Modern Indian history

Spending the Charter Act of 1813's education grant had divided Orientalists and Anglicists. Macaulay's Minute of February 1835, declaring that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia', settled the quarrel for English.

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Impact on education

• Anglicist turn: the English Education Act, 1835 made English the medium of higher learning and stopped promoting Oriental institutions such as the Calcutta Madrasa.
  • NCERT sociology cites the Minute as a classic case of ethnocentric judgement.
• Downward filtration: educate a small elite and expect learning to trickle down; mass and vernacular schooling were neglected.
  • Indigenous pathshalas decayed; the Hunter Commission (1882) had to plead for primary and vernacular education.
• Institutional path: Wood's Despatch (1854) and the universities of 1857 built a pyramid of English-medium colleges on this base.

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Jotirao Phule (1827–1890) turned nineteenth-century reform away from polishing upper-caste custom towards freeing those at the very bottom. His writings were among the first in India to treat rights as both freedom and equality, and his reach across castes, women, peasants and workers shows how wide that idea was.

Shudras and ati-shudras

• Caste as slavery: Gulamgiri (1873) argued that Aryan conquerors had subjugated the land's original people; he dedicated it to the American movement to free slaves.
• One oppressed bloc: he urged shudras (labouring castes) and ati-shudras (the 'untouchables') to unite against caste discrimination.
• Satyashodhak Samaj (1873): worked for human rights and social justice for low castes, and conducted marriages and rituals without Brahmin priests.
• Practice, not only print: he threw open the well in his house to the 'untouchables' and schooled their children.

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NCERT records that piece-goods made up 33 per cent of India's exports in 1811-12 but no more than 3 per cent by 1850-51. The Industrial Revolution explains much of this collapse; colonial rule explains why India could not respond.

What the Industrial Revolution did

• Machine competition: the Spinning Jenny and power-driven Lancashire mills made cheap, uniform cloth that undercut handspun yarn first and handwoven cloth next.
• Trade reversal: cotton piece-goods, virtually absent from India's imports at the end of the eighteenth century, formed over 31 per cent of their value by 1850 and over 50 per cent by the 1870s.
• Late start at home: Bombay's first cotton mill came up only in 1854, far too late to shield the artisan.

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Both Gandhi and Tagore rejected colonial schooling, which Gandhi said made Indians "strangers in their own lands", but they differed on what education and the nation were for.

Approach towards education

• Gandhi, education for self-respect: colonial education enslaved minds, so he wanted Indian languages as the medium and learning that restored dignity.
• Craft at the core: under Nai Talim, literacy alone was not education; pupils had to work with their hands and learn a craft.
• Tagore, education for creativity: schools killed a child's wonder, so he built Santiniketan, an abode of peace in rural Bengal.
• Blending traditions: science and technology sat beside art and music; Visva-Bharati's Kala Bhavana (1919) was India's first nationalist art school.

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The first public railway opened between Stockton and Darlington in England in 1825. Railways soon remade economies and societies from Europe to colonial Asia, with effects shaped by who built them, and for whom.

Economic effects

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• Industrial linkage: cheap, fast freight joined regional markets and fed demand for coal, iron and engineering.
• Opening continents: the railroad drove westward expansion of industry and trade in America; Canada's transcontinental lines still carry most of its wheat and coal.
• Colonial pattern: the Bombay–Thane line (1853) began a network tying hinterlands to ports, serving imperial trade over local industry.
• Ecological cost: forests fell for sleepers; in Garhwal and Kumaon, oak gave way to chir pine needed for railway lines.

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Tribal communities lived by shifting cultivation, forest produce and customary rights over land. Colonial revenue and forest laws turned them into indebted tenants and wage labourers, and they replied with some of India's earliest anti-colonial revolts.

How colonial rule affected tribals

• Land and debt: cash revenue and private property opened tribal land to moneylenders, traders and landlords, the dikus; unpaid debts meant lost land.
• Forests: the Indian Forest Act, 1878 reserved forests for timber and railways, curbing grazing, jhum and minor produce, so customary use became crime.
• Labour: tribals were recruited for tea plantations, mines and railway works, often under coercive contracts far from home.
• Stigma and intrusion: the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 labelled communities criminal by birth; police, courts and missions eroded village autonomy.

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From Plassey (1757) to the last Anglo-Maratha war (1818), Company armies of Indian sepoys defeated rulers who often had more men and modern guns. Money, organisation and Indian disunity decided the outcome.

Military reasons

• Drill and discipline: European-style drill let sepoys hold formation and fire steady volleys; Indian armies were loose levies of chiefs.
• Weapons were not the gap: Haidar Ali and Tipu modernised with French help, and Mahadji Shinde raised a large European-style army, yet all were worn down.

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Bengal's famine of 1770 came five years after the Company took the Diwani; the 1876–78 famine killed over five million in the Deccan and south. Drought was the trigger; colonial policy turned scarcity into mass death.

Revenue and agrarian reasons

• Rigid cash revenue: the Permanent Settlement (1793) fixed demand whatever the harvest, and defaulting estates were auctioned; Ryotwari and Mahalwari pressed peasants too.
• No reserves: peasants sold grain at harvest and borrowed from moneylenders, so one failed monsoon meant hunger.
• Commercialisation and deindustrialisation: cash crops took land from food, while ruined artisans crowded onto farms.

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The provinces of British India were drawn for revenue, defence and control, not for the people within them. Redrawing therefore began long before 1947, and each phase has reflected the priorities of its age.

Colonial reorganisation for control

• Administrative convenience: Assam was separated from Bengal (1874) and the North-West Frontier Province created (1901) to ease governance and guard the frontier.
• Divide and rule: Bengal was partitioned in 1905; Swadeshi protest forced its annulment in 1911, and Bihar and Orissa became a separate province (1912).
• Early identity claims: Orissa and Sindh became provinces in 1936, and Burma was separated from India in 1937.

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Rammohun Roy, versed in Sanskrit and Persian, cited ancient texts against sati, and in 1829 sati was banned. Reform thus began in Bengal by arguing with tradition, then grew across India.

Rise of reform

• New ideas: English education, print and Western rationalism let an urban middle class question idolatry, caste and women's status.

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Lord Curzon (1899–1905) ruled as an efficient autocrat whose reforms, by overriding educated Indian opinion, gave nationalism its sharpest push yet.

Policies: the merits

• Administrative drive: attention to irrigation, rural credit and ancient monuments improved governance.

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After Non-Cooperation the national movement ceased to be a platform of the educated few. Through the 1920s and 1930s new ideologies entered the Congress or grew beside it, and each carried a fresh social group into the struggle.

Ideological strands after the 1920s

• Gandhian mass politics: the Salt March (1930) turned a household tax into an all-India cause, and Quit India (1942) drew in peasants, women, students and traders.
• Constitutionalists: C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru's Swaraj Party (1923) took the fight into the councils; the Nehru Report (1928) defined equal citizenship, keeping lawyers and professionals engaged.
• Socialists: young leaders formed the Congress Socialist Party (1934) for a more radical, egalitarian Congress; the Karachi Session (1931) declared Fundamental Rights, including women's equality.
• Communists and labour: the AITUC (Bombay, 1920) and the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929) put industrial workers and strikes on the national stage.
• Revolutionaries: the HSRA, founded at Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla in 1928, and Bhagat Singh's Assembly bomb (1929) fired students; the Chittagong armoury raid (1930) followed.

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Company rule met resistance from its early decades: the Sannyasi rebellion in famine-struck Bengal, the Vellore mutiny of 1806 and the Santhal revolt of 1855-56. In 1857 these streams met.

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A century of local rebellions

• Peasant and tribal anger: revenue demands, moneylenders and lost forest rights fuelled local risings; in 1857 Gonoo of Singhbhum led the Kol tribals.
• Sepoy grievance: the Vellore mutiny arose over uniform rules that offended Hindu and Muslim sepoys; the greased cartridges touched the same nerve.
• Dispossessed rulers: the Doctrine of Lapse and Awadh's annexation displaced old elites; Rani Lakshmi Bai and Kunwar Singh of Arrah led in 1857.
• Fear for faith: laws against sati (1829) and for widow remarriage, with missionary activity, bred fear for religion and custom.

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The nineteenth-century awakening, from Rammohun Roy's campaign against sati to Vivekananda's Chicago address of 1893, re-read tradition through reason. It gave educated Indians a shared language of self-respect, the raw material of national identity.

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How the Renaissance shaped national identity

• Reason over custom: campaigns against sati (abolished 1829) and for widow remarriage built a questioning public that later questioned colonial rule.
• Pride in the past: the Asiatic Society (1784), Dayananda's call to return to the Vedas and Vivekananda's defence of Indian civilisation answered colonial contempt.
• Print and song: Bankim's Anandamath (1882) carried 'Vande Mataram', later sung across the Swadeshi movement.
• Associations to Congress: English-educated professionals formed the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Indian Association, then the Congress; Dadabhai Naoroji's drain critique gave them an economic case.
• A wider nation: Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj and Sri Narayana Guru drew lower castes into the idea of the nation.

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By 1946, the INA trials, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny and the Cabinet Mission Plan had weakened British authority, and a war-exhausted Britain sought a transition. Its exit was certain; how it left, through its offers, its timing and its handling of the princes, made the transfer far harder.

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How imperial power complicated the transfer

• Cripps offer (1942): post-war dominion status came with the right of any province 'not prepared to accept the new Constitution' to keep its position, conceding the principle of division.
• Repression: mass arrests after Quit India removed the Congress from politics for three years, while the League consolidated its 1940 demand for Muslim states.
• Cabinet Mission (1946): its 16 May scheme of grouped provinces under a weak centre won League acceptance, but rival readings of grouping broke the talks; Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) brought bloody riots.
• A divided Interim Government: formed under Nehru in September 1946, it took in the League in October; by January 1947 the League sought the Constituent Assembly's dissolution.
• Deadline diplomacy: Attlee's government fixed June 1948 for withdrawal, then hurried the transfer to August 1947; partition followed with the migration of millions and widespread violence.
• Princely states: Britain refused to pass paramountcy to the successors and let it lapse, leaving 565 states legally free to choose.

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In Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi wrote, "It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves". That idea of self-rule, inward and outward, is why his thought still speaks to today's conflicts, inequality, consumption and public ethics.

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Between 1834 and 1920, almost half a million indentured labourers from India landed at Mauritius's Aapravasi Ghat alone, part of a world-wide migration of over two million. Both the colonial need behind it and the culture the migrants carried shape this answer.

Why indentured labour was taken

• Plantation demand: once slavery was abolished in the 1830s, sugar colonies lacked labour; in 1834 Britain chose Mauritius for its 'great experiment' with 'free' labour to replace slaves.
• Distress at home: most recruits came from eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, central India and dry Tamil Nadu districts, where cottage industries declined and land rents rose.
• Contract and deception: contracts promised a better life, but agents misled and even abducted migrants; indenture came to be called a 'new system of slavery'.
• Wide spread: labour went to Mauritius, the Caribbean, Natal and Fiji until the system was abolished in 1921 after nationalist opposition.

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Aurangzeb's death in 1707 left an emperor who reigned in Delhi but no longer ruled the provinces. By mid-century power had splintered among regional rulers, none able to command the whole.

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A hollow Mughal centre

• Weak successors: factional nobles and short reigns drained treasury and army.
• Invasions: Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739; Ahmad Shah Abdali raided north India five times between 1748 and 1761.

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From 1885 the Moderates, among them Dadabhai Naoroji, Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, sought reform by constitutional agitation. By the 1890s, NCERT notes, many Indians questioned this political style.

Why the Moderates failed to convince

• Narrow social base: urban English-educated lawyers, teachers and journalists; peasants, workers and most women stayed outside.
• Feeble methods: petitions, memorials and resolutions, mocked as "politics of prayers", won only the Indian Councils Act, 1892, a modest, indirect widening of representation.
• Self-contradiction: their own drain of wealth critique showed colonial rule impoverished India, yet they kept trusting British fairness.
• Modest goals: Indianisation of services, a separate judiciary and repeal of the Arms Act, not self-government.
• Mass distress unaddressed: the famines of 1896–97 and 1899–1900 drew resolutions but no popular campaign.
• Part-time leaders: in 1887 Dinshaw Wacha complained to Naoroji that colleagues like Pherozeshah Mehta were too busy with personal work.

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On the eve of independence, agriculture held 70–75 per cent of India's workforce and manufacturing only about 10 per cent. That lopsided structure was largely the legacy of the collapse of India's famed handicrafts under colonial rule, which reached deep into the village.

Why traditional crafts declined

• Machine competition: cheap mill-made English cloth flooded Indian markets, and local industries could not compete.
• Unequal tariffs: Britain imposed import duties on cotton textiles to shield Manchester, while Indian markets stayed open to British goods.
• Loss of patronage: as the British annexed Indian states, towns like Dhaka, Murshidabad and Thanjavur lost their courts and with them their artisans.
• Weavers squeezed: in the Carnatic and Bengal, weavers deserted villages, closed workshops and took to agricultural labour.

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Till the early 1920s, nationalist demands centred on self-government within the empire. Gandhian mass mobilisation drew peasants, workers, women and depressed classes into politics, and their hopes widened the very meaning of swaraj.

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New objectives added since the 1920s

• Complete independence: the Lahore session of December 1929, under Jawaharlal Nehru, committed the Congress to Purna Swaraj; 26 January 1930 was observed as Independence Day.
• Democratic citizenship: the Motilal Nehru Report (1928) held that every person of either sex aged twenty-one should share in public affairs.
• Equal rights: the Karachi session (1931) declared all citizens equal before law irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex, committing the movement to women's equality.
• Social justice: Gandhi warned that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability survived; the Poona Pact (September 1932) gave the depressed classes reserved seats.
• Economic justice: the Congress Socialist Party (1934) pressed for a more radical, egalitarian Congress, and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936) demanded freedom from economic exploitation.
• Linguistic federalism: after the Nagpur session of 1920, the Congress reorganised itself on linguistic lines and promised linguistic provinces.
• Secular nationhood: equality across religions made communal harmony a condition of freedom, not an afterthought.

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Rammohun Roy attacked sati by appealing both to humanitarian and natural rights doctrines and to the Hindu shastras. That double appeal, to reason and to scripture, shaped every women's question of the century and the controversies around it.

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Major issues

• Sati: Rammohun Roy's campaign led to Bentinck's regulation of 1829 banning widow immolation.
• Widowhood: Vidyasagar cited ancient texts to show widows could remarry, and a law followed in 1856; Ranade's tracts set out the shastric sanction for remarriage, and Karve opened a widows' home in 1896.
• Child marriage and consent: the Native Marriage Act, 1872 fixed 14 for girls and 18 for boys marrying under it; after the Phulmoni Dasi case (1889), the Age of Consent Act, 1891 raised the age from 10 to 12.
• Female infanticide: the Act of 1870, first applied in Punjab, the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, targeted the killing of girl infants.
• Education: the Phules' school for girls (1848) and the Bethune School (1849), followed by Arya Samaj schools for girls in Punjab.

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The Revolt of 1857 shook British rule in north India. In November 1858 Queen Victoria's proclamation ended the East India Company's rule, and every major policy was redrawn around one aim: never again.

Shifts in British policy

• Crown rule: the Government of India Act 1858 placed India under a Secretary of State in London and a Viceroy, the Queen's representative, in India.
• Princes as allies: rulers were assured their territory would never be annexed and could pass it to adopted sons, but had to accept the Queen as Sovereign Paramount.
• Army remodelled: the share of Indian soldiers was cut and of European soldiers raised; recruitment moved from Awadh, Bihar and central India to Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans.
• Landed loyalists: new policies secured landlords' and zamindars' rights over their land, making them a loyal buffer.
• Social caution: the government pledged to respect customary religious and social practices; the earlier reforming zeal gave way to non-interference.
• Divide and rule: Muslims, blamed for the uprising, saw land and property confiscated on a large scale and faced suspicion and hostility.
• Token inclusion: the Indian Councils Act 1861 admitted nominated Indians to the legislative council, while real power stayed with officials.

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