The history of the British Raj refers to the period of British rule on the Indian subcontinent 7 Transfer of Power; 8 See also; 9 Notes; 10 References . the Defence of India Act, which allowed it to intern politically dangerous dissidents without.
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Although the rebellion had shaken the British enterprise in India, it had not derailed it. After the war, the British became more circumspect.
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Much thought was devoted to the causes of the rebellion, and from it three main lessons were drawn. At a more practical level, it was felt that there needed to be more communication and camaraderie between the British and Indians—not just between British army officers and their Indian staff but in civilian life as well. New regiments, like the Sikhs and Baluchis, composed of Indians who, in British estimation, had demonstrated steadfastness, were formed. From then on, the Indian army was to remain unchanged in its organisation until Of these only about 41, were civilians as compared with about 84, European officers and men of the Army.
It was also felt that both the princes and the large land-holders, by not joining the rebellion, had proved to be, in Lord Canning's words, "breakwaters in a storm". Consequently, no more land reforms were implemented for the next 90 years: Bengal and Bihar were to remain the realms of large land holdings unlike the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Lastly, the British felt disenchanted with Indian reaction to social change.
Until the rebellion, they had enthusiastically pushed through social reform, like the ban on sati by Lord William Bentinck. The proclamation stated that 'We disclaim alike our Right and Desire to impose Our Convictions on any of Our Subjects'; [64] demonstrating official British commitment to abstaining from social intervention in India. The population of the territory that became the British Raj was million by and remained nearly stationary until the 19th century. The population of the Raj reached million according to the first census taken in of India.
Studies of India's population since have focused on such topics as total population, birth and death rates, growth rates, geographic distribution, literacy, the rural and urban divide, cities of a million, and the three cities with populations over eight million: Delhi , Greater Bombay , and Calcutta. Mortality rates fell in —45 era, primarily due to biological immunisation. Other factors included rising incomes and better living conditions, improved better nutrition, a safer and cleaner environment, and better official health policies and medical care. Severe overcrowding in the cities caused major public health problems, as noted in an official report from In the urban and industrial areas In the busiest centres houses are built close together, eave touching eave, and frequently back to back Space is so valuable that, in place of streets and roads, winding lanes provide the only approach to the houses.
Neglect of sanitation is often evidenced by heaps of rotting garbage and pools of sewage, whilst the absence of latrines enhance the general pollution of air and soil. Singha argues that after the colonial government strengthened and expanded its infrastructure via the court system, legal procedures, and statutes. New legislation merged the Crown and the old East India Company courts and introduced a new penal code as well as new codes of civil and criminal procedure, based largely on English law. In the s—s the Raj set up compulsory registration of births, deaths, and marriages, as well as adoptions, property deeds, and wills.
The goal was to create a stable, usable public record and verifiable identities. However, there was opposition from both Muslim and Hindu elements who complained that the new procedures for census-taking and registration threatened to uncover female privacy. Purdah rules prohibited women from saying their husband's name or having their photograph taken. An all-India census was conducted between and , often using total numbers of females in a household rather than individual names. Select groups which the Raj reformers wanted to monitor statistically included those reputed to practice female infanticide , prostitutes, lepers, and eunuchs.
Murshid argues that women were in some ways more restricted by the modernisation of the laws. They remained tied to the strictures of their religion, caste, and customs, but now with an overlay of British Victorian attitudes.
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Their inheritance rights to own and manage property were curtailed; the new English laws were somewhat harsher. Court rulings restricted the rights of second wives and their children regarding inheritance. A woman had to belong to either a father or a husband to have any rights. Thomas Babington Macaulay — presented his Whiggish interpretation of English history as an upward progression always leading to more liberty and more progress. Macaulay simultaneously was a leading reformer involved in transforming the educational system of India.
He would base it on the English language so that India could join the mother country in a steady upward progress. Macaulay took Burke's emphasis on moral rule and implemented it in actual school reforms, giving the British Empire a profound moral mission to civilise the natives. Yale professor Karuna Mantena has argued that the civilising mission did not last long, for she says that benevolent reformers were the losers in key debates, such as those following the rebellion in India, and the scandal of Governor Edward Eyre 's brutal repression of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in The rhetoric continued but it became an alibi for British misrule and racism.
No longer was it believed that the natives could truly make progress, instead they had to be ruled by heavy hand, with democratic opportunities postponed indefinitely. The central tenets of liberal imperialism were challenged as various forms of rebellion, resistance and instability in the colonies precipitated a broad-ranging reassessment Much of the debate took place in Britain itself, and the imperialists worked hard to convince the general population that the civilising mission was well under-way. This campaign served to strengthen imperial support at home, and thus, says Cain, to bolster the moral authority of the gentlemanly elites who ran the Empire.
The British made widespread education in English a high priority. Bentinck favoured the replacement of Persian by English as the official language, the use of English as the medium of instruction, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers. He was inspired by utilitarian ideas and called for "useful learning. Missionaries opened their own schools that taught Christianity and the three Rs. Bellenoit argues that as civil servants became more isolated and resorted to scientific racism, missionary schools became more engaged with Indians, grew increasingly sympathetic to Indian culture, and adamantly opposed scientific racism.
Universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established in , just before the Rebellion. By some 60, Indians had matriculated, chiefly in the liberal arts or law. About a third entered public administration, and another third became lawyers. The result was a very well educated professional state bureaucracy. Of the top-level positions, almost all were held by Britons, typically with an Oxbridge degree. By the number of institutions had doubled and enrolment reached , The curriculum followed classical British standards of the sort set by Oxford and Cambridge and stressed English literature and European history.
Nevertheless, by the s the student bodies had become hotbeds of Indian nationalism. As the Anglican Church was the established church of England, "it had an impact on India with the arrival of the British". Paul's Cathedral being built in Missionaries from other Christian denominations came to British India as well; Lutheran missionaries, for example, arrived in Calcutta in and by "the year there were over 31, Lutheran Christians spread out in 1, villages". After , the establishment of schools and hospitals by British Christian missionaries became "a pivotal feature of missionary work and the principal vehicles for conversion".
Stephen's College are two examples of prominent church-affiliated educational institutions founded during the British Raj. In agriculture a " green revolution " took place in the s. The most important difference between colonial and postcolonial India was the utilization of land surplus with productivity-led growth by using high-yielding variety seeds, chemical fertilizers and more intensive application of water. All these three inputs were subsidized by the state. Agriculture was still dominant, with most peasants at the subsistence level.
Extensive irrigation systems were built, providing an impetus for switching to cash crops for export and for raw materials for Indian industry, especially jute, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and tea. Much of the economic activity in British India was for the benefit of the British economy and was carried out relentlessly through repressive British imperial policies and with negative repercussions for the Indian population. This is reified in India's large exports of wheat to Britain: A colonial government committed to laissez-faire economics refused to interfere with these exports or provide any relief, declaring it "a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows.
While other Indian mills produced cheap coarse yarn and later cloth using local short-staple cotton and cheap machinery imported from Britain, Tata did much better by importing expensive longer-stapled cotton from Egypt and buying more complex ring-spindle machinery from the United States to spin finer yarn that could compete with imports from Britain. In the s, he launched plans to move into heavy industry using Indian funding. The Raj did not provide capital, but, aware of Britain's declining position against the US and Germany in the steel industry, it wanted steel mills in India.
It promised to purchase any surplus steel Tata could not otherwise sell. It used American technology, not British, [] and became the leading iron and steel producer in India, with , employees in TISCO became India's proud symbol of technical skill, managerial competence, entrepreneurial flair, and high pay for industrial workers. British India built a modern railway system in the late nineteenth century which was the fourth largest in the world. The railways at first were privately owned and operated.
It was run by British administrators, engineers and craftsmen. At first, only the unskilled workers were Indians. The East India Company and later the colonial government encouraged new railway companies backed by private investors under a scheme that would provide land and guarantee an annual return of up to five percent during the initial years of operation.
The companies were to build and operate the lines under a year lease, with the government having the option to buy them earlier. The first passenger railway line in North India between Allahabad and Kanpur opened in In , Governor-General Lord Dalhousie formulated a plan to construct a network of trunk lines connecting the principal regions of India.
Encouraged by the government guarantees, investment flowed in and a series of new rail companies were established, leading to rapid expansion of the rail system in India. Most of the railway construction was done by Indian companies supervised by British engineers. By India had a full range of rail services with diverse ownership and management, operating on broad, metre and narrow gauge networks. In , the government took over the GIPR network, while the company continued to manage it. With shipments of equipment and parts from Britain curtailed, maintenance became much more difficult; critical workers entered the army; workshops were converted to making artillery; some locomotives and cars were shipped to the Middle East.
The railways could barely keep up with the increased demand. Headrick shows that until the s, both the Raj lines and the private companies hired only European supervisors, civil engineers, and even operating personnel, such as locomotive engineers. The government's Stores Policy required that bids on railway contracts be made to the India Office in London, shutting out most Indian firms.
There were railway maintenance workshops in India, but they were rarely allowed to manufacture or repair locomotives. TISCO steel could not obtain orders for rails until the war emergency. The Second World War severely crippled the railways as rolling stock was diverted to the Middle East, and the railway workshops were converted into munitions workshops. India provides an example of the British Empire pouring its money and expertise into a very well built system designed for military reasons after the Mutiny of , with the hope that it would stimulate industry. The system was overbuilt and too expensive for the small amount of freight traffic it carried.
Christensen , who looked at colonial purpose, local needs, capital, service, and private-versus-public interests, concluded that making the railways a creature of the state hindered success because railway expenses had to go through the same time-consuming and political budgeting process as did all other state expenses. Railway costs could therefore not be tailored to the timely needs of the railways or their passengers.
The British Raj invested heavily in infrastructure, including canals and irrigation systems in addition to railways, telegraphy, roads and ports. By the Raj had the largest irrigation system in the world. One success story was Assam, a jungle in that by had 4,, acres under cultivation, especially in tea plantations. In all, the amount of irrigated land multiplied by a factor of eight. Historian David Gilmour says:. In the second half of the 19th century, both the direct administration of India by the British Crown and the technological change ushered in by the industrial revolution had the effect of closely intertwining the economies of India and Great Britain.
Since Dalhousie had embraced the technological revolution underway in Britain, India too saw rapid development of all those technologies. Railways, roads, canals, and bridges were rapidly built in India and telegraph links equally rapidly established in order that raw materials, such as cotton, from India's hinterland could be transported more efficiently to ports, such as Bombay, for subsequent export to England. Massive railway projects were begun in earnest and government railway jobs and pensions attracted a large number of upper caste Hindus into the civil service for the first time.
The Indian Civil Service was prestigious and paid well, but it remained politically neutral. Historians continue to debate whether the long-term impact of British rule was to accelerate the economic development of India, or to distort and retard it. In , the conservative British politician Edmund Burke raised the issue of India's position: Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray continues this line of attack, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of "plunder" and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of the Mughal Empire.
Marshall shows that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy. Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation. Many historians agree that the East India Company inherited an onerous taxation system that took one-third of the produce of Indian cultivators.
According to economist Angus Maddison , "The British contributed to public health by introducing smallpox vaccination, establishing Western medicine and training modern doctors, by killing rats, and establishing quarantine procedures. As a result, the death rate fell and the population of India grew more than two-and-a-half times between and Population growth worsened the plight of the peasantry.
As a result of peace and improved sanitation and health, the Indian population rose from perhaps million in to million by While encouraging agricultural productivity, the British also provided economic incentives to have more children to help in the fields. Although a similar population increase occurred in Europe at the same time, the growing numbers could be absorbed by industrialisation or emigration to the Americas and Australia.
India enjoyed neither an industrial revolution nor an increase in food growing. Moreover, Indian landlords had a stake in the cash crop system and discouraged innovation. As a result, population numbers far outstripped the amount of available food and land, creating dire poverty and widespread hunger. During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded , including the Great Famine of — , in which 6.
Having been criticised for the badly bungled relief-effort during the Orissa famine of , [] British authorities began to discuss famine policy soon afterwards, and in early Sir William Muir , Lieutenant-Governor of the North Western Provinces , issued a famous order stating that: The first cholera pandemic began in Bengal , then spread across India by Ten thousand British troops and countless Indians died during this pandemic. Fevers ranked as one of the leading causes of death in India in the 19th century.
In there were around , leprosy patients. The central government passed the Lepers Act of , which provided legal provision for forcible confinement of leprosy sufferers in India. Sir Robert Grant directed his attention to establishing a systematic institution in Bombay for imparting medical knowledge to the natives. By , a new middle class had arisen in India and spread thinly across the country.
Moreover, there was a growing solidarity among its members, created by the "joint stimuli of encouragement and irritation. It came too from Queen Victoria's proclamation of in which she had declared, "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects. Irritation, on the other hand, came not just from incidents of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from governmental actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns e.
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It was, however, Viceroy Lord Ripon 's partial reversal of the Ilbert Bill , a legislative measure that had proposed putting Indian judges in the Bengal Presidency on equal footing with British ones, that transformed the discontent into political action. The membership comprised a westernised elite, and no effort was made at this time to broaden the base.
During its first twenty years, the Congress primarily debated British policy toward India; however, its debates created a new Indian outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, by the restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and by the use of Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India.
Thomas Baring served as Viceroy of India — Baring's major accomplishments came as an energetic reformer who was dedicated to upgrading the quality of government in the British Raj. He began large scale famine relief, reduced taxes, and overcame bureaucratic obstacles in an effort to reduce both starvation and widespread social unrest. Although appointed by a Liberal government, his policies were much the same as Viceroys appointed by Conservative governments.
Social reform was in the air by the s. For example, Pandita Ramabai , poet, Sanskrit scholar, and a champion of the emancipation of Indian women, took up the cause of widow remarriage, especially of Brahamin widows, later converted to Christianity. Congress member Gopal Krishna Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society , which lobbied for legislative reform for example, for a law to permit the remarriage of Hindu child widows , and whose members took vows of poverty, and worked among the untouchable community.
By , a deep gulf opened between the moderates, led by Gokhale, who downplayed public agitation, and the new "extremists" who not only advocated agitation, but also regarded the pursuit of social reform as a distraction from nationalism. Prominent among the extremists was Bal Gangadhar Tilak , who attempted to mobilise Indians by appealing to an explicitly Hindu political identity, displayed, for example, in the annual public Ganapati festivals that he inaugurated in western India.
The Viceroy Lord Curzon — was unusually energetic in pursuit of efficiency and reform. Curzon's act, the Partition of Bengal —which some considered administratively felicitous, communally charged, sowed the seeds of division among Indians in Bengal and, which had been contemplated by various colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck, but never acted upon—was to transform nationalist politics as nothing else before it. The Hindu elite of Bengal, among them many who owned land in East Bengal that was leased out to Muslim peasants, protested fervidly.
Following the Partition of Bengal , which was a strategy set out by Lord Curzon to weaken the nationalist movement, Tilak encouraged the Swadeshi movement and the Boycott movement. The Swadeshi movement consisted of the usage of natively produced goods. Once foreign goods were boycotted, there was a gap which had to be filled by the production of those goods in India itself. Bal Gangadhar Tilak said that the Swadeshi and Boycott movements are two sides of the same coin.
The large Bengali Hindu middle-class the Bhadralok , upset at the prospect of Bengalis being outnumbered in the new Bengal province by Biharis and Oriyas, felt that Curzon's act was punishment for their political assertiveness. The pervasive protests against Curzon's decision took the form predominantly of the Swadeshi "buy Indian" campaign led by two-time Congress president, Surendranath Banerjee , and involved boycott of British goods. The rallying cry for both types of protest was the slogan Bande Mataram "Hail to the Mother" , which invoked a mother goddess, who stood variously for Bengal, India, and the Hindu goddess Kali.
Sri Aurobindo never went beyond the law when he edited the Bande Mataram magazine; it preached independence but within the bounds of peace as far as possible. Its goal was Passive Resistance. Some joined local political youth clubs emerging in Bengal at the time, some engaged in robberies to fund arms, and even attempted to take the lives of Raj officials. However, the conspiracies generally failed in the face of intense police work. The swadeshi cloth, although more expensive and somewhat less comfortable than its Lancashire competitor, was worn as a mark of national pride by people all over India.
The League favoured the partition of Bengal, since it gave them a Muslim majority in the eastern half. In , when Tilak and Lajpat Rai attempted to rise to leadership positions in the Congress, and the Congress itself rallied around symbolism of Kali, Muslim fears increased. The Muslim elite, including Dacca Nawab and Khwaja Salimullah , expected that a new province with a Muslim majority would directly benefit Muslims aspiring to political power. The first steps were taken toward self-government in British India in the late 19th century with the appointment of Indian counsellors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils with the Indian Councils Act of Municipal Corporations and District Boards were created for local administration; they included elected Indian members.
The Indian Councils Act , known as the Morley-Minto Reforms John Morley was the secretary of state for India, and Minto was viceroy — gave Indians limited roles in the central and provincial legislatures. Upper class Indians, rich landowners and businessmen were favoured. The Muslim community was made a separate electorate and granted double representation. The goals were quite conservative but they did advance the elective principle. The partition of Bengal was rescinded in and announced at the Delhi Durbar at which King George V came in person and was crowned Emperor of India.
He announced the capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi, a Muslim stronghold. Morley was especially vigilant in crushing revolutionary groups. The First World War would prove to be a watershed in the imperial relationship between Britain and India. Shortly prior to the outbreak of war, the Government of India had indicated that they could furnish two divisions plus a cavalry brigade, with a further division in case of emergency.
Their participation had a wider cultural fallout as news spread how bravely soldiers fought and died alongside British soldiers, as well as soldiers from dominions like Canada and Australia. After the split between the moderates and the extremists, organised political activity by the Congress had remained fragmented until , when Bal Gangadhar Tilak was released from prison and began to sound out other Congress leaders about possible re-unification.
That, however, had to wait until the demise of Tilak's principal moderate opponents, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta , in , whereupon an agreement was reached for Tilak's ousted group to re-enter the Congress. The reforms after the war will have to be such, The Lucknow Session of the Congress was also the venue of an unanticipated mutual effort by the Congress and the Muslim League, the occasion for which was provided by the wartime partnership between Germany and Turkey.
Since the Turkish Sultan , or Khalifah , had also sporadically claimed guardianship of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca , Medina , and Jerusalem , and since the British and their allies were now in conflict with Turkey, doubts began to increase among some Indian Muslims about the "religious neutrality" of the British, doubts that had already surfaced as a result of the reunification of Bengal in , a decision that was seen as ill-disposed to Muslims. In , the Muslim League had anywhere between and members and did not yet have its wider following among Indian Muslims of later years; in the League itself, the pact did not have unanimous backing, having largely been negotiated by a group of "Young Party" Muslims from the United Provinces UP , most prominently, two brothers Mohammad and Shaukat Ali , who had embraced the Pan-Islamic cause; [] however, it did have the support of a young lawyer from Bombay, Muhammad Ali Jinnah , who was later to rise to leadership roles in both the League and the Indian independence movement.
During , two Home Rule Leagues were founded within the Indian National Congress by Tilak and Annie Besant , respectively, to promote Home Rule among Indians, and also to elevate the stature of the founders within the Congress itself. Besant, for her part, was also keen to demonstrate the superiority of this new form of organised agitation, which had achieved some success in the Irish home rule movement , to the political violence that had intermittently plagued the subcontinent during the years — Tilak's in western India, in the southern Bombay presidency , and Mrs.
Besant's in the rest of the country, but especially in the Madras Presidency and in regions like Sind and Gujarat that had hitherto been considered politically dormant by the Congress. Their propaganda also turned to posters, pamphlets, and political-religious songs, and later to mass meetings, which not only attracted greater numbers than in earlier Congress sessions, but also entirely new social groups such as non- Brahmins , traders, farmers, students, and lower-level government workers.
The British authorities reacted by imposing restrictions on the Leagues, including shutting out students from meetings and banning the two leaders from travelling to certain provinces. The year also saw the return of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to India. Already known in India as a result of his civil liberties protests on behalf of the Indians in South Africa, Gandhi followed the advice of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale and chose not to make any public pronouncements during the first year of his return, but instead spent the year travelling, observing the country first-hand, and writing.
In tackling the challenge of holding this community together and simultaneously confronting the colonial authority, he had created a technique of non-violent resistance, which he labelled Satyagraha or, Striving for Truth. Also, during his time in South Africa, in his essay, Hind Swaraj , , Gandhi formulated his vision of Swaraj , or "self-rule" for India based on three vital ingredients: Gandhi made his political debut in India in in Champaran district in Bihar , near the Nepal border, where he was invited by a group of disgruntled tenant farmers who, for many years, had been forced into planting indigo for dyes on a portion of their land and then selling it at below-market prices to the British planters who had leased them the land.
When Gandhi was ordered to leave by the local British authorities, he refused on moral grounds, setting up his refusal as a form of individual Satyagraha.
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Soon, under pressure from the Viceroy in Delhi who was anxious to maintain domestic peace during wartime, the provincial government rescinded Gandhi's expulsion order, and later agreed to an official enquiry into the case. Although the British planters eventually gave in, they were not won over to the farmers' cause, and thereby did not produce the optimal outcome of a Satyagraha that Gandhi had hoped for; similarly, the farmers themselves, although pleased at the resolution, responded less than enthusiastically to the concurrent projects of rural empowerment and education that Gandhi had inaugurated in keeping with his ideal of swaraj.
The satyagraha in Ahmedabad took the form of Gandhi fasting and supporting the workers in a strike, which eventually led to a settlement. In Kaira, in contrast, although the farmers' cause received publicity from Gandhi's presence, the satyagraha itself, which consisted of the farmers' collective decision to withhold payment, was not immediately successful, as the British authorities refused to back down. The agitation in Kaira gained for Gandhi another lifelong lieutenant in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel , who had organised the farmers, and who too would go on to play a leadership role in the Indian independence movement.
In , in the face of new strength demonstrated by the nationalists with the signing of the Lucknow Pact and the founding of the Home Rule leagues , and the realisation, after the disaster in the Mesopotamian campaign , that the war would likely last longer, the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford , cautioned that the Government of India needed to be more responsive to Indian opinion. After more discussion, in August , the new Liberal Secretary of State for India , Edwin Montagu , announced the British aim of "increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.
Earlier, at the onset of World War I, the reassignment of most of the British army in India to Europe and Mesopotamia , had led the previous Viceroy, Lord Harding , to worry about the "risks involved in denuding India of troops. However, since the Government of India wanted to ensure against any sabotage of the reform process by extremists, and since its reform plan was devised during a time when extremist violence had ebbed as a result of increased governmental control, it also began to consider how some of its wartime powers could be extended into peacetime.
Consequently, in , even as Edwin Montagu, announced the new constitutional reforms, a committee chaired by a British judge, Mr. Rowlatt, was tasked with investigating "revolutionary conspiracies", with the unstated goal of extending the government's wartime powers. Bengal , the Bombay presidency , and the Punjab. With the end of World War I, there was also a change in the economic climate. By the end of , 1. To combat what it saw as a coming crisis, the government now drafted the Rowlatt committee's recommendations into two Rowlatt Bills. The Government of India was, nevertheless, able to use of its "official majority" to ensure passage of the bills early in Meanwhile, Montagu and Chelmsford themselves finally presented their report in July after a long fact-finding trip through India the previous winter.
In particular, rural candidates, generally sympathetic to British rule and less confrontational, were assigned more seats than their urban counterparts. The principal of "communal representation", an integral part of the Minto-Morley Reforms , and more recently of the Congress-Muslim League Lucknow Pact, was reaffirmed, with seats being reserved for Muslims, Sikhs , Indian Christians , Anglo-Indians , and domiciled Europeans, in both provincial and Imperial legislative councils.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre or "Amritsar massacre", took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the predominantly Sikh northern city of Amritsar. After days of unrest Brigadier-General Reginald E. Dyer forbade public meetings and on Sunday 13 April fifty British Indian Army soldiers commanded by Dyer began shooting at an unarmed gathering of thousands of men, women, and children without warning. Casualty estimates vary widely, with the Government of India reporting dead, with 1, wounded.
Dyer was removed from duty but he became a celebrated hero in Britain among people with connections to the Raj. In , after the British government refused to back down, Gandhi began his campaign of non-cooperation , prompting many Indians to return British awards and honours, to resign from civil service, and to again boycott British goods.
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In addition, Gandhi reorganised the Congress, transforming it into a mass movement and opening its membership to even the poorest Indians. Although Gandhi halted the non-cooperation movement in after the violent incident at Chauri Chaura , the movement revived again, in the mids. The visit, in , of the British Simon Commission , charged with instituting constitutional reform in India, resulted in widespread protests throughout the country. Gandhi subsequently led an expanded movement of civil disobedience, culminating in with the Salt Satyagraha , in which thousands of Indians defied the tax on salt, by marching to the sea and making their own salt by evaporating seawater.
Although, many, including Gandhi, were arrested, the British government eventually gave in, and in Gandhi travelled to London to negotiate new reform at the Round Table Conferences. In local terms, British control rested on the Indian Civil Service, but it faced growing difficulties. Fewer and fewer young men in Britain were interested in joining, and the continuing distrust of Indians resulted in a declining base in terms of quality and quantity.
By Indians were numerically dominant in the ICS and at issue was loyal divided between the Empire and independence. Epstein argues that after it became harder and harder to collect the land revenue. The Raj's suppression of civil disobedience after temporarily increased the power of the revenue agents but after they were forced by the new Congress-controlled provincial governments to hand back confiscated land.
Again the outbreak of war strengthened them, in the face of the Quit India movement the revenue collectors had to rely on military force and by —47 direct British control was rapidly disappearing in much of the countryside. In , after the Round Table Conferences, Parliament passed the Government of India Act , which authorised the establishment of independent legislative assemblies in all provinces of British India, the creation of a central government incorporating both the British provinces and the princely states, and the protection of Muslim minorities.
The future Constitution of independent India was based on this act. A voter could cast a vote only for candidates in his own category. The Act provided for more autonomy for Indian provinces, with the goal of cooling off nationalist sentiment.
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The act provided for a national parliament and an executive branch under the purview of the British government, but the rulers of the princely states managed to block its implementation. These states remained under the full control of their hereditary rulers, with no popular government. To prepare for elections Congress built up its grass roots membership from , in to 4.
In the elections Congress won victories in seven of the eleven provinces of British India. The widespread voter support for the Indian National Congress surprised Raj officials, who previously had seen the Congress as a small elitist body. While the Muslim League was a small elite group in with only members, it grew rapidly once it became an organisation that reached out to the masses, reaching , members in Bengal in , , in Punjab, and hundreds of thousands elsewhere. The Muslim League, in contrast, supported Britain in the war effort and maintained its control of the government in three major provinces, Bengal, Sind and the Punjab.
Jinnah repeatedly warned that Muslims would be unfairly treated in an independent India dominated by the Congress. On 24 March in Lahore, the League passed the " Lahore Resolution ", demanding that, "the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign. The Congress was secular and strongly opposed to having any religious state.
The Hindu and Muslim belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs and literature [sic]. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on life and of life are different To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.
While the regular Indian army in included about , native troops, it expanded tenfold during the war, [] and small naval and air force units were created. Over two million Indians volunteered for military service in the British Army. They played a major role in numerous campaigns, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Casualties were moderate in terms of the world war , with 24, killed; 64, wounded; 12, missing probably dead , and 60, captured at Singapore in Small warships were built, and an aircraft factory opened in Bangalore.
The railway system, with , employees, was taxed to the limit as demand for transportation soared. The British government sent the Cripps' mission in to secure Indian nationalists' co-operation in the war effort in exchange for a promise of independence as soon as the war ended. Top officials in Britain, most notably Prime Minister Winston Churchill , did not support the Cripps Mission and negotiations with the Congress soon broke down.
Congress launched the "Quit India" movement in July demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British from India or face nationwide civil disobedience. On 8 August the Raj arrested all national, provincial and local Congress leaders, holding tens of thousands of them until The country erupted in violent demonstrations led by students and later by peasant political groups, especially in Eastern United Provinces , Bihar, and western Bengal.
The large wartime British Army presence crushed the movement in a little more than six weeks; [] nonetheless, a portion of the movement formed for a time an underground provisional government on the border with Nepal. It did not slow down the British war effort or recruiting for the army. Earlier, Subhas Chandra Bose , who had been a leader of the younger, radical, wing of the Indian National Congress in the late s and s, had risen to become Congress President from to As the war turned against them, the Japanese came to support a number of puppet and provisional governments in the captured regions, including those in Burma , the Philippines and Vietnam , and in addition, the Provisional Government of Azad Hind , presided by Bose.
Bose's effort, however, was short lived. In mid the British army first halted and then reversed the Japanese U-Go offensive , beginning the successful part of the Burma Campaign.
Bose's Indian National Army largely disintegrated during the subsequent fighting in Burma, with its remaining elements surrendering with the recapture of Singapore in September Bose died in August from third degree burns received after attempting to escape in an overloaded Japanese plane which crashed in Taiwan, [] which many Indians believe did not happen. In January , a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain.
Although the mutinies were rapidly suppressed, they had the effect of spurring the new Labour government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick Lawrence , and including Sir Stafford Cripps , who had visited four years before.
Also in early , new elections were called in India. Earlier, at the end of the war in , the colonial government had announced the public trial of three senior officers of Bose's defeated Indian National Army who stood accused of treason. Now as the trials began, the Congress leadership, although ambivalent towards the INA, chose to defend the accused officers. Jinnah proclaimed 16 August , Direct Action Day , with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a Muslim homeland in British India. The following day Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and quickly spread throughout British India.
Although the Government of India and the Congress were both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India's prime minister. Later that year, the Labour government in Britain, its exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, and conscious that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support, nor the reliability of native forces for continuing to control an increasingly restless British India, [].
Thus, Wavell concluded, if the army and the police "failed" Britain would be forced to go. In theory, it might be possible to revive and reinvigorate the services, and rule for another fifteen to twenty years, but:. As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated. With the British army unprepared for the potential for increased violence, the new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten , advanced the date for the transfer of power, allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan for independence.
Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs , agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines in stark opposition to Gandhi's views. This was done so that Mountbatten could attend both ceremonies. The great majority of Indians remained in place with independence, but in border areas millions of people Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu relocated across the newly drawn borders. In Punjab, where the new border lines divided the Sikh regions in half, there was much bloodshed; in Bengal and Bihar, where Gandhi's presence assuaged communal tempers, the violence was more limited.
In all, somewhere between , and , people on both sides of the new borders, among both the refugee and resident populations of the three faiths, died in the violence. At independence and after the independence of India, India has maintained such central British institutions as parliamentary government, one-person, one-vote and the rule of law through nonpartisan courts. One major change was the rejection of its former separate princely states.
Metcalf shows that over the course of two centuries, British intellectuals and Indian specialists made the highest priority bringing peace, unity and good government to India. For example, Cornwallis recommended turning Bengali Zamindar into the sort of English landlords that controlled local affairs in England. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the rule of the British Crown from to For other uses of "British Rule", see British Rule disambiguation.
For other uses, see British India disambiguation. For other Indian empires, see History of India. Star of India flag Bottom: Part of a series on the. Madrasian Culture Soanian , c. Maurya Dynasty , c. Chalukya Dynasty , c. Delhi Sultanate , c. Mughal Dynasty , c. The Great Rebellion , c. Presidencies and provinces of British India. Madrasian Culture Soanian Culture. Bronze Age — BC. Iron Age — BC. Late medieval period — Early modern period — Periods of Sri Lanka. Palaeolithic Soanian Culture , c.
Parthian Empire , c. Durrani Empire , c. Lord Salisbury was Secretary of State for India — The reigning British monarchs during the period of the British Raj, —, in silver one rupee coins. History of the British Raj. A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today.
Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty. Famines in British India. This article duplicates the scope of other articles , specifically, Timeline of major famines in India during British rule. Please discuss this issue on the talk page and edit it to conform with Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Major famines in India during British rule Famine Years Deaths [b] Great Bengal Famine — 10 [] Chalisa famine — 11 [] Doji bara famine — 11 [] Agra famine of —38 — 0.
Lockard, Societies, Networks, and Transitions []. Gopal Krishna Gokhale , a constitutional social reformer and moderate nationalist, was elected president of the Indian National Congress in Congress "extremist" Bal Gangadhar Tilak speaking in as the party split into the Moderates and the Extremists. Partition of Bengal and Swadeshi movement. He promoted many reforms but his partitioning of Bengal into Muslim and Hindu provinces outraged the people. Sir Khawaja Salimullah , an influential Bengali aristocrat and British ally, who strongly favoured the creation of Eastern Bengal and Assam.
Surendranath Banerjee , a Congress moderate, who led the opposition to the partition of Bengal with the Swadeshi movement to buy Indian-made cloth. Cover of a issue of the Tamil magazine Vijaya showing "Mother India" with her diverse progeny and the rallying cry " Vande Mataram ". Lord Minto, the Conservative viceroy met with the Muslim delegation in June The Minto-Morley Reforms of called for separate Muslim electorates.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi seated in carriage, on the right, eyes downcast, with black flat-top hat receives a big welcome in Karachi in after his return to India from South Africa. Muhammad Ali Jinnah , seated, third from the left, was a supporter of the Lucknow Pact, which, in , ended the three-way rift between the Extremists, the Moderates and the League. Mahatma Gandhi with Dr. Annie Besant en route to a meeting in Madras in September The British had no desire to educate the Indian masses, nor were they willing to budget for such an expense.
That Indians seized the English language and turned it into an instrument for our own liberation — using it to express nationalist sentiments against the British — was to their credit, not by British design. The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to by apologists for empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so.
But the facts are even more damning. In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns double those of government stocks, paid entirely from Indian, and not British, taxes. It was a splendid racket for Britons, at the expense of the Indian taxpayer. The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources — coal, iron ore, cotton and so on — to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time.
And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers. A marvellous post-independence cartoon captured the situation perfectly: Nor were Indians employed in the railways. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early 20th century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men — whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England.
Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones.
In , therefore, the British passed an act of parliament explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. Between and , India imported around 14, locomotives from England, and another 3, from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after After independence, 35 years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again.
There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their identities and their self-respect. In , when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1. The India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercialising society: The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them. The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilisational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and abundant prosperity — in short, all the markers of successful modernity today — and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British.
If there were positive byproducts for Indians from the institutions the British established and ran in India in their own interests, they were never intended to benefit Indians. Today Indians cannot live without the railways; the Indian authorities have reversed British policies and they are used principally to transport people, with freight bearing ever higher charges in order to subsidise the passengers exactly the opposite of British practice.
That is now between two sovereign and equal nations, not between an imperial overlord and oppressed subjects; indeed, British prime minister Theresa May recently visited India to seek investment in her post-Brexit economy. History is its own revenge. India South and Central Asia features. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All.