The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement

The British Conquest of India

Before we come to the main theme of the book, we shall make a brief survey of the advent of the British and the psychological factors that ultimately led to the aspiration for a united India.

The British came to India as traders early in the 17th century. The Moghul emperor Jehangir permitted the English to trade in India in 1608. As a result, the English established a factory at Surat. However, India's connection with the West had started earlier with the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to establish themselves in India and the last to leave. They arrived as early as 1498 via the ocean route discovered by Vasco-da-Gama. But it was the East India Company, chartered by the British crown and ultimately responsible to the parliament, that launched British rule in India. The British East India Company was established on 31 December 1600 AD, under a Royal Charter of Queen Elizabeth I for a period of 15 years for spice trading, with a capital of £70,000. In 1640, the Company acquired the site of modern Madras (Chennai), where it quickly built Fort St George. In 1668, King Charles II transferred to the East India Company the site of Bombay (Mumbai), which he had received as part of a dowry when marrying the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. In 1690, Job Charnok, at the invitation of Nawab Ibrahim Khan, laid the foundations of Calcutta. The site was a swampy land on the Bhagirath comprising the village of Sutanati, to which in 1698 were added the villages of Kolikata and Govindapur.

From this time onwards the three presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal were established and became for all practical purposes the centre of British India's political and military activities. Within a century Britain had acquired almost complete sovereignty over India; but this was neither a swift nor sudden process. Firstly, it entailed wars with the Company's rivals - the Portuguese, the Dutch and, more formidably, the French.

It was by the Battle of Wandiwash that the French threat was eliminated and by the Battle of Plassey, a few years earlier that it got a foothold over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The Battle of Wandiwash was a continuation of the Anglo-French armed struggle and rivalry in Europe and other parts of the world. Eyre Coote commanded the English troops while Comte de Lally commanded the French troops. The British captured the fort near Wandiwash in 1759. This battle sealed the fate of the French empire in India. The French were no longer in a position to challenge British superiority.

A few years earlier, the East India Company had succeeded in establishing itself and getting power in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and the east coast. The decisive step in this direction was the Battle of Plassey, more correctly Palasi (from the Palas trees that abound in the area). Fought between the British forces and those of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah on 23 June 1757, the battle lasted only one day when the forces of the Nawab were put to flight. The agility and far-sightedness of the English, coupled with their unscrupulous employment of treason, intrigue and conspiracy in the enemy camp crippled the strength of the Nawab's army. Robert Clive who was the commander of the British forces said in his report on the battle: 'Mir Jafar, Rai Durlabh and Yar Lutuf Khan gave us no other assistance than standing neutral.' These three were secretly in league with the East India Company. This battle gave the East India Company control over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

Immediately after the Battle of Plassey, Moghul emperor Shah Alam granted Dewani of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa to the British East India Company. As a result, it secured permission to collect land revenue from these provinces in return for an annual tribute and maintaining of order and peace. They collected the land revenues through the local

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Nawab and took control of his army. This made the East India Company a ruling power and not merely a trading group as it had started.

As long as the Company's chief business was trade, it was left to manage its own affairs. But after Plassey, when the Company acquired territory, the British Government felt that a Regulating Act was necessary. With Pitt's India Act, a Board of Commissioners as a department of the English Government was created to exercise control over political, financial and military affairs over British possessions in India. For the first time a Governor-General was appointed who was soon to emerge as politically all-powerful. Within another hundred years, the British took control of almost the whole of India.

Let us now take a look at the political map of India at that time immediately after the Battle of Plassey.

• The Moghul empire had more or less disintegrated, after the Muslim forces of Persian king Nadir Shah plundered Delhi in 1739. Later in 1756, Ahmad Shah, the Emir of Afghanistan, who had previously seized the Punjab, again captured Delhi. A united force of Marathas and Sikhs could not defeat the invaders, and the possibility of a reunification of Indian peoples into a strong national state began to dim.

In the South of India, an independent state of Hyderabad was established; this was one of the many Muslim and Hindu states to emerge amid the rapid decline of Moghul-centralised authority and political chaos in India.

The East India Company was on its way to the complete control of Bengal, India's most populous province. At the same time important areas of the Deccan came under the control of the East India Company. From favourable locations on coasts -Madras, Bombay and Calcutta - the East India Company started tapping the interior resources of India's well-developed manufacturing economy, vast population and solid agricultural base; also the British started limiting India's access to world trade with tariffs, by taking command of India's textile industry and exporting Indian gold.

Warren Hastings was appointed the first Governor-General of British India in 1772. From that time onwards, the British relied on superior military power, as well as bribery, extortion, political manipulation of native chieftains; at the same time they exploited the disunity among various Indian kingdoms, to subjugate the entire subcontinent.

The Marathas - the successors of Shivaji - had built a Maratha empire; but they were notorious for their plundering raids, and many states were forced to pay them protection money as a means of direct and indirect subjection. In 1761, Afghan Shah Durrani defeated them and this ended their expansion to the west.

In 1798, Lord Wellesley was appointed Governor-General. An imperialist, Wellesley combined the instruments of war and diplomacy to fulfil his ends. Determined to tame all opposition and to wipe out any desire for independence, Wellesley put in place the system of Subsidiary Alliances. The system was such that when an Indian ruler felt that he was in danger from his neighbours, he could take help of the English; in return he would have to pay and maintain British troops in his state. While the system was a complete success, it undermined the independence of Indian rulers and gave the British total power in India.

The Sikhs of Punjab, after the death of Ranjit Singh, attacked British positions, starting a costly war. The Sikhs were one of many groups or individual states that resisted British exploitation, brutality and territorial seizures at sporadic intervals.

The result was that a series of wars were fought between the British and the Indian kingdoms; these were the Anglo-Mysore wars, the Anglo-Maratha wars, the Anglo-Sikh wars and the Anglo-Gurkha wars. The Company took control of Mysore by defeating

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Tipu Sultan in 1792; the Marathas were convincingly defeated in 1819. Further, the company expanded its rule by defeating Nepal in 1814-16, Sind in 1843, Punjab in 1848-49 and Burma in 1886. In the wars against Mysore the British fought Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, who proved to be formidable foes; it was only after four wars that they took complete control of the areas ruled by Tipu Sultan. The war against the Marathas led by Nana Phadnavis followed. By 1799, Tipu Sultan was defeated and in the following twenty years the mighty power of the Maratha confederacy was reduced to ashes and dust. In the meantime, the Moghul emperor in Delhi had shrunk to a mere shadow of his former self; soon he was to become a pensioner of the Company and its virtual prisoner. Moreover, by 1818 the proud Rajputs, driven by petty jealousies, had become feudatories of the Company. All that now remained was the conquest of Sind and the Punjab. The former fell in the aftermath of the disastrous Anglo-Afghan war. In Punjab as a result of the anarchy following the death of Ranjit Singh, his successors could not stand up to the British. A few years later Dalhousie became the Governor-General. Determined to extend direct British control over large areas, Dalhousie introduced the Doctrine of Lapse. Under this doctrine, if the ruler of a protected state died without a natural heir his state would not pass to an adopted heir but would be annexed to British dominions, unless the adoption had been clearly approved earlier by British authorities. This allowed the Company to get the lion's share of Indian states, like Satara in 1848, Nagpur, and Jhansi in 1854. Oudh was deposed on the grounds of misgovernment and was annexed in 1856.

While all this was happening, we must not forget that India was on the verge of the utter loss of her cultural and historical unity in the middle of the 18th century. For the patriotism that existed then in India was local or dynamic. There was no Indian national feeling at the beginning of the 18th century. In fact, Indian rulers of that time more often allied themselves with the British against other Indian rulers, than allied together to fight the common enemy. The Nawab of Oudh entered into a subordinate alliance with the British against the Marathas. The Rajput rulers wanted protection against the Marathas. Raghoba sold himself to the British to fight the Peshwa in Poona. The Nizam's forces marched against those of the British in the fight against Tipu.

The British took full advantage of the divisions in India. Right from the beginning they followed a policy of divide and rule. Diplomacy and deceit were used to gain control of revenue collection in the province of Bengal. This gave them effective control of the administration. The Marathas, the Sikhs and the rulers of Mysore could never unite to confront the foreign enemy and fell one by one. By the onset of the 19th century there was no local power that could cope with their onslaught.

Once the British had consolidated their power, commercial exploitation of natural resources and native labour became ruthless. By the middle of the 19th century, the arrogant exploitation of the people had tried the patience of the Indians to the limit. We shall touch upon some of these incidents which served as triggers to the sense of Indian Nationalism.

First there was the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, which was suppressed most brutally and ruthlessly.

Next, the Partition of Bengal in 1905 triggered off a strong reaction not only in Bengal but in the whole of India.

Then there was the shooting and killing of innocent people in the Jallianwalabagh incident in 1919.

At the same time, the British, to serve their own purpose, set up educational institutions that imparted Western education through the English language and had established a vast railway network and telegraph lines. This brought the country some kind of administrative unity. But they also began a systematic exploitation of the Indian people.

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Despite this political division and total disunity, the concept of India existed. There was still a notion of Indian civilisation and culture existing in this geographical space called India. And that was because there was a strong fundamental unity based on a cultural and spiritual oneness that ran like the thread holding the garland, throughout the whole history of India.

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