INDIA.

British colonial rule in India, established formally in 1757, lasted for almost two centuries. Ironically, however, it was when the territorial extension of the Indian Empire had reached its apogee with the final conquest of Burma in 1885 that the first stirrings of organized Indian nationalist opposition also began to manifest themselves.

EARLY NATIONALISM

The emergence of a structured movement of anti-colonial resistance in India is conventionally traced to the Indian National Congress established in December 1885. Its early membership was elite, urban, and Western-educated. Its methods and demands were moderate, petitioning for greater Indian participation in imperial governance and economic policies that would develop, not impoverish, India. Gradually a more militant strand emerged that declared self-rule a "birthright" and advocated assertive strategies of boycott to achieve it. These "extremists" also reached out to the masses but the symbols around which they mobilized—Hindu deities and historical figures—often alienated religious minorities.

Forming a quarter of India's population, most Muslims remained aloof from the Congress. Indeed, the reformer Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) had warned that political activism by a community lagging educationally and economically behind the Hindu majority would mean its eventual obliteration. In December 1906, a few leading Muslims gathered in Dacca (eastern Bengal) to found the All India Muslim League. Earlier in October, a delegation of Muslim landlords had met with the viceroy to demand separate electorates and weighted representation for Muslims, a concession embodied in the Indian Councils Act of 1909. Elite Muslim and imperial interests dovetailed to represent Indians as divided into distinct communities requiring separate representation.

INDIA IN THE WORLD WARS

In August 1914, Britain unilaterally declared India a combatant in World War I. At first nationalists like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) supported the British in hopes of substantial political reward. Although Edwin Montagu (1879–1924), secretary of state for India, proclaimed on 20 August 1917 the new British policy of the "progressive realization of responsible government in India," reforms in 1919 disappointed even moderate nationalists, granting only less important provincial powers to Indians. Separate electorates were retained and the franchise restricted to propertied and educated men usually loyal to the Raj (imperial government). These meager concessions were offset by the Rowlatt Acts of 1919, which perpetuated draconian wartime measures such as the detention of Indians without trial. And on 13 April 1919, General Reginald Dyer (1864–1927) fired at an illegal but unarmed assembly that, unaware of the imposition of martial law, had gathered at the Jallianwallah park in Amritsar (Punjab), leaving 379 dead and over 1,200 injured. Becoming a symbol of colonial injustice, this act provoked widespread protest.

The deleterious economic impact of the war on India's poor, especially the shortage and high price of essential commodities, laid the groundwork for Gandhi's mass nationalism. Furthermore, the post-war dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan claimed to be the caliph of Sunni Muslims, provided an opportunity for a Congress alliance with Indian Muslims. Capturing the party's leadership in 1920, Gandhi launched a combined nonviolent noncooperation and pro-caliphate movement rallying Hindus and Muslims on parallel, though separate, platforms. Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), until then a member both of Congress and the League, resigned from the former in protest against this welding of religion and politics. Gandhi's call to boycott British goods and institutions was heeded by large numbers of Indians. However, far from single-handedly awakening popular ferment, Gandhi capitalized on already widespread labor and peasant unrest, channeling it along Congress's lines but never fully controlling it. Indeed, he was forced to call off noncooperation when in February 1922, breaching the dictate of nonviolence, angry peasants killed twenty-two policemen in the northern town of Chauri Chaura. In 1924, when Kemal Atatürk (1880–1938) abolished the office itself, the procaliphate movement also ended and earlier unity devolved into religious rioting in northern India.

Noncooperation remained dormant until the renewal of civil disobedience in the period from 1930 to 1934. Gandhi kicked off the movement in March 1930 with a 240-mile march to the sea to manufacture salt in violation of the government's monopoly. Thereafter, civil disobedience spread quickly, fanned by the economic dislocation of the Great Depression. The British replied with constitutional reform. The Government of India Act of 1935, while still maintaining firm colonial control at the center, enlarged the franchise to thirty-five million voters and provided fully elected Indian provincial governments. In the elections of 1937, the Congress benefited from its mass campaigns to win in eight of eleven provinces. The Muslim League, however, fared abysmally. In the two largest Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab, cross-religious regional coalitions assumed power. Jinnah now revived the theory, first mooted by Syed Ahmed Khan in the 1880s, that Hindus and Muslims formed two equal nations as a way to trump the numerical minority of Muslims and to unite them across provinces.

Once again, in 1939, the viceroy announced India's entry into World War II without consulting Indians. This time Congress resigned its provincial ministries in protest. Now finding it convenient to endorse the League's claim that the Congress did not represent all Indians, the British pushed Jinnah to define his demands. Recent scholarship considers the League's Lahore Resolution of March 1940 an attempt to negotiate a power-sharing agreement for Muslims in India, not a call for partition. In formally asking for independent Muslim states in the northeast and northwest, Jinnah was pressing the more important stipulation that future constitutional arrangements be negotiated on the basis of a parity of "Hindustan" and "Pakistan" within India. Japan's bringing the war to Southeast Asia in 1942 produced fresh efforts to conciliate Indian opinion. On 8 August 1942, when negotiations had collapsed, Congress launched the Quit India movement, the largest civilian uprising since the rebellion of 1857. Far from leaving, however, the British responded with repression, using troops massed in India for the war.

BRITISH DECOLONIZATION IN INDIA

Domestic considerations combined with popular pressures in India pushed the eventual British offer of independence. For Britons emerging from the war, economic reconstruction at home took priority over diverting scarce human and material resources to reassert imperial control in India where political unrest had assumed worrisome proportions by 1945–1946. Apart from the growing nationalist orientation of the increasingly Indianized civil service, the vaunted "steel frame" of the Raj, British confidence in their Indian sword arms was also shaken. The Indian National Army, formed from Indian POWs captured in Southeast Asia, had aligned with the Japanese in 1943–1945. The trial in late 1945 of three of its officers galvanized nationalist sympathy, turning these "deserters" into heroes, and spread to the Royal Indian Navy, whose ratings mutinied in Bombay from 18 to 23 February 1946.

In the elections of 1945–1946, while the Congress repeated its previous success, the League's performance improved spectacularly: it won all reserved central assembly seats and polled 75 percent of the provincial Muslim votes. With the League and Congress the only major parties left in the political fray, in March 1946 a high-powered British Cabinet Mission attempted to broker a constitutional arrangement for independent India. Their plan involved a three-tiered federation in which most powers would vest in three groupings of provinces—two comprising Muslim majority provinces in the east and west and the third the Hindu majority provinces. An arrangement that would have preserved Indian unity while satisfying the League demand for parity of representation through Muslim provinces that could influence the center, it was rejected by the Congress objecting precisely to the weak center. With this rebuff also went the last chance for an undivided India.

A frustrated League's call for "direct action" on 16 August 1946 to achieve Pakistan precipitated large-scale violence along the lines of religion in Bengal, Bihar and, later, Punjab. As northern India slid into chaos, on 20 February 1947 the prime minister Clement Attlee (1883–1967) announced a British departure by June 1948, moved up to August 1947 by the last viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900–1979). Upon Attlee's announcement, Hindu conservatives, followed by the Congress, called for a partition of Bengal and Punjab, separating Hindu from Muslim majority districts. Power was handed to Pakistan and India on 14–15 August 1947 in the midst of a bloodbath and the largest population transfer in South Asian history.

POSTCOLONIAL CONTINUITIES

While Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), prime minister until his death in 1964, inaugurated a new era of nation-building and economic development in 1947, the colonial imprint on the postcolonial state was striking. India was now a democratic, secular republic, but a remarkable 200 articles of its constitution were taken from the Government of India Act of 1935. Instituting a federal structure in which powers were shared between the union and the states, independent India retained provisions enabling the center to dismiss democratically elected but recalcitrant regional governments. Both Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi (1917–1984, prime minister in 1966–1977 and 1980–1984) perpetuated the colonial reliance on the nonelected administrative and police services to shore up executive power. This top-heavy state, and sometimes vice-regal style of governance, was justified by the requirements of planned development in an impoverished country disrupted by the mayhem of partition. But one harmful result, particularly pronounced under and after Indira Gandhi, has been the decay of institutions that sustain democratic functioning from the grassroots up and a preference for personalized power. Postcolonial patterns of governance have veered between recourse to shortsighted populism and resort to authoritarianism to stem popular unrest (the most extreme example being the suspension of civil liberties during the Emergency in 1975–1977). In the 1980s these reflexes provoked secessionist movements in Punjab, the Northeast, and Kashmir.

HINDU NATIONALISM

Gandhi's assassination on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse (1910–1949) was a dramatic reminder of the existence of a Hindu nationalism in place since the Hindu Mahasabha's (Greater Hindu Society) foundation in 1915. Though obscured by the Congress in the anticolonial movement, the two shared many members and ideals. Hindu nationalism, inspired by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's idea of "Hindutva" (Hinduness) defining the core of the Indian nation, acquired a militant edge with the founding, in 1925, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a formally apolitical paramilitary group propounding aggressively anti-Muslim ideas. Driven into the shadows after Gandhi's assassination, by the 1980s the Hindu Right reorganized itself sufficiently for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—evolved from the Mahasabha—to lead a national coalition government from 1998 to 2004. This recuperation was enabled partly by Congress's tendency, particularly in the 1980s, to buttress its weakening electoral and social bases of support by whipping up fears of a national unity threatened by religious minorities (the Sikhs in Punjab and Kashmiri Muslims). Such espousal of a majoritarian nationalism made ideological room for the BJP. To expand beyond its core base—upper caste, middle and lower class, urban and semi-urban, from the Hindi-speaking north—the BJP's rhetoric downplayed class and caste difference to emphasize religious unity. Muslims provided convenient targets against which to mobilize. With the insurgency in Kashmir "confirming" their "inherent disloyalty," since 1990 the BJP also made a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya—allegedly built over a temple marking the birthplace of the deity Ram—symbolic of all the majority's woes. Though Hindu activists destroyed the mosque in December 1992, the campaign to build a temple on the site remains central to the BJP program, conveniently revived since their ouster from power in May 2004.

KASHMIR

While most of the 560-odd princely states of India were quietly absorbed by the country within whose territory they found themselves in 1947, the dispute over Kashmir brought India and Pakistan to war within two months of their independence. Physically wedged between the two, Muslim-majority Kashmir's integration touches vitally on the national ideals espoused by both. While on the one hand Pakistan's identity as a homeland for India's Muslims remains incomplete without Kashmir, on the other, the presence of Kashmir's Muslims in the union vindicates India's claim to being a religiously inclusive secular state. Following a cease-fire in 1949, two-thirds of the region has been under Indian and the remaining third under Pakistani control. Further bedeviling resolution of the Kashmir dilemma, a largely popular insurgency continuing since 1989—partly aided by Pakistan but mostly provoked by underdevelopment, corruption, and interference by the Indian center—has made clear that many Kashmiris themselves want independence from both postcolonial states. However, the Indian-administered portion includes, besides Kashmir, the sub-regions of Jammu and Ladakh, with large Hindu and Buddhist populations respectively, in favor of remaining with India. Despite periodic diplomatic parleys, the region remains a potential flashpoint between the now nuclear-armed countries and the dispute one of the most enduring, unresolved legacies of decolonization.

See alsoBritish Empire; British Empire, End of; Colonialism; Gandhi, Mahatma; Pakistan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bose, Sumantra. Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace. Cambridge, Mass., 2003.

Brass, Paul R. The Politics of India since Independence. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York, 1988.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York, 1996.

Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.

Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York, 1998.

Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India: 1885–1947. New Delhi, 1983.

van der Veer, Peter. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, Calif., 1994.

Mridu Rai