducated Moslem majority, and West Bengal would have more non-Bengalis than Bengalis in its population. Gopal Gokhale, now president of the Indian National Congress, attacked the scheme, and Surendrenath Bannerjee (now nicknamed "Surrender Not") staged protest rallies and launched a highly effective boycott of British-made goods. From 1906 onward, the followers of Tilak stage occasional terrorist attacks against the British. The British Raj survived this crisis and lived for another four decades, but it was the beginning of the end for British rule in India.

2. They most recently saw action in the brief war Britain fought with Argentina to keep the Falkland Islands (1982).

3. Queen Victoria took on the title "Empress of India" in 1876.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball