INDIA

The starting date for British rule in India is conventionally given as 1757, when East India Company forces commanded by Robert Clive (1725–1774) defeated the Nawab of Bengal, a vassal of the Mughal Empire, and asserted British military supremacy in the region. In 1765 the Mughal emperor presented the Company with the diwani of Bengal—the right to collect the tax revenues—making it the province's effective ruler. Under the administrations of Governor-Generals Warren Hastings (1732–1818) from 1772 to 1785 and Charles, Marquess Cornwallis (1738–1805) from 1786 to 1793, the East India Company spread its influence into independent kingdoms and Mughal provinces, notably Awadh and Arcot, backed with a growing army composed largely of Indian sepoys. The late eighteenth century also witnessed a flowering of cultural exchange between east and west, particularly in the Mughal centers of Lucknow and Hyderabad, where European officials adopted aspects of Indian court culture and often took Indian wives and consorts. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in Calcutta in 1784, undertook sustained study of Indian culture, from religion to language to natural history; its first president, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), identified the kinship among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin to discover the Indo-European language family.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had a major effect on the nature and scope of British rule in the subcontinent. Richard Colley Wellesley (1760–1842), governor-general from 1798 to 1805, used the threat of French expansion in the east (triggered by Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798) as a pretext for consolidating and extending British power. One of Wellesley's preferred methods was the "subsidiary alliance system," whereby the East India Company assumed indirect control of provinces such as Awadh and Hyderabad by requiring regional rulers to garrison and pay for Company troops. In this manner the Company retained a regulating hand in the affairs of key states such as Awadh, Hyderabad, and Tanjore. Wellesley also waged war. By 1800 the East India Company army stood at two hundred thousand troops, with a European officer corps of about thirty thousand. In 1799 the British defeated and killed their most dangerous Indian enemy, Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) of Mysore, and placed his domains in the hands of a compliant puppet ruler. In 1803, after failing to impose a subsidiary alliance on the powerful Maratha confederacy, the Company went to war with the Marathas and succeeded in fracturing the union. The Company's Court of Directors in London objected to wars of expansion because of their high cost and recalled Wellesley in 1805. His successors pursued imperial consolidation, however, and by 1818, thanks to a series of subsidiary alliances and outright conquest, British suzerainty extended as far west as the River Sutlej in Punjab.

These conquests were accompanied by a wave of "Anglicist" administrative measures, which sought to reform Indian customs in keeping with British liberal ideals. Christian missionaries entered India after 1813, when the East India Company lost its monopoly on trade. In 1829 the Hindu practice of sati, or widow burning, was suppressed. British officials also aggressively hunted down practitioners of thagi, who supposedly performed ritual murder and robbery in the name of the goddess Kali. In 1835 Persian was replaced by English as an official language of East India Company business. Territorial expansion also continued, fueled by rising fears of Russian influence in India. The Afghan

War of 1839–1842, in which a British force of 16,500 soldiers and camp-followers was virtually annihilated, led to the Company's last recall of a governor-general, in 1844; but the conquest of Sindh and Punjab in the 1840s extended British rule across modern-day Pakistan. The Company further enlarged its domains with the "doctrine of lapse," espoused by the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie (1812–1860; governor-general from 1848–1856), whereby if a regional prince died without a legitimate heir, the East India Company assumed control of his province. This proved especially controversial since the Company did not recognize adopted heirs, customary in Indian courts. In 1856 Dalhousie annexed the north Indian province of Awadh. The move was highly unpopular in South Asia, and helped fuel mounting opposition to Company rule.

The following winter, a new kind of rifle was distributed to the sepoys of the East India Company army. Rumor spread among the troops that the cartridges for the guns were greased with a combination of cow and pig fat, which meant that both Hindus and Muslims would be defiled when they bit the ends off the cartridges to load them. The rumor catalyzed long-standing discontent. On 10 May 1857 sepoys at Meerut shot their British officers and marched toward Delhi, the Mughal capital, thus beginning the Indian Mutiny-Rebellion. They called on the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II (r. 1837–1858), to grant them his protection and set up a provisional government. Mutinies followed across the camps of the Bengal Army. British communities in Lucknow and Kanpur were besieged in horrific conditions, and hundreds of civilians massacred. Reprisals against the mutineers were equally savage, involving brutal degradation and summary executions. On 2 August 1858 the British Parliament formally assumed the reins of Indian government from the East India Company, thus commencing the "Raj." The East India Company was dissolved soon after, and the emperor exiled to Burma.

the raj to world war i

By wiping out both the Mughal Empire and the East India Company, the British Raj ended two contradictions of earlier British rule: the paradox of a commercial company acting as a ruler; and the fiction that the East India Company governed as a vassal of the Mughal emperor. Much of India now belonged openly to the British Empire, was governed on behalf of the queen by a viceroy and his council, and was administered by the elite, tightly organized Indian Civil Service. The Indian army was restructured to maintain a ratio of one British soldier for every two sepoys, and recruitment efforts now focused on "martial races," believed to be more loyal. British communities withdrew into easily secured cantonments on the outskirts of Indian cities, and racial discrimination tended to replace the relative cultural tolerance of the Hastings era.

The British Raj also borrowed elements from the East India Company and Mughal government that had preceded it. The Raj pledged itself to nonintervention in matters of religion and to maintaining the integrity of the Indian princely states—which even at the time of independence covered approximately one-third of the subcontinent. Indian regional rulers were encouraged to associate themselves with Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), a relationship consolidated in 1876 when the queen was named Empress of India. The fusion of East and West found concrete form in the architecture of the period, much of it built in a new style called Indo-Saracenic, which mingled elements of Islamic and Hindu architecture with the gothic revivalism popular in Victorian Britain. Britain's symbolic appropriation of India reached its apogee under the viceroy from 1898 to 1905, Lord Curzon (1859–1925), who staged an elaborate coronation durbar (assembly of nobles) for Edward VII (r. 1901–1910) in 1903. Convergences and separations between British and Indian cultures were popularly captured by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) in his widely read poems, stories, and novels.

Britain's chief economic contribution to India is generally seen as the railroad network, which jumped from virtually nil in 1858 to twenty-five thousand miles of track by 1900. But the railroads also helped Britain turn India into a supplier of raw materials, such as cotton and jute, and a captive market for British manufactured goods. This had devastating effects on India's industrial development, both artisanal and factory-based. The trade imbalance, coupled with a steady depreciation of the rupee and burdensome "home charges"—by which India paid Britain for the cost of its administration—led Indian nationalists to characterize British rule as a drain of wealth. Politically and socially, British policies proved no less controversial. A prime example was the Ilbert Bill of 1883, a reforming measure that placed Indian and European justices on the same footing, thereby making it possible for Indians to judge European defendants. Members of the British-Indian community objected vehemently to the bill, formed leagues of protest, and forced the viceroy to back down.

The Ilbert Bill furor encouraged Indian nationalist sentiment to coalesce. In 1885 the Indian National Congress held its first meeting in Bombay. The body sought redress from the colonial government for injustices such as the hefty home charges and discrimination against Indian candidates who wished to enter the Indian Civil Service. Congress membership grew rapidly and the group soon became the leading organ of nationalist

opinion. Emerging calls for Indian self-government heightened dramatically in 1905 when the British government decided to partition Bengal into two provinces: one Hindu-majority province centered in Calcutta and one Muslim-majority province with its capital at Dhaka. The move appeared not only to violate Bengal's integrity as a region but also to promote a policy of "divide and rule" and foment communal hostility. Sponsored by Congress, Bengali Hindus boycotted British goods and made a point of using only Indian-made, or swadeshi, products instead (notably homespun fabrics). Meeting in Calcutta in 1906, Congress announced swaraj, or self-rule, as one of its central goals. The same year witnessed the founding of the Muslim League in Dhaka, designed to serve as the voice of Muslim nationalist opinion. More radical measures were favored by Bengali terrorists and supporters of the militant Marathi leader Bal Gangadar Tilak (1856–1920), who was jailed for sedition in 1908.

The newly elected British Liberal government of 1906 responded to protests in India with a series of limited reforms, known as the Morley-Minto Reforms (1909). In 1911 Bengal was reunified, although the imperial capital was shifted from Calcutta to Delhi, where it would remain for the rest of the Raj. By the eve of World War I, key elements in the Indian nationalist movement were firmly in place. India had become the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, but how long it would remain so was open to debate.

See alsoColonialism; East India Company; Great Britain; Imperialism; Sepoy Mutiny.

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Maya Jasanoff