A Vision of United India

Chapter 4

India under the British

The British came to India originally as traders through the East India Company during the rule of Jehangir in the 16th century. The chief aim of the British at that time was to make an impact on the Dutch hold on the spice trade and to establish a lasting outpost. But the company soon established its military and political dominance in India. By 1834, the East India Company was no more a trading company; it became the official ruler of India. Eventually, the company assumed complete domination of India and encroached on each and every aspect of her life. The company was very successful till the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. The mutiny ended a year later when The India Act (1858) was passed; this act abolished the East India Company and vested all power with Queen Victoria. From that time onwards, it was the British Government that governed India through the Indian Civil Service. However, the British were not the first Western power to come to India. They had to contend with the Portuguese and the French.

The arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century marked the beginning of European domination over the Indian subcontinent, which lasted more than 400 years. The Portuguese controlled coastal Sri Lanka for 150 years and established a trading settlement at Colombo. In 1658, the Dutch drove them out, and in 1796, the British, who controlled the country for the next 152 years, supplanted the Dutch. By the mid-19th century, the British had brought about a dramatic transformation of the economy with the introduction of coffee and tea. A British colony from 1802, Sri Lanka became independent as a separate nation on Feb. 4, 1948. It became a member of the United Nations in 1955. It must be noted that Sri Lanka had a long historic connection with India from the very earliest times and was bound to it by the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Similarly, Burma (now called Myanmar) was first united into a single kingdom in 1044 under the ruler Anawrahta, who made it the centre of Theravada Buddhism. In the 19th century the country came under British control. The British took Tenasserim and Arakan in 1826, most of the delta region, including Rangoon, in 1852, and a large part of the rest of the country in 1885. From 1886 to 1937, they governed it as a province of India. After that, it was declared a separate State.

The northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent came under British control by the middle of the 19th century. This was the territory of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was part of the cultural unity and political unity of India from the most ancient times. Later in the 11th century, it came under Islamic rule. Britain wanted control of this Muslim nation in order to prevent Russia from expanding southward. From its base in India, Great Britain fought three Afghan Wars in less than 100 years: 1839-42, 1878-80, and 1919.

Although the British had more modern arms than the Afghans, the English found the territory very difficult to hold and administer. Local uprisings and guerrilla warfare eventually drove the British out. In the second war, the British sought to establish a mission at the capital, Kabul. Following the murder of their envoy, the British occupied the city and installed a new king. After this conflict, Britain managed the foreign relations of the country, until the third war gained independence for Afghanistan in 1919.

Thus all the areas that were under the influence of Indian culture were taken over by the British by the end of the 19th century. The whole subcontinent of India came under the

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British by the end of the 19th century. They were soon declared as separate States and got their independence in due course.

Relations between Hindus and Muslims

Once the British had conquered the whole of India, they had to contend with the Hindu and Muslim populations. They soon dominated both. Before the advent of the British, relations between the Hindus and Muslims had been somewhat amicable with some exceptions now and then. But this amity was based more on a policy of peaceful coexistence, rather than on any real attempt to understand each other. When the British took over, their natural hostility was turned towards the Muslims whom they had replaced. Lord Ellenborough wrote of the Muslims in 1843: "I cannot close my eyes to the belief that that race is fundamentally hostile to us, and our true policy is to reconcile the Hindus".

The advent of the education system brought in by the British through the English language saw the Hindus adapting themselves rapidly to the new situation. As a result, the Hindus broke new ground in almost all fields, whether it was education, business or in the professions.

The Muslims, unable to adapt themselves to the new conditions and demands, remained stagnant. This resulted in an economic downgrading of the Muslim community. Then came the Sepoy Mutiny and things changed for the worse for them. The general trend towards their economic collapse received a further impetus in the post-1857 period when the British, incensed at the Muslim "audacity" in staging a revolution against them, launched upon an avowedly anti-Muslim policy. Their lands were confiscated without rhyme or reason; they were barred from enlistment in the army and the police, their traditional vocations. Indeed, they were made to stew in their own juice, persecuted, humbled, and frustrated. Thus, by the 1870s, according to W.W. Hunter, a renowned author, there was scarcely a Government office in Calcutta in which a Muslim could "hope for any post above the rank of a porter, messenger, filler of ink-pots and mender of pens". The poignancy of the Muslim economic situation was summed up by Hunter in these words, "A hundred and seventy years ago it was almost impossible for a well-born Mussalman in Bengal to become poor; at present it is almost impossible for him to continue rich". In the rest of the subcontinent as well, the Muslims had fallen on evil days in the aftermath of the mass uprising. Thus the Muslim community, which was ruling most of India before the coming of the British, and were the dominant class in India, found themselves completely at a loss in the new situation.

The Muslim Response

The Muslim response to this challenge posed by the rise of the British and the emergence of the Hindus as a power was not integrated; it was rather disparate, tardy, and somewhat local in character. The religious leaders who had provided leadership to the community since the decline of Muslim power in India, withdrew from the mainstream of community life, and devoted themselves exclusively to imparting religious education. Their seminaries, especially at Deoband, Farangi Mahal, Rai Bareilly and Calcutta did help the Muslims to preserve their identity, but hardly addressed themselves to the problem of the economic collapse of the Muslims. The first response came in April 1863 when Nawab Abdul Latif (1828-93) launched the Mohammedan Literary Society in Calcutta, then the capital of the British Indian Empire. The Society stood for Western learning and progress; it submitted to the government a number of memorials on the state of Muslim

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education and on social and religious issues; it was in part, responsible for the Government's Resolution of Aug. 7, 1871, on Muslim education. Initially apolitical, the Society progressively assumed a political role: it represented the Muslim viewpoint and Muslim grievances to the government. Syed Ameer Ali (1849-1928), the great jurist and scholar, also addressed the Muslim problem, but primarily in political terms. He founded the National Mohammedan Association in 1878 and it submitted a memorandum to the Viceroy, which for the first time processed and articulated Muslim demands and grievances. The memorandum, which became the basis of discussion on the state of Muslim education and Muslim employment for three years, finally led to the government's Resolution of Jul. 15, 1885. This was an important event for it signified a reversal of the British Government's policy towards Muslim progress. Ameer Ali, who was by far the most politically oriented among the Muslim leaders of his time, mooted the idea of a conference of Muslim leaders and intelligentsia and later the establishment of an All India Muslim Political Conference, both in 1888, but his plans were aborted because of opposition or lack of response from other leaders.

The Indian Renaissance

As already seen, by 1857, the whole of the Indian subcontinent had come under the control of the British. The exploitation of India by the British had reached very great proportions. The Indian nation was thus facing a great crisis. The historian T.B. Macaulay thought that India was at the point of dissolution. The society was steeped in superstition, manacled by primitive customs, and it seemed that the sense of community had all but vanished. The situation was similar to what India had faced in the 14th century. At that time, the question was the continuity of India's life - whether her separate identity in culture, social organization, religion and thought would be maintained or whether she would merge with the expanding commonwealth of Islam. Then, India was saved by the spiritual revival of the 14th and 15th centuries. This time the question was different - it was not the continuance of the Hindu culture. Rather, the problem facing India was the confrontation of a superior, expanding and highly dynamic civilization with an old, static and, as it appeared, decaying culture. Here was a civilization, which was convinced not only of its own incomparable greatness, economic strength, and technological and scientific superiority but was moved by a firm belief that the form of life it represented was the final one to which all others must conform.

Along with this, there was another problem that confronted Indian culture - it was the relationship of Hinduism with Islam and the problem of their coexistence in the new circumstances under the domination of a people alien to both. It was at this critical moment that the Indian renaissance began and this was essentially due to the manner in which Hinduism reacted to the foreign domination. This reaction, which first started in Bengal, spread to all other parts of the country and included all the fields of culture. The sole exception was in the political field; for, till the end of the nineteenth century, British rule was accepted as a beneficent development. Raja Rammohan Roy publicly thanked God for having placed India under the British rule. Prasanna Kumar Tagore declared: "If we were asked what government we would prefer, English or any other, we would one and all reply English by all means, even in preference to a Hindu government".

The national feeling slowly started taking shape and it was not long before that it took a concrete political form. It came in the shape of the Indian National Congress. Ironically, it was an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, who was responsible for the formation of

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the Indian National Congress. In the words of an Indian historian, "The Congress was the natural and inevitable product of forces already at work in the country; it would have emerged soon enough, Hume or no Hume."

Hume, who was the son of a radical politician, entered the Indian Civil Service in Bengal in 1849. After serving as magistrate in the district of Etawah at the time of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he was assigned to the board of revenue in the North-Western Provinces. From 1870-79 he was attached to the central government of India as secretary in the revenue and agriculture department. His views favouring greater participation for Indians in Indian affairs created difficulties, and he was returned to provincial administration. On his retirement from the civil service in 1882, he involved himself in political activities aimed at giving Indians a more democratic, representational government and was one of the conveners of the first session of the Indian National Congress, held at Bombay in 1885. This event heralded the beginning of a political awakening. The demand for political freedom, however half-hearted and halting, began to find expression in the collective life of political India.

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